Drug WarRant

That’s the title of a strange, disconcerting, and absurd column by Doug Hunter in the Tri-City Times (Michigan).

Doug Hunter has been riding along with the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department, and reports on a couple of heinous crimes that were committed, and uses these stories to somehow attempt to make the point that “Drugs beget violence.”

He seems to have a real love of pulp crime stories based on his writing…

The order was given to Colleen Sturdevant of Emmett Township to retrieve the empty Miller High Life beer bottle from the car. Handing it off, the bottle was broken and the jagged weapon was applied to the exposed throat of the semi-conscious Maurice.

The life sustaining blood flowed freely and the perpetrators soon became covered with it. […]

That was a story about some criminals who robbed and beat a man who was meeting some friends out in the country to smoke pot. The next is about a man who was going out to buy some pot and was murdered by youths who had offered to show him where to get some.

The report from the small caliber revolver was loud inside the vehicle. Turning his head Devon Sapp saw his older friend slump forward. Gasping and gurgling sounds and fluid began emitting from his now open mouth. […] Through the open window another bullet tore through Matt’s right lung, aorta and into his beating heart. […] The gurgling and gasps had ceased. Matthew Rogul, the father of young children, had passed from this life for a ‘Ten Sack.’

Kind of a bad Mickey Spillane wanna-be.

Here’s the kicker:

All this suffering for an illegal drug that some want to legalize, claiming it’s medicinal and harmless.

What???

If marijuana was legal, Matt Rogul would be alive now, and Maurice wouldn’t have been robbed and beaten.

Here’s what I wrote to the editor:

Doug Hunter certainly has a pulp crime novelist’s skill for telling tragic stories about violence (Illegal drugs mean danger, October 7), but his conclusion — “All this suffering for an illegal drug that some want to legalize, claiming it’s medicinal and harmless” — makes no sense whatsoever.

If marijuana was legal, Matt Rogul would be alive today. Instead of turning to criminals to score some pot, he would have gone to the store, where, just like with alcohol, he could have purchased it safely in a controlled and regulated system.

Prohibition makes the black market obscenely profitable and recruits people into the criminal lifestyle. Every drug dealer we arrest creates an instant job opening, increasing the numbers of criminals, and law enforcement efforts wasted on the revolving drug dealers (who would be put out of work with legalization) result in letting violent criminals, like those involved in “Hit a Lick,” slip through the cracks.

The reason to legalize marijuana isn’t because it’s harmless (although it is certainly safer than alcohol, tobacco, or just about any other drug). The reason to legalize it is to reduce the damage of prohibition, which fuels crime and puts the control of drugs in the hands of criminals.

Now interestingly, the title of the piece was accurate: “Illegal drugs mean danger.” But it’s not because of the word “drugs.” The only way to reduce the danger of illegal drugs is to make them legal.

ENCOD sends a letter to Malaysia asking them to stop killing people for trafficking small amounts of a plant that doesn’t kill people.

Many people in Malaysia want to consume cannabis and other drugs, so it is obvious that other people will supply them. Taking the life of people will not change that situation.

Pot legalization gains momentum in California

The state already has a thriving marijuana trade, thanks to a first-of-its-kind 1996 ballot measure that allowed people to smoke pot for medical purposes. But full legalization could turn medical marijuana dispensaries into all-purpose pot stores, and the open sale of joints could become commonplace on mom-and-pop liquor store counters in liberal locales like Oakland and Santa Cruz.

San Francisco mayor (and candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor of California) Gavin Newsom:

“I really feel strongly about the drug war being an abject failure. If you can point to huge evidence that drug polices in this country have worked, I’d love to see that evidence. [..] Low-level marijuana possession, with all due respect to those that will use this video to attack me, is not a top priority for my current job and role as mayor and hasn’t been, nor would it be as governor.”

California Supreme Court refuses to overturn ruling that OKs collective cannabis cultivation.

…finding that the contribution of collective members may be solely financial, and patients “should not be required to risk criminal penalties and the stress and expense of a criminal trial in order to assert their rights.”

Via The Agitator, more than one million people were stopped and frisked in America last year without probably cause.

In Harlem, George Lucas changed his route home from work to avoid a stretch of Seventh Avenue, because he kept being stopped by the police.

Off-topic. Drug WarRant regular and photographer Allan Erickson has a wonderful 2010 calendar highlighting the beauty of Oregon. It’s only $25.

1,000 feet from anywhere. What’s the point of needle exchange programs if you have to conduct them in cornfields?

Delightful! Drug Czar complains about LEAP getting more publicity than the prohibitionist law enforcement lobby. Here’s the text of the drug czar’s speech. Here’s the 600+ word letter to the editor(!) by President of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Russell Laine that was rejected by the Washington Post (few papers accept letters that long), responding to this OpEd by Peter Moskos and Stanford Franklin.

Pretty good trick by LEAP’s media director — getting the drug czar to mention Law Enforcement Against Prohibition to a large group of law enforcement officers.

DrugSense Weekly – a weekly review of the most interesting or relevant articles in the press and on the web related to drug policy reform.

Drug War Chronicle – weekly update of drug war news and analysis from Stop the Drug War.org.

In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Cynthia Tucker cautiously moves a step forward with Why not de-criminalize marijuana use?.

It’s a short post that riffs off The Washington Post article I mentioned, as well as Andrew Sullivan’s Cannabis Closet posts.

What’s interesting in this particular case, though, is some of the colorful characters that you discover further down on the page…

Say What?? says:

Why not de-criminalize marijuana use?

Hmm, why not de-criminalize the following:

1. gambling
2. prostitution
3. alcohol (for those under 21)
4. crack
5. cocaine
6. imbezzlement
7. voter fraud (you know, help out ACORN)
8. underage sex

Well, first of all, thanks for not using rape and murder. People who can’t tell the difference between smoking pot and rape will quickly stop being invited to the good parties. As far as the others, I’m actually fine with one through five, but imbezzlement [sic] and voter fraud? Really? This guy couldn’t even land a job as stock boy. He’d put the sweat socks and carburetors in the produce section.

El Jefe decides to take the sarcastic road:

Ms. Tucker – your right, we do not have enough lazy slackers in society, we need more.

El Jefe, if potheads are such lazy slackers, how do they manage to keep supplied with pot? And how is it that some of them actually know the difference between “your” and “you’re”?

Joe Matarotz made my head explode:

Being a college student in the early 70’s, I smoked a small forest worth of pot. I can say that it is one of the few things I’ve done that I am ashamed of today. Keep it illegal. Smoking pot is NOT something to be encouraged.

Let me get this straight… Joe is ashamed of all the pot he smoked and wishes it had been illegal so he wouldn’t have smoked it… but… wait, it was illegal and he smoked it anyway. If it stays illegal, will that mean that Joe will be less ashamed of having smoked pot when it was… illegal? I’m so confused.

And what about the notion that making it legal would encourage it? Well, let’s see… I believe that it’s legal to eat camel dung. Does that mean that it’s encouraged?

Wow, did you know that the U.S. government encourages the consumption of camel dung?

Sunshine… Yes, she calls herself Sunshine, and really betrays her name with another “lazy” post

Have you ever seen a pot head with a ‘to do list’ ? The answer is no. Pot heads are too lazy to do anything. The pot heads who are all for legalizing it have probably already pickled their brains and can’t see the damage it does. This country should NEVER, EVER legalize pot.

Sunshine, all your friends smoke pot and you don’t even realize it.

CK Hall brings takes the intellectual approach:

For all you “authorities” on Pot–Keep it ILLEGAL!

Kind of hard to debunk that. Sort of like saying “Hey, all you “earth is round” people – keep it flat!”

Public Option Heading South says:

Anyone who has seen a relative or close friend hit rock bottom because of drug addictions knows why marijuana should be illegal. Marijuana is the port of entry for stronger highly addictive drugs like crack cocccain [sic], opiates, meth etc. Alcohol, while a drug that can lead to self destructive consequences isn’t any where near as addictive for most people.

Well, that’s certainly one approach to proving your point. Simply make up shit.

Mutts R Stupid (apparently some kind of self-referential name) came up with this doozy:

Legalizing pot is ok by me, let stupid people kill themselves faster, it will improve the gene pool. My mother was a night ER nurse in a small town, and I recall her telling me a tale of woe concerning young drug users. This teenage boy came into the ER with black, cold arms. It turns out he had been told that injecting peanut butter into his veins would make him high, so that is what he did. He lost both arms.

Marijuana kills people fast, and somehow causes people to inject peanut butter in their arms. I don’t even know how to respond to that. This apparently explains the millions of armless dead pot smokers, and why they put peanut butter behind the counter.

Mutts R Stupid came back with another one…

Have you ever seen what the lungs of a long term pot smoker look like? Worse that [sic] tobacco users lungs by far. At least tobacco has some quality control, and is highly processed, and somewhat purified.

Somehow I doubt that Mutts R Stupid has personally compared the lungs of pot smokers and cigarette smokers (and if it were true, why isn’t the ONDCP trotting those pictures out all over the media?). But it’s odd that he’d oppose legalization because pot lacks quality control — wouldn’t that be a reason to legalize? And I don’t know that I’d want to get that excited about the highly processed “purification” of tobacco.

Of course, these folks are the fringe elements who populate the comments sections of local newspapers. And clearly nobody out there has an argument that could come close to denting the strength of ours.

Part of me is entertained by these specimens of humanity’s periphery, while another part of me is deeply frightened.

Well, duh.

Washington Post: Cartels Face an Economic Battle

Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico.

It’s never been something that arrests and seizures can do. Destroying the cartels (and not just a particular cartel) can only come through market forces. Legalization is the best and quickest way to accomplish it.

Give the cannabis consumer the choice between “Buy American” and “Mexican brick,” and there’s no doubt they’ll go American.

Regular readers have heard me rail against Caballes v. Illinois, the truly awful Supreme Court decision that allowed searches based only on the whim of a dog, thereby encouraging fishing expeditions.

Well, the Supreme Court of Canada Saskatchewan Court of Appeal just ruled on a similar case. Seven members of the Court sat on the case and all agreed that the case should be thrown out. Since the officer had no reasonable suspicion that the car contained drugs, calling in a dog to sniff was unacceptable.

In one of the separate, yet essentially concurring decisions upholding the Queen’s Bench decision, Chief Justice John Klebuc and justices Gary Lane, Robert Richards, Gene Anne Smith and Ysanne Wilkinson said Yeh’s rights were violated by the sniffer dog search “and the trial judge made no error in excluding the evidence obtained as a result of that breach.” Justices Georgina Jackson and Darla Hunter concurred with that finding in their decision. […]

Meanwhile, Jackson — writing also on Hunter’s behalf — said “there is a good reason to limit dog searches when a person is detained.”

Jackson said police powers shouldn’t be expanded to allow the use of dogs in searches in instances where police officers themselves couldn’t by law perform a search.

“Police conduct must be considered objectively from the perspective of the ordinary travelling public, as well as from the perspective of crime prevention,” Jackson wrote. “If the police can use a sniffer dog when a person is detained in the circumstances such as the case at bar, the traffic stop runs the risk of becoming a pretext for a search for drugs.”

See that last sentence? “…the traffic stop runs the risk of becoming a pretext for a search for drugs.”

Exactly the place we’re at in the United States. We even have officers who brag that it’s the only reason they do traffic stops.

The Supreme Court Justices of Canda Saskatchewan Court of Appeal Justices understand this. Why is it so difficult for our Supreme Court?

We see this all the time…

80% of Puerto Rico Murders Called Drug-Related

SAN JUAN – About 80 percent of the murders committed in Puerto Rico are directly linked to drug trafficking, authorities and academics say.

So despite the headline, it’s not really drug-related. It’s more accurately drug-war-related, or drug-trafficking-related, but it’s easier for headline writers to say “drug-related.”

But it does make me wonder why, when there are various violent religious conflicts around the world, headline writers don’t refer to those deaths as “God-related.”

Some people have so totally lost touch with reality that all I can do is laugh.

Here’s the American Patrol Report writing at Right Side News about the recent El Paso conference.

Critics say the people at the conference missed the 800-lb guerilla in the room. “The Mexican drug war was triggered by the construction of the new fencing and vehicle barriers,” said Glenn Spencer of American Border Patrol, “But the people at this conference, including academics, are so delusional that they refuse to face the facts.”

Spencer said the same sort of delusion has taken over many in Washington, D.C., including DHS Secretary Napolitano.

“The American people understand that if we finish the fence we will finish the cartels,” Spencer said. “Next fall they will let politicians know of their displeasure if they don’t wake up and stop drugs at the border by completing the fence project,” he added. Spencer says putting an end to cartels will go a long way toward solving Mexico’s problems.

A fence? You’re going to stop drugs with a fence? A fence will finish the cartels?

What incredible delusion.

Assuming that you were able to completely fence the 7,477 miles of land boundaries and the 12,380 miles of coastline, and then you somehow managed to keep the drugs from going over, under, or through the fence, you’d still have to deal with the simple fact that the United States imports over 2 trillion dollars of goods each year and the cartels only need to piggyback the drug shipments in with legal shipments. If we shut those down, or even slowed the legal shipments down enough to inspect more than a tiny fraction, the economy would be damaged drastically.

A fence.

Robert Almonte, executive director, Texas Narcotic Officers Association and El Paso police deputy chief (retired), had a different view of the war on drugs than most of the learned participants in the recent conference in El Paso (surprise, surprise): ‘War on Drugs’ conference got the issue wrong

It’s a pretty bad piece of dreck, full of standard stale prohibitionist misdirection, strawmen, and cherry-picked statistics. I particularly noted the ending:

Our children deserve better; El Paso deserves better. O’Rourke, in calling for the public to exert pressure on our elected officials to legalize marijuana, has stated: “As evidence, I point to the 3,200 people who have been killed in Juárez.”

I say to you, Mr. O’Rourke, as evidence against legalizing marijuana and other dangerous drugs, I point to the countless Americans and their families whose lives have been destroyed by drugs and the over 38,000 Americans who die from drug overdoses each year.

Let me get this straight. As a defense of prohibition, we should ignore the 3200 killed in Juárez under prohibition, and instead focus on the 38,000 Americans killed by overdoses under prohibition.

Right.

Arthur Salm at San Diego News Network has the creative juices flowing

All of the complications, headaches and frustration we’re grappling with right now spring from nearly a century of American society’s ground-level, fundamental bungling . Cannabis was demonized for a goulash of reasons we won’t rehash here, but not one of them passes the Martian test: Could you explain this to a Martian and not sound like an idiot?

That’s a good test. And no, there’s no way that you could truthfully explain marijuana prohibition to a Martian without sounding like an idiot.

Salm’s closing is poetry. Evocative, powerful, and absurdly beautiful…

Somewhere, another dog has bitten another man. The sun has risen so far in the east that it’s now practically in the west. And, so long as men shoot elephants from helicopters, and have their hearts broken by women and vice versa and any combination therein, and loved ones and pets die, and the rent is due, and life is just too damn complex and weird, folks are just naturally going to want to get high.

Sometimes they do it just for the merry hell of it. And when we don’t want to face this hard fact, when we delude ourselves into thinking there’s something inherently evil about it, we end up spending time and money appointing task forces to look into the matter.

Legalize it. Regulate it. Tax it. And while you’re at it, stop shooting elephants from helicopters.

Massachusetts: Marijuana law has had little effect on schools

After the recent partial decriminalization of marijuana in the state, this article takes a look at how it has affected schools. Other than the occasional Principal who uses the change to complain about the law (“From our standpoint, (the law is) sending a terrible message to kids,” said Welch.), the actual result is that there hasn’t been a change for the worse.

There is no epidemic of pot smoking in schools that didn’t exist prior to the decriminalization law.

The concluding line was the point that I’d like to emphasize:

“Kids have learned that alcohol and drugs aren’t acceptable here…they may do them, but it won’t be here,” said Fleury.

One of the things that oppressive prohibition does is remove incentives for increasing the appropriateness of use.

Back when I was in college, even though marijuana was illegal, local enforcement had its own version of decriminalization. It went like this: Smoking pot on campus (in dorms, at the soccer field, etc.) was fine (not the football field because of alumni) as long as you never gave or sold it to high school students.

This actually worked well. Nobody in college would even consider selling to high school students — they would be not only subject to immediate arrest, but would be ostracized by the rest of the campus.

Give people an opportunity to use drugs responsibly and give them reasonable restrictions as to when and where, and most people are happy to comply.

Legalization gives us opportunities that few can understand.