Drug WarRant

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The U.S. deputy drug czar will be in Grand Rapids Monday to campaign against an initiative on the state’s Nov. 4 ballot that would legalize marijuana use for serious medical conditions such as cancer and glaucoma.

Call your Congressman and ask why your tax dollars are being used to send federal agencies out to campaign against state initiatives. Ask if they really have extra money for that lying around in Washington.
Seriously. Do it now. It’s easy.
I’ll wait…
Did you call yet?

… because we need one.
Go at it.
“bullet” “drcnet”

New Zealand

Police have hired one of the country’s top lawyers to investigate a former officer’s stunning confession that he lied in court – and wrongfully sent at least 150 people to prison.
Patrick O’Brien wrote to Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias admitting to perjury, saying he was racked with guilt after carrying a “dreadful secret” for more than 30 years.
Now nearly 60, O’Brien was an undercover agent in covert drugs operations in the 1970s, immersed in a dark, criminal underworld, and the star Crown witness in the resulting court trials. […]
In his confession, O’Brien told Dame Sian he answered to the “grey men” who trained him, on whose orders he lied to obtain the convictions at any cost.
“They called it Doomsday work and instructed me to take this dreadful secret to the grave,” O’Brien wrote.
“In every case I lied to the courts and I lied to the juries to obtain convictions against my targets.
“Telling lies was easy – ‘policemen don’t tell lies’ – and my targets never stood a chance.”
Tampering with evidence was also common, he said. Often the exhibit before the court was not the drugs that he bought from the target.

So his conscience brought about his turnaround. How many others didn’t have one?

“I am nearly 60 years old now, and in what time is left to me, intend correcting the wrong I have done.”

A herculean task.
You see, this is another aspect of the tragedy and disease of the drug war.
The social contract that we enter into for the safe operation of society gives extraordinary power to law enforcement, and with that arrangement comes incredible responsibility to be perfect in holding that trust.
Both the responsibility and the trust must be there for law enforcement to adequately do its job.
But the drug war corrupts. Not only financially, but in terms of that social contract. Police see citizens as their enemy and the ends start justifying the means. When that happens, they destroy the fragile balance of responsibility and trust.
What comes next? As certainly as night follows day, when the trust is broken — when the contract is not honored — extreme lawlessness and civil unrest follow.
There are a lot of good cops out there, and they certainly don’t want to be judged by the excesses and corruption of the bad apples, but we have no choice. How are we to tell which apples are bad by looking at them? Every damaged one we discover makes us even more suspicious of the rest.
So the good cops know that they must not cover up the activities of bad cops behind the blue code of silence. That, in fact, they must actively pursue and punish those who betray the badge. Otherwise they become tainted by the rot.
But that’s not enough. There is so much drug war corruption in law enforcement that those of us on the other side of that social contract quite simply cannot have confidence that the rotten apples are being found.
So the good cops — the ones who understand the importance of the trust — must take it a step further. They must root out the very cause of the rot, and advocate with all their might for the end of the corrupting drug war laws. Only then, can they salvage the contract and bring back the truth of their purpose.
For those good cops looking to take that step, I give you Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

Remember the Peacemaker? This is the Peacekeeper.

Don’t they just love their war toys?
Via Radley.

The contempt for the rule of law, the abandonment of Constitutional principles, the foundation-laying toward an extreme and entrenched Authoritarian government — these are things that drug policy reform advocates have seen happening for many years in conjunction with the drug war. The ground work was laid well before 9/11.
Of course, such concerns were often dismissed as paranoid rants from drug-addled brains. And, since drug policy communities have often attracted a few tinfoil-hat-wearing characters speaking in tongues, it was easy for a complacent population to ignore the signs.
Then came the “opportunity” of 9/11. Suddenly there was justification for expanding governmental powers as the public rushed to be the first to trade in their rights for some magic beans that would protect them.
“The cause we have chosen is just,” said John Ashcroft as he laid out some of the dismantling of America in the Patriot Act. The Times reported Ashcroft called for a “dramatic shift away from what he described as an old law-enforcement culture that was strapped by restrictions and limitations no longer relevant in an age of terror.”
So now the war on drugs exceptions to the Bill of Rights could be extended to the also vast and indefinable war on terror.
We’ve talked about this before, but several recent stories have brought this to my attention again.
“bullet” For years now, the government has been illegally spying on its citizens and has gone to great lengths to avoid any kind of oversight (with the helpful capitulation of Congress). They always said we should just trust them — they’re not going to listen in on our conversations — just the terrorists’.

GEORGE BUSH: It‰s phone calls of known Al Qaeda suspects making a phone call into the United States.

But…

In the most unsurprising revelation imaginable, two former Army Reserve Arab linguists for the National Security Agency have said that they routinely eavesdropped on Ö ‹and recorded and transcribedŠ Ö the private telephone calls of American citizens who had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism.

“bullet” So if a government has nothing preventing them from spying on citizens, how will they react to those who protest government policy?

The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday. […]
The police also entered the activists’ names into the federal Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database, which tracks suspected terrorists. One well-known antiwar activist from Baltimore, Max Obuszewski, was singled out in the intelligence logs released by the ACLU, which described a “primary crime” of “terrorism-anti-government” and a “secondary crime” of “terrorism-anti-war protesters.” […]
Sen. James Brochin (D-Baltimore County) noted that undercover troopers used aliases to infiltrate organizational meetings, rallies and group e-mail lists. He called the spying a “deliberate infiltration to find out every piece of information necessary” on groups such as the Maryland Campaign to End the Death Penalty and the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance.

And here’s the mindset of an authoritarian government:

The former state police superintendent who authorized the operation, Thomas E. Hutchins, defended the program in testimony yesterday. Hutchins said the program was a bulwark against potential violence and called the activists “fringe people.” […]
Hutchins told the committee it was not accurate to describe the program as spying. “I doubt anyone who has used that term has ever met a spy,” he told the committee. […]
Hutchins said the intelligence agents, whose logs were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland as part of a lawsuit, were monitoring “open public meetings.” His officers sought a “situational awareness” of the potential for disruption as death penalty opponents prepared to protest the executions of two men on death row, Hutchins said.
“I don’t believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government,” he said.

Yeah, how dare they use that First Amendment to protest the government…
[Side note: another scary sign of authoritarianism is the degree to which, in recent years, the notion of disagreeing with the government/its policies/its laws is somehow seen as un-American.]
“bullet” So how far does this governmental sickness go? What about indefinite detention for innocent people?

A federal judge yesterday ordered a small band of Chinese Muslims being held at the Guantanamo Bay military prison released into the United States by Friday, rejecting the Bush administration’s contention that it could detain them indefinitely without cause.

These are people who have been held for seven years and yet the government admits that they are completely innocent. They can’t be returned to China, but the government doesn’t want them in the United States, where they could talk to the press about how they were treated at Guantanamo. So they want to continue holding them forever.
Oh, the next day, the administration got a different court to issue a stay, so they could have another shot at detaining them indefinitely.
“bullet” In the context of all these symptoms of Government Gone Wild, the Supreme Court this week heard Herring v. United States – a case dealing with one aspect of the exclusionary rule of evidence (the exclusionary rule means that if law enforcement do not follow the law, any evidence they find subsequently is excluded from consideration in the trial). It’s likely that the Supreme Court will rule in this case that the exclusionary rule doesn’t apply.
There has already been some whittling away at the exclusionary rule in Hudson v. Michigan, and there’s a very real danger that the Supreme Court could eventually eliminate it altogether.
Nathan Robinson warns:

If we allow tainted evidence into court, then for the police the ends will justify the means. As long as they can get a hold of something incriminating, the steps they have taken to obtain it will not matter, even if those steps include violations of constitutional rights.
The implications of removing the rule are so enormous that it is surprising that the Court is even considering removing or watering down the effects of this valuable rule. By doing so, the Court reveals that it is out of touch with the day-to-day realities of the American criminal justice system. In my experience, police officers are already mainly concerned with what the end result of a search is, rather than how they go about performing it, and often dig up questionable probable cause, or try to badger people into consenting to searches. In these cases, the exclusionary rule is one of the only ways of holding police accountable.
But conservative justices on the Court do not care for the exclusionary rule, and the more of them that sit on the bench, the greater the threat to its existence. Those who value their civil liberties have much more to fear from a McCain Court than the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The exclusionary rule is one of our country’s most unique and powerful protections against government misbehavior, and if we allow Stevens and Ginsburg to be replaced with more Scalitos, we can wave it a fond goodbye, as police gain greater and greater incentives to disregard our rights without consequence.

But perhaps we should just count on Scalia’s New Police Professionalism and trust them. And just trust the federal government not to listen in on our phone calls. And trust the Maryland police to go after the bad protestors. And sit back and enjoy our indefinite detention.

Interesting press release about the problems of field drug test kits that are so ubiquitous, yet keep giving false positives and really messing up people’s lives.

However, there is now conclusive evidence the field drug tests falsely indicate the presence of drugs when used on numerous natural products such as soap, soy milk, essential oils and chocolate. […]
“We are alarmed by the growing number of people who have been taken to jail for simply possessing organic products,” says Ronnie Cummins, Executive Director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA). “This is an attack on people who have adopted an organic natural lifestyle, whether it’s the food they eat, the soap they clean with or the perfumes they use. What kind of world do we live in where nursing mothers’ have their babies taken from them and are subjected to coercive interrogations to generate false confessions, over healthy organic foods like raw chocolate,” says Cummins who co-founded the 800,000 supporter strong OCA.

Here’s the line that grabbed my attention:

The American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU’s) Drug War Project is also contemplating a class action challenge to the drug war testing industry.

I even like the wording of that sentence.

Dan Gardner slams the UNODC

This failure has many causes but a key one is the simple fact that the primary source of information about the drug trade is the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
For the UNODC, the criminal prohibition of drugs is not merely a tool of public policy. It is a cause, a crusade, a faith. One does not question a faith. One promotes it.
And that’s what the UNODC does every year when it releases its World Drug Report.
For journalists and politicians the world over, the WDR is the definitive source of information about drugs and drug policy. Any time you read a news story or political statement about drugs in Afghanistan or elsewhere, there’s a good chance the WDR was used as a source.
To an extent, that’s fine. The WDR has lots of solid data in it.
But the report is primarily an instrument of propaganda. Its purpose is to praise the status quo, bury evidence of failure, and frame the discussion so serious scrutiny of the War on Drugs never happens. […]
Don’t be fooled by the UN imprimatur. The World Drug Report is crude propaganda.
Journalists and politicians who take it at face value contribute to the manipulation of public opinion and the stifling of meaningful debate. And that is unacceptable at a time when Canadian soldiers are fighting and dying in the War on Drugs.

Well done, Dan.

“bullet” His Last War — by Jeff Prince. “David Noblett — and dozens of other patients — just wanted their doctor back.” A powerful must-read.
“bullet” Scott Morgan’s tearing it up. Read The Amazing Gigantic Missing Heroin Stash and The World‰s Smallest Bag of Marijuana.
“bullet” From the MPP blog: Global Cannabis Commission: ‹No Justification For Incarcerating an Individual For Cannabis PossessionŠ, I found a unicorn, and The Drug Czar‰s Legacy of Failure, by the Numbers
“bullet” Side note: Has it sunk in yet that in 104 days or less, John Walters will no longer be the drug czar?
“bullet” Speaking of the drug czar… His latest drug enemy? YouTube.
“bullet” DEA Lays An Egg In Washington State: 5-Day Copter Patrols Net 20 Pot Plants. Also from NORML Blog: NBA and NORML Joining Forces To Achieve Mutual Goals? Not As Far Fetched As It Sounds

Shannon Kari in the National Post: Candidates Still Believe Crime Pays

It has become a Canadian election campaign staple that politicians will tell the public the justice system is broken and changes are needed to crack down on crime, even when the crime rate is falling.
This year is no different.
The Liberals want to make it harder for young offenders to be granted bail, the NDP is calling for hiring more police and classifying auto theft as a violent offence. The Green party wants a crackdown on white collar criminals and the Bloc Quebecois says changes are needed to make it more difficult for convicted criminals to be granted parole.

That’s been true in the states for years, of course, although I’m actually feeling like I’m seeing a little less of it this cycle.
Criminologist Jane Sprott has the politicians’ number:

There is a “hostility to evidence” as the public is repeatedly told the justice system is too lenient and that crime is a major societal problem without the data to back up these claims, suggested Ms. Sprott.

Exactly.

Nick Bala, a law professor at Queen’s University in Kingston who specializes in youth justice issues, said he is not surprised the strategy of Mr. Harper has been successful.
“Playing on people’s fears gets you elected,” especially with respect to young offenders, said Mr. Bala. “Youth crime gets a disproportionate amount of media space because it is more sensational,” he said.
The most extreme cases are presented as the norm, when they are the exception, said Mr. Bala.
Promising longer prison terms is easier than telling the public that youth crime is a complex issue that involves more than the justice system. “It is not a quick fix. But you don’t get elected saying that,” Mr. Bala said.

Smart on crime. That’s what we need.
How do we get the people to ask their Representatives for proof that their tough new laws will actually help anyone?

Cincinnati is trying to figure out why their homicide rate is up this year.

Police say cutting the supply of illegal drugs may be the cause locally.
The national cocaine supply out of Latin America is dwindling due to tighter border control and stricter laws, police say.
“Our intelligence says there is quite a shortage on crack cocaine right now, and that has the buyers frantic to buy based on their addiction and the sellers know their livelihood is threatened based on supply and demand,” said Lt. Col. James Whalen, Cincinnati’s patrol bureau commander. “When you get involved with buying and selling drugs, unfortunately you run into violence.”

I’m not so sure how much I buy the shortage argument. I think the supply is reduced somewhat (although that’s probably more a result of the tanking of the dollar than laws and border controls, and I suppose there could be some localized pockets that are experiencing a shortage.
If that’s so, then I’m betting it’s not the shortage of one drug per se, but rather the change of status quo in the black market that’s causing a re-organization (which, unlike shifting markets for Pepsi and Coca-Cola, are resolved through guns rather than lawyers and TV ads).
Lt. Col. Whalen is at least right in noting that supply and demand are a factor in drug war violence (and a pleasant surprise it is to hear that). He’s on the right track, but the analysis is incomplete.
Of course, some people are not too happy with Whalen’s notion.

“The way it usually works is the more dope on the street, the more fellas on the street, the more competition for corners on the street, the more gun violence,” said Michael Levine, a former 25-year DEA agent and a police expert on drugs, currently located in High Falls, N.Y.
“So what are we supposed to believe, that we should import crack to Cincinnati to stop violence? We’ll have the Red Cross do a peace mission of crack cocaine drops,” he said.

Funny. But no, Michael. What you do is to legalize and regulate the drug trade to get it out of the hands of the black market’s business model.
But Michael is also right. If there is a glut of drugs on the market, then you have too many people selling them, and there are fights over territory.
Basically, drug war violence can come from any imbalance in the supply and demand chain (or even in a balanced market, from a power play attempt to control the market).
In my neighborhood was a chicken restaurant called “Atlanta’s Wings and a Prayer.” It was open for a very short time and then recently closed. Why? Maybe it was the economy. Maybe people preferred Popeye’s Chicken. Maybe people didn’t like going to that location to get chicken. Maybe their chicken wasn’t that good. But there’s a shift in the market.
Stores open, stores close. Starbucks takes over the world, and then scales back, and Mom and Pop coffee shops open near Starbucks to take advantage of the new interest in quality coffee. Pepsi and Coke shift their emphasis to bottled water while continuing their war against each other.
Sure, people are hurt in the legal market. Business owners lose their fortunes. Some people have to drive further to get chicken. But there are generally no shoot-outs over territory. You don’t have the manager of Starbucks bustin’ a cap at the barista of the Coffee House Bakery over the Cinnamon Dolce Latte market (which is, quite frankly, a lot like crack).
In a legal market, shifts are constantly happening, and some people succeed while others fail, and the lawyers haggle over the complex issues. But it’s largely done without violence.
In the black market, however, violence is the way disputes are handled, regardless of whether there is a shortage or a glut.
The only way to stop that is through legalization and regulation.