Drug WarRant

“bullet” Missoula to enforce lowest priority measure:

Nearly a year after voters made the Garden City a little greener by asking county law enforcement to ignore adult marijuana offenses, Missoula’s top prosecutor has adopted an official policy to uphold the referendum.
“In the interest of compliance with the 2006 voter initiative on marijuana . we are asking law enforcement officers to stop arresting individuals or writing and submitting tickets ( with mandatory appearance dates ) where the offense committed is solely possession of marijuana in misdemeanor amounts or possession of drug paraphernalia intended for use of marijuana,” according to a draft of the policy by Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg, an outspoken opponent of the measure.
Van Valkenburg’s policy also instructs deputy prosecutors to charge misdemeanor marijuana cases on a lowest-priority basis when marijuana is the sole offense

Nice to see a prosecutor who is willing to follow the law.
“bullet” A report on a government operation to demonstrate to High School students that American have no rights.

On the morning of Friday, October 12, 2007, Steinert High School in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, was flooded by police with five drug-sniffing dogs accompanied by a prosecutor and school officials. The whole student body was arrested by being detained in various classrooms and forced to wait while the search of their lockers verified that each student was innocent of drug possession. Every locker got searched. And every student was under technical arrest until cleared of drug possession, approaching unlawful imprisonment.
The school sent us a letter home with our son saying it was a “…pre-planned search of student lockers using trained narcotics detections dogs.” It continued, “As per our ongoing protocol of ensuring a safe and orderly drug-free environment…this search was a component of our program to deter illegal activity.” There was no reasonable suspicion of any drug activity. It seems that this search was itself an illegal activity because it was a warrantless dragnet, pure and simple.

Guess how much drugs they found?
I wonder how they teach the Political Science in that school? Maybe like abstinence-only sex and drug education, they teach from a heavily redacted Constitution.
“bullet” At another High School, a student who understands rights has written a short play based on a famous Supreme Court case.

‹Bong Hits 4 Jesus,Š written and directed by junior James Dennin, is a dialogue between a student and a principal over the freedom of speech, inspired by the Supreme Court case Frederick v. Morse. […] ‹The ruling raised the question of, to what extent do students have rights,Š said Dennin.

“bullet” Alex at Drug Law Blog expresses one of my pet peeves

What he’s saying is

1. A drug has the potential to harm people.
2. Therefore, the use of the drug should be against the law.

This is pretty much the standard analysis of most folks in law enforcement, not only around salvia but around all recreational drug use. But how do we get from 1 to 2?

Yes, it’s a variation on the Underpants Gnome syndrome. And it’s extremely pervasive in this country on both the right and the left.
“bullet” Nice piece by LEAP’s Jerry Cameron: Praise for Restoring a Life

I will be leading a round-table discussion on current events in the drug war at the regular weekly meeting of the Illinois State University chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. Tomorrow (Wednesday) at 8 pm in Schroeder Hall, room 114.

Fun with money…

The State Department is requesting $550 million to combat drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America […]
“We must provide our troops with the help and support they need to get the job done,” Bush said. “Parts of this war are complicated, but one part is not, and that is America should do what it takes to support our troops and protect our people.”

Confused? It’s just business as usual in Washington. Bush has put the Mexico drug war money in with the massive request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You see, as soon as it’s part of the “support the troops” money, it’s free! Nobody questions it. Nobody asks how we can afford it. Nobody holds hearings*. To do so is to face the “you don’t support the troops” inquisition. So anything thrown into this pot of money — like funding mercenaries in Mexico — is… free. (Of course, we still have to pay for it.)
*(This would normally be the case with a war spending bill. But in fact, Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs actually is holding a hearing: U.S. Security Assistance to Mexico on Thursday.)

Karen P. Tandy is stepping down as head of the DEA, in order to take a lucrative job with Motorola. Her ignorance, her fostering of drug war corruption, and her slavish devotion to all that is evil about the drug war will be… missed quickly replaced with someone else just as bad.
One of my very first full-length posts as a blogger was about Karen P Tandy’s confirmation process (it still is the #1 Google response for Karen P Tandy and one of the top five for Karen Tandy).
So, once again, as with Andrea Barthwell, I outlast a drug warrior — an accomplishment that is not without its downside, since both of them probably make more money in the time it takes you to read this, than I make in a week.
From her press release:

Reflecting on her 30 year career, with the last 4 years as the DEA Administrator, Ms. Tandy stated, ‹It just doesn‰t get any better than this […]”

Hmmm… maybe not for her.
But what about the poor farmers in Colombia? What about the thousands of non-violent drug offenders in federal prisons? What about the medical marijuana patients who have been denied their medicine by the DEA? What about these people?
Does it ever get better for them?

Principal Morse’s decision to tear down Joseph Frederick’s Bong Hits 4 Jesus banner in an effort to prevent people from seeing that simple message, resulted in the greatest backfire imaginable.
Because of that action, everyone in the world knows the phrase “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” Despite the Supreme Court loss, Joseph Frederick won beyond his wildest dreams — he was trying to use nonsense to make a statement about free speech and student rights. And he was heard.
Now, it seems that Bong Hits will get even more coverage…
Paramount, MTV take ‘Bong Hits’ —
True story inspires free-speech tale

“bullet” Apparently Malaysia is going to be drug free by 2015. ‘Bout time. The United States has been drug free since 1995… 2001… 2008…
“bullet” But wait! The people of Carlsbad, New Mexico apparently know the secret to becoming drug free…

CARLSBAD Ö A group of approximately 40 persons gathered Saturday morning for the Fourth Annual Prayer Walk in downtown Carlsbad, walking one mile to the Beach Park and praying for the city.
The walk was sponsored by the Carlsbad Community Anti-Drug/Gang Coalition. Coalition Preventionist Alison Bryant said the prayer walk is one of the strategies the Coalition uses to help the community work toward becoming drug free.

I wonder if they really mean drug free, or if they have a specific list of drugs in their prayers, and whether they exempt caffeine, aspirin, alcohol, ritalin, vicodin, viagra…
And what do they hope their prayers will do?

Houghton said that every year after the prayer walk takes place there are several major drug busts in Carlsbad.

Ah, I see. They’re praying for war.
“bullet” Contractors may train Mexican drug forces My prediction: this will not end well.
“bullet” Agents find marijuana in tour bus

“It tells us that the drug-trafficking organizations are trying to use a variety of ways to do this,” [Customs and Border Protection spokesman Brian] Levin said. “They are looking for the appearance of normalcy and legitimacy. They are trying not to stand out.”

Is this your first day on the job, Brian?

Detroit News editor Nolan Finley is not going to take it anymore.

You want to know why kids are being killed in Detroit? Because drug dealing is a $100 billion enterprise in the United States. All of that money moves through the criminal underground, where it is untaxed, unregulated and untraceable.
The only way to stop the drug trade from consuming our children and our communities is to take the profit out of selling dope.
For more than 30 years, we’ve tried to do that by kicking in doors, rounding up street corner dealers, cutting off international supply lines and filling our prisons. And it hasn’t worked.
It will never work. Those determined to destroy themselves with drugs will find a way to do so, just as those who prefer to ruin their lives with alcohol or gambling, vices the government decided that, if we can’t beat ’em, we might as well tax ’em. […]
A drug-free America is an impossible dream. Our stubborn determination to press this lost cause is killing people. […]
When babies die in their beds, we have to start challenging the premises of the drug war, and asking whether the fight is worth the cost.

Robin was a medical marijuana patient and activist in Montana. For 22 years she suffered the ravages of systemic lupus, a condition that involved unrelenting constant pain and numerous severely debilitating side-effects. She was allergic to most prescription drugs her physicians tried, and only medical marijuana brought enough relief to make her life bearable.
Despite her status as a medical marijuana patient, the DEA seized her medicine last spring (which is when this video was shot). Since then, it’s been harder for her to get what she needed and caregivers have been understandably afraid to supply her.
Yesterday morning, Robin ended her life.
Peace be with you.

Over at Alternet, Paul Armentano has a hilarious (and very true) piece: ‘Pot 2.0’: Where Can I Get Some?

So let’s review, shall we? Our federal government wants Americans to get off the pot. So they spend billions of dollars outlawing the plant and driving its producers underground where breeders clandestinely develop stronger and more sophisticated herbal strains than ever existed prior to prohibition. The Feds then go out and inadvertently give America’s pot farmers billions of dollars in free advertising by telling the world that their weed is more potent than anything Allen Ginsberg, Tommy Chong or Jerry Garcia ever smoked in their heyday. In response, tens of millions of Americans head immediately to their nearest street-corner in search of a dealer (or college student) willing to sell them a dimebag of the new, super-potent pot they’ve been hearing about on TV.
Perhaps it’s time for the DEA to heed their own advice and “just think twice.”

It’s… smokin’…

“bullet” Robert Sharpe letters

The drug war doesn‰t fight crime. In fact, what it does is it fuels crime.

“bullet” Jonathan V. Last loves the drug war, and thinks that Canada should get some more of it.

ONE OF THE UNTOLD successes of the Bush administration has been the progress made in the fight against illegal drugs.

Right.
Last is a Weekly Standard editor, and I’ve mentioned this moron and Walters sycophant before.

Director John Walters is not the type to go running for the nearest TV camera. Yet the quiet success he has overseen is a powerful reminder that the bad guys are not 10 feet tall; that failure is not inevitable; that the war on drugs is a war worth fighting; and that we’re fighting it well.

“bullet” Drug Sense Weekly
“bullet” “drcnet”