Drug WarRant

This is really a follow-up to the previous post, and I already added the link as an update there, but I can’t resist commenting on these points, reported quite well from El Paso by Sito Negron at Newspaper Tree.

Talk about pathetic…

When asked whether there was a difference between hard drugs like cocaine and marijuana he said it was a question for the attorney general, and when pressed on the question he said “I’d wait and ask the attorney, I’ve had only one meeting with the attorney general so far and I’m pretty new in my tenure so I think I’d just defer until we go further down the road.”

He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say. Wow.

Then, about medical marijuana (remember, this is the guy who very recently said “Marijuana is dangerous and has no medicinal benefit.” Now:

As for medical marijuana, he said: “I think the medical marijuana, we’re reserving that question for the medical community. The decision on whether marijuana actually has a medicinal benefit within its chemical compound is a question we’re going to let science answer.”

Uh huh.

Finally, and here’s a real kicker, he’s asked about alcohol prohibition.

Finally, he was asked about whether the end of Prohibition reduced violence in Chicago, and whether that was a possible model for legalizing marijuana.

“I’m not sure I’d liken what we’re talking about to Prohibition, but I don’t think anybody thought after Prohibition was lifted crime ended as a result,” Kerlikowske said.

Classic nirvana fallacy. Of course, crime didn’t end. But it was dramatically reduced, and the structures for organized crime related to the black market of alcohol were weakened fatally. That’s the exact same situation that we face with prohibition of drugs.

OK, Kerlikowske is a tool, and he’s making the office look silly. But there’s something else happening. Everywhere he goes, he’s being asked the legalization question. And now he’s being asked the Chicago prohibition question. The press is waking up, or becoming emboldened, or something.

Additionally, note in Negron’s article…

But Kerlikowske, who by the rules governing his office cannot say anything else — “The statute says we have to absolutely resist (legalization” — said that the administration is working on a “different approach” to the Drug War.

More and more, the Drug Czar’s statements are prefaced with the disclaimer that what he has to say does not include all the options. (And by the way, I take full credit for that. It’s taken a couple of years to catch on, but my article is having an effect.)

This is fabulous stuff. People are commenting on what the Drug Czar has to say, but no longer accepting it. Kaptinemo in comments may have it right:

I keep thinking that I’m witnessing the ‘end of days’ when it comes to the ONDCP. And Mr. Kerlikowske has been chosen (and probably knows that he has) to preside over its’ dissolution.

In the Christian Science Monitor former Colombian Senator and Defense Minister Rafael Pardo and Professor Juan Gabriel Tokatlian (from Argentina) call for a timeout.

Before Washington ramps up yet another losing war on drugs, it should take a clear-eyed look at how its current strategies are affecting the supply and demand of drugs. Congressman Eliot Engel (D) of New York has introduced a bill to do just that.

Washington would be wise to back Congressman Engel’s initiative because there has not been a thorough, frank evaluation of the fight against drugs in decades. The drug czar office’s annual report is not enough. Recommendations by an independent commission, however, could generate the consensus and strategy we sorely need.

A commission. What a great idea. If only Nixon had asked for a commission to study the issue before ramping up the war on drugs way back then… Oh, right.

It’s a good recommendation, even though Engel doesn’t have the guts to let the commission form honestly.

Let me be absolutely clear that this bill has not been introduced to support the legalization of illegal drugs. That is not something that I would like to see, nor is it my intent to have the Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission come to that conclusion.

In El Paso

“Some think legalization will reduce the violence,” Kerlikowske said. “It will not. If drugs were to become legal, I doubt very seriously that (the criminals) would take up jobs at Microsoft or Intel. Criminals are not going to change.”

Such a bizarrely ignorant world-view. It requires:

1. A finite and unchanging number of “criminals” world-wide – that everybody is specifically either a criminal or non-criminal for life and that can’t change, and that no enticements could turn a non-criminal into a criminal.
2. That criminals would have the same power to bribe officials (and entire countries), and buy guns if all their money supply was cut off, and
3. That they would still want to kill people on the border even if they had nothing to smuggle across.

This guy got a Master’s Degree? Somebody better talk to the Board of Trustees at University of South Florida.

Update: Lots more from Kerlikowske here. Some really amazing stuff.

The North American Leaders Summit concluded today. Naturally, it would seem that the drug war in Mexico would be a major item of discussion.

If it was, solutions were not part of the conversation. Obama’s remarks were remarkably lacking in substance — keep sending the money, keep up the “police action,” oh, and say bad things about the cartels to deflect concerns about human rights abuses.

Regarding the U.S.-Mexico agenda, Obama stressed his support for the $1.4 billion Merida Initiative – aimed at bolstering the battle against drugs in Mexico and Central America – and for Calderon’s efforts on that score, even though human rights groups have criticized the Mexican president’s militarized approach to the problem.

“I have great confidence in President Calderon’s administration applying the law enforcement techniques that are necessary to curb the power of the cartels, but doing so in a way that’s consistent with human rights,” Obama said in response to a reporter’s question.

“The biggest, by far, violators of human rights right now are the cartels themselves that are kidnapping people and extorting people and encouraging corruption in these regions,” he added.

Really? That’s what you’ve got? First of all, who needs to be told that the cartels are bad people?* I don’t really think that there’s a cartel fan club in town.

The point isn’t the dastardly nature of the cartels. The point is coming up with policy that actually improves things rather than making things worse.

And it’s clear that nothing resembling good policy showed up at the summit.

---

* When I first read the linked article about Los Zetas, I thought they had mistakenly put a picture of a Star Wars convention with the article. Then I blew up the picture and looked closer and it scared the crap out of me.

Mark Kleiman and Jon Caulkins get it — that any of the solutions the U.S. comes up with regarding the business of poppies in Afghanistan are doomed to failure.

See

• Careful what you wish for, and
• Targeting the Taliban’s Drug Dealers

As usual, it’s a good analysis of what won’t work, and why, but fails to note the really big picture, and ignores the one option that lacks the failure characteristics of all the others.

The really big picture is that the combination of demand and the black market guarantees there will be massive illicit profits going to somebody. The option left out, as usual, is regulation (legalization) in some form.

Yes, I know that legalization is not a politically feasible option currently, but it’s leaving it out of the discussion that I find intellectually objectionable. It simply insures that the only option that has a chance of success will never get discussed.

I haven’t talked much, if any, about Michael Jackson’s death. Now they’re reporting that he died of an overdose of Propofol. That’s a drug that’s used for general anesthesia, and is rarely abused recreationally — the DEA hasn’t even bothered to schedule it.

And yet our drug czar has been salivating over the opportunity to make Michael Jackson the poster child for prescription drug abuse (calling his death a wake-up call).

First of all, the notion that Michael Jackson, in life or death, ever was a representative sample of anything, is absurd.

And of course, the results of such overzealous campaigning are likely to be two-fold.

1. Emboldening the DEA to continue to act as if they have medical training and the right to determine what doctors prescribe (and arrest them if they believe differently).
2. Making doctors afraid to prescribe the required medicine to really help the sick.

If there is prescription drug abuse, then fine, let’s deal with it. But just looking for opportunities to propagandize regardless of relevance — that’s just irresponsible.

Feel free to keep playing in comments on the new site to get used to them. I’ve updated the “About” page (see far upper left of this page) to include what html is allowed in comments and how to use it. If you want an avatar, you can go to gravatars and upload the image you’d like and associate it with the email address you use to log in here.

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U.S. Plan Raises Ire in Latin America in the Washington Post. The development of military air bases in Colombia (for the drug war, of course) is just not good foreign policy. Regardless of what you think of Chavez, it’s natural for him to suspect such a move, and for the people of Venezuela to support him and turn against us at the mere thought of such bases.

It’s nice to see that the fact that the Drug Czar is required by law to oppose us is gaining wider traction. More people (and media) understanding this fact dramatically reduces the power of the Drug Czar’s office to disseminate propaganda.

The Senate Friday confirmed University of Pennsylvania psychologist A. Thomas McLellan as deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

More proof that life as a politician kills brain cells: Legalized pot a tough sell in governor’s race

“If the whole society starts getting stoned, we’re going to be even less competitive,” Democratic Attorney General Jerry Brown […] said on a recent radio show.

“Like electing Jerry Brown as governor, the idea of legalizing drugs is one more bad idea from a bygone era,” said Jarrod Agen, spokesman for Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner

DrugSense Weekly

Drug War Chronicle

If you’re reading this, you’re at the new location of Drug WarRant.com.

Our home for the past 6 years was at blogs.salon.com using radio userland software. Radio hasn’t been upgraded in ages, and they’ve announced that the blog hosting will go away in December of this year. This is a big change (and a difficult transition).

I have moved the blog to a server at DreamHost and adapted a WordPress theme to be close to the old look of Drug WarRant. All 3,500 radio posts were exported to MT and then imported into WordPress relatively intact (with some formatting errors). Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do with the old comments — they can’t be retrieved from the Salon server (except manually — over 20,000 of them).

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The old site will continue to exist (complete with comments, etc) until December. I’ll be adding forwarding information to specific pages over there in order to make the transition better.

Thanks for your patience. I depend so much on the readers of this site — you really make it possible for me!

Consider this an open thread and an opportunity to experiment with comments. Note: You can use most standard html tags including links, bold, italic, blockquote, etc. (no images).

Thomas Black and Jens Erik Gould have written a curiously bizarre article for Bloomberg.com: Calderon’s Waning Power Lends Urgency to Obama Meeting on Drugs
This article dramatically demonstrates the disconnect when people are unable or unwilling to discuss the options available. The article is about the fact that Calderon may lose power and how that will affect the “success” of the drug war.

“My concern is that Calderon has three years left,” said Michael Braun, who stepped down last year as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s chief of operations. “Everyone has to work as hard as we can, to make as much headway as we can, because we don’t know what’s coming next.”
Time may already be running out after Calderon’s party lost its leading role in Congress in mid-term elections in July, said Jorge Chabat, a political science professor at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico City.

Check out the next passage:

Should the National Action Party lose the presidency in 2012, Mexico might revert to its traditional nationalism, pulling back on collaboration with the U.S. and halting the bloody war on drug cartels unleashed by Calderon, he said.

The supposedly scary news is that there might be a halt to the bloody war. Do they realize what they’re saying?
Ah, but then, if you remember, according to our drug warriors, violence is a sign that we’re winning…

The crackdown also has stoked almost 10,000 drug-related murders in the past 18 months as weakened gangs battle for drug routes and retaliate against police.

Weakened. Right. Hmm… Their ability to corrupt the military and police doesn’t make them look all that weak to me. And as long as there is demand, there will be supply, which means that no matter how many cartels are taken down, more will be there to replace them. So this violence solves nothing.
What about other ideas?

“We should rethink a strategy that’s more effective,” Manlio Fabio Beltrones, Senate leader for the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI

And how do the article’s authors react to the notion that there might be another approach?

A PRI victory would probably reverse Calderon’s steps drawing closer to the U.S. to curb the $17.2 billion of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs the U.S. Justice Department estimates cross the border annually.

Because, of course, in their minds there can be no option other than fighting the drug war (despite its failures), so any other option is unacceptable by definition, without even hearing it.
The conclusion of the article is really astonishing. Check out the pathetic plea, here:

Mexico’s only choice is to “grind this out,” Gil Kerlikowske, the director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, said last week in Mexico City.
“What are the alternatives?” he said.

Oh, my. Can you believe that? He knows that the current strategy is horrible, but plaintively wishes that someone would give him an alternative. We’d be happy to, but unfortunately, the answer isn’t in his vocabulary.
….
Things are a little crazy in my neighborhood right now. There’s a fire about three blocks away that’s been raging out of control. After work, I carefully drove over near there to check it out. Not pretty. The firefighters are hard at work, armed to the teeth with assault weapons, fighting the flames. Yet the fire continues to spread.
A block away from the fire, I spotted the fire czar, who was overseeing the attack on the fire, and I asked him how it was going.

“It’s really tough. We’ve been laying down a lot of firepower, yet the fire keeps lashing out and causing more destruction. It’s got to be weakened — nothing could take that kind of punishment unscathed — and it must be that weakened condition that’s causing it to become more violent.”

I asked if he had tried anything else besides shooting at the fire.

“Of course! We’ve tried everything. Grenades seemed to have some good impact and the fire would temporarily subside, but then it would build right back up, and we were losing a lot of people due to the shrapnel.
“Nothing seems to be working. If only there was some other solution.”

So I asked him. Had he tried… water.

“That’s not in my vocabulary…. Seriously, anything at all,” he pleaded in between burst of automatic weapon fire. “Doesn’t anybody have any ideas? We’re losing ground here every minute.”

So I sighed and went home. The fire should reach here later tonight.

“bullet” Don’t Smoke It by Peter Gorman in the Fort Worth Weekly, is an extensive article about industrial hemp.

In fact, he said, traditionally independent Texas farmers could come to see hemp-growing as a right they’re being denied. “Texans don’t like their personal rights abridged,” he said. “And once they understand the difference between marijuana and industrial hemp, your average Texas farmer would probably demand the right to grow it.
Daniel Leshiker, who farms near Ralph Snyder in North Central Texas, agreed with Snyder that hemp sounds intriguing.
“We already need another crop, that’s for certain. I just planted 200 acres of sunflowers for their seed for the first time,” he said. “So while I don’t know much about hemp except they used to make rope with it, well, you tell me I could make money with it, and I’ll grow it. That’s what we are in the business to do.”

“bullet” Where will Christians fall when the marijuana debate lights up?

But younger Christians might be a different story. In late April, the evangelical blog Burnside Writer‰s Collective quizzed its young-ish readers on a series of pot-related questions. Should marijuana be legalized? Fifty percent of responders thought so, and the next largest percentage said it should at least be decriminalized. Have you ever smoked marijuana? Fifty percent said yes, 40 said no. The 10 percent in the middle respond, in uniquely young evangelical fashion, that they have smoked once or twice. (Doesn‰t that just mean ‹Yes?Š)

“bullet” This is the stupidest idea I’ve ever seen. The Wheel of Justice? Spinning to see what drug dealer you’ll arrest next. If that isn’t proof that the drug war is idiotic in itself, I don’t know what is.
“bullet” Dr. Joycelyn Elders: Americans need to be more healthy. The former Surgeon General writes:

“To me, [marijuana is] not nearly as toxic for our bodies as tobacco or alcohol. It should be legalized.”

“bullet” Via Scott Morgan: Police Will Do Anything to Arrest People for Marijuana

The Tigard Police Department has ended a sex-for-marijuana Internet sting because officers posting the online ads posed as promiscuous women, not prostitutes.
á
The officers posting the Craigslist ads posed as women willing to a have casual sexual encounter with men who had marijuana. No cash was involved. When the men showed up for the encounter, they were charged with prostitution and delivery of drugs.
Defense attorneys say the program was entrapment.

No kidding.
Also from Scott: Federal Prosecutor Drops Medical Marijuana Charges

And the universe didn‰t collapse. Not only that, the story has gotten no press whatsoever. Often, when the government refrains from doing something cruel to someone, there isn’t much of a news story left to report. This just goes to show how silly it is to assume that there’s a political imperative requiring us to continue aggressively enforcing bad drug laws. There isn‰t.
See how easy it is to just leave patients alone? Next time, try not arresting them in the first place.