Drug WarRant

Mike S. Adams recently had a baffling column over at TownHall.com: University Awards Criminal Justice Degree to Cocaine Dealer
In a nutshell, one of his students at University of North Carolina-Wilmington was arrested for selling cocaine, spent several months in jail and had to drop out of school for a semester, but was re-admitted while continuing to serve time on weekends and was able to finish his degree, graduating with a BA in Criminal Justice on May 10th.
Now I don’t want to even get into the discussion of whether his sentence was appropriate. I have no idea what the particulars of this case were (and I doubt that Adams knows all the details either — although you can certainly get an idea of Adams’ leanings when he says “states should have the right to pass laws allowing for the execution of drug dealers”).
I also don’t particularly find the fact that he got a degree in Criminal Justice alarming or wrong — there are certainly careers in which a Criminal Justice degree would be useful and a felony conviction would not necessarily be a barrier. Sure, it’s mildly humorous, but that’s about it.
What I find bizarre about the column is:

there has been an obvious failure of leadership within the ranks of our university administration. It could be argued that a student should eventually be readmitted to UNCW even after a felony conviction for cocaine dealing. But the notion of a) only having the student sit out one semester and b) readmitting him before he even finished serving his sentence for cocaine trafficking is preposterous.
How can we make a judgment about whether the student is rehabilitated if he has not yet finished his sentence? Is there some reason why we have so much confidence in him? Or are we simply holding him to a lower standard because he is a minority? Do we just expect our Hispanic students to traffic in cocaine? Are we motivated by a racism that is almost too subtle to detect?

Since when is the university supposed to be a secondary Justice system? Should the university have some kind of parole board to consider whether someone who has been complying with all the requirements of the courts should have some additional sanctions imposed by the faculty? I wonder if Adams would be happy if the student was first required to be paddled by all of his teachers before being allowed to pay tuition and study.
My reaction to hearing a story like this is to applaud the student. And, quite frankly, to applaud the courts and the university for arranging the possibility for him to finish his degree that way. I have been somewhat appalled at my own university’s policy of mandatory expulsion for felony drug distribution charges, regardless of circumstance or students’ potential (although they do have a difficult, but possible, re-admittance procedure.)
If a student is getting good grades, earning a degree that will help them in their life, and paying their tuition… isn’t that a good thing? Shouldn’t that be encouraged? Even in those who have broken the law?
The university is in the business of providing an education. It’s not in the business of making moral judgments of people, or acting as an extrajudicial punishment organization.
I wonder if Adams would hold other businesses to the same standard. Complaining that a local grocery store, for example, agreed to sell groceries to a former drug dealer. Perhaps the store even allowed this criminal to buy filet mignon.

How can we make a judgment about whether the shopper is rehabilitated?

In the memory of Rachel Hoffman, her parents have established the Rachel Morningstar Foundation, the goal of which is to pass a law requiring legal advice to be sought before a civilian can consent to undercover work. They will also work to decriminalize marijuana in Florida.
Go Rachel.

Apparently people are having complicated and heated discussions regarding how much marijuana a medical marijuana patient should be allowed to possess.
I find it difficult to get very interested in that debate, although I understand that it’s important for the patients.
Here’s what I do think, however.

1. Law enforcement does not have a dog in this race. The patient can have a valid opinion. So can the doctor. But not the cop.
2. It seems to me that the amount that a patient is allowed to have should be at least the amount that the patient needs. Since that varies for each patient, there should be no set limit.
3. If you really have to set a limit, then I’d decide it based on safety and place it just under the amount that would cause a fatal overdose*. That way, you wouldn’t have to worry about anyone getting hurt.

Art Hanger is a Member of Canadian Parliament and chairman of the House of Commons Justice Committee and he has written one of the most moronic OpEds I’ve read in some time. He’s complaining about the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision saying that suspicion-less sniffing of backpacks by dogs is a violation of the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure.
His OpEd: Basic Logic Escapes Six Justices In Two Drug Dog Cases, which is, of course, funny, because the one really lacking logic is the one who wrote this dreck.

…a police-trained drug dog, sniffing the back-pack of someone under suspicion hardly violates this elusive clause that says everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.
This very basic logic somehow escaped six of nine members of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Everyone to be afforded the protection of this clause includes a fellow by the name of Gurmakh Kang-Brown, who was caught with 17 ounces of cocaine in his luggage during a random search at the Calgary Greyhound Bus depot. Everyone includes a high school student in Sarnia, Ont., caught with 10 bags of marijuana and 10 magic mushrooms during a search on school property.
Yet the Supreme Court, in what ranks high on the asinine decision list, recently rushed to protect their rights and privacy by ruling that police violated the charter by allowing their dogs to sniff search because they didn’t have enough reason to suspect drugs were present.
Didn’t they? And so what. Both culprits were caught with sizable amounts of illegal drugs – enough to generate a lot of misery and crimes committed by users needing cash to buy these drugs. Trained dogs led police to drugs that in no way could be mistaken as stashes for personal consumption. The last time I looked, our schools, including elementary, and transportation ports are constantly being used by drug pushers to apply their trade; hence, the sniffer dogs are employed to curtail the drug pusher’s activity.
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who chooses to deal in illegal drugs forsakes their rights and I believe that most people in this country feel the same way.

This guy is chair of a Justice Committee.
Let’s try to understand his reasoning. The search was OK, because it turned out that those searched were guilty. So this means that you can search anyone, because if they’re guilty, then it’s OK, and if they’re not, well then… oops.
Now maybe it would be all right for the government to simply shoot Art Hanger on sight, because if it turned out that he was a mass murderer then it would be OK, and if not, well then… oops.
Art continues his intellectual exuberance to the end, by suggesting how the Justices could improve themselves…

You know, police have another tool the justices might be wise to explore. It is called Drug Abuse Resistance Education ( DARE ), a basic program designed to educate children on the ravages of illegal drugs.

My Deep Thoughts page got picked up by StumbleUpon and then Reddit, drawing a large number of new visitors to the site. There’s a fairly good discussion in the Reddits comments.
Welcome to any new folks who found their way to the front page!
Update: Penamientos sobre la guerra contra las drogas. Someone’s translated some of them (and there’s discussion).

He’s got an interesting idea. Every time some young person dies in a tragic situation, lawmakers seem to rush to make a law named after that youth that increases penalties or outlaws more things.
Irv Hoffman, however, wants “Rachel’s Law” to bar police from enlisting young people in their drug war.

Gov. Charlie Crist said he was open to hearing Hoffman’s suggestions.
”Anything he would have to say, we would take very seriously,” Crist said.

The interesting part is when law enforcement will have to step forward and argue that they can’t fight the drug war without putting civilians at risk.

The ACLU has launched a new group blog: ACLU Blog of Rights. It appears to have some real potential, with a range of contributing writers that includes Glenn Greenwald, and with categories that includes drug law reform, among other anti-authoritarian issues.
I’ll keep an eye on it and let you know if there’s anything interesting.

“bullet” Radley Balko has more information on the Chesapeake raid. It’s not real pretty.
“bullet” Department of the obvious. Authorities: Traffickers using highways to transport drugs
“bullet” I wonder if this was the same highway… Truck Spills Tons of Oreos on Highway… Mmmm…
“bullet” See Scott Morgan’s Drug Czars Say the Darndest Things and Dick Morris Tells John McCain to Propose Harsher Cocaine Laws.

I’ve decided I’m annoyed by stupid people this week. So here’s another rant about them. I’m not talking about just any stupid people — in other words, not the ones who just sit at home and watch 700 Club reruns — but the stupid people who decide to go out into the world and loudly attempt to convince the rest of us of their particularly odious brand of stupidity.
Stupid #1
Let’s start with the amazing video that has been circulating the last couple of days. Rabid talk show host Kevin James is on Hardball screaming about appeasement, and Chris Matthews decides to actually ask him if he knows what it means. James digs himself into one of the deepest holes I’ve ever seen, and the video, while extremely painful to watch is, at the same time hilarious.
Forget about the mentions of Bush and Obama in the video — this isn’t about them. This is about the notion that anything other than pro-war can be loudly proclaimed as appeasement or surrender. This kind of stupidity dramatically reduces options and damages the country’s ability to accomplish anything. This stupidity completely cuts out rational discussions of diplomatic, economic, humanitarian, isolationist, and other options which are potentially potent tools with no relationship to appeasement or surrender. And in fact, it may turn out that war is the least viable option.
Unfortunately, recent years have given these idiots the notion that they are actually, uh, important, and that people with… facts are merely elitists (hopefully this is a temporary trend and not the beginnings of the death of empire — the dead hand of Hari Seldon would have a field day slapping around Kevin James)
What does this have to do with the drug war? Same situation. The screaming about the imperative to be “winners” — to win the war on drugs — is often paired with the notion that anything else is surrender. Thus, they attempt to shout-down any rational discussions of legalization and regulation, harm reduction, black market profit reduction, safety, targeting specific problems, etc.
When the stupids rule the discussion, then your ability to actually find solutions is limited or destroyed.
… as even a dumb machine knows.

Stupid #2
Via Grits for Breakfast is a letter to the editor in which a woman actually wishes harm to the families of criminal defense attorneys. Fortunately, the 14-year-old daughter of a defense attorney slapped her upside the head.
But as is so eloquently (!) shown by FarkingSean in a Fark.com discussion about the letters, there’s a whole lot of stupidity out there.
His view is, that while perhaps harming their families is going too far, defense attorneys should refuse to defend people they think are guilty. And he believes this to be common-sense justice.
He also believes that it’s better for an innocent man to be jailed than for a guilty one to go free because of the simple math that a freed guilty man may go out and harm others, while the jailed innocent man won’t.
I grew up with a real understanding of the Constitution and individual rights, so such a statement is so foreign that I had a bit of a hard time at first even responding in my head to such nonsense. I didn’t think I’d ever have to.
But I guess maybe we’re in a time when we have to respond to the stupids. So…

Even if you discount the moral, Constitutional, and American reasons for not jailing innocent people, consider this: If an innocent man is sent to jail, that usually means that the person who actually did the crime has not been sent to jail. So you’ve got your free guilty person plus an innocent in jail. Now do the math.

Recipe for disaster:

• An out-of-control drug war, where half the American citizenry is a potential enemy
• A win-at-all-costs mentality, with discussion of any other options being considered surrender and therefore anathema
• A lock-em-up attitude toward the criminal justice system that fails to understand citizen rights.

With apologies to Randy Newman

Stupid people have no reason…
Stupid people have no reason…
Stupid people have no reason to…

There’s lots more coverage of Rachel Hoffman’s murder every day.
Rachel Hoffman’s friends and supporters protested police department actions and remembered Rachel.
And much more information continues to surface…
Hoffman didn’t have “Confidential Informant” training

TPD officials said they didn’t train Hoffman because she was already involved in the drug business and knew what she was doing.

Yeah. Because she already sold pot to her college friends, she was perfectly trained to go undercover with marked bills and suddenly buy large amounts of different drugs and a gun. Right.
Told to Inform, They Live at Risk

In Hoffman’s case, it was the work of another informer that led to her own work for the police.
On April 15, an informer told Tallahassee police that Hoffman had sold marijuana in the past but hadn’t done so recently, according to police records. […]
Two days after police got the informer’s tip, a Tallahassee police officer stopped Hoffman as she was getting into her car.
The officer asked Hoffman if she had any drugs in her apartment. A quarter-pound of marijuana, she said, plus two ecstasy pills and four Valiums, according police records.
While she waited, police obtained a search warrant and found the marijuana and ecstasy in the apartment. She wasn’t arrested.
Instead, with the prospect of serving time for more serious charges, the graduate of Countryside High and Florida State University agreed to work with police.

I’d really like to be able to hear from Rachel what actually happened at that stop, or some of what happened after. Unfortunately, she’s dead, so we can’t ask her.
Details Surface in Hoffman Case

Hoffman, 23, had $13,000 in recorded bills to buy a gun, 2 ounces of cocaine and 1,500 ecstasy pills May 7 from two men, Deneilo Bradshaw, 22, of Tallahassee, and Andrea Green, 25, of Perry. But somehow the drug deal went bad and Hoffman’s body was found the next day in Taylor County.

Wait. $13,000 for a gun, 2 ounces of cocaine and 1,500 ecstasy pills???? But I’ve always thought that these things were much more expensive.

• 2,000 Ecstasy pills with an estimated street value of $43,000
• 800 Ecstasy pills with a street value of $20,000
• 400 Ecstasy pills… the street value of the pills was $20,000

Hmm… do you think the police sometimes exaggerate about street value? But of course they do.
Then we learn a little more about a truly messed up operation

On May 7, Hoffman drove alone in her 2005 Volvo to meet the two men, according to the reports. About 6:40 p.m., Green called her on her cell phone and told her to meet them in the parking lot of the Royalty Plant Nursery. The nursery is north of Forestmeadows on North Meridian Road.
Pender last saw Hoffman on North Meridian Road south of Forestmeadows, according to the court document. Hoffman called Pender and said she was following Green and Bradshaw in their car down Gardner Road. Pender said he told Hoffman not to follow them, but Hoffman hung up.
About 6:45 p.m., investigators lost contact with her. Calls to her phone went unanswered, and the monitoring device stopped working.
At some point, Special Agent L. Andris of the Drug Enforcement Administration said he saw two men in a gray BMW parked in front of the nursery as he drove by.
Jeanette Moran, DEA spokeswoman, said the Tallahassee Police Department had asked the DEA to assist them in the case. She wouldn’t comment further.
When investigators reached the 1000 block of Gardner Road, they found one back flip flop, one spent .25 caliber bullet, two live .25 caliber rounds and tire skid marks. Hoffman was wearing black flip flops when she was reported missing.

If only she could talk to us.
…
Somebody asked me recently if I thought Rachel Hoffman’s case was getting additional attention in general because she was an attractive, young, white girl.
The answer is… most definitely yes.
It’s a simple fact that is part of our culture and part of the history of this drug war.
A critical part of the drug war has historically been to marginalize certain segments of society. And so even now, when a young black or hispanic man is shown on the news in a drug bust it seems somehow… unimportant. That is partly due to the inherent racism of the drug war, both in perception and in percentages of arrests and incarcerations.
But when the press gets hold of the murder of a young white girl with so much potential, it always eats it up.
And so while it may seem… cold to “take advantage” of the death of Rachel Hoffman, there is the fact that she can accomplish something important because of who she was and the tragedy of her demise. She can draw national attention to the problems of the drug war and the use of confidential informants.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard police recently say that the drug war wouldn’t work without confidential informants.

Law enforcement officials say such work is necessary to get drugs and bad guys off the streets.
“The drug world is subversive, and there is no way to penetrate it without confidential informants,” Tallahassee police Officer David McCranie said.
Statistics are hard to come by, but officials in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties say the use of informers is common, and sometimes they get hurt.

Rachel has a lot of work to do, and we can give her a hand.