Drug WarRant

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.

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.