Drug WarRant

The United States, apparently unhappy with the meager level of violence in Mexico, is putting up bribe money in an attempt to escalate it.

The Department of State offered up to $50 million Monday for information leading to the arrests of 10 top Mexican drug suspects accused of key roles in a violent organization estimated to have sold more than $1 billion worth of drugs in the United States.
U.S. Attorney Benton J. Campbell said the reward money and new federal charges were among U.S. efforts to dismantle a powerful drug trafficking organization known as The Company, whose members came from an elite security force called Los Zetas.

Remember that the Zetas started out as a group of elite Mexican Army soldiers trained in the U.S. at the School of the Americas by U.S., French and Israeli specialists to be able to take down Mexican cartels. Instead, they became the most dangerous cartel of all.
So, unable to take down the cartel that we trained, we’re now offering rewards for their capture. $50 million may seem like a lot, but it’s worthless if you can’t spend it. If you’ve got the size of organization to protect you if you turn them in, then you’re already part of a competing cartel that would stand to gain much more than $50 million with the elimination of the Zetas.
If we succeed in taking down the Zetas, will that end the violence? Of course not — it will just create a leadership vacuum in the cartels resulting in mid-level gangsters fighting it out in the streets in order to grab the brass ring that is the leadership of the multi-billion dollar drug trade.
Of course, when the one possible solution to the drug war is not part of your vocabulary — if it can’t even be considered — then all one can do is flail around trying ever more useless “solutions.”

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

One of the problems police have in the drug war is that drug transactions are consensual, so nobody generally wants to report them to the police. Police therefore have to get creative to even find out about drug deals.
Well, a drug deal went down in Statesville, North Carolina recently and the police were all over it. Oh, yeah, they had the 411 on this one.
One itsy, bitsy problem. They forgot to have anyone besides the police involved in the deal.

An undercover Iredell County Sheriff’s Office deputy recently purchased drugs from undercover Statesville police officers, raising questions about communications between the two agencies.
Statesville Police Chief Tom Anderson said undercover officers from his department were working a week-long case when they met with someone interested in selling a small amount of marijuana.
The undercover SPD officers met with the individual in the parking lot of a local store to make the deal, Anderson said. […]
After the arrest, investigators from the sheriff’s office arrived and confirmed the seller was an undercover deputy and he was released, Anderson said.

Good thing they were able to stop that small amount of marijuana they were selling from reaching the streets.

Via Allen St. Pierre at NORML…
Yep, a newly formed Drug Task Force has been established in the House of Representatives to fight back against the Obama administration which “seeks to shut the war on drugs down.”
Wait. What was that again? The Obama administration is shutting down the drug war? In whose fantasy?
Well, I guess, it’s true in this group’s fantasy, led by Rep. John Mica (R-Fla). They are going to see to it that we keep the war going strong. The other members of the task force are Reps. Dan Burton and Mark Souder, R-Ind.; Darrell Issa, R-Calif; Jim Jordan, R-Ohio; Aaron Schock, R-Ill.; and Michael Turner, R-Ohio. Wow, an entire eight out of the 435 Representatives!

After the disastrous article on marijuana addiction they ran Friday, the New York Times appears to be trying to regain some credibility with today’s follow-up: If Marijuana Is Legal, Will Addiction Rise?
They interview Roger Roffman, Wayne Hall, Mark A.R. Kleiman, Peter Reuter, and Norm Stamper about marijuana addiction under legalization. The consensus among all five is that it is much ado about nothing, despite the fact that some of these five are prohibition-enablers.

Sarah Kershaw and Rebecca Cathcart drop a load in the New York Times Fashion and Style section: Marijuana Is Gateway Drug for Two Debates

IT was as if she woke up one day and decades of her life had disappeared.
Joyce, 52 and a writer in Manhattan […] ‹I would come home from work, close my door, have my bong, my food, my music and my dog, and I wouldn‰t see another person until I went to work the next day,Š said Joyce […]
‹What kind of life is that? I did that for 20 years.Š […]
Smoking pot, she said, ‹was a slow form of suicide.Š

What?
This is the fault of pot? This sounds like an idiot who had no ambition. The pot wasn’t the problem – she still managed to hold down a job and keep her dog alive. She simply made a choice that wasn’t in anyway dictated by pot.
As one commenter noted:

It’s not “as if” decades of Joyce’s life had disappeared. Those decades have indeed disappeared, plain and simple. All of us who have reached a certain age are familiar with this fact, whether we smoke dope, drink booze, or get high on nothing but pure spring water, and whether we spend our nights listening to music with our pets, parenting and grandparenting children, partying with friends and lovers, or fulfilling vows of prayer and silence as monks. It sounds to me as if Joyce liked her life well enough until, after decades of it, she didn’t. It happens all the time. Why blame marijuana?

At one point, the article reaches an amazing low with the addition of National Institute of Drug Abuse’s Dr. Nora Volkow, who complains that people don’t take marijuana addiction seriously enough.

With marijuana, ‹it‰s going to take some real fatalities for people to pay attention,Š Dr. Volkow said. ‹Unfortunately that‰s the way it goes.Š
Only after the basketball player Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose in 1986, and the crack epidemic began, did the government start a campaign to warn of cocaine‰s dangers.

Marijuana fatalities? What the hell is she talking about? And the nonsense about Len Bias’ death leading to something positive? Try learning the true history of the hysteria.
This entire Times piece is embarrassing, made only a slightly bit better by the fact that the graphs accompanying the article contradict the thrust of it.

I’ll miss him.
I grew up watching Walter, whether he was reporting the news or helping us be a part of the great and terrible moments in history, from the Apollo missions to the tragedies of the day. But he did more than report. He was a classic journalist — he wanted to really know, so he could do his part to pass on the truth — not a he-said, he-said political beltway mouthpiece (that dominate network and cable news today), but real journalism. It’s no surprise that he was considered the most trusted man in television.
Many years later, I got a chance to see a rare interview with Walter on TV. Catherine Crier was talking to him one-on-one on the relatively new Fox News channel. Ironically, he was just getting into talking seriously about the dearth of real reporting today — how the networks and cable cared only about bottom line to the detriment of the news — and you could see Crier frantically signaling offstage to let the interview run and not cut to commercial… but he was cut-off mid-sentence for a commercial break, and when they came back he was gone.
In his later life, Walter discovered the truth about the drug war, and came out as a passionate reformer, working with Drug Policy Alliance.
Here’s Allen St. Pierre’s recollection, along with Cronkite’s “Drug war is a war on families” OpEd from 2004.

Walter Cronkite: On America’s “Disastrous” War on Drugs

Part one:

Part two
Part three
Part four
Part five
Part six
An earlier post of mine about Walter, including the letter he sent me.

“bullet” Radley Balko on new technologies making it possible to upload videos and pictures of police at work.

As more and more people acquire it, police officers will have to approach their jobs with the knowledge that everything they do while on duty can legally be captured and stored on a server they won’t be able to access. Confiscating phones and cameras won’t work anymore. The law enforcement community shouldn’t fight this technology, they should embrace it. It’s just as likely to protect the good cops from false reports of abuse as it is to expose the bad ones.

“bullet” CBS Series on Weed

• High Stakes: A Call to Legalize Marijuana
• America’s Love-Hate History with Pot
• Inside Holland’s “Half-Baked” Pot Policy
• Time for Marijuana Legalization
• Pot No Longer Focus of Anti-Drug Campaigns
• Fast Draw: Marijuana
• Legal Pot would Bring in $1.4B for Calif.

“bullet” He‰s Not High – Inside Barney Frank‰s Plan to Legalize Marijuana
“bullet” Calling marijuana medicine sends the RIGHT message to kids
“bullet” But Officer, those weren’t my drugs in the car.
“bullet” DrugSense Weekly
“bullet” “drcnet”

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala):

“Sen. Leahy and I were talking during these hearings, we’re going to do that crack cocaine thing you and I have talked about before,” Sessions said.

Good for you!

If you’re not interested in seeing a cop choke a man to death who’s trying to swallow some drugs, or hear more justification from cops for why this type of thing is an appropriate thing that happens in a drug war, don’t go read Ryan Grim or Scott Morgan.

The Boston Herald runs an article about police complaints that the decrim law is hard to enforce.
This was the kicker.

Meanwhile, in Braintree on Monday night, police spotted a suspected perv smoking pot in a car filled with coils of rope, a pair of handcuffs and bottles of NyQuil. But they had to let the man go, even though he was awaiting trial on child sexual assault charges. Said Deputy Chief Russell Jenkins, ‹Had the law not been changed, he absolutely would have been placed under arrest.Š

First of all, I’ll believe it when you show me pictures.
Second, are they really saying that they need pot laws as an excuse to hold people for other crimes they haven’t committed?
This is pathetic.