Drug WarRant

Pretty poor timing for our dead-son exploiting* Steve Steiner.
On February 10, I noted that Gil Kerlikowske had been selected as the new drug czar nominee. This was confirmed by the next day.
On February 13, Steve Steiner puts out a media advisory:

Media Advisory: Guest for Discussion on National Drug Czar Position

Father who lost his son to drug overdose ready to speak up on National Drug Czar position.

No, he wasn’t making himself available to discuss Gil Kerlikowske. He had apparently missed the news. The media advisory was to promote someone else:

Mr. Steiner feels passionate about the current issue and has someone in mind for the position — Mr. Ronald Brooks

So who is Ronald Brooks? I’ve written about him before He’s a hard-core opportunistic drug warrior, who also happens to be a first-class illiterate idiot. About the only worse choices would be Calvina Fay, Mark Souder, or the Semblers.
The good news about this silliness is that if people like Steiner and Brooks are what the opposition have to offer, the drug war is doomed.
*for those who don’t know about Steiner and think I’m being insensitive, note that his son overdosed from crushing and snorting OcyContin, and Steiner now accepts money from Purdue Pharmaceuticals (makers of OxyContin) to campaign against medical marijuana.

“bullet” Kathleen Parker is on fire again at the Washington Post with Snap, Crackle, Pot – an excellent OpEd about Phelps, Lott, and the drug war, and she speaks with Howard Wooldridge of LEAP.
“bullet” Speaking of Phelps, the attorneys of two of the young men that Sheriff Lott went after have spoken up, and (no surprise) the only thing Lott was after was for them to incriminate Phelps.

The lawyers did not release the names of their clients, but Harpootlian said that his client didn’t even see Phelps smoke marijuana at the party. McCulloch said his client was out of town, and only lived at the home when the party happened. Both men have since moved.
“After they arrested him, they didn’t ask him where did you get the marijuana or who sold it to you. Almost all the questions they asked him were about Michael Phelps,” Harpootlian said. He added: “It was like they were busting the biggest heroin distributor in the country.”
The investigators appear to be trying to build a case against Phelps from others – a tactic normally used to bring down drug dealers with a large amounts of cocaine or methamphetamine, not someone who smoked marijuana five months ago, said Chip Price, a Greenville attorney who has dealt with drug cases for 33 years.
“Never have I seen anything like this on a simple marijuana case,” Price said.

“bullet” Mark Bauerlein in The Chronicle of Higher Education also sees clearly the stupidiy of the statement in the Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. government claims, however, that increasing violence is an indication that the drug war is working. One of them is quoted as asserting that “There is violence ‘because these guys are flailing. We‰re taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now.”
Apart from the juvenile expressions, we may be sure that if the violence were going down, the same officials would claim credit for that, too. “See? We’re taking these guys down. They can‰t even fight back any more . . .:”

“bullet” Mark Kleiman and Harold Pollack give advice for the new drug czar at the American Prospect. Most of it’s pretty good. They do get into pushing a couple of pet ideas (like in #8/9), but that’s OK. And, of course, Kleiman has to find a way to get in his pathetic juvenile strawman dig with:

Tell libertarians, and some liberals, that the drug problem isn’t just some statist or reactionary myth: Drug abuse, and not just the drug war, causes great harms.

This is just some fantasy. I don’t know a single libertarian or liberal who claims that drug abuse isn’t harmful. What many do claim is that prohibition isn’t the tool for dealing with it. And some even claim that we can’t properly address drug abuse until prohibition is out of the way. And some libertarians claim that government isn’t the way to deal with drug abuse at all. But they don’t claim that the problems of drug abuse don’t exist.
“bullet” This is disturbing.

Many doctors may lose their ability to prescribe 24 popular narcotics as part of a new effort to reduce the deaths and injuries that result from these medicines‰ inappropriate use, federal drug officials announced Monday.
A new control program will result in further restrictions on the prescribing, dispensing and distribution of extended-release opioids like OxyContin, fentanyl patches, methadone tablets and some morphine tablets.

We don’t need to make it harder for doctors to help patients in pain. We’re already making people suffer more than we should.
“bullet” Being drug free when you’re on probation doesn’t even help you when you live in San Antonio.

In San Antonio, between 2/3 and 3/4 of positive urine tests from the Bexar probation department resulted in false accusations of drug use, Greg Harman at the SA Current reports

If you’re going to be thrown back in jail for drug use when you didn’t use the drugs, it’s not much incentive to stay clean, is it?
“bullet” “drcnet”

Yesterday, I noted some particularly stupid statements by an unnamed senior U.S. official:

U.S. law-enforcement officials — as well as some of their counterparts in Mexico — say the explosion in violence indicates progress in the war on drugs as organizations under pressure are clashing.

“If the drug effort were failing there would be no violence,” a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. There is violence “because these guys are flailing. We’re taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now.”

I wasn’t the only to notice (actually, quite a few places commented).

Enter Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard to the rescue of the unnamed U.S. official:

This is one of the paradoxes of the war on drugs that leads to ridicule from opponents of the policy. I spent my first year out of school writing memos for police chiefs on topics ranging from devising better systems for monitoring domestic violence to developing protocols for chemical attacks. One of the projects I worked on involved developing new metrics for monitoring the progress of the HIDTA (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area) program. The problem was just as described above. These cops would go in and target the upper echelon of a distribution network. When they achieved their mission, rates of violent crime would spike in their area of operations. The reason: once you take out the big fish, the small fish start killing each other as they battle for control of all those newly underserved customers.

The cops wanted a new metric by which to judge their success — one that would not penalize them for an increased murder rate that necessarily follows from doing their job, i.e. eliminating a major drug trafficker.

The flaws in Goldfarb’s argument are obvious — he’s confusing success in an action with success in policy.

When those cops he worked with busted the big fish, and the little fish fought over the territory and customers (which were still there), Goldfarb doesn’t say what most likely happened next: One of the little fish won and became the new big fish; distribution continued as before; and they were back to square one (except for all the violence and people dying).

If you’re trying to measure whether the cops were successful in busting big fish, then the answer was “Yes.” If you’re trying to measure whether the drug war was successful, the the answer was a resounding “No.”

This is a common problem with drug warriors who can’t tell the difference between action and policy. You see it all the time. There’s a five ton seizure of drugs (a successful action) and they say that’s proof that the drug war is working. In fact, it’s usually a sign that the traffickers have so much drugs moving that even a five ton seizure doesn’t affect the availability of drugs at all (an unsuccessful policy).

Sure, it’s not the cops’ fault. They’re told to execute an action. It’s the over-riding policy that’s fatally flawed, which makes the cops’ successful actions meaningless at best, and usually disastrous.

Of course, Goldfarb’s defense of the idiot in the WSJ story was particularly ridiculous, since that official was actually claiming that the violence was proof of “progress in the war on drugs.”

And that’s just false. Every time we escalate the war on drugs, more people die, but the economics of the black market drug trade dictate that the war on drugs must fail. So yes, with any luck, the violence will subside in Mexico if and when a new equilibrium is created… that is, until the next unnamed moronic U.S. official, cheered on by Michael Goldfarb, thinks that the drug war can be won by increasing violence.

Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty by Lysander Spooner, 1875
I dare you to read the whole thing.
The next time someone says “Well, if you want to legalize drugs, why don’t you just legalize murder while you’re at it?”, I want to strap them down and force them to read this…
… but their reading comprehension would probably fail catastrophically, and then I’d be stuck with a vegetable strapped to a chair.

I’m going to be busy the next few days with a special out-of-town guest. Brendan Hunt, one of my former students from the early 90’s, has done quite well in the improv comedy field, including five years as part of the outstanding Boom Chicago troupe in Amsterdam.
Brendan created a one-man show about that time, appropriately titled “Five Years in Amsterdam” which performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and six cities around the world, including the HBO Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen 2007. He’s coming back to Illinois State University this weekend and will be performing the show this Saturday night at 7 pm in the Bone Student Center Old Main Room. Free!

Occasionally smart. Often upsetting. Always funny. This breakthrough hit of HBO’s US Comedy Festival autobiographically offers sex, drugs and rock and roll, with a side order of deep, lasting inner peace; oh and soccer too.

Brendan was the co-founder of Theatre of Ted, an open-mic-anything-goes student performance venue at Illinois State (and I’ve been the group’s faculty advisor for 18 years). Ted is bringing Brendan back and underwriting this special event.
I can’t wait to see the show myself. If you’re in the area, check it out.

Former presidents blast drug repression efforts

RIO DE JANEIRO – Three former Latin American presidents said Wednesday that regional policymakers should consider the decriminalization of marijuana because long-standing attempts to curb the production and trafficking of illicit drugs have failed.
In a report by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, former presidents Cesar Gaviria of Colombia, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil said “we are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs.” […]
“Most of the damage associated with cannabis use Ö from the indiscriminate arrest and incarceration of consumers to the violence and corruption that affect all of society Ö is the result of the current prohibitionist policies,” the report said.

Here’s the report, and it’s quite powerful.

Violence and the organized crime associated with the narcotics trade
are critical problems in Latin America today. Confronted with a situation
that is growing worse by the day, it is imperative to rectify the ‹war on
drugsŠ strategy pursued in the region over the past 30 years.
Prohibitionist policies based on the eradication of production and
on the disruption of drug flows as well as on the criminalization of
consumption have not yielded the expected results. We are farther
than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs.

And check this out:

Current drug repression policies are firmly rooted in prejudices, fears
and ideological visions. The whole issue has become taboo which
inhibits public debate. The association of drugs with crime blocks the
circulation of information and segregates drug users in closed circles
where they become even more exposed to organized crime.
Hence, breaking the taboo and acknowledging the failure of current
policies and their consequences is the inescapable prerequisite for
opening up the discussion about a new paradigm leading to safer,
more efficient and humane drug policies.

Wow.
It’s not a perfect report — it still talks in terms of reducing drug consumption, rather than reducing drug abuse (an important distinction), but still, a very good report.
In other world news, it appears that the Obama administration is at least making an effort to change the U.S. position in Vienna, by now supporting needle exchange internationally.

Until last week, US officials had been pushing hard for anti-drug programs reminiscent of the zero-tolerance stand of former President George W. Bush‰s so-called war on drugs š and the talks were at an impasse. […]
Now, it looks like the tone is changing. Obama has long wanted to repeal the 1988 ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs inside the United States, but he needs Congress to go along to make that domestic change. So he‰s shifting his gaze outward. In a significant break from both Mr. Bush and Bill Clinton before him, Barack Obama is making his support for needle exchange programs official, at least abroad. Today, Laura Tischler of the State Department confirmed the US is giving its negotiators new guidelines.

The shift is important, and better than Bush or Clinton, but not enough, as it still leaves much of the rest of the harm reduction agenda off the table.
Update: The Wall Street Journal covers the story of the Latin American study, but turn to John Walters and similar drug warriors for comment, getting the horrifically wrong “people are dying so we must be doing something right” argument:

Mr. Walters said increased violence in border areas of Mexico was partly a result of criminal organizations compensating for reduced income from the supply of drugs by turning to other activities, such as people-smuggling, and continuing to fight over turf.
U.S. law-enforcement officials — as well as some of their counterparts in Mexico — say the explosion in violence indicates progress in the war on drugs as organizations under pressure are clashing.
“If the drug effort were failing there would be no violence,” a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. There is violence “because these guys are flailing. We’re taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now.”
Latin American governments have largely followed U.S. advice in trying to stop the flow of drugs from the point of origin. The policy has had little effect.

A note to ‘senior U.S. official’ who won’t even put his name to his ridiculous comments: In the words of Seth Meyers: “Really?!?” Really, Mr. Senior U.S. Official? Have you read the news recently? Drug gangs going into a jail to make a hit. Senior Mexican drug officials taken out a week after assuming the job. Police and government officials implicated at every level. And you’re taking these guys out, Mr. Senior Official? Really? ‘Cause it looks like they’re taking you out.
Read an interesting quote (possibly not completely technically accurate as a definition criticism, but correct nonetheless)…

Mexico is being torn apart by drug gangs, often wrongly called cartels. Cartels are created to uphold prices. In the case of Mexico, it is law enforcement and the prohibition of drugs that upholds prices š and makes drug dealing irresistibly profitable.

What do we know about Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske?
Update: Lots of good stuff in comments. The early consensus seems to be that he won’t be a friend to drug policy reform, but he’s less likely to be the kind of sadomoralist that we’ve had (he’s certainly no John Walters). The Seattle experience is certainly a plus — home of hempfest and Norm Stamper, and just a little bit down the road from Vancouver. I know a number of people from Seattle and it seems to have a good vibe — maybe some of that rubbed off on him.
The fact of the matter is that the Drug Czar can’t be a reformer as currently constituted. He’s required by law to lie, remember?
But what I’m most interested in is what the new drug czar might not do. It would be nice if he didn’t show up at state legislatures trying to prevent them from passing state laws regarding medical marijuana or decriminalization. It would be nice if he didn’t go out of his way to lie to the press all the time about marijuana. It would be nice if he didn’t travel around the country acting as an advance salesman for drug testing companies.
These are things that a new drug czar could legitimately fail to do. And that would be a good thing.

Further Update: NORML’s Daily Stash interviewed former Seattle Police Chief (and LEAP member) Norm Stamper today about Gil Kerlikowske as drug czar. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet.

It’s so sad to be in a state where the Democrats have to be both the party in charge and the opposition party at the same time (It was the Democrats who impeached our Democratic governor). Unfortunately, the rules make it very difficult for Libertarians to get on the ballot, and the state Republican party is startlingly pathetic (this is the brain-trust who ran carpet-bagger Alan Keyes against Barack Obama for the Senate after briefly considering Andrea Barthwell).
Illinois Review is a joke and now we learn the brilliance of the Illinois Republican Liberty Caucus.
They tried to attack Radley Balko today. Twice. The First time was because Radley found it odd that they would use the words “child porno” when discussing an attorney who had represented clients like Playboy. Their intelligent attack on Radley was something along the lines of “Oh, yeah? Well child pornography is illegal. So there.”
They they decided that they had him for lying on his bio — he said that he wrote a bi-weekly column for Foxnews.com and they claimed he was lying because they could only find two columns under his name at forbes.com! The RLC took down that post once they realized the extent of their stupidity.
Note: This really has nothing to do with drug policy, but you don’t attack Radley for no reason and get away with it around here.
Update: It gets even more deliciously absurd. In their first attack on Balko, they showed a picture of him, but they hotlinked to it from his site (a completely boneheaded move since they were stealing his bandwidth and he controls what’s on his own site). So he simply switched the image for this one (scroll down), and now the RLC is accusing him of hacking their site! What morons!
OK, I take it back — the Republican Party in Illinois is clueless, but this circus from the Illinois RLC is beyond clueless, and it’s unfair to the Illinois Republican Party for me to link the RLC to them.

I’ve been trying to figure out the whole nonsense of Sheriff Lott trying to go after Michael Phelps for “breaking the law.”
I’m no lawyer, and I don’t know much about South Carolina laws.
Going into today, here’s what Sheriff Lott’s case looked like to me:

1. Picture of Michael putting his lips on a long plastic tube. Implies a lot, but proves nothing.
2. Statement by Michael admitting that was him in the picture and apologizing for inappropriate behavior, but never actually mentioning pot. Implies a lot, but proves nothing.

Based on that evidence, I assume that any competent attorney could get the case thrown out of court without even getting out of bed. (That is true, isn’t it?)
After today’s revelations, however, it seems to me that Lott has a different idea: Go after every college student in the area who might have been at the party, catch them with some pot, and then throw the book at them unless they turn against Phelps.
He probably figures he can scare them all into testifying that they were having an innocent monopoly party until Phelps showed up with his pound of dope and started filling bongs and selling it to people. (That’s the way the drug war works, don’t you know?)
Now, instead of a meaningless picture and statement, they’d have a parade of snitch testimony. Pretty sick, but it starts looking like a possible prosecution (assuming that the DA would want to touch a case like that). Everyone would know that it was a put-up job.
And getting a jury that didn’t already have an opinion on the case? Tricky. Of course, they may assume that Michael would plead to avoid the negative publicity. But a guilty plea might hurt him as much with sponsors as the publicity, so it’s hard to say which way it would go.
Anyway you look at it, this is just plain stupid.
Update: Norm Kent over at NORML does some of the same speculation that I do, except that he’s smarter than me and knows more.
Also, there is some question about how solid some of the information is on this case. The arrests and bong seizure reported by WIS-TV have not been confirmed by law enforcement.

Holy crap. Sheriff Lott is certifiable.

Lott says the picture indicated a law was being broken in his jurisdiction. He said he couldn’t ignore the violation just because Phelps is rich and famous.
We’ve now learned that since investigators began trying to build a case, they’ve made eight arrests: seven for drug possession and one for distribution. These are arrests that resulted as the sheriff’s department served search warrants.
We’ve also learned that the department has located and confiscated that bong.