Drug WarRant

“bullet” Radley Balko has the beginnings of the story of Gonzalo Guizan, killed in a drug raid that found no guns and very little drugs.
Oh, and Gonzalo was just a guest in the house.
“bullet” Police no-show saves lives. Now there’s a headline.
“bullet” Drug gang pins up police hit list in northern Mexico I wonder how these drug gangs got so powerful and bold. They must have some massive source of funding… If only we could shut that funding off somehow or divert it to more legitimate uses, then they’d have a much harder time recruiting.

Via Jamie Spencer comes this amusing story.

An unwitting passenger arriving at Japan’s Narita airport has received 142g of cannabis after a customs test went awry, officials say.
A customs officer hid a package of the banned substance in a side pocket of a randomly chosen suitcase in order to test airport security.
Sniffer dogs failed to detect the cannabis and the officer could not remember which bag he had put it in.

I’m sure they’ll be pleased to know that they died because the drug war is a success.

The result has been mayhem: a street war in which no target has been too big, no attack too brazen.
Opposition politicians and even some police officials have begun to question whether the president’s ambition has exceeded his grasp, with dangerous and destabilizing consequences for a country that shares a 2,000-mile border with the United States.
The president has vowed to stay the course, portraying the violence among gangs and attacks on the police as a sign of success rather than failure.

Success? Even if you assume that the escalated war is destabilizing the cartels, it’s not like that would mean you would run out of those willing to use extreme measures to traffic drugs. As long as drugs are highly profitable black-market commodities, there will be people willing to step up to attempt to make their fortunes, no matter how many you destabilize or kill.
So there are two ways to actually make real change rather than just coming up with a new crop of dead bodies all the time.

1. Convince everyone to stop using drugs. That’s what commenter pfmpm at the article naively suggests. And yes, and such an idea is seductive to many, because it would work, if it were possible. I’d be open to hearing ideas on how you could accomplish it, but I think that the entirety of human existence serves as proof that it ain’t gonna happen.
2. Remove the distribution of drugs from the black market. This can be done — we’ve done it before.

Funny
Note: Other than obvious spam, I think I’ve deleted about two posts on the blog in four years and that was for calling another commenter names. If anyone actually thought I was deleting posts, they could, I suppose, actually write me about it so I could try to find out what happened. But I’m guessing these are just trolls of some kind.

Reformed drug warrior Bob Barr has been named the Libertarian Party’s nominee for President.
Update: Root will be VP nominee

Mark L. Schneider has an OpEd in the Christian Science Monitor: Rethink The Fight Against Cocaine
This is another one of those articles that starts out pretty much right on track — identifying the failures of the war on drugs…

Every year, White House officials describe the US counterdrug policies in the same glowing terms used to describe the Emperor’s new clothes: We’re snuffing out coca crops and cracking down on those who grow them. […]
Officials tell us they’ve made progress in eradicating tens of thousands of acres of coca by spraying chemical weed-killer from airplanes protected by heavily armed helicopter gunships.
They tell success stories about hundreds of tons of coca paste and cocaine they’ve seized on Colombian roads and on the high seas. They speak proudly of the coffee, beans, and vegetables harvested under Colombian and US alternative development projects.
But there are key facts missing in their description of the Emperor’s counterdrug-policy wardrobe. When Plan Colombia ( the multibillion dollar US assistance program targeted at curbing drug smuggling and supporting Colombia against armed guerrillas ) started, coca was cultivated in 12 of Colombia’s 34 provinces. Today it is grown in 23 of those provinces.
In 2006, after five years of Plan Colombia, four years of the regional Andean Counterdrug Initiative, and after spending $5.5 billion, some 1,000 metric tons of cocaine were produced between Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. That’s about the same amount that was produced in 2002 when President Alvaro Uribe took office.
The head of the White House Office of Narcotics and Drug Control Program, John Walters, admitted at a press conference in Haiti recently that last year that cocaine production had risen to 1,400 metric tons in 2007 – a whopping 40 percent hike. Not surprisingly, his staff is scrambling to rephrase that.

Yep. A major failure, and an attempt by the government to white-wash it.
Good points, based on the facts.
But then, before long, comes the disconnect — the notion that since there is no reality other than prohibition, any solutions have to come within the constraints of prohibition.
And you can see the pathetic scrambling to come up with something that makes sense when an entire set of options simply doesn’t exist in your brain.
So, since the drug war is a failure, how does Schneider propose “fixing” it? Three points:

1. Shift to economic development.
   

   That’s why it’s so important for Washington to support a massive increase in rural infrastructure investment, rural governance, and public service extension into those communities now.

   Fair enough as an idea by itself, but that’s not going to really change anything. And he knows that,

2. So…
   

   Certainly for traffickers, the only option is more effective law enforcement that works closely with other nations to go after their money, their assets, and their structures.

   What does that even mean? We haven’t been doing that? This is just nonsensical language that says that since prohibition isn’t working, we must not be trying hard enough, rather than following the logical and rational conclusion that perhaps something else should be tried.

3. And here’s the final point of disconnect. Somehow magically mobilize the masses of drug users to change their reality to match that of the prohibitionist.
   

   And a massive public service effort should be launched to target recreational users that equates cocaine use with drunken driving – unacceptable destructive behavior. Their weekend fun kills young people in Colombia and Los Angeles and Miami. It has to stop.

   Really? That’s going to work? What happens if those recreational users know that you’re full of it and that ending the drug war is the way to save those young people in Colombia and Los Angeles? Even if they don’t know this, what makes you think that any kind of PR campaign is going to magically stop drug use? Could you do the same thing with sex? Simply tell everyone to stop having sex in order to stop overpopulation and the spread of STD’s. Right.

How can an intelligent person even propose such nonsense? It’s because they intellectually are stunted — they are unable to conceive of any existence other then prohibition, so they don’t have… reality… to draw upon in their calculations.
Having a discussion about the failure of prohibition without being able to consider a world without it is like trying to do math without using even numbers.

The Michigan Court of appeals apparently doesn’t really understand the Constitution.

The Michigan Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 ruling released Wednesday, said police may use dogs to sniff outside a house for drugs without a search warrant. A Wayne County judge had suppressed evidence and dismissed marijuana charges against Detroiter Jeffrey Jones — who had been convicted of previous drug charges — because Jones argued the sniffing was an illegal search. The majority on the appeals panel agreed with prosecutors that police, acting on a tip, may use a trained dog to sniff the front door, and use that information to get a warrant to search inside the house.

This is the inevitable result of the Supremely bad decision in Illinois v. Caballes that allowed dog sniffs to justify searches in traffic stops that were otherwise lacking in suspicion.
Now it’s your homes.
We are ceding the decision-making regarding time-honored 4th Amendment protection of the home to an animal — and one that is much more pathetically eager to please than it is smart.*
Want to search someone’s house? Don’t worry about probable cause. Just bring your dog to sniff the front door. If the dog you’ve trained acts the way you want him to, then that will be all you need to get a warrant to search someone’s home. And if what you subsequently find is odorless and clear at the other end of the house, it won’t matter, because once you have the warrant, you’ll no longer have to justify whether the dog actually smelled anything.

“bullet” 30 Years of Failure. Radley Balko talks to Ed Burns about the Drug War.
“bullet” Government Marijuana Scare Stories Deliberately Confuse Correlation with Causation from the ACLU blog.
“bullet” Barbara Kay lines her cage with the National Post and drops this madness Not your mother’s reefer

The verdict on the new marijuana is in, and it’s “guilty.”

The Post’s Colby Cosh responds

So may we expect Ms. Kay to don her bonnet, pick up her hatchet and take up the battle against the legal poisons that openly kill thousands of Canadians every year Ö as opposed to an illicit one that millions enjoy, and that rarely, if ever, takes a life?

This is followed by a lame Schwarzenegger impression: Barbara Kay on the marijuana legalization debate: “I’ll be back…”

“bullet” Drug policy chases weeds, misses needs by Jim Stingl
“bullet” Time to escalate the violence. Both the Senate and the House have passed versions of Plan Mexico.
“bullet” DrugSense Weekly
“bullet” “drcnet”

Transform reports on an interesting development in Vietnam:

Vietnam’s National Assembly is considering decriminalizing drug use, downgrading the personal use of illegal narcotics from a criminal offense to an administrative violation, a Vietnamese legislator said Friday. […]
“Being addicted to or using drugs should be considered a disease, and should only be subject to administrative fines,” Mai said. “We cannot jail hundreds of thousands of [drug users], can we?” […]
“I think it makes sense to drop the article,” Loan said. “Few countries in the world sentence drug addicts to prison terms.”

But don’t book your flight for Hanoi just yet.

Vietnam addresses drug addiction through mandatory drug detoxification centres, in which drug users are confined for periods of two years or, in the case of a few centers, up to five years. Local government authorities maintain lists of drug addicts in their districts and send cases to the detoxification centers at their discretion.
In practice, Mai said, the legal change would have little effect, since almost no drug users are prosecuted under Article 199. Instead, they are generally sent to the detoxification camps…

And how does that work?

some 90 per cent of those released from the detoxification camps eventually return to drug use.
Critics of the camp system say there are few opportunities for those released from the camps to find jobs, reintegrate into society, or get support in staying off drugs, and that they usually gravitate back towards their old social circles and habits.

What about selling drugs?

Dealing drugs would remain a serious criminal offense, punishable in some cases by death. […]
A total of 85 people were sentenced to death for drug crimes in 2007, and nine more have received death sentences so far this year.

Now our drug warriors like to point to harsh drug laws as a deterrent. It’s hard to get any harsher than death. So how has that worked?

“Many people have been sentenced to death for trafficking heroin, but heroin trafficking is still rampant,” Mai said. “The traffickers know that the laws are strict but they are still trafficking narcotics.”

The drug war. It’s hard to imagine a more obvious failure that is nonetheless glorified worldwide.

You claim that it’s drugs that cause violence, not the drug war, so…
Now that you’ve had decades to show results, with billions of dollars spent, can you show me some proof that there has been any reduction in violence and corruption as a result of making drugs illegal?
… in the United States?
… in Colombia?
… in Mexico?
… in Afghanistan?