Drug WarRant

Having a great time in New York. I highly recommend both August: Osage County and Passing Strange — two very different shows with a lot to offer. August is the best combination of writing and acting I’ve seen in years. Passing Strange is not a traditional Broadway musical by any means — more like a “rock story” — Stew did a brilliant job with both the music and the journey.
So I’ve been a bit behind on blogging…
“bullet” Desperation time? Walters and friends are busy trying to convince the taxpayers that Mexico’s doing a great job in the drug war and we should support plan Colombia…. without any conditions
“bullet” All Indicators Point to a Softening of America’s Harsh Marijuana Laws by Alexander Zaitchik at Alternet
“bullet” DrugSense Weekly

The drug czar has teamed up with The Daily Mail Reuters to promote the latest in anti-marijuana junk science.
The bold headline: Heavy marijuana use shrinks brain parts: study. Ut oh. We’re in trouble now.
Except…
1. We’re talking about people who smoked 5 joints a day for 20 years, and.
2. The study did not in fact find that marijuana use shrinks brain parts.

The researchers acknowledged that the study did not prove it was the marijuana and not some other factor that triggered these brain differences.

I’d love to get paid to do studies that determine things without having to actually determine them.
But instead, I simply tried my own unscientific experiment and compared the brains of noted pot smoker Carl Sagan and noted non-pot smoker John Walters (which i was able to borrow and return without it being missed). In every test performed, Sagan’s brain won handily, despite being dead for 12 years.
More here and here
Marijuana. Harmless?
Um, no. But probably less harmful than — prohibition, alcohol, cigarettes, aspirin, global warming, working as a miner, politicians, prison, Hostess Twinkies, jogging, driving, sex, cheeseburgers, skiing…

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled yesterday that money laundering requires actually, you know, laundering the money. Merely hiding cash so someone won’t find it no longer qualifies as laundering.

This was one of a pair of the decisions handed down Monday that could make it harder for prosecutors to win convictions for money laundering. This law has been one of the government’s most powerful weapons in the war on drugs.
In the second ruling, the court said the law against money laundering applies only to the profits of an illegal operation, not all of the cash it generates.

This is good news, because it cuts back on one of the abuses of the drug war — that of piling on all sorts of multiple charges for the same offense.

Defense lawyers complained the law was used to press defendants to plead guilty to other crimes, such as drug dealing. A conviction for money laundering can result in up to 20 years in prison.

I’m on a delay at O’Hare waiting for my new plane so i can board (the old one had a clogged drain!)
Allan sent me this Letter to the Editor in the Illinois Daily Herald by Janet Chandik — one of those bizarre individuals who somehow slipped by Darwin’s selection process.
It’s worth sharing in full…
We Should Keep Marijuana Illegal

I would like to respond to D. Skipworth’s letter last Monday. She stated the war on drugs is hypocritical and a lost cause and potential tax dollars go uncollected because of ignorant politicians and police. The benefits of hemp are mentioned, and she states cannabis is good for the planet. We learn Chris Columbus may have come to America with sails made from hemp. While that may or may not be true, I think they used to pull teeth without Novocain, too.
In a perfect world we would all do the right thing and use common sense. Too bad for us, we all have a different idea of common sense. I’ll just use one word as an extreme example: pedophiles. Cannabis may or may not be good for the planet, but for the average person it is not. It is a proven fact cannabis, or marijuana, is a gateway drug. The war on drugs is a war that I gladly take on. Why would our society want to legally unleash another mind altering substance when we as a society clearly cannot handle the one we have: alcohol. I am speaking of those individuals who drink to excess and then put others at risk. How about the misuse and abuse of prescription medication? Even over-the-counter meds?
So, hemp is used for food and medicine in other ( more sophisticated – implied ) parts of the world? That’s great. We in America have a lot of freedoms and choices that those in other parts of the world do not have, and I readily give them their use of hemp and gladly keep our public servants, who I dare not as a whole call ignorant.

So, to recap:

• Smoking pot is like pedophilia
• The fact that we have novocaine shows that we don’t need hemp
• The gateway theory is proven [despite all the evidence to the contrary]
• Janet would personally like to conduct the war on drugs [maybe we can turn the whole thing over to her?]
• Janet feels it’s appropriate to give up freedoms in exchange for keeping public servants.

Where do they spawn these people?

Nick Gillespie has a delightfully fun piece> over at Reason, detailing some of the best of the worst — anti drug advertisements, with an honorable mention to the Stoners in the Mist website.

Stoners underscores what most Americans already knew: Real winners don’t do anti-drug websites.

All sorts of interesting stuff that probably deserves individual posts, but I want to get it out here…
“bullet” Vindictive Prosecution – an editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal smacks down the Feds’ most recent medical marijuana busts.
“bullet” U.S. conditions threaten Mexico anti-drug package. There’s talk that some high placed Mexican officials are looking for an excuse to turn down the money.
“bullet” Drug War Madness: Smoke a Joint and Your Whole Family May End Up Homeless by Tony Newman
“bullet” Failing Upward: New Frontiers in Scalia‰s ‹New Professionalism by Radley Balko
“bullet” Barbara Kay Says Mean Things About Marijuana Users and the Reform Movement by Scott Morgan
“bullet” Bush can’t remember if he used cocaine or not
“bullet” Killing the Messenger: Bexar probation chief wants to fire PO who snitched on faulty urinalysis results at Grits for Breakfast.
“bullet” “drcnet”

As some of you know, I’m involved in a lot of other pursuits in addition to the Drug WarRant blog (and my day job). Some of these are going to keep me pretty busy in the near future — I’ll try to keep up the blogging, but I may miss a couple of days here and there.
Living Canvas I’m Producer/Artistic Director for a new production in Chicago this summer. Unsex Me Here – a Living Canvas production is the fifth performance art show based on the concepts in my fine art photography. This show will be loosely based on Macbeth. I’ll be in Chicago every weekend for rehearsals until the show opens July 11 (running through August 16 at National Pastime Theater). More information available at my Living Canvas site. Don’t miss it.
New York On Monday, I’ll be taking 70 community people to New York for a seven day theatre trip. We’ll be seeing shows every night and I’ll give walking tours of different parts of the city each day. We’re seeing August: Osage County, Passing Strange, The Country Girl, Reasons to be Pretty, The 39 Steps, and November (I’ll also be seeing Momix at the Joyce Theater). I’ll be pretty busy all week, but if you’re in New York and would like to get together for coffee or a drink and talk drug policy, drop me a line, and we’ll see if we can find a time.
Illinois Shakespeare Festival As part of my job, I’m doing the graphic design for the Festival’s program guide and doing their photography. It’s a great Festival, and if you’re in Illinois, you should check it out this summer.
I sure wish there were more than seven days in a week sometimes.

Drug war cops want bigger guns

Mexican police need bigger guns to fight increasingly violent drug gangs, a federal police chief said, after drug hitmen killed seven officers in the northern city of Culiacan.

“We need machine guns,” said General Rodolfo Cruz, the federal police force’s link with the army in their joint 18-month-old war on Mexico’s powerful drug cartels.

“Pistols are just for showing off, they are good for nothing,” he told reporters in Culiacan

Oh, yeah, machine guns are a really good choice for police work, especially when you’re working in populated areas of your own country filled with… citizens. You know, children, families, etc. Rather than just “showing off” with a pistol, you need something that indiscriminately scatters bullets all over the place.
You start with a drug war with massive black market profits. As criminal enterprises jockey for this gold mine, violence breaks out. Rather than deal with the root cause, you send in troops to go after the criminals. They fail to oblige by packing up and leaving their gold mine, but instead buy AK-47s and fight back, with violence escalating. So now you want machine guns to respond. And what will the criminal groups do? Roll over and play dead? No. They’ll just get bigger guns, or escalate other guerilla warfare techniques. And then what happens?

Stratfor – publisher of online geo-political intelligence analysis written by a global team of intelligence professionals (read former CIA staff) – has argued that Mexico rapidly hurtling down the road to becoming a ‘Failed State’ due to the ‘War on Drugs’.

You should read the entire Stratfor article: Mexico: On the Road to a Failed State?”

There comes a moment when the imbalance in resources reverses the relationship between government and cartels… That is the prescription for what is called a ‹failed stateŠ Ö a state that no longer can function as a state.

Escalating the war doesn’t destroy the cartels. You can destroy individuals or even individual cartels, but the profits will still be there. They can bunker down within the citizenry and strike when they wish. And if the level of their ability to corrupt exceeds the resources of the country to counter (see Guitherism:”No government in the world can compete with the black market in financial compensation for police officers.”), then you achieve a failed state.
The really sad thing is reading the conclusion of the Stratfor analysts.

One way to deal with the problem would be ending the artificial price of drugs by legalizing them. This would rapidly lower the price of drugs and vastly reduce the money to be made in smuggling them. Nothing hurt the American cartels more than the repeal of Prohibition, and nothing helped them more than Prohibition itself. Nevertheless, from an objective point of view, drug legalization isn‰t going to happen. There is no visible political coalition of substantial size advocating this solution. Therefore, U.S. drug policy will continue to raise the price of drugs artificially, effective interdiction will be impossible, and the Mexican cartels will prosper and make war on each other and on the Mexican state.

I want to take a moment to follow up on my last post Obama and the drug war. Let me make it clear that I am not at all surprised by Obama’s statements. I’ve said for years that Obama was unlikely to be a leader in drug policy reform. And given his past drug use, the political reality was always certain that he would overcompensate. As one reader noted in an email to me today — The Republicans…

…will cast him as a pot-smoking, coke-snorting (and maybe drug-dealing) [black man]…if he was seen as advocating or soft on drugs, can you see it now: “he’s just a [black man] who wants to legalize drugs!”

And that is the reality of mainstream politics in the Democratic and Republican party today. (I’ll have a separate discussion about Barr and others who are running in 3rd parties later — but in this post, I’m just talking about the Dems and Repubs.)
No Presidential candidate will come out of those two parties with the nomination and a strong reform position on drug policy. Not gonna happen. At least not for some time. So by ridiculing Obama’s position on the drug war, I’m certainly not saying that anyone else is going to come out of that stink with a better smell. Certainly not McCain. Remember, change comes from the bottom. That’s where we have to focus our efforts. It would be nice to believe that we could magically elect a leader that would change it all for us and save us all the grunt work, and I have my own daydream fantasies about what I’d do if I somehow suddenly became President (without having to prostitute myself to actually win the damn job), but I’m way too far down on the succession list, so it’s just a daydream.
So, is there any reason to care about the Presidential election if we don’t expect any real change from the top regarding drug policy?
Yes.
Let me tell you what I’m looking for. I’m looking for a candidate who won’t be using the power of the federal government to actively prevent us from fomenting bottom-up change. The things that endanger us as free citizens also endanger our ability to function as a free citizenry. Authoritarian rule and lying to the people are two of the worst, and these have been the ascendant characteristics of this administration.
So, once I realize that anything that the two-party Presidential candidates say about the drug war are bullshit, I then take a look at them and ask myself: Which is more likely to promote authoritarian rule? Which is more likely to encourage and facilitate an ONDCP and DEA that lie to the people? Which is more likely to squelch dissent or treat drug war dissenters as a threat to the country? And as far as I can tell at this point, McCain wins the prize.
So, drug policy reform from Obama? Not a chance. Benign neglect? Possibly. Attempts to reverse, or slow, an authoritarian trend? Hopefully.
Update: Via Reuters:

During a fund-raiser in Denver, Obama Ö a former constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School Ö was asked what he hoped to accomplish during his first 100 days in office.
‹I would call my attorney general in and review every single executive order issued by George Bush and overturn those laws or executive decisions that I feel violate the constitution,Š said Obama.

This is why I don’t express very much interest in the Presidential campaign.

When I am President, we will continue the Andean Counter-Drug Program, and update it to meet evolving challenges. […]
Mexican drug cartels are terrorizing cities and towns. President Calderon was right to say that enough is enough. We must support Mexico‰s effort to crack down. […]
And we‰ll tie our support to clear benchmarks for drug seizures, corruption prosecutions, crime reduction, and kingpins busted. […]
We need tougher border security, and a renewed focus on busting up gangs and traffickers crossing our border. […]
And we‰ll crack down on the demand for drugs in our own communities, and restore funding for drug task forces and the COPS program.

Just great.
Change will not come from the top. It will only come from the bottom.