Drug WarRant

Radley Balko asks the question over at Fox News:

– In 1989, your wife Cindy became addicted to the prescription drugs Percocet and Vicodin. Eventually, she began stealing medication from the non-profit medical charity she ran to assist the victims of war and disaster areas. You and your wife were able to negotiate a settlement with the Justice Department that let her off with restitution and admission to a rehabilitation center, but no fines, jail time or even public disclosure. Certainly no one could fault you for trying to save your spouse from criminal sanction. But you’re consistently one of the most strident drug warriors in Congress. You’ve voted to strengthen penalties against those who use and traffic in both illicit drugs and who divert prescription drugs. You’ve supported mandatory minimums and harsher penalties for first-time offenders. Why shouldn’t average people without powerful connections who make the same mistakes your wife made be shown the same leniency and mercy the criminal justice system showed her?

Economics professor N. Gregory Mankiw has an OpEd in the New York Times What If the Candidates Pandered to Economists?
It’s a light piece about how the campaign might be different if McCain and Obama were trying to court the votes of economists, and it includes:

Liberalize Drug Policy
Many economists marry their support of economic freedom with a similar support of personal freedom. Drug policy is a case in point. A 2006 poll of professional economists asked whether the United States should legalize marijuana. Those in favor outnumbered those opposed more than three to one.

Interesting, but it misses the point. It’s not just that economists are more freedom-loving. It’s that they understand economics; they know the immutable laws of supply and demand. From this, they know that drug prohibition won’t (and cannot) work. Period. Anyone who has absorbed even Economics 101 and applied it to the drug war can see this clearly.
The U.S. formulation of drug policy is done with a complete ignorance of economic principles — it’s as stupid as having a space program that never considered the effects of gravity.

“bullet” Grits for Breakfast reports on a police officer’s approach to conducting his job

Investigators found that the sergeant had used drug evidence with the wrong cases, disposed of narcotics evidence and improperly stored evidence envelopes in his desk.
The probe also revealed that Leal could not account for drugs allegedly purchased by a confidential informant and used by Leal as the basis for five search warrants.
During a subsequent polygraph test, Leal admitted that for at least two of those, he had merely cut and pasted information from other warrants and that no drug purchases were ever made, the memo states.
He also admitted to reprinting prior warrants from other cases and changing times, dates and locations to obtain legal permission to search other suspected drug houses, according to the memo.

Hey, why should a cop bother with little things like obeying the law when going after druggies?
It’s the enormity of cases like these that make people lose all respect and trust for law enforcement.
“bullet” An appeals court overturns an 85 year prison sentence for possession of between one and four grams of cocaine. Apparently, not only was the sentence absurdly long, but the court felt the defendant should actually have been in some way in possession of the cocaine in order to be convicted of possession.
“bullet” The Globe and Mail is putting out a four-part series by Margaret Wente trashing harm reduction. Part one is full of bad anecdotes and lacking much in the way of facts, or in understanding the complex issues involved. I’ll be keeping an eye on it — next Saturday she takes on legalization.

“bullet” Graham Boyd continues his reports from Vienna conference on drug policy, including some intriguing stuff regarding attempts from the ONDCP office to sabotage their efforts. Day Two and Day Three
“bullet” U of Central Florida column by Ben Badio: Legalizing Marijuana Will Ruin A Great Culture

Imagine a world where pot becomes the cultural equivalent of smoking cigarettes, something that is done, or not done, but cultureless either way. Imagine how humorless, dramaless and boring the TV show Weeds would be without the unrelenting threat of legal action. Imagine a world where an organization like NORML suddenly becomes quite abnormal because it has nothing left to fight for.

Sounds good to me.
“bullet” Daniel McQuade challenges Pennsylvania to follow New Jersey’s lead and re-visit drug-free school zones.
“bullet” The Wall Street Journal and Scott at Grits for Breakfast talk about the hidden costs of incarceration, blowing gaping holes in the arguments of idiots like James Q. Wilson and George Will.
“bullet” “drcnet”

My show opens in Chicago tomorrow evening.
“Unsex Me Here” – a Living Canvas production – running July 11 through August 16, Fridays and Saturdays at 11 pm at National Pastime Theater, 4139 N. Broadway in Chicago.

Powerful movement, mesmerizing imagery, a meaty rib taken from the side of the Scottish play, unexpected humor, and naked people on scaffolding… doing Shakespeare.

The show runs an hour and is followed by an optional Q&A with the cast and… me. Tickets are $15 each, but readers of this blog can get a special discount for the first two weekends: Two tickets for $15 if you order them here.
The show has absolutely nothing to do with drug policy, so this is both a shameless and unrelated plug… and yet — the intriguing use of imagery on the moving body is somewhat mind-altering itself. As the Chicago Reader said of a previous Living Canvas production:

Stoners, Dali fans, sensualists of every stripe, this show’s for you. Sober or otherwise, you’ll find the visual pleasures of Guither’s idiom considerable, the kinetic sculpture consistently engrossing…

So if you’re in the Chicago area, check it out.

Radley Balko has the story of another drug raid gone wrong, this one in Troy, New York, terrifying a young single mother — no guns, no drugs. Apparently it was based on a bad tip, with no follow-up buys or confirmation (and also apparently four houses were raided that morning and all turned up nothing).
But check out the interview with Troy Police Sergeant David Dean:

Sgt. Dean: “We did not hit the wrong house, we hit the house that the search warrant directed us to hit.” […]
Anya: “Do you think this will hurt your credibility?”
Sgt. Dean: “The last thing we want to do is enter an innocent person’s home – it doesn’t get us anywhere, and it doesn’t hamper the drug trade.”
Anya: “Will you be going back to clean-up the damage to the house?”
Sgt. Dean: “We just have to enter lawfully with our search warrant, that is our only obligation.”
Anya: “And you can leave it in any state that you left it?”
Sgt. Dean: “Yes. We had probable cause that led us to believe there was drug activity.”

So as long as the court signed their pathetically inadequate warrant, they don’t have any obligation to the people they serve. And the reason for not wanting to raid an innocent person’s house is not because their innocent, but because it will be wasted effort for the police.
This guy should be fired. Immediately.
Update: I should really check what Scott Morgan has written before I post something — he’s got a good take on this story as well, with a suggestion for hearings in the state legislature.

The ACLU is presenting this week at the Beyond 2008 Forum in Vienna, as part of the input toward the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 10 year evaluation of world drug policy.
Remember, 10 years ago, the UN proclaimed “A Drug Free World – We Can Do It” and they set goals of “eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy by the year 2008.”
Obviously, that failed spectacularly, not that any of the players will be rushing to admit it — in fact, attempts to re-write history are already happening.
Fortunately, there are some mechanisms in place to at least provide some public response. I think that the ACLU’s presentation does a good job of tying in with the rest of the global drug policy reform efforts to shift UN drug policy. They realize that UN drug policy is not going to go away at this point and that the most likely areas to affect change is focusing on harm reduction and human rights. The human rights approach is particularly useful, since there is precedent in the U.N. indicating that, theoretically, U.N. drug policy must take a back seat to U.N. human rights policy.

A human rights-based approach to global drug policy would principally

1. prioritize prevention and treatment of negative health consequences of drug misuse over criminal justice responses and supply-side reduction measures, and
2. require that U.N. bodies measure effectiveness by assessing indicators of drug-related harm, rather than relying solely on drug use and interdiction statistics. Drug-related ‹harmŠ includes overdose rates, disease transmission rates, negative drug enforcement consequences as well as individual and communal criminal justice system-related consequences.

There is a huge global movement for reform that is being expressed through these forum opportunities. And it will be hard for the U.N. to ignore these voices entirely, especially while having to simultaneously ignore the documented abject failure of U.N. drug polcy (although they will try). It’s possible that some reform language will make it through into the next 10 year plan, but without (as the ACLU notes) reform of the International Narcotics Control Board — a particularly odious, corrupt, and unaccountable entity — it will still be an uphill battle for individual countries to adopt workable drug policies.
Update: ACLU’s Graham Boyd comments on the process.

“bullet” The New York Times editorial that I mentioned last week has generated some Letters to the Editor. Califano’s letter is so… Califano — he just can’t stop himself from making up bizarre statistics.
“bullet” Clarence Page phones in a column about the drug war Don’t forget the war next door. Come on, Clarence — what a waste of prime newspaper real estate! You could be a voice on the drug war, if you’d only grow a pair.
“bullet” On the other hand, Josh Strawn hits one out of the park with War on Drugs vs. War on Terror at Pajamas Media, explaining to conservatives why our drug policy doesn’t work.

Drug policy has been sculpted by notions of public morality, out of the supposed desire to maintain order and to preserve quality of life instead of letting it deteriorate. But the evidence proves that those objectives are not only failing to be met, the inverse is being accomplished. Drug policies Ö in particular those defined by eradication of crops and draw-down of demand Ö create more chaos than order, and destroy more lives than they save. This argument needs now to extend beyond the crack alleys of America and into rural Afghanistan, where farmers and their families Ö our potential allies in the quest for peace and stability in Afghanistan Ö are suffering because of our own stale ineffectual anti-drug policy.

Must-see TV:
The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez – an award-winning documentary on PBS’s P.O.V., directed by Kieran Fitzgerald and narrated by Tommy Lee Jones.
Check your local listings for exact time and date, but it will be running beginning tomorrow night at 10 pm nationwide.
For those who don’t know, Esequiel was an innocent American citizen, shot to death by U.S. Marines on United States soil, in the name of the drug war.