Drug WarRant

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

• Annual deaths from extreme cold: 680
• Annual deaths from marijuana overdose: 0

Something must be done about this. My God, they let children play in it! And lots of people even own their own freezers. Somebody oughta write a law.

New Jersey

Gov. Jon S. Corzine said Tuesday that he supports and would sign a bill allowing medicinal marijuana use, but added that economic issues are his top priority.
“I don’t think that we ought to be having fights on issues that don’t go to the heart of the needs of a broad majority of folks,” Corzine told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “I think that this is one that if it can be moved expeditiously because there’s a consensus, I think that’s great. I have studied the issue and I think that if properly structured, it’s an initiative that’s sensible.”

What is it with this country’s apparent thirst for seeing hard-core “law and order” that doesn’t actually respect… the law?

More at Crooks and Liars.

Allan catches this outrageous editorial at a sleazy rag called Investor’s Business Daily.
They start by buying into the most rosy cherry picked statistics they can find direct from the DEA and the drug czar and decide:

The news is nearly all bad for global drug traffickers these days. From the jungles of southern Colombia to the dusty border towns of northern Mexico, it’s bleak for drug lords.

And, of course, that’s nonsense. As Ted Galen Carpenter notes in The National Interest, “We‰ve heard it all before. Many, many times before.”

The reality is that street prices for illegal drugs act like the famous observation about prices in the stock market: they will vary. Over the past fifteen years, the retail price of cocaine has moved in a range between roughly $90 and $200 per gram. The latest spike is nothing abnormal, just as the plunge in prices from November 2005 to January 2007 was not unusual. […]
Not only is the U.S. market for cocaine and other illicit drugs still healthy, the market elsewhere in the world is even more robust. […]
With such vast consumer demand, and with the black-market premium creating profit margins of 90 percent or more, there is little chance of shutting off the supply. The economic incentives to engage in drug trafficking are simply too powerful.

But the morons at Investor’s Business Daily actually think that the government can shut off the supply of drugs and then magically…

There’s no need to help addicts if there’s nothing to get addicted to Ö and nobody’s life is diminished by a lack of exposure to drugs.

And these guys give investment advice.
Then they really go off the deep end…

The three lessons of this are, one, a drug war can be won.

Really? Oh, I give up. Don’t even tell me the other two.
What makes this even funnier is that these idiots actually want me to pay to comment on their article. For the 69 words I excerpted for web use, they suggest I should pay $.25 per word. Right.
I’ll give them this — their copyright is safe. Fiction writing that imaginative is unlikely to be claimed as un-copyrightable fact. But who would pay for this dreck? John Walters? Certainly not me (and my use of it is exempt under fair use anyway).
—-
Speaking of idiots…
“bullet” Lou Dobbs complaining about Obama:

Well, you know, he’s certainly not alone in his — well, in his lack of expression on the issue, because most liberals in the country simply do not want to discuss the reality that Mexico remains the source of the drugs serving this nation’s extraordinary drug habit. The United States, with about just under 5 percent of the world’s population, consuming about two-thirds of the world’s illegal drugs, and this government and the American people, apparently without the political will to stop it, and — continue to permit the devastation of millions of lives in this country.

“bullet” Police in Australia:

POLICE WINNING WAR ON DRUGS
POLICE hope a massive drug bust last week will end the growing number of burglaries and violent assaults in Albany […]
“Part of yesterday’s process was to eliminate those people, which we have done,” he said.
“This whole operation will be ongoing.”

“bullet” The Dallas Morning News thinks it knows how to stop the violence in Mexico. By addressing the fact that cartels often kill or kidnap journalists and other “storytellers” to silence them.

Either way, the locals are less likely to protect those trying to tell the rest of us the truth.
That’s why it’s so critical that Mexican legislators pass a law before them now to make it a federal crime to curtail an individual’s right to self-expression. The proposal also would strengthen the federal office of special prosecutor and give it more clout in investigating cases like Mr. Ortiz’s.
Giving the feds more power to protect journalists wouldn’t end the violence, but at least the cartels would know that Mexico City values the storytellers. And that must frighten them.
The more the truth gets out, the more likely the free world will be to stand up to the merchants of death.

Really? Passing a federal law against curtailing the right to self-expression is going to frighten cartels so they won’t kill or kidnap journalists?