Drug WarRant

I must admit… I never thought I’d see an effective political ad that advocated a 15-year-old’s use of marijuana.

The lead essay over at Cato Unbound this month is outstanding: Towards a Culture of Responsible Drug Use by Earth and Fire Erowid.
There will be reaction essays coming out later this week by Jonathan Caulkins, Jacob Sullum, and Mark Kleiman, and a week of online discussion.
Should be quite interesting.

The Agitator/Reason’s Radley Balko will be appearing live online at The Art of the Possible on Wednesday at 7 pm Eastern, and will be taking real-time questions from readers in the comments.

“bullet” Real Commander Needed for the War on Drugs by Neal Peirce

Will America’s ill-starred “war on drugs” and its expanding prison culture make it into the presidential campaign?
Standard wisdom says “no way.”
We may have the world’s highest rate of incarceration — with only 5 percent of global population, 25 percent of prisoners worldwide. We may be throwing hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders, many barely of age, behind bars — one reason a stunning one out of every 100 Americans is now imprisoned. We may have created a huge “prison-industrial complex” of prison builders, contractors and swollen criminal justice bureaucracies. […]
A serious set of problems, a shadow over our national future? No doubt. But do our politicians talk much about alternatives? No way — they typically find it too risky to be attacked as “soft on crime.”
But let’s imagine — what if major party nominees Barack Obama and John McCain were pressed to state their positions on drugs and incarceration?

“bullet” Obama’s Biden Pick Signals ‘More of the Same’ Stupid Drug Policies by Paul Armentano

Voters who hoped that Barack Obama’s call for “change” would include revamping U.S. drug policy are finding themselves with reasons to be skeptical. […]
[recap of Biden’s atrocities] […]
So should progressives cite Obama’s tapping of Biden as reason to abandon all hope for drug law reform? Not necessarily, though the notable absence of the subject at the Democratic National Convention will likely give some folks — this author included — yet another reason to be cynical.
Bottom line: No administration since the Carter administration has proactively taken steps to liberalize federal drug penalties, and there’s little indication that Obama and Biden will possess either the desire or the political will to buck this long-running trend.

The Presidential candidate is the last place to look for drug policy reform.
… or even a discussion about it.
You want a discussion about drug policy reform, come to Pete’s couch.
It is interesting, however, to speculate about the planned press conference that Ron Paul is holding on Wednesday morning at 10:30, for which Baldwin, Barr, McKinney, and Nader have supposedly been invited.
That group, as a whole, could actually talk about drug policy.

David Simon, writer/creator of “The Wire,” joins other writers at Mother Jones to discuss How to Fix a Post Bush Nation – a guide to the next first 100 days:

How to Fix It: Lose the Drug War
“We are the jailingest motherf*ckers on the planet. More than that, the number of violent offenders in federal prisons has gone down to its lowest level ever in the history of the countryÖin the single digits, by the Bureau of Prisons’ own statistics. And the political party that let this get out of control? It was the Democrats. The drug war has actually destroyed the deterrent in inner cities by teaching whole police departments to chase drug stats when they should be solving crimes. And, of course, because they can’t put all those people in prison, it doesn’t even work as a draconian policy. Most people are just thrown back onto the street.
A smart politician could cite all these things, and we could stop the madness. But everyone’s worried that the little old lady in Terre Haute is going to think you’re soft on drugs. I think all the little old ladies in Terre Haute get it. The American people are smarter than politicians give them credit for. If McCain came to a Democratic Congress with reforms, I think he’d be a hero to moderates everywhere, because do you know people who believe in the drug war? I don’t know if there’s a cop in Baltimore who believes in it except as a means of getting overtime pay, hoard pay. I think everybody knows except the government.”

More of that interview here.
Simon also has an important and disturbing article about the “escalating breakdown of urban society across the U.S.” … in The Guardian (U.K.)
He talks about how crime policing in the cities is driven by politics, and how juries in inner cities are starting to actually convict at lower rates than outside the cities, due to the politicization of policing, and how even those statistics are ignored by politicians and the U.S. press.

[I]n my city, we have fought the drug war to the very end of the line, with sergeants becoming lieutenants and majors becoming colonels and city mayors becoming state governors. We have done so for decades, one day into the next, one administration after another, each claiming progress and measuring such in arrest rates, drug seizures, crime stats. And no one asks: why?
No one asks why, with all the arrests and seizures, the availability and purity of narcotics and cocaine has actually increased over the past three decades. No one asks why, with all the law enforcement committed, whole tracts of the city have nonetheless degenerated into free-fire war zones. No one asks why police commanders are routinely able to reduce the rates of robbery, or rape, or assault significantly in any time period prior to an election, while the murder rate – in which the victim can’t be obscured or clerically “unfounded” – stays as high as ever. And now, this week, no one asks why men and women from Baltimore, upon being given a chance to strike a blow against disorder and mayhem by convicting those charged criminally, would shirk their responsibility.
Well, here it is, plain as day…

“bullet” None of us is safe from police raids by Vera Leone

That’s what makes the Berwyn Heights case so potentially important: It is opening a window into the realities lived every day by innocent victims and survivors of the ineffective and destructive “war on drugs.” Let’s remember this case, keep this window open, and use it to address the misguided (at best), unjust and indisputably failed drug war policies that are destroying the fabric of our society.

“bullet” Killing of Mayor’s 2 Dogs Justified, Prince George’s Finds

The Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Office has concluded in an internal review that its deputies were justified when they shot and killed two dogs belonging to the mayor of Berwyn Heights during a July drug raid, Sheriff Michael Jackson said yesterday.

“bullet” Is it time to legalise drugs? BBC4 Radio’s Today show discusses drug legalization, with LEAP’s Jack Cole and, from the other side, Ian Oliver. The show’s host clearly appears to be on Jack’s side.
“bullet” Despite U.S. Aid, Coca Cultivation on Rise in Andes

“If you look back at the days of Escobar, the names have changed but there’s as much cocaine or more cocaine coming out of the Andes as a whole as in the peak anti-Medellin war on drugs,” said John Walsh of the Washington Office on Latin America, a policy group critical of U.S. anti-drug policies in the region. “We’re talking almost 20 years later.”
So far this decade, the United States has invested nearly $8 billion in the drug war, funding manual eradication efforts in Bolivia and neighboring Peru and an aerial herbicide-spraying program in Colombia that has covered more than 2.5 million acres since 2000.

“bullet” All their dreams go up in smoke Police in the southwest suburbs of Chicago have their annual pot bonfire.

“bullet” “drcnet”

If you haven’t seen it before, here’s the commercial that it’s spoofing.

In my ideal world, Insite (North America’s first legal supervised drug injection site) would be even more effective in a legalized drug regime, supplying clean controlled drugs and eliminating the black market, rather than being simply a place to safely inject drugs obtained on the street.
However, the supervised drug injection site is an important element of harm reduction within today’s prohibition world, particularly when combined with the health, counseling and referral services at Insite. It makes a real difference.
But the SadoMoralists can’t stand the idea of any kind of policy that includes the possibility of non-judgmental use of recreational drugs, regardless of its effectiveness.
I didn’t think anybody could top Margaret Wente’s babbling in the Globe and Mail, but Tousaw Law has discovered this gem by Karin Litzcke in the National Post.

The people who speak out the most vociferously in favour of Insite are addicted, not to the drugs themselves, but to the living they earn from serving drug addicts or, less concretely but just as dangerously, to the ecstatic feeling of beneficence that comes from believing they are helping the downtrodden.
These are the people to whom Insite really matters; not the drug addicts themselves, but the bureaucrats and politicians who will have smaller empires if Insite is closed. They are selling Insite to the public on the basis that harm reduction represents the compassionate way to deal with addiction. They are the empathy industry.
But the comfort offered by harm reduction is as empty, as fleeting, and ultimately as destructive as the comfort offered by drugs themselves.

Unbelievable.
Tousaw responds

Karin Litzcke‰s opinion about harm reduction is some of the vilest spew I‰ve read in quite some time. Tragically, she doesn‰t even see the irony of spouting off about the so-called empathy industry allegedly making its living off the backs of addicts while ignoring that police, prosecutors, prison officials and the like all make their livings off the back of drug prohibition. Drug prohibition that, by the way, is directly responsible for most of the evils that harm reduction attempts to mitigate. Drug prohibition that is also responsible for most of the damage that addiction causes to both the addict and society.

Exactly.
It’s a really dirty part of prohibition – a form of psychological projection – attributing your own faults to others. Sometimes, in the more pathological prohibitionists, this is done unconsciously. More often, it’s an intentional Rove-ian-type ploy to shift the blame for failed policies.
For example:

• Use poisons to spray crops in Colombia damaging the ecosystems and driving the traffickers into the clear-cutting in the rainforest… thus blame drug users for damaging the environment.
• Use prohibition to increase black market profits for major international criminal enterprises… thus blame pot smokers for funding terrorists.
• Receive millions of tax dollars for deceitful, ineffective government propaganda… thus complain about the well-funded pro-pot movement.
• Be part of a world-wide massively funded prohibition regime that destroys everything it touches… thus rail about the “empires” of the harm reduction volunteers in the “empathy industry.”

Here’s the headline:

Cannabis users warned as high- strength skunk floods market
by Daily Mail Reporter

Yeah, I wouldn’t want to put my name on this story either.

Cannabis users are increasingly opting for high-strength skunk because weaker varieties of the drug have been frozen out of the market, campaigners warned today.
A report by charity DrugScope says that in some areas, skunk is so dominant it is almost impossible to obtain herbal cannabis or resin.

Um. So, I guess the message is…

“Hey guys, if you go out and buy some pot right now, it’ll probably be the good stuff.”

Except, of course, for the pesky little… facts.

According to pot potency data collected by the UK‰s Forensic Science Services and published by The Guardian newspaper, the average potency of THC in seized samples of British cannabis fell approximately 25 percent between 2004 and 2007.

Oops.
…
In other news that makes you go… huh?
Japan: Sumo world in turmoil after wrestlers test positive for marijuana

It’s baaack…
I thought that maybe, maybe, after we woke people up to the lies and nastiness of the exhibit when it was in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry, and when it then was moved to a small corner at Navy Pier, that this incredibly offensive exhibit – Target America: Opening Eyes to the Damage Drugs Cause – might just curl up and die.

But no. It’s been brought back to life and it’ll be opening October 2 at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, complete with a new section devoted to Southern California.
For those who weren’t around for the Chicago exhibit, the entire thing is a blatant P.R. piece for the DEA that tries to make the case that the DEA is actually fighting terrorism, when in fact, they are the terrorist enablers (if not the actual terrorists).
Drug WarRant readers helped to organize a protest at the Museum of Science and Industry that got national coverage (and you can read about my first day protesting here).
Good thing I haven’t retired DEA Targets America – Opening Eyes to the Damage Caused by the Drug War. It looks like it’s needed yet again.
I’m not likely to be able to get to L.A. for the opening to protest, but if any groups out there would like some assistance, we can probably help out. The flyer that I used in Chicago is available to be revised and used again.
It’s a great opportunity to educate.
Update: Flyer is revised slightly to be current. It’s designed to be full color on 4″ x 6″ card stock (a great size for handing out to people) and has a link to the website for full sources of everything on the card. Last time I got these done very inexpensively at PSPrint (and they looked great) — we can get 5,000 for about $180 including shipping to Los Angeles.
If there are SSDP groups or others who would like to take the lead in protesting the exhibit and getting the word out, I (and the fine readers of Drug WarRant) would be happy to pay for the flyers so that you’d have them. All I ask is that you do it in a way that reflects well upon drug policy reformers (polite, non-confrontational, professional).
Also, it appears that the California Science Center may be a slightly easier place to distribute flyers than the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The parking lot is exterior with a clear public outside walkway to the museum (as opposed to MSI’s linked underground garage). They may still try to restrict flyer distribution, but the Science Center is part of the State of California so they cannot prevent political speech, particularly on public sidewalks outside the museum, if patrons are not being accosted or prevented from getting to the entrance.