Drug WarRant

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.

CBS News is starting a multi-part special report on marijuana legalization: Marijuana Nation: The New War Over Weed
Check out yesterday’s entry: Inside Holland’s “Half Baked” Pot Policy – a good feature.
Update: Today’s feature: Pot No Longer Focus of Anti-Drug Campaigns

Today’s Washington Post looks at the recent Supreme Court decision that says defendants have the right to confront the lab analysts who accuse them.

The predictions are dire. In New York, murderers could walk free. In Fairfax County, drunken driving cases could be dismissed. And nationwide, thousands of drug cases might have to be thrown out of court annually.
Legal experts and prosecutors are concerned about the results of last month’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that requires lab analysts to be in court to testify about their tests. Lab sheets that identify a substance as a narcotic or breath-test printouts describing a suspect’s blood-alcohol level are no longer sufficient evidence, the court ruled. A person must be in court to talk about the test results.
The opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, has prosecutors and judges shaking their heads in disgust and defense lawyers nodding with satisfaction at the notion that the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment guarantee that defendants “shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him” is not satisfied by a sheet of paper.

Of course prosecutors are scared by this ruling. It makes their job harder and it also means that more drug cases might go to trial in the hope that they could get a dismissal if the prosecutor can’t produce the analyst. The only way prosecutors manage the huge load of drug cases is to see to it that only 5% go to trial (through piling on charges to make the plea deal attractive in comparison to the alternative). If more drug cases go to trial, the whole system falls apart, particularly in a time when more money for courts is unlikely to be found.
And the system is corrupt. This Supreme Court ruling merely states that the prosecutors and judges must do their job as specified in the Constitution. If they can’t handle it, then maybe we’ll finally take a look at why we’re prosecuting so many people.

Robert Koopmans is a Staff Reporter for the Kamloops Daily News in BC. When writing about an approved medical marijuana user with a doctor’s prescription whose marijuana had been improperly seized by the RCMP, this report noted:

He says he is now almost out of his “medicine.”

Robert Koopmans apparently writes for a “newspaper.”