Drug WarRant

The latest drug craze.

A great South Park episode, between the Heavy Metal references, the sudden drug war hysteria, and hiding kittens in attics to keep them from being seized by the DEA.

Via CESAR Fax (may not yet be up on their site), comes this chart showing a 10 year comparison of employee positive drug tests from Quest Diagnostics. The Quest statistics are often trotted out in cherry-picked portions to proclaim a dramatic reduction in cocaine use or marijuana use or meth use, but rarely showing the whole picture.
Is this supposed to be good?

Overall, the total percentage of workers with positive drug tests showed an insignificant reduction, one that could be more than offset by the substitution effect (switching from marijuana that stays in your blood a long time to other drugs that don’t).
I don’t see how anyone can call this chart an example of success.
Also, notice the workplace drug that’s missing?

Newsweek

• Farmers in Afghanistan can’t make enough to feed their families on traditional crops.
• Opium pays 10 times as much as wheat or corn, and yet opium farmers still earn about $300 per family member per year (the real money goes to traffickers)
• To get through the year, they often get a loan on the future crop from the traffickers.
• Then eradicators, encouraged by the U.S., destroy the crop.
• Unable to deliver the opium to the traffickers, the farmer faces death.
• So the farmer sells his 10-year-old daughter to be the trafficker’s “bride.”

How’s that drug war going?

The Drug Enforcement Agency needs to be put out of its misery. It’s a completely failed, corrupt organization with no legitimate accomplishable goals, that’s being used for personal and political gain, dirty tricks, spying, drug-running, and undermining legitimate state and sovereign governments.
If that wasn’t enough, sometimes they’re also the keystone cops. A new audit discovered over 90 weapons and 230 laptop computers missing from the DEA, despite a bad audit for those specific items in 2002 and new procedures being put in place to better account for them.
And this follows a 2006 audit that took a look at the supposed $339 million the DEA had seized in 2005 and discovered they had no idea how close that number was to the truth, given the serious failures in following established procedures when dealing with cash.
But at least they’ve got a museum, and a brand new Spike-TV show.
Oh, and guns. They’ve got guns. (Except for the ones they lost, of course.)

Here’s a little Sunday morning inspiration for you. Send it to all your church-going friends and relatives. It’s just over 9 minutes long and it’s a must-see.

“It’s so important for us, as both religious leaders… as members of congregations, to resist any sort of complicity, any sort of willingness to go along with this, because I think that ultimately really compromises our life of faith and our own morality.”

– Father Earl Kooperkamp, St. Mary’s Episcopal

“I would hold the religious community responsible for that. I think it’s an aspect of American puritanism/ And then we got into hysteria around that — in a way it’s a projection of anxiety onto certain people, again for puritanical purposes. And so, once we went down this path, then fueled by religious communities who supported it, it just picked up steam. And now it’s one of the reasons that we, as religious leaders, need to speak out against it, because we were responsible for it.”

– The Very Rev. Scott Richardson, St. Paul’s Episcopal, San Diego

“It needs to be repealed. It can’t be just reformed. The whole system has to.. the whole drug policy and those laws have to be repealed.”

– Sister Marion Defeis, Catholic prison chaplain, ret.

Here’s an expanded Part 2, which is 17 minutes.
Another great job by Mike Gray.
Via Transform
(Also posted on the Drug War Videos page.)

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned a questionable plan in Bartonville, Illinois to be “proactive” in drug enforcement, and while details were lacking, it seemed suspiciously like an unconstitutional fishing expedition on the part of police (perhaps testing the extremes of the horrible Supreme Court decision in Illinois v. Caballes).
It appears, based on this report from Peoria Pundit, that my suspicions were well-founded (and that their dog is like every other drug-sniffing dog — mostly worthless).

But there‰s the funny part: Their dog is ‹busted.Š As in ‹broken.Š As in ‹doesn‰t work.Š A source tells me of one person who was stopped in one of these ‹proactiveŠ enforcement events. Police took him out of his car and made him stand there while the drug-sniffing dog circled the car, sniffing away. The dog found nothing, which is understandable, since the driver didn‰t have ANY drugs in the car.
But he DID have a small bag of weed in his pants.
Certainly, the driver thought, this dog is eventually going to hit on the grass in his pocket. Nope. Nothing. Not even after the dog took a good long sniff.

Sometimes a headline on an article just amuses me.
I realize it’s the name of a town and they can’t help it, but still, when I saw this article…
Program Led by Marlboro Police, DEA Will Teach Parents About Drug Abuse
… I couldn’t help imagining this:

“bullet” Justices to Weigh Search and Consent
“bullet” Police are like vampires
“bullet” Prescribing Heroin — Everything you wanted to know about heroin, as told by Michael Jourdan, from the Centre of Alcohol and Drug Research in Copenhagen. ( I got to know Michael in New Orleans at the International Drug Policy Conference — a great guy. The site is a kind of grass-roots talking encyclopedia and they approached him, asking him to answer 36 questions about heroin.
“bullet” DrugSense Weekly
“bullet” “drcnet”

Police in London on their way to a drug raid where they take down an internet cafe, a butcher and a greengrocer.
If I saw this, I’d be looking for the big cartoon balloon animals, clowns and marching bands to follow.

Either that, or it was jury nullification — somewhat the same thing in this case.
Coverage at Grits, Hit and Run, and MPP.