Drug WarRant

“bullet” Nice to see a college OpEd with some sense.
“bullet” This is how the world looks when you are only able to perceive one side of things. Then the only question you can ask is how to make prohibition work and you are unaware that the word “whether” exists.
“bullet” How dysfunctional is the drug war? Just check this out: A D.A.R.E. officer(!) arranges a major drug transaction… in the parking lot of an elementary school. Investigators are onto the rogue officer and tape the transaction, while accidentally broadcasting it over the police scanner to anyone who might be listening.

Hey, Testers, Leave Those Kids Alone

* If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. This is the single most odious line of reasoning ever concocted because it misses the point. People, including students, are not required to prove they’ve done nothing wrong.

There’s an extensive legalization comment thread over at Marginal Revolution. Some of the comments are quite uninformed, but there are a few reasoned individuals as well. It comes from a discussion of whether prohibition violence would really decrease with legalization (something we know for certain).
Here’s the part that really gets surreal:

Under one model, local gangs have a more or less fixed ability to terrorize a neighborhood. Even if everything is legalized, the gangs will continue local monopolies to maximize tribute, subject of course to constraints from other gangs and the police. In this model, legalizing drugs doesn’t do much good. The local gang either shifts its monopoly to another area (milk and sugar, if need be), or de facto the gang’s local monopoly on the drug trade continues. The gang busts you if you try to get your supply of crack cocaine from Merck.

It’s one of the more bizarre notions I’ve heard (even though Tyler Cowen only believes that it will be partly operative).
There’s no way that criminals can compete with a reasonably priced, well-supplied legal market, and absolutely no way that they can monopolize it, assuming a civilization not in total anarchy.
Sure, assuming an instant legalization, criminal enterprises and gangs will be left suddenly scrambling to find some other way of surviving outside the law, and they will try a number of models. But with the money spigot turned off, the lure will be lost for new recruits, and any attempts they make to switch to victim-based crimes will be met with a newly united front of community and law enforcement that will be formidable.

Last night — just a typical Friday night college party in Normal, Illinois, with the police using knives to break into bedrooms without a warrant.

They conducted a 3-hour search, but no drugs were found.
I’m particularly fond of the officer’s gracious reply — “Shut up!” — after the student respectfully calls him “sir.”
The video is in one of the back bedrooms. The report I heard was that the entry into the main apartment was also forced despite denial of consent.
Note: I was not there, so if the Normal PD would like to provide their own explanation or more information, I’m listening.
Update: The residents have confirmed that the police did not have a warrant. They have approached the Normal PD office and were told that since they didn’t have any footage of the police illegally entering the main portion of the apartment that it’s simply their word against the cops’ and they have no case against the police.
I’ve been told by one source that once the police were in the apartment, they had the right to break into the bedrooms for “safety” reasons, but I don’t know enough about the specific laws there.
Regardless of the technicalities of the law (and I still believe that the police have broken it dramatically), there is a matter of showing respect to the citizens whom you are supposed to protect and serve.

Link (Via Baylen)
The next big scandal in sports comes from a statement made on radio by Dallas Mavericks forward Josh Howard. Howard explains:

“What I was stating was just [in response to] a random question he asked me about the marijuana use. I just let him know that most of the players in the league use marijuana and I have and do partake in smoking weed in the offseason sometimes and that’s my personal choice and my personal opinion. But I don’t think that’s stopping me from doing my job.”

He’s not using marijuana during the season, and he hasn’t flunked any drug tests.
So now the league and the press are scrambling to find how you punish someone for… um… telling the truth.

Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said before Friday’s game against the Hornets that any punishment from the club will be meted out “internally.”
“We won’t make it public,” Cuban said. “But we’ll deal with it.
“We’ll do what we need to do and deal with it internally and then that’s it.”

What really bugs them is that he is matter-of-fact and unrepentant about it.

The Sean Bell case ends up with acquittals on all charges. Apparently nobody did anything wrong.

“bullet” Action Alert: Contact your representatives and have them support the federal marijuana decriminalization bill.
“bullet” Dust-up, Day 5: Drug Policy from Scratch. Stimson reaches deep into his rectum and pulls out the Nixon/Linkletter argument.
“bullet” Drug Sense Weekly
“bullet” “drcnet”

You may have thought the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was merely a sadly delusional chapter in our nation’s history. And yet, every now and then I see a letter to the editor in the local paper signed by someone who calls herself head of the local WCTU chapter.
What I didn’t realize (until I read Allen St. Pierre’s post today) was that they also take a position on marijuana.
At their marijuana ‘facts’ page you can learn a number of interesting things, including:

long-term marijuana users experience withdrawal symptoms such as stomach pain, irritability, and aggression. […] Sudden heart attacks have been linked to pot smoking […] Loss of fertility in both males and females may occur. Marijuana can disrupt testes and uterine function. In males testosterone levels and sperm counts can decrease and abnormal sperm form. Menstrual periods have ceased in females who use pot regularly. […] fathers who smoked pot might increase the chances of their babies dying from SIDS. […] Marijuana use is a major risk factor in the development of full-blown AIDS in HIV-positive persons. HIV marijuana smokers progress to full-blown AIDS twice as fast as non-smokers. […] Chronic use results in adults being four times more likely to be depressed later in life and to have suicidal thoughts. […] In a 1999 report of 664 drug-related deaths, 187 of them resulted from marijuana use alone. […] A scientific study of airplane pilots showed their inability to properly land a plane using a flight simulator even 24 hours after smoking one joint. […] As of January, 2001, the Mississippi Research Center for the National Institute on Drug Abuse had on record more than 15,000 studies on cannabis. None of them show the raw material marijuana to be safe or effective for medical use. […] Many of the state-based referendums on medical marijuana have been supported and funded by individuals and organizations who favor decriminalization and legalization and who would profit from producing and selling marijuana.

If I didn’t know the damage that this organization has done to the country historically, I would merely consider this nothing more than a group of deluded oddballs who are completely and hilariously wrong.

It’s delightful entertainment over at the LA Times, because we so seldom get to see prohibitionists in any kind of debating forum, and Stimson is a textbook case as to why that is. It’s no contest at all — Jacob Sullum hardly has to try.
Today’s question is about violence.
While Stimson admits that legalization could bring about a reduction in prohibition-related violence, he say that won’t help us at all.

Here’s the rub, though: If you impose high taxes, a gray market will inevitably be created, and along with it will come violence. If you impose no taxes, and thus the price remains low, there will be rampant consumption and the predictable, attendant violence and social dislocation that go hand in hand with consumption.

Did you catch that? Apparently the only options are excessively high taxes or no taxes. You see, I would have thought that maybe the idea was to come up with a method of taxation that would fall short of encouraging a gray market.
But let’s assume that we are politically unable to do anything else. Are we really to believe that grey-market violence is anything like black-market fueled violence? Sure, there are criminals that get involved when one state taxes cigarettes too high, but does anyone actually worry about Los Zetas putting severed heads on stakes in order to protect their tax-free Virginia Slims territory?
And as far as the “violence and social dislocation” that will occur with the increased drug use that comes from untaxed legalized drugs, what exactly is Stimson saying? And how does he support it? What’s going to happen? Are the newly added casual marijuana users going to be mixing it up? Or will it be the harder drug users who no longer have to steal to support their dependence?
There’s no evidence that drug-related (as opposed to prohibition-related) violence would increase with legalization, even if there was significantly increased use. In fact, there are many reasons that even drug-related violence would be reduced (law enforcement focused on violence rather than drugs, greater emphasis on getting help for those who need it, etc.
The dishonesty of Stimson’s argument is staggering. According to him, there is no point in getting rid of prohibition-related violence, because even if we do, we’ll have grey-market violence or drug-related violence. The quantity or nature of the violence seems to be irrelevant to him.
Now here’s the way I see it. Let’s call the level of drug-related violence that exists today a “3.” And let’s say that the grey-market violence that we’d see if taxation was too high might be a “4.” On that scale, I would place prohibition-related violence at around “27.” (In Mexico, “63”)
Let’s say that untaxed legalization caused drug-related violence to double (something I think highly unlikely). Let’s compare our options:

1. Today: Prohibition violence (27) plus drug violence (3) = total violence (30)
2. Grey-market: Grey-market violence (4) plus drug violence (3)=total violence (7)
3. Legalization with no taxes: Drug violence (6)=total violence (6)

So why shouldn’t we legalize?
Of course, these are rather arbitrary numbers, but they’re a lot more accurate than Stimson’s nonsense.

“bullet” Sean Mullins’ “The Ballad of Kathryn Johnson” is available for 99¢ on iTunes or at Amazon. As Radley says:

And it‰s good! Well, the music is good. The lyrics wander around a bit, and don‰t really tell what actually happened. But hey, it‰s a good pop song about a botched drug raid. I‰m not going to complain.

“bullet” Scott Morgan has discovered a handy guide for teens to obtain prescription drugs. It’s put together by the Drug Czar. And it’s a nifty site.
“bullet” California Brewery faces federal fines for putting the name of its town on its bottle caps. The Mount Shasta Brewing Company is located in Weed, California.