Drug WarRant

Congress is actually making progress toward giving us some real (if incremental) reform.

At least four of the worst excesses of the federal war on drugs appear likely to be rolled back this year — the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity, the federal ban on the funding of syringe exchange programs, the all-out federal war on medical marijuana, and the HEA AID Elimination Penalty. All four reforms are advancing quickly in Congress.

However, Mark Souder is trying to make a stink, and has an amendment to the HHS appropriations act, which:

Would prohibit funding for any program which distributes sterile needles or syringes for the hypodermic injection of any illegal drug.

This could be debated as early as today.
You can take action here if you wish to tell your Representatives to oppose Souder’s amendment.

I am becoming a huge fan of Gus Kerlikowske.
But, you say, how can that be? Kerlikowske opposes marijuana legalization.
Of course he does. He’s the drug czar and required to by law.
It’s the way he does it — so deliciously ridiculous.

“Legalization is not in the president’s vocabulary, and it’s not in mine,” he said. […]
“Marijuana is dangerous and has no medicinal benefit,” Kerlikowske said in downtown Fresno …

This is pure gold. He said this in California! “Marijuana has no medicinal benefit.” In California where everybody knows somebody who is benefitting medicinally from marijuana.
You see, our old drug czar would have attacked this with subterfuge. He would have said something like “The FDA and other legitimate medical organizations will never accept smoked drugs as medicine. We have to turn to medical professionals for the proper development of drugs from cannabis, with properly controlled doses, not the false and damaging hope of a dangerous smoked drug just because it makes people feel good. What message are we sending to the children?” And some people would have nodded and thought that sounded reasonable.
Not Kerlikowske. He goes into California and says that marijuana has no medicinal benefit. Well nobody really believes that anymore — even the hard core drug warriors out there are trying to convince people that other existing drugs provide the same or better benefit as marijuana. By claiming no medicinal value, Kerlikowske looks like a doofus, and by extension, so does the entire U.S. marijuana policy.
And that ‘legalization not in his vocabulary’ business, over and over again — more fabulous stuff. It sounds stupid and totally childish. And not just to us.
Of course, we need to ridicule him for this and take advantage of it. Point out the Emperor’s New Clothes. But this is easy stuff. And we can make it work for us.
When it comes to marijuana, I love Gus.
However, that does not mean that I’m sold on him as drug czar in all areas. Not in the least. I’m very concerned with the damage that he may cause in the area of prescription drugs — he’s really big on pushing the abuse/overdose messages there (it seems to be a personal agenda for him) and I worry that the government may go even further overboard in terms of making it hard for doctors to prescribe what is necessary for pain management.
But today, he’s making me smile.

One new thing that we’re seeing recently is leaders, former leaders, and press of foreign countries willing to speak out against the U.S. Drug War. Not only are they learning about the failures and destruction of the drug war, but in today’s economy, they’re losing faith that the U.S. will be able to continue to bribe countries into playing along.
Check out this extraordinary editorial in the Guatemala Times: US failed war on drugs is killing Guatemala.

Calderon in Mexico has the resources (from the US) money, man power and the equipment to chase the narco gangs out of Mexico. Out to where, nobody asks, never mind, Calderon is considered to be a monumental success in the war on drugs. The same applies to Uribe in Colombia; he also got his resources from the US. (Remember both Colombia and Mexico has a lot of OIL.)
Where are the Narco Gangs re-surfacing? Everywhere where they can operate in a weak country that does not have the same resources as Mexico and Colombia, especially Guatemala, because we are right there across the border.
We are paying the ultimate price for the idiotic, myopic and ill conceived anti drug war strategies designed by the US and implemented in Colombia and Mexico ( We wonder is it about drugs or is it about OIL resources?).
Mexico gets billions to make war on narcos; Colombia gets billions to make war on narcos, result: massive narco migration. That is hailed as a success in the war on Drugs.
Well it is no success for Guatemala and other countries who suffer the consequences.

And they know exactly where they stand…

Guatemala is in the middle, Guatemala does not concern the US because we are unimportant to them, we have no OIL. No economic interest, no security interest, no political interest. So the geniuses of the US Drug war give resources to Colombia and Mexico, but very little to Guatemala. Result: Guatemala will soon have more narcos then chickens. But who cares. Geopolitically Guatemala is disposable.

The editorial concludes with an eminently fair and reasonable suggestion.

We have a better suggestion: take the money away from Mexico and Colombia, have the narcos return to their countries of origin. Make an air bridge and import the drugs legally into the US. Mexico prospers, Colombia prospers, the US takes care of their problem and we are out of this idiotic war on drugs. That is what we call a successful strategy to contain the problem.

What a powerful and… true… editorial. Only problem is, nobody’s listening.

We all had a good laugh a couple of days ago with the story of the undercover police selling drugs to the undercover Sheriff’s deputy in Statesville, NC.
Well, here’s another one that looks like it came right from the files of Reno 911, this time from El Paso, Texas.

The sheriff of Hudspeth County illegally detained a group of El Paso officers on a drug stakeout, then laughed as he told them that their operation was blown and they were free to leave, a lawsuit against the sheriff alleges.

It’s pretty confusing, but this is what I gather from the allegations in the lawsuit…
The El Paso officers, who believed they were deputized by the DA to work narcotics in Hudspeth County as well as El Paso, got word of a possible drug shipment and set up a stakeout in Hudspeth County. Since the Hudspeth County sheriff doesn’t come in that early in the morning, they couldn’t notify him they were working his turf. They pulled over a car (the wrong one) and a Hudspeth County deputy saw them and asked them what they hell they thought they were doing.
So they go back to their stakeout, get word that the Sheriff is trying to arrest them, decide to head back to El Paso, but get stopped in a Sheriff’s roadblock. The Sheriff hauls them in and says they’d better let him know next time they work his turf, and then:

“He concluded his presentation by announcing with a laugh: ‘Whatever you were working on is f—-d up now, and you’re free to leave.’ “

So the El Paso narcotics officer is suing as a private citizen for, get this, a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights:

His lawyer, Wyatt, said that “The Fourth Amendment protects everybody from being arrested without probable cause. In this instance there was no probable cause that anybody had committed a crime yet the sheriff of Hudspeth County ordered that several El Paso police officers be arrested and detained.”

Yeah, life’s a bitch when you don’t have Fourth Amendment rights, isn’t it, Officer Dangle Short? When police can just pull you over and put you through hoops just because they don’t like you, or they have a hunch you’re doing something you shouldn’t be…

Again, i got all excited – today’s Chicago Sun Times — plastered across the entire front page is a picture of someone smoking a joint with the headline screaming Cook County going to pot

If you‰re busted carrying a small amount of marijuana in portions of Cook County patrolled by the sheriff‰s police, you may get off with just a ticket.
In a move that caught the sheriff‰s office off guard, the county board on Tuesday voted to decriminalize possession of less than 10 grams of pot in unincorporated areas of Cook County. Those are the parts of the county not claimed by Chicago or its suburbs.

Oh. Still…

Leading the charge was Cmsr. Earlean Collins, a Democrat who admitted her grandson was busted for carrying a small amount of marijuana. She said arrests like that clog the jails.
‹They got my grandson…he had a half of joint in the car,Š Collins said. ‹They stopped him. They took him to the police station. They impounded his car and let him out the next morning. Why do that?
‹A lot of kids make a mistake, have a little marijuana, and they can avoid going to jail or court.Š

Yeah, it’s a bitch when it hits your friends and family, isn’t it?
The measure still needs to be signed by Count Board President Todd Stroger, who said:

‹I don‰t know,Š Stroger told CBS2. ‹I wasn‰t paying enough attention to it. I‰ll find out about it later. I can‰t comment on it.Š

I got pretty excited for a minute when I read the breathless news from Liberty Counsel reported on CNW:

… liberals in Congress have nonetheless passed a $768 million dollar Financial Services Appropriations bill š without allowing debate š that will force taxpayers to pay for the destruction of innocent human life in the District of Columbia. Additionally, the bill š which President Obama supports š would legalize medical marijuana, fund a needle exchange program to provide intravenous drug addicts with clean needles to continue injecting illicit and often deadly drugs, eliminate money previously allocated for a drug prevention campaign…

Still…
Too bad about taxpayers funding the prohibition apparatus that keeps killing innocents in the drug war, but the rest of that sounded pretty good. Why haven’t I heard that much about his in other sources?
Ah, it turns out the Liberty Counsel isn’t a libertarian group, the CNW is the Christian News Wire, and the legalized medical marijuana is merely about lifting the ban that prevents DC residents from voting on it for their district.

The Founding Fathers never wanted a national police force. In fact, there were adamantly opposed to the idea, having a strong distrust of centralized authoritarian structure.
They specifically left out the powers to form any kind of national structure for domestic policing, leaving that entirely up to the states, with one teeny, tiny exception — this bit of power ceded to the federal government in the Constitution:

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

The Commerce Clause, it’s often called. And for many years, that worked just fine, and was accomplished without any national force. It wasn’t until 1865 that the Department of the Treasury established the Secret Service to combat counterfeiting — a relatively easy fit for the role of “regulating commerce among the several states.” In 1908, the FBI got its start (although the name was different then) with a grand total of 10 agents.
The Federal Bureau of Narcotics was established by the Department of the Treasury in 1930 under commissioner Harry J. Anslinger. It later became the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968 and was supplanted by the Drug Enforcement Administration, established by President Nixon. There are now over 10,000 employees of the DEA, over 25,000 employees of the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security had 183,000 employees in 2004.
Even as these national police forces grew, there was an historic view of the importance of keeping policing a state matter, except when “necessary.” Those my age can remember all the old TV shows where the feds couldn’t do anything unless the crooks physically crossed state lines….
… and yet in Raich v. Gonzales in 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that federal agents could use a federal law to enter a state and seize a plant wholly grown in that one state with no money changing hands, even where that plant was fully compliant with that state’s laws.
This is pretty bad. The existence of massive, bloated, power-hungry federal police forces is only one part of the problem we’re facing, however.
In many ways, the scarier effect is the increased loss of local accountability in local and state police forces.
This is also a function of the drug war (and, in more recent times, also a function of the war on terror which grew out of the drug war). The drug war brought about the proliferation of the multi-jurisdictional drug task force, teaming up local police with federal police, with additional funding often coming from federal grants (most notably the Byrne grants, which have led to numerous gross abuses of police power).
The feds offer training and money, and the Pentagon gives them toys (16,000 departments received more than 380,000 pieces of equipment just in 2005, including armored vehicles). It’s no wonder that they start to look at the feds as not only their friends, but as their source of authority, rather than their local communities.
Now, consider the idea that a local community might like to reduce the amount of police time spent on certain pursuits (it’s their police, after all). Maybe they’d like fewer marijuana arrests and more effort spent on solving difficult crimes or community building (mandates like this have been set in a variety of local communities and states). Well, if the cops are part of a multi-jurisdictional task force getting Byrne grants, their receipt of funds is judged on the following criteria:

1. Number of offenders arrested
2. Number of offenders prosecuted
3. Number of drug seizures
4. Quantity by weight (e.g., ounces, grams, dose units) and drug type
5. Total value of funds and assets forfeited

Now you’ve got police with a financial incentive to ignore local mandates, and you’ll immediately hear them running to the press saying that they have no option but to enforce the federal laws…
Asset forfeiture is another area where the state police are seduced to work for the feds instead of their own state:

Under the federal equitable sharing law, if state police want to circumvent state forfeiture laws Ö for example, because the state law allocates forfeited assets to the state’s education fund Ö they simply turn the forfeiture over to federal law enforcement authorities. Federal authorities keep 20% and return roughly 80% to the state police.

This dangerous trend toward nationalizing drug police is exacerbated by organizations like the National Narcotic Officers’ Associations’ Coalition, led by President Ronald E. Brooks (who I’ve ridiculed before). This is an organization working to coordinate local, state, and federal police forces into promoting sentiments like this:

The resolve to fight drug abuse must be stronger than ever. It must be
understood that drug trafficking is terrorism. We must fight the efforts to reduce our nation’s commitment to fighting drug abuse. Most importantly, we must fight those groups that are working to legalize or decriminalize drugs through strategies of harm reduction, medical marijuana, and industrial hemp.

That’s right. They’re saying it’s the role of the police to fight reform groups.
And they’re very clear about their goals:

• To ensure that the Edward R. Byrne Memorial Fund is fully funded…
• To maintain, increase, and intensify drug asset revenue sharing…
• To assist in the preparation of the National Drug Strategy…
• To have an impact on legislation affecting narcotic officers and narcotic enforcement in the United States.

They don’t even hide the fact that part of their desire is to break down the old notion of a locally accountable police force.

For the
past fifteen years, thanks to the HIDTA Program and Byrne-funded multi-jurisdictional drug
task forces, Federal, state and local drug investigators are co-located and working
cooperatively in cities, towns, and rural communities throughout the country. […]
The Byrne Justice Assistance Grants
fund multi-jurisdictional task forces that don’t replace state and local funds, but rather provide the incentive for local agencies to cooperate.

And they’re not alone. When it came to lobbying for federal Byrne grant money, they were joined by such organizations as: National Alliance of State Drug Enforcement Agencies, International Association of Chiefs of Police, National Sheriffs’ Association, National District Attorneys’
Association, Major County Sheriffs’ Association, National
HIDTA Directors, and the National Troopers’ Coalition.
So what’s the result of such a breakdown of local accountability?
Despite the fact that medical marijuana has been the law of the state for years…

The California Narcotics Officers Association, from its official training materials: “Marijuana is not a medicine. á There is no justification for using marijuana as a medicine.” [MPP]

They are training police officers to believe that state laws are a lie and that their own citizens who passed the laws are wrong. And how does this lead to “protect and serve”?
We’ve seen this all over the country. Police in Massachusetts and Minnesota complained endlessly about the decrim and medical marijuana laws passed in their states in 2008 (and still are). Police are regularly trying to influence legislators and governors (such as the recent medical marijuana veto by Governor Lynch in NH) to fall in line with federal laws rather than passing laws that will help their own constituents.
And, of course, California cops have not only ignored local mandates, but actively worked with the feds to subvert them by calling in the DEA to conduct medical marijuana raids, etc.
This is dangerous on many levels. One of the reasons to have police accountable locally is part of the checks and balances on government to prevent the tyranny that can come from an unchecked authoritarian national government.
The founders also understood the necessary, yet potentially dangerous, power possessed by the police force, and that it was way too much power to give to a national domestic entity.
Finally, the police serve an incredibly important function in society, and that function works best when the police are an integrated part of the local community. Police have lost much of their effectiveness because they are no longer seen as part of the community and (much due to the fault of the drug war) are no longer trusted by large portions of the community. More and more, police see themselves as soldiers facing an enemy in an occupied land, rather than as civic friends who can help.
These problems are a result both of the destructiveness of the drug war, and the trend toward nationalization of police (also a by-product of the drug war). Unfortunately, our attempts to solve the dual problems relating to policing trends will be vigorously fought by national police lobbyists. And every step we get closer toward a national police force will make reform even harder.

TPMCafe Book Club is focusing this week on Ryan Grim’s new book This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.
So far…

• The Economics of Abuse by Mark Kleiman
• There is No Such Thing as Drug Policy by Ryan Grim
• Added: Changing the Baseline by Ethan Brown

I’m sure I’ll be talking about this later.

Thoreau over at Unqualified Offerings has a couple of excellent posts worth reading, including You can’t spell “defeat” without D, E, and A and…
Drug War Explained:

A friend who doesn‰t pay much attention to law and politics asked me what would happen if he had a marijuana plant in his house. Here‰s the answer I gave him:

• Masked men with guns would break down your door.
• They would confiscate your assets.
• They would drag you away in front of your family.
• They would lock you in a cage with violent criminal gangs.
• They would do these things because if you were allowed to grow and use that plant then something bad might happen.

He didn‰t quite know what to make of that.

Radley Balko covers it:

Last week, an undercover New York City police officer participating in a drug buy shot and killed 49-year-old Shem Walker during an altercation at Walker‰s home in Brooklyn. Police say Walker, described by family and neighbors as an ex-con who had reformed, apparently thought the officer was a drug dealer or a vagrant. When the officer didn‰t respond to Walker‰s verbal demand to leave his property, apparently because he was wearing earphones to monitor the drug buy, Walker tried to forcibly remove him from Walker‰s front stoop. The two got into an altercation. A second undercover officer then joined the fight, at which point the first officer shot and killed Walker.

Sigh.