Drug WarRant

Well, I’m finally back from some excellent quality time with family (which did include some good discussions about drug policy — they’ve come so far…).
I’ve been really out of touch (having to depend on television(!) for news and information), so it’ll take me a bit to catch up.
“bullet” Scott Morgan has the story of another botched raid. The only thing we can be sure of is that these will continue to happen more often as long as law enforcement policies continue in their current direction. And there will be more dead cops and dead innocent civilians.
“bullet” Massachusetts marijuana decrim law goes into effect today. It’s unlikely to change things much, but it does make it clear that Massachusetts law enforcement is apparently populated primarily by whining, confused incompetents. After reading their complaints, I’m really glad I don’t have to depend on them to, oh, say, investigate anything.
“bullet” Judge blasts plan to randomly drug test teachers.

A federal judge halted the Kanawha County school system’s plan to randomly drug test teachers.
U.S. District Judge Joseph Robert Goodwin said the drug testing plan would force teachers to submit to an unconstitutional and unjustified search. He also gave a scathing rebuke of the policy and the school board that approved it. […]
He said that the school board’s argument that something bad could happen while a teacher under the influence of drugs was supervising children was based on an unreasonable kind of worse-case-scenario thinking. Goodwin asked why the board had not also passed a policy to randomly test teachers for tropical diseases.
“Total security for us and our children is only possible — if unlikely — in a totalitarian state,” Goodwin said.
He added, “Who wants to live in a society when a government will stop at nothing to prevent bumps and bruises.”

“bullet” “drcnet”

I got a moment to get to the library in Antigo, Wisconsin and get me some internet, and lo and behold, the questions are back at Change.gov!
I couldn’t put in the full question I had intended in my earlier post (the character count maximum is frightfully small), but I was able to put in the following

“76% of likely voters think the drug war is failing. Yet suggestions from opponents of the drug war are often dismissed. Will you appoint a blue-ribbon commission to look at all aspects of drug policy, including examining alternatives to prohibition?”

There are already close to 1000 questions including the word “marijuana” and quite a few with “drug policy”
Get over there and vote for the ones you like.

Had a brief window of internet access in Iowa, but expect very little where I’m headed next in Wisconsin.
What are your hopes for the New Year?

“bullet” (Arizona) Goddard Might Consider Legalized Marijuana

Attorney General Terry Goddard said Tuesday he might be willing to consider legalizing marijuana if a way can be found to control its distribution – and figure out who has been smoking it.
Goddard said marijuana sales make up 75 percent of the money that Mexican cartels use for other operations, including smuggling other drugs and fighting the Mexican army and police.
He said that makes fighting drug distribution here important to cut off that cash. He acknowledged those profits could be slashed if possession of marijuana were not a crime in Arizona.

Recognition of actual facts. Wow.
“bullet” Blast from the past… Weed Delivery Guy Saves Christmas

“It wasn’t long before all through the house, not a creature was stirring up off the couch. The boys opened the baggie and packed a bowl with delight, murmuring, “Happy Christmas, weed delivery guy. You did us one right.”

“bullet” Draft of Michigan med-cannabis rules wants to require that “caregivers or patients provide detailed cultivation records and track where each and every plant goes.”
“bullet” Children Stare with Heroin Eyes

Legislators in Suffolk County, New York, have passed a bill
that creates a Web site to show heroin-related arrests by location, frequency and the age of the culprits. […]
A website that tells everyone where the drug cops have been active? What could possibly go wrong with that?

“bullet” Another really, really, stupid lawmaker…
Drug Paraphernalia Tax Proposed

Rep. Darryl Rouson, D-St. Petersburg, has an interesting idea for raising revenues during these tough times.
House Bill 99 would add a “surtax of 5 percent” on items described as “drug paraphernalia” in Florida statute.
That includes not only “bongs” and “hypodermic syringes,” but also, according to state law, common items that can be fashioned into drug tools including “a balloon,” a “2-liter-type soda bottle” and “duct tape.”

Happy Holidays!
I’m off to visit my dad in Quincy, Illinois, my mom in Indianola, Iowa and my sister in White Lake, Wisconsin. For the next week or so, I’ll have very limited access to the internet. I’ll try to pop in if I can.
Use this thread to pass on any news, and to share your holiday wishes.

There appears to be no rush to re-open the “Open for Questions” at Change.gov, although there are discussions going on there. However, the questions are speculation are not going away, and I think that’s a good thing.
“bullet” If Obama Is Pro-Science and Honest, He’ll Put the Kibosh on the Drug War by Alexander Zaitchik at AlterNet:

Nobody expected Obama to tap Tommy Chong to run the Office of National Drug Control Policy. But maybe, just maybe, Obama would have the political courage to publicly acknowledge what an emerging majority of Americans now grasps: that the war on drugs is a failure, that it is unjust, and that it is an epic waste of law-enforcement time and resources.
Still a month before inauguration, the hopes of drug-policy-reform advocates have had their wings clipped several times… […]
Advocates may have their best ally not in the White House or in Congress, but in the economy. As state budgets shrink across the country, legislatures are often forced to choose between education and prison budgets.

“bullet” Why Obama Really Might Decriminalize Marijuana by John H. Richardson in Esquire

The stoner community is clamoring to say it: “Yes we cannabis!” Turns out, with several drug-war veterans close to the president-elect’s ear, insiders think reform could come in Obama’s second term — or sooner.

Let’s keep the conversation going. I know that there are some who support drug policy reform who believe that we have to save the conversation for the “right moment” (and, of course, there’s always a reason why that moment isn’t now). But that’s wrong. The more the conversation happens, the more people come to realize the importance of reform.
There’s a lot you can do. Talk to your family at the holidays. Write a letter to the editor. Reward and thank journalists and others who talk about reform. Encourage others to do so.
Update Reactions to the Esquire article:

• Obama to Decriminalize Marijuana, Claims Really High Person

(Gawker)

• Will he legalize it? (No.) (Culture 11)

The L.A. Times reports that New Hampshire, due to financial crises, is putting a freeze on jury trials!
Hmm… I seem to remember reading something about jury trials before… Oh yeah, in the Constitution of the United States

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed….

If there’s anything you’re not going to cut, I’m guessing it should be what you’re required to do by the Constitution.
The article goes on to talk about justice cuts all over the country – and at this point it’s showing up mostly in reduction of quality of justice rather than selectivity in prosecution. And that’s really dangerous in an already overloaded and poorly served function of government.
This could really blow up eventually.
The drug war is, of course, a huge part of this issue. The immense volume of drug prosecutions nationwide has completely overwhelmed and undermined the concept of justice and jury trials. This led to the use of over-charging (and the assistance of the legislature in passing overkill drug laws) in order to force plea bargains. In other words, they charge you for possession, trafficking, manufacture, paraphernalia, conspiracy, and tax evasion adding up to 5,000 years so you’ll plead guilty to whatever they want (whether you’re guilty or not), avoiding the jury trial you’re entitled to by Constitution. (And if you’re innocent, you’re really screwed.)
You know, instead of saving money by denying Americans their rights under the Constitution, perhaps the government should save money by restoring rights under the Constitution…

Now, it’s not just New Zealand that uses really bad science when it comes to the drug war, but it sure seems like that little country shows up disproportionately, (although a lot of that is attributed to the outrageously bad research coming from the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand, usually involving poor conclusions from inadequate samples).
What caught my attention this time was this article, which dramatically noted that cannabis causes over $30 million in hospital bills each year in New Zealand.
Oh? I was trying to figure out what could possibly cause all those costs. In my experience, cannabis users tended to make more trips to 7-11 than to the emergency room. In fact, while I’ve personally accompanied some idiots to the emergency room who didn’t know how to drink alcohol, I’ve never known a single person to go to the hospital for marijuana use.
So I was looking for the particular study referenced. While I didn’t find that particular one, I found a related study that explored all the social costs of all illicit drugs in New Zealand: New Zealand Drug Harm Index (pdf)
If you want some geeky entertainment, try going through this entire document and note all the outrageous assumptions made and bizarre notions for calculating “social costs.”
This study considers the costs to society of illegal drug use to include

• All costs of producing and selling the drugs
• All crime costs related to drugs
• All enforcement costs related to drugs, including customs, police, criminal courts, prisons, community sentences, preventative expenditures, etc.
• Not only the prison costs, but the lost output of prisoners!
• All health costs related to drugs
• The lost output of drug users who died early
• Pain and suffering related to drug use

… you get the idea. It goes on and on.
The study also bizarrely computes a potential “savings” to society for all drug seizures based on the assumed lack of societal costs that would otherwise be attributed to those drugs.
Here are some quotes that made my head explode:

The costs estimated using the prevalence approach are then compared to a counterfactual situation, in this case where no illicit drugs were ever used. That is, in order to determine the harm avoided by reducing drug consumption we compare the current situation with drug use to a hypothetical case where there is no harmful drug use. […]
[T]his study assumes that illicit drug consumption is abusive and imposes a social cost. Therefore, all resources diverted by illicit drug consumption are regarded as social costs. […]
One input to the drug harm model is an estimate of the ëadditional‰ or ëmissing‰ population who would currently be alive were it not for the deaths caused in the past by illicit drugs. Essentially, this involves estimating the population that would have existed in 2005/06 based on the modified mortality rates assuming no drug use in the past. […]
Drug-attributable mortality causes a reduction in society‰s productive capacity that society could have benefited from in the counterfactual case (a world without illicit drug use). This cost is a function of how many people die prematurely due to drug use and what those people could have earned. […]
As in Collins and Lapsley (2002) we assume that the probability of absenteeism is the same for tobacco use and illicit drug use. […]
In the absence of data on the production cost of illicit drugs in New Zealand, we follow the approach used by Collins and Lapsley (2002). They value the production cost of a drug as a fraction of its street price. This assumes that there is a significant risk premium factored into the price of illicit drugs and that the resource cost of the inputs would be lower in their best alternative legitimate use. The value of resources diverted is assumed to be five percent of the street price for all illicit drugs except for cannabis, opioids and methamphetamine produced from domestically sourced inputs. Cannabis is assumed to have a lower risk premium so the resource cost is equal to 25 percent of the street value. This approach is likely to yield a conservative estimate of the value of diverted inputs. […]
This study estimates costs for three health conditions that are recognised widely as affecting many drug users: depression, HCV and HIV/AIDS. […]
The value of travel delays was estimated by multiplying four components:

• average length of time a vehicle is delayed by an accident
• value of time per vehicle
• traffic flow per hour – gives indications of how many vehicles would be involved when an accident happens
• number of crashes in a particular year.

[…]
The study does not consider licit drugs such as legal party pills, such as benzylpiperazine (BZPs). Nor does it include harm from other legally available substances such as alcohol or tobacco. […]
Incarceration poses a further cost due to the lost output of inmates. Lost output estimates were calculated on the basis of the age and gender profile of inmates jailed due to drug use, and totalled $38.4 million. […]
This study uses a value of $106,600 per year of life lost due to the premature mortality of drug users, and drug-related homicides and road accident fatalities. […]

Again, you get the idea. This is a study designed to find everything you could possibly invent and manipulate to conceivably be a cost related to drugs. You could take the same damn study and change the word “drugs” to “prohibition” and it would make a whole lot more sense (but still be ridiculous).
What is the value of such a detailed time-intensive waste of time?
Propaganda.

“bullet” Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast rounds up a good discussion on the Dynamics of Overcriminalization
“bullet” Budget Woes Kill Elgin’s DARE Program
“bullet” “drcnet”

Scott Morgan has the story