Drug WarRant

On the one hand, marijuana is practically legal—more mainstream, accessorized, and taken for granted than ever before. On the other, kids are getting busted in the city in record numbers. Guess which kids.

This article in New York Magazine by Mark Jacobson is quite a colorful trip through the marijuana scene in New York, from the arrests of people of color, to the delivery services to the wealthy.

He starts with the global scene as it exists today.

(Photo: Horacio Salinas)

Could it be that, at long last, the Great Pot Moment is upon us?

The planets are aligning. First and foremost is the recession; there’s nothing like a little cash-flow problem to make societies reconsider supposed core values. The balance sheet couldn’t be clearer. We have the so-called War on Drugs, the yawning money pit that used to send its mirror-shade warriors to far-flung corners of the globe, like the Golden Triangle of Burma and the Colombian Amazon, where they’d confront evil kingpins. Now, after 40 years, the front lines have moved to the streets of Juárez, where stray bullets can easily pick off old ladies in the Wal-Mart parking in El Paso, Texas, even as Mexico itself has decriminalized pot possession as well as a devil’s medicine cabinet of other drugs. At the current $40 billion per annum, even General Westmoreland would have trouble calling this progress.

Jacobson does a few taste tests around the city and analyzes the pot today compared to when he smoked it years ago. He knows that strides have been made in pot development over the years, but isn’t impressed (particularly compared to all the reefer madness stories).

This was because the fancy weed I was smoking, and paying twenty times as much for, wasn’t getting me more smashed, at least not in the way I wanted to be.

“I hear this a lot, because back then, you were probably smoking sativas imported from Jamaica, Vietnam, and Mexico,” Danko informed me. Sativas imparted “a head high,” as opposed to the largely “body high” of indicas. The problem with this, he went on, was that tropical sativas, being a large (some as high as fourteen feet!) and difficult plant to grow (the Kush has bigger yields and a shorter flowering time), especially under surreptitious conditions, were rare in today’s market. My lament was a common one among older heads, Danko said, adding that “the good sativa is the grail of the modern smoker.”

Learn something new every day.

Then we turn to the arrests.

The fact is, New York City is the marijuana-arrest capital of the country and maybe the world. […] Harry Levine, a Queens College sociology professor who has been compiling marijuana arrest figures for years, says, “The cops prefer pot busts. They’re easy, because the people are almost never violent and, as opposed to drunks, hardly ever throw up in the car. Some of this has to do with the reduction in crime over the years. Pot arrests are great for keeping the quota numbers up. These kind of arrests toss people into the system, get their fingerprints on file. The bias of these arrests is in the statistics.”

Not everyone, however, is getting arrested.

Francis said the cops weren’t all that much of a factor. “For the most part, I walk through the town unopposed.” But what about the busts?

“What busts?”

I showed Francis a copy of the New York State marijuana-arrest stats. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t know a soul who had been pinched. He was not, however, surprised by the ethnic breakdown. “I hate to say it, but there’s no way I’m hiring a black guy to work for me. The chances of a black guy getting stopped is about 50 times more than a white guy. I can’t afford that. Fact is, pot is legal for white people but not for black people, which is total bullshit.”

Fascinating article.

Is war on drugs worth it? Maybe not, new FBI data suggest.

… fast forward to the obligatory prohibitionist comment:

Pro-legalization groups are missing the forest for the trees, says Gregory D. Lee, a retired Drug Enforcement Administration agent. […] “[Under legalization], the crime rate would rise because of crimes committed by people under the influence of these substances.”

Mr. Lee points to the rising price of cocaine in the US as a sign that domestic and international interdiction is working. “The war on drugs,” he says, “is being won.”

Don’t you just love it when people attribute their own failings to their opponents?

So let’s see. Mr. Lee cherry-picks a short-term statistical blip in cocaine prices (that are probably more a result of the weakened dollar than interdiction) and says that the war on drugs is being won, ignoring such things as, say, Mexico. Classic case of… you guessed it… missing the forest for the trees.

Interesting article in the New York Times: A Popular Plant Is Quietly Spreading Across TV Screens by Brian Stelter

Tips for cultivating marijuana. Testimonials by patients about its medical benefits. Cannabis cooking lessons. Even citations for award-winning strains of pot. Viewers here can now watch, every week, what amounts to a pro-weed news program.

Booted off one skittish TV station but quickly picked up by another, the low-budget “Cannabis Planet” show is televised evidence of how entrenched marijuana has become in California’s cultural firmament and a potent example of the way the pot subculture has been edging into the national mainstream. […]

There are similar stirrings in the scripted TV world. On “Glee,” Fox’s new high school musical, one of the characters is a medical marijuana dealer. At the New York Television Festival next week one of the competing pilot projects seeking a TV network home will be “Rx,” a drama set in the medical marijuana world.

A rash of recent news reports have documented the mainstreaming of pot, citing among other examples frequent drug references in the media and endorsements by a growing list of celebrities. This month Fortune magazine’s cover asks: “Is Pot Already Legal?” CNBC repeats its eight-month-old documentary about the pot business, “Marijuana Inc.,” at least once a week; it continues to be rated one of the channel’s most popular documentaries.

This is good stuff. While there is the potential for some backlash, the most likely result is that people will get used to the notion of marijuana as an accepted part of society. Most people are, to some extent, already. Nobody but politicians, die-hard prohibitionists, and others who profit from prohibition argue for tougher laws on pot.

When they see the notion of marijuana accepted everywhere from the editorial pages to the cable TV shows, and then realize that the sky hasn’t fallen, there hasn’t been a rash of marijuana-induced ax murders, and all they have had to deal with is an increase in the prevalence of that sticky-sweet smell, then people will wonder (even more) what all the fuss was about.

I wonder if the media is having a harder time finding prohibitionists to comment, because Calvina Fay is getting a lot more print than usual recently.

Calvina Fay, the executive director of Drug Free America Foundation, said a weekly TV show extolling marijuana as harmless contributes to inappropriate public perceptions of the drug. “They are putting people’s lives in danger as they promote a toxic, harmful weed to sick people and intentionally ignore the harms of it,” she said, adding that the drug had been “linked to a plethora of health problems.”

Toxic, harmful weed. Right. Here’s an idea, Calvina. I’ll take your toxic, harmful weed and consume it while you consume some other weed — something like, I don’t know, foxglove, or bittersweet nightshade, or castor beans, or mountain laurel, or yew berries. Then we’ll compare notes in a week.

And as far as promoting it to sick people… Well, we haven’t had to. They’ve been asking for it because it helps them, and because it’s safer than the other medications that they get from pharmaceutical companies, most of which are, you guessed it, promoted to sick people every night on the TeeVee.

LEAP reports on the new FBI numbers released today.

The data, from the FBI’s “Crime in the United States” report, shows that in 2008 there were 1,702,537 arrests for drug law violations, or one drug arrest every 18 seconds.

“In our current economic climate, we simply cannot afford to keep arresting more than three people every minute in the failed ‘war on drugs,'” said Jack Cole, a retired undercover narcotics detective who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). “Plus, if we legalized and taxed drug sales, we could actually create new revenue in addition to the money we’d save from ending the cruel policy of arresting users.”

That’s about like arresting the entire population of Vermont, Washington DC, and Wyoming. Every year.

Update: Just to clarify, the figure above is for all drug arrests, not just marijuana arrests. Arrests numbers actually went down slightly, although they’re still the second highest in history.

… around the internet

In the New York Times’ Room for Debate: What Does Mexico’s New Drug Law Portend?, featuring comments from:

• Tony Payan
  

  …decriminalizing drug possession is in and of itself a change of, paradoxically, gigantic and modest proportions. […] In the end the United States may be left alone to fight a 40-year-old failed “war on drugs” or join the rest and craft a more nuanced strategy to consider other possibilities in dealing with psychotropic substances. Perhaps this time change will come from South to North, instead of North to South.

• Jorge Castañeda
  

  If anything, the new law criminalizes drug use much more radically than before […] Mexico should move toward decriminalization, but it cannot do so if the United States does not. Among the many reasons is the so-called Zurich effect…

• Calvina Fay (!)
  

  Mexico’s President Calderon got it wrong on decriminalizing drugs. I fear for the future of Mexico and the domino effect here at home. […] Drug users are not innocent. They support the vicious drug cartels.

• Peter Reuter
  

  Evidence from other countries suggests that decriminalization could be modestly helpful in addressing Mexico’s recent difficulties. […] Unfortunately, decriminalization will not address Mexico’s most severe drug-related crime and violence.

• Ethan Nadelmann
  

  Such reforms generally do not result in higher rates of drug use — at least that’s the evidence from other countries. And it will have no impact on President Calderon’s battle with the major drug trafficking organizations.

Mexico’s Hopeless Drug War by Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the Wall Street Journal.

Mexico’s big problem—for that matter the most pressing security issue throughout the hemisphere—is organized crime’s growth and expanded power, fed by drug profits. Mr. Calderón’s new policy is unlikely to solve anything in that department.

The reason is simple: Prohibition and demand make otherwise worthless weeds valuable. Where they really get valuable is in crossing the U.S. border. If U.S. demand is robust, then producers, traffickers and retailers get rich by satisfying it.

Mary is the drug war voice of reason over at the Wall Street Journal. You can tell from her various articles that she understands the equation and is able to connect the dots. She just doesn’t go all the way and tell you the obvious solution, because, after all, it is the Wall Street Journal opinion section.

The case for legalising all drugs is unanswerable by John Gray in the Guardian.

…the fact is that the costs of drug prohibition now far outweigh any possible benefits the policy may bring. It is time for a radical shift in policy. Full-scale legalisation, with the state intervening chiefly to regulate quality and provide education on the risks of drug use and care for those who have problems with the drugs they use, should now shape the agenda of drug law reform.

Unanswerable, indeed.

Some Potent Arguments For Legalizing Marijuana by Robert McCartney, Washington Post.

When it comes to marijuana, American society has lost the war on drugs–and that’s okay. We should stop squandering time and money trying to reverse history and instead legalize both medical and recreational use of this mild narcotic widely seen as no more harmful than alcohol.

Mexican movie star Gael García Bernal calls for legalization

The Motorcycle Diaries star is adamant the majority of street battles in the North American country are sparked by the trade in illicit narcotics.

And he insists the quickest way to end the bloodshed is to legalise drugs and take the entire industry out of the hands of criminal gangs.
He tells the New York Daily News, “Drugs are illegal – therefore, there’s a fight. I hope drugs become legalised in Mexico. If drugs were legal, there would be nothing to fight about.”

Some disturbingly amusing video for your enjoyment/horror.

I had never heard of Retro Bill. Apparently, he’s the Official DARE Safety Buddy (among other things). He even has a picture of himself with John Walters giving him a thumbs up.

Here, he shares some general, non-drug, safety tips.

Drug-free? Right. I use a lot of caffeine, and no amount of caffeine could ever make me as… enthusiastic as Retro Bill.

“Hey kids! Watch me play ping-pong… with myself!”

There are a lot of different models of drug legalization that could be considered.

To my knowledge, none of them involve strapping bombs to donkeys.

Kudos to Rachel Hillier Pratt for responding so pleasantly to our post about her article, and for having the integrity to agree to correct her article once informed of inaccuracies.

We’ve got some fascinating discussions going on. David Raynes continues to insist that there’s no point in dismantling the criminal black market since there will still be some criminals once we’re done. It appears that he’s planning on declaring victory in the “debate” and going home. RCS takes me to task for incivility in the Caballes Revisited post, but BruceM and Allan explain to him the difference between incivility toward a person and properly (though colorfully) describing their work. Note: James Johnston pleasantly replied to my request, but it seems unlikely that he’ll be stopping by.

Must-read: CNN-Money.com: How marijuana became legal: Medical marijuana is giving activists a chance to show how a legitimized pot business can work. Is the end of prohibition upon us?By Roger Parloff, senior editor. Extensive article, very well written.

TNR interviews the Border Czar Alan Bersin in a video: We Will Not Even Consider Legalizing Drugs. Bersin claims that legalizers want the cartels to win, but the interviewer corrects him, pointing out that legalizers want to put the cartels out of business..

More opportunities missed. Topical use of cannabinoids could reduce reliance on antibiotics. [Thanks, Mike]

Argentinean Archbishop Luis Villalba:

“Drugs are evil and facilitating their consumption is not good, it is evil and goes against the fundamental principle that man has been created for life and not for death,” he went on. “Drugs are synonymous with death and young people must not be led into them, they must be steered away,” the archbishop warned.

Since alcohol is a drug, does that make communion evil? Not to mention those who facilitate it… What about Christ, when He turned water into wine. Was He committing evil acts? Just curious.

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.

I’ve long thought that Illinois v. Caballes was one of the worst of a series of Constitutionally bad 4th Amendment decisions by the Supreme Court.

In a nutshell, the Supremes, led by Justice Stevens, ruled that, even absent any other suspicion, a drug dog alerting on a car was sufficient cause to justify a full search. In other words, the total decision as to whether there was sufficient reason for a search was to be determined by a dog anxious to please his or her law enforcement master.

The case was brought back to mind this week, when I found, via CrimProf Blog, an analysis of Stevens’ Caballes decision, written in 2006, but just recently posted on SSRN. It was written by James B. Johnston of Seton Hall University and published in the Quinnipiac Law Review. The abstract:

When a drug dealer delivers illegal narcotics to the American market place, he frequently uses our nation’s roadways. In an opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens and captioned Illinois v. Caballes, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a drug dealer does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in delivering illegal drugs that is detected by a drug sniffing dog from the drug dealer’s car. The article argues that we as a society have a right and an obligation to protect ourselves from drug abuse and drug traffickers. Justice Stevens’ opinion provides a brilliant examination of judiciap [sic] precedent coupled with common sense. Caballes provides a balanced approach by providing law enforcement with a case that allows our police and prosecutors to fairly and effectively bring drug traffickers to justice.

My first thought was this was a simple and badly written review written by a high school student (or at least a beginning law school student throwing it together last minute for a class). That’s partly due to the horrid structure of the abstract. The second sentence is a grammatical disaster zone. Perhaps James should have read how to write an abstract (paying particular attention to #1, 3, and 4).

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