Drug WarRant

I started Drug WarRant on Sunday, July 27, 2003 with a post about the Hinchey Amendment. I thought maybe I’d post once a week or so — mostly for myself, but if anyone happened to stop by… I discovered there was way too much to talk about, and people eager to read. In five years, there have been over 2900 posts and 2.6 million page views on this blog.
Boy, have I learned a lot! There’s no way to conscientiously write a single-issue blog for five years without coming away with an incredible amount of information about the subject. Through newsreaders, I track hundreds of articles and posts from around the world. I read Supreme Court decisions and scientific studies. Readers send me tips and newsmakers and policy leaders often engage me personally in support or dispute.
My own views have evolved somewhat over time because of that increased knowledge. When I started, I knew that the drug war had serious problems and that marijuana should be legalized, but I had not yet learned that criminal drug prohibition of any kind, as a concept, was provably unsalvageable.
I also had to learn the extent to which I had been lied to by the government and the media — some intentional, some unwitting. It takes time to sort through the clutter of propaganda to find the truth.
It’s been an exciting and frustrating five years. I sometimes forget what I had to go through to learn what I know, and I’m frustrated that so much of the general public can’t immediately shrug off decades of accumulated propaganda in order to embrace reform. I find myself wondering why simply telling them the truth in a clear, reasoned, and factually supported way isn’t enough. But then I remember that deprogramming is a process.
Certainly, I wish we had made more progress over the years. It is depressing to realize that the 6th Hinchey Amendment is in the works and very little progress has been made in Congress.
And yet, we have done remarkable things. The drug warriors are getting desperate, and are lashing out wildly, making their own situation worse, as the public begins to see their deficiencies and lies. The ONDCP and DEA have even gone so far as to respond to their opponents, and the head of the UNODC attended an international drug policy reform convention, We can no longer be dismissed as druggie hippies. Attention must be paid.
The wonderful addition of LEAP to the movement and the ascendancy of SSDP also had powerful impact, and drug policy reform is being seen everywhere. While much of the media, including the news services, are still willing to pass on the government line, they now often add an opposing voice. OpEds and editorials all over the place are daring to speak our “L” word and the drug warriors are getting bashed right and left.
In the last five years, the U.S. government has shown signs that it may be losing its power to impose its drug war on the rest of the globe, and more countries are daring to resist.
We absolutely own the internet.
The few pathetic attempts on the part of prohibitionists to create an internet presence have been met almost uniformly with ridicule, and to this day, I know of no pro-drug-war site that allows publicly displayed comments. But we’re everywhere — and not just drug policy reform sites and their blogs, but also libertarian, liberal and conservative sites, criminal justice sites, and more.
And it’s not just the sites, but all the residents of our online communities who write letters to the editor, comment on online fora, and even comment here at Drug WarRant. I know I couldn’t do what I do without you — not only because of the tips, corrections and feedback I get, but because the comments you leave on my blog provides much of the motivational fuel to keep it going.
So a huge thanks to all my readers, and especially those who stop by in the comments. It means a lot.
There have been a few notable accomplishments here at Drug WarRant in this half-decade. I took down Andrea Barthwell (not once, but twice) and took on the DEA’s Museum exhibits (also see articles in the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune) and their Vigil for Lost Promise. I provided useful resource pages for the Raich and Bong Hits 4 Jesus Supreme Court cases. The most popular page on my site continues to be Why is Marijuana Illegal (which is used as a resource for tons of High School and College papers), followed by Drug War Victims. Recent pages that have generated a lot of interest include Deep Thoughts About the Drug War and The Drug Czar is Required by Law to Lie.
The current head of the DEA, Michele Leonhart, can’t enter her own name in Google without getting my article about her (same thing is true with former DEA head Karen P Tandy).
Five years. Navel gazing time. Is five years enough? It’s a really long time to blog. Should I hang it up?
Uh. Nope. The simple fact is that I cannot at this time stop knowing what I know and getting upset about the fact that the drug war still rages.
So I’ll continue finding time late at night and in between my job and all my other passions to have a conversation with you about drug policy reform.
Obviously, I don’t do this for the money. I do it because I must. Fortunately, the Google ads cover my out-of-pocket expenses for the blog itself. And I don’t need to get paid for my writing/reporting. However, I do like stuff. So while I certainly don’t want a cent from anyone who is on a tight budget, if you feel like you’ve found Drug WarRant valuable to you and desire to express your appreciation in more than words (which are always welcome), you can drop by my wish list or help me buy me some coffee.
Thanks for a great five years. Who knows — someday we may just be able to make this blog obsolete.
Update: Thanks for all the wonderful comments! You made my day.

There’s a fascinating interview with deputy drug czar Burns in The Arcata Eye. I believe the interview was conducted by Kevin Hoover.
The Arcata Eye is certainly not known for is support of the drug war, yet Burns agreed to a 25 minute interview in conjunction with some publicity-seeking busts. Hoover did a masterful job for the most part, starting off the interview as a standard media interview, but then gradually increasing the stakes. Burns was forced to scramble to keep up, thereby leaving some rather gaping holes in his answers.
Bruce Mirken at MPP blog has identified a couple of blatant lies by Burns in the interview, but those are by no means the only ones.
Some low-lights:

Eye: Do we know that? Is there enough research to indicate that it has no medical efficacy? I can bring you chemotherapy patients who would tell you that it is the only thing that suppresses their nausea and gives them an appetite. So is there nothing to what they‰re saying and feeling?
Burns: I‰m saying that maybe that, the… Anybody can say something makes me feel better anecdotally. And I hear that a lot. ‹Marijuana is the only thing that makes me feel good.Š I say you should try crack, because from what I hear, crack cocaine will make you feel really good as well. This is not about making people feel better, it‰s about as a country and the effects it will have on all of us, all 305 million of us. Because someone tells me that ‹smoking crack cocaine releases my nausea and allows me to have healthier appetite,Š does that mean that we legalize it nationwide, and that its available to kids in a greater number? We have to make those kind of policy decisions. And we ought not make them on people who say, ‹Me personally, it makes me feel better.Š

At one point the Eye mentions the argument that there hasn’t been enough formal study of marijuana as medicine, and Burns replies that there’s no need to study it — the fact that it’s smoked rules it out as serious medicine.
Later, the Eye asks about the Compassionate IND program, where the federal government supplies marijuana to grandfathered patients. Burns thinks he has a chance to score:

Burns: That goes back to the people that said, ‹You know what, we really oughta study that more.Š So we do, and we set up a program, and we give a small number of people marijuana, and I know most of them by name because they show up in every hearing that I go to and say, ‹I‰ve been smoking marijuana for years and the federal government gives me this marijuana.Š Well, that was an attempt to do what the critics said. Why don‰t we study it more?

Except, of course, that the federal government has refused to actually study those patients, because they already know what they’d find out and don’t want that public.
True colors:

Eye: Philosophically… you‰re a Constitutional law teacher, I believe?
Burns: A little bit.
Eye: …and the whole premise of America‰s freedom and self determination. How can we reconcile that with the government telling us what we can ingest and what we can‰t?
Burns: Well, I think, first of all we settled it Appomattox, the fact that we‰re gonna have this thing for the Supremacy Clause, and when push comes to shove we‰ll decide on certain issues who will prevail, the federal government or the state. And on many issues it‰s the states, and for the most part, I think most Americans would agree that it should be that way. But on some issues that affect all of us for the good of the order we have to come to some consensus. And not everybody‰s happy, are they? And every time we don‰t get to do what we want, I know there are states where they really really like to marry young girls, 12, 11, or 10 and they would argue to you, ‹How dare the federal government preclude us from engaging in certain activities?Š Well, in some instances we just say your, quote, ‹constitutional rightsŠ and your freedom to do certain things gets trumped by the rest of us who say, ‹You know that‰s just not a good idea.Š

Nothing like putting scare quotes around “constitutional rights” to make it clear what kind of American you are.

Article by Ray Stern
Did you know that 90% of drugs comes from south of the border? Neither did the DEA.
So where did Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas get his “facts”?
Robert Caldwell, who has a history of uninformed nonsense.

Maybe I’m an intellectual elitist, but sometimes I forget that they don’t require any literacy or intelligence tests to get on the internet tubes, and when reading some commenters on public fora, I find myself physically staggering from the sheer enormity of the black hole that sits right where their comprehension should be.
At these times, I can actually see the ponderous rusted hamster wheel turning askew in their heads generating a thought process that goes something like this:

Drugs=Bad. Legalization=Drugs. Therefore, Legalization=Bad. You support Legalization. You=Bad. Why do you want to do bad things to children?

Former Baltimore City police officer Peter Moskos in U.S. News and World Report today: Drugs Are Too Dangerous Not to RegulateÖWe Should Legalize Them
It’s a great piece with the right focus for a major national magazine.
On the other hand, the magazine is doing a point/counter-point on this and the other side is taken by former drug czar Lee P. Brown, who starts with the most inane, brain-dead statement imaginable.

Advocates of legalization argue that drug prohibition only makes things worse. They argue that crime, the spread of HIV, and violence are major consequences of drug prohibition. But these represent only part of the damage caused by drug use. Consider drug-exposed infants, drug-induced accidents, and loss of productivity and employment, not to mention the breakdown of families and the degeneration of drug-inflicted neighborhoods. These too are consequences of drugs.

Does he realize how stupid that is? Does he expect that the population is stupid enough to believe that paragraph makes any rational sense? Is he insulting our intelligence, or is his own simply that far gone?

“bullet” Misha Glenny: A dangerous fiction

The time has come to shout from every rooftop that the war on drugs hands billions of pounds on a plate to criminal syndicates and terrorist organisations every year. Senior policymakers, police commanders and politicians have all told me in private that the war on drugs does nothing to halt the flow of product to market. But they are all too frightened to speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy.

“bullet” Thanks to Daksya for the link to this 7 page whine by Thomas Schweich (former State Department coordinator of counternarcotics) in the New York Times: Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?. The thing is, I don’t doubt the accuracy of much of what he says, but the only reality he can see is drug war. His five-point plan at the end of the article is quite frankly, absurd.

1. Inform President Karzai that he must stop protecting drug lords and narco-farmers or he will lose U.S. support. Karzai should issue a new decree of zero tolerance for poppy cultivation during the coming growing season. He should order farmers to plant wheat, and guarantee today‰s high wheat prices. Karzai must simultaneously authorize aggressive force-protected manual and aerial eradication of poppies in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces for those farmers who do not plant legal crops.
2. Order the Pentagon to support this strategy. Position allied and Afghan troops in places that create security pockets so that Afghan counternarcotics police can arrest powerful drug lords. Enable force-protected eradication with the Afghan-set goal of eradicating 50,000 hectares as the benchmark.
3. Increase the number of D.E.A. agents in Kabul and assist the Afghan attorney general in prosecuting key traffickers and corrupt government officials from all ethnic groups, including southern Pashtuns.
4. Get new development projects quickly to the provinces that become poppy-free or stay poppy free. The north should see significant rewards for its successful anticultivation efforts. Do not, however, provide cash to farmers for eradication.
5. Ask the allies either to help in this effort or stand down and let us do the job.

Update: See Barnett Rubin at Informed Comment: Global Affairs for a good critique: Assume the Existence of a State in Afghanistan
“bullet” Tousawlaw catches Margaret Wente answering questions about her propaganda series in the Globe and Mail. At one point she says”

Marijuana legalization seems so easy! But it‰s very vexed.Here‰s one part of the problem. If we legalize it, someone is going to make a huge amount of money from promoting and selling it. Who do you want that to be? Private enterprise, like Big Tobacco? Or your government? Do you want your government shilling weed the way it does the lottery?

Tousawlaw notes:

Ummm, someone already is making a huge profit promoting and selling it. Is that who Ms. Wente thinks should be doing so?

“bullet” In Athens, Greece, Anna Korakaki was arrested for ordering hemp protein from a United States health food company and charged with four counts of criminal drug possession.

The day of Anna Korakaki’s arrest, her friends went to a local health food store in Athens to purchase a loaf of sprouted hemp bread (meaning that whole hemp seeds had been imported to Greece, then sprouted and ground for baking). The bread was brought before the judge to demonstrate that hemp foods are available in Greece, which seemed to shock the judge, but made no difference to his thinking towards Anna’s parole.

“bullet” Marijuana Polic Project has a blog.
“bullet” “drcnet”

National Media Interest ‘Intense’ Over Hoffman Case

“Other officers around the country that see this story when ’20/20′ runs it – as well as the jurisdictions around Tallahassee that have seen the coverage already – are going to see what happened there and ask why.
“No one is going to ignore this. I can promise you that.”
Natapoff argues there should be more accountability, more documentation and more transparency when it comes to confidential informants. She thinks cases like Hoffman’s and Johnston’s will help shine a light on this secretive and largely unknown aspect of police work.
“Inch by inch, story by story, you’re going to start seeing the ramifications of these actions,” she said. “But reform in the criminal justice system is usually one piece of the puzzle at a time.”

Last week, I mentioned the excellent OpEd by Joy Strickland of Mothers Against Teen Violence: Drug laws fertilize teen violence
Well, special agent in charge of the Dallas Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Agency James Capra responded (can’t have people thinking that the drug war is bad for teens).
Here are a couple of his more outrageous comments:

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that legalization or decriminalization would reduce crime in our communities.

and

For Ms. Strickland to suggest that she “is not aware of one single death directly caused by marijuana” or that it “is irrational to lock up an individual because of what he chooses to put into to his own body” as justification to decriminalize is disturbing logic.

What’s disturbing is that our tax dollars are paying for him to lie to us. Prompt at Newsvine does a nice job of taking this apart.
…
Elsewhere, we have an idiotic background paper from The Heritage Foundation written by Ray Walser, their Senior Policy Analyst for Latin America: Mexico, Drug Cartels, and the Merida Initiative: A Fight We Cannot Afford to Lose. Now, much of this very long background article is just providing, well, the background, but Walser lacks even the basic understanding of drug policy, drug use, and the effects of prohibition, which results in very bizarre statements:

Drug consumption and the resulting international trade in controlled substances remain one of the greatest man-made catastrophes of the past 30 years.

What? Drug consumption is a man-made catastrophe? Anything else related to drug policy perhaps have an impact in the past 30 years? Bueller? Bueller?
Of course, the idiot gets his “facts” from Walters.

Despite modest progress, continued U.S. drug consumption is a root cause and a central driver of drug-related violence in Mexico. John P. Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Pol icy (ONDCP), recently exclaimed, “We will all need to come to grips that American consumers are fund ing the violence. We share responsibility, and we need to do more to help!”

Drug-related violence. Right. And even worse, in Walser’s words, later:

Drug violence inevitably translates into economic losses as well as human loses.[sic]

Drug violence? What is that?

The Mexican people are besieged by the continuing drug violence. […] Much of the intensified drug violence in Mexico is the result of open warfare among the dif ferent trafficking organizations. Undoubtedly, many of Mexico’s mounting drug casualties are traffickers murdered by traffickers. […] Military surge operations have targeted several epicenters of the drug violence [emphasis added]

Don’t you mean prohibition violence?
The conclusion was so dramatically over the top, I couldn’t help laughing:

Mexico is teetering on the brink of another crisis, which involves bullets rather than banking policies and exchange rates. The victims of this crisis range from honest cops and Mexican children to American youth who become hooked on cocaine or methamphetamines.
Mexico and the U.S. face the same enemy: elusive, sophisticated, resourceful, and violent transnational criminal networks that exploit U.S. and Mexican weaknesses and vulnerabilities, defy historical concepts of sovereignty and nationhood, supply the most dangerous and darkest human desires, and undermine the foundations of democratic goverÜnance and the basic concepts of free societies. Making common cause against such an enemy makes eminently good sense.

Oh, and according to Ray Walser’s bio his “areas of policy research and interest include defending the values of freedom and individual liberty.”

When looking at these stories, keep in mind that drug policy reform could just as easily be the target in each of these.
“bullet” Maryland Troopers spied on activist groups

Undercover Maryland state troopers infiltrated three groups advocating peace and protesting the death penalty Ö attending meetings and sending reports on their activities to U.S. intelligence and military agencies, according to documents released Thursday. […]
‡ On Oct. 3, 2005, an undercover state police agent attending a meeting of activists ferreted out the fact that antiwar protesters were laying plans to distribute fliers at the Towson Town Center mall.

Hmmm, our meetings are much more interesting.
“bullet” They could be eavesdropping. In Massachusetts, where they opposed federal spying on citizens, they apparently want to do it themselves:

MASSACHUSETTS residents are on the verge of losing a fundamental protection from government spying if the Legislature and governor approve a bill to give prosecutors the power to seize Internet, telephone, and electronic communications records – without judicial oversight and without notifying a citizen they have done so.
The attorney general and district attorneys have attached their power grab to a bill aimed at increasing sentences for sex offenders, which is named “An Act to Further Protect Children” or “Jessica’s Law.” However, the power that they seek isn’t limited to investigations of suspected sex offenders or child abuse cases. It is a general grant of unchecked power to district attorneys and the attorney general that can be used against all of us.

Yeah, make it a bill to go after sex offenders, but allow police to use it for anything. Who will vote against that?
“bullet” And score one for the good guys. From the ACLU:

We just received word today that the Third Circuit struck down a federal Internet censorship law as unconstitutional. The law, called the Child Online Protection Act, imposed civil and criminal penalties on those who place ‹harmful to minorsŠ material on the Web. Under this law, no adult, no matter how mature or responsible, would have been allowed to see material that is deemed unfit for a child. The law would have forced vast swaths of constitutionally protected speech off of the Web.

That’s good news. I’ve been involved in the fight against internet censorship since the predecessor of COPA (the Communications Decency Act) back in 1996 — I was part of 24 hours of Democracy — my first major internet activism.
These are where the real fights for our freedom take place. Not on the Iraq/Pakistan border.

Senator Jim Webb was just on the Colbert Report and mentioned that the U.S. has 25% of the world’s prison population and only 5% of the world’s population, and that we need to do something about that. Imprison those who are dangerous, but stop trying to just look “tough on crime.” He stumbled over it a bit, but still…
Nice to see a U.S. Senator saying good things on the TeeVee.
Here’s the video (Thanks, Scott)