Drug WarRant

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“It needs to be repealed.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 the whole drug policy and those laws have to be repealed.”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.

Earlier this month, I thoroughly ridiculed, some upcoming Reefer Madness-style sensationalism from Nicky Taylor and the BBC.
Well, it’s happened. Nicky Taylor discovered first-hand the horrifying effects of smoking marijuana and is sharing her terrifying ordeal with the rest of the world…

“I felt absolutely terrified,” recalls Nicky, a divorced mother-of-three, thinking back to her first experience just over a month ago.
“Paranoia set in, and I felt as if I was having a panic attack. At one point, I was simply too frightened to get out of my chair.
“I had a feeling the drug had unlocked some sort of paranoia in my head that would never go away again – I suddenly felt everyone hated me. Without doubt, that was one of the worst moments of my life.”

The Daily Mail was thrilled to be able to help disseminate the information:

While some will question Nicky’s wisdom in committing herself to such an experiment when she is a mother of three young children, there is little doubt that her experiences are both enlightening and cautionary to anyone who might think cannabis is harmless.

I guess the British media and Nicky Taylor were providing a public service to inform the millions of people who had smoked cannabis that their first-hand experiences were, in fact, false.
So I called my friend George, who lives in a London suburb, and asked him about the article and the BBC piece.

“Bloody hell!” he exclaimed. “I’ve often had a bit of skunk on the weekend with friends or when going to an Arsenal match, and I thought I was enjoying it. But apparently I’ve been terrified. Who knew?”

Who knew, indeed? I really don’t understand the British press. I had even thought the BBC had some kind of cred, but if they’re showing “documentaries” like this, apparently they’re like some kind of National Enquirer (I already knew that about the Daily Mail).
Are their readers/viewers really that stupid that they accept this nonsense? Cannabis is so widely used that Reefer Madness is just not effective as propaganda anymore.
The Daily Mail piece really gets hilariously surreal at one point, when Nicky Taylor apparently fails to realize that certain effects of cannabis are features and that anyone with 2 more brain cells than moron knows you don’t conduct an interview while stoned (particularly if you can’t handle it)

“At one point, I went to interview the man who runs Amsterdam’s hemp museum after smoking cannabis,” says Nicky. “I wanted to appear professional – as any reporter from the BBC would. But this proved to be next to impossible. I was giggly and could hardly keep my mind on what he was saying.
“Embarrassingly, my attention suddenly wandered to a pile of guinea pig bedding which was sitting in the corner of his office, clearly intended for someone’s pet.
“I rushed over to it and kept picking it up. I felt as if I’d just discovered the Holy Grail, but the poor man clearly thought I was incredibly odd. He was obviously uncomfortable in my presence, and I was clearly unable to be professional while on the drug.”
To find out how much her concentration had been compromised, Nicky set herself the task of assembling a flat pack cabinet, first free from and then under the influence of cannabis.
Without having smoked the drug, she found the job straightforward. While stoned however, it was a different matter.
“I took only two puffs of cannabis, but was totally hopeless when it came to assembling the cabinet,” she says. I felt so spaced out that I ended up passing out on the sofa with the cabinet still in bits around me. The drug totally destroyed my ability to think.”
Over the course of the four-week investigation, this “mental oblivion”, as Nicky describes it, was to become a familiar feeling.

Clearly we need to arrest marijuana smokers. They might become… giggly.
The whole piece is such nonsense as to be not worthy of debunking… But it is so much fun to ridicule.

Scott Morgan takes it to the drug czar’s office with A False and Embarrassing Press Release from the Deputy Drug Czar
Deputy Drug Czar Scott Burns tries to go after the decriminalization bill in New Hampshire and ends up getting it wrong big time, so much so that apparently lawmakers are passing it around for laughs.
Burns claims that the law would decriminalize “the manufacturing, possession, and/or distribution of 1.25 ounces or — over 90 marijuana joints.” The law would, in fact, only decriminalize possession of 0.25 ounces. And even in Burns’ deluded world, he’d still have to be rolling 2.5 joints per gram (and under the actual law, he’d have to be rolling 13 joints per gram). Now it’s true that people do have different sized joints, but generally one gram is average.
Be sure to read Scott Morgan’s full response, but here is the press release:

Press Release
Wednesday, March 19, 2008

STATEMENT FROM DEPUTY “DRUG CZAR”
SCOTT M. BURNS ON MARIJUANA
DECRIMINALIZATION EFFORTS IN
NEW HAMPSHIRE

(Washington, D.C.) — Today, Scott M. Burns, Deputy Director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), made the following statement regarding marijuana decriminalization legislation, which is currently being debated in New Hampshire.

“Decriminalizing the illegal and highly addictive drug — marijuana — sends the wrong message to New Hampshire’s youth, students, parents, public health officials, and the law-enforcement community.

“The supporters of decriminalizing marijuana are fooling themselves if they believe the manufacturing, possession, and/or distribution of 1.25 ounces or — over 90 marijuana joints — is good public policy.

“Decriminalizing marijuana — the drug which sends the most of America’s youth into substance abuse treatment and recovery — is a dangerous first step towards complete drug legalization. In fact, marijuana sends the highest percentage of New Hampshire residents into drug treatment than any other illicit drug.

“The last thing New Hampshire need is more drugs, drug users, and drug dealers on their streets and communities — further straining limited law enforcement manpower and resources.

I strongly urge responsible leaders in New Hampshire to stop any effort to decriminalize or legalize the highly addictive drug marijuana.”

To learn more about the dangers of marijuana use, please visit:
http://www.ondcp.gov/drugfact/marijuana

“bullet” Ottawa, Illinois, population 18,307, now has their own SWAT team
“bullet” Arcata, California (population 17,294) is considering it.