Drug WarRant

Some time ago, I wrote about a compelling bit of criminal justice reporting by Scott Christianson related to crime clearance rates — the percentages of violent crimes and property crimes that are solved through arrest or other means.
Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast applies Christianson’s analysis to current dismal clearance rates and the recent news related to the increase in marijuana arrests, and comes to some powerful conclusions (that are certainly of no surprise to us) — that the popularity of the drug war is harming police effectiveness.

“bullet” Canada Backs Call to Step Up Fight Against Afghan Drugs — Some sane voices in this article. Unfortunately, not the ones making the decisions.
“bullet” Obama is So Bad on Drug Policy, He Got Endorsed By Prison Guards – Scott Morgan
“bullet” The Federal War on Medical Marijuana Becomes a War on Children

But that wasn’t the worst of it. County child protective services came along on the raid and took Naulls’ three daughters, aged 1 to 5, and charged him and his wife with child endangerment. They weren’t even accused of breaking any state laws.

Via NORML…

Marijuana Arrests For Year 2006 š 829,625 Tops Record High…Nearly 15
Percent Increase Over 2005
September 24, 2007 – Washington, DC, USA
Washington, DC: Police arrested a record 829,625 persons for marijuana
violations in 2006, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s
annual Uniform Crime Report, released today. This is the largest total
number of annual arrests for pot ever recorded by the FBI. Marijuana arrests
now comprise nearly 44 percent of all drug arrests in the United States.
“These numbers belie the myth that police do not target and arrest minor
marijuana offenders,” said NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre, who
noted that at current rates, a marijuana smoker is arrested every 38 seconds
in America. “This effort is a tremendous waste of criminal justice resources
that diverts law enforcement personnel away from focusing on serious and
violent crime, including the war on terrorism.”
Of those charged with marijuana violations, approximately 89 percent some
738,915 Americans were charged with possession only. The remaining 90,710
individuals were charged with “sale/manufacture,” a category that includes
all cultivation offenses even those where the marijuana was being grown for
personal or medical use. In past years, roughly 30 percent of those arrested
were age 19 or younger.

Via PoliBlog, comes this unbelievable quote in the Miami Herald:

”Our belief is that if we could eradicate all coca, we could eradicate all cocaine, because it is the basic ingredient for cocaine,” said Christy McCampbell, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international narcotics and law enforcement.

That’s your “belief?” No. That’s a fact. It’s also completely meaningless. The eradication of all coca is not even theoretically possible today, nor is it being seriously contemplated by anyone, except Christy McCampbell, apparently.
It’s extremely annoying to consider that we’re actually paying this moron’s salary. (Not to mention the fact that it’s very likely that a deputy assistant secretary for international narcotics and law makes more than I do, even without the use of a brain.)

tonight — I expect that this will be a bit of a hit piece on how the California med-mar distribution has evolved. I’m interested to see how balanced it is (and how much recreational marijuana is demonized by both sides). I’ll be in rehearsal, so if you see it, let us know in comments.

Link

It’s bad enough when government agencies are all lobbying for a chunk of drug war cash. But when you get private companies into the act as well, then the entire power structure has a financial stake in continuing and escalating the destruction.
Lucrative private players have been heavily in the mix for years, from drug testing companies to privately owned prisons — all lobbying for harsher drug laws.
A couple of other instances have been in the news lately.
“bullet” Link

The Defense Department has picked five companies, four of them from the Washington area, for a contract to support the Pentagon’s counter-narcoterrorism activities. The government may spend as much as $15 billion through the five-year contract.
The local companies are Arinc of Annapolis, Lockheed Martin of Bethesda, Raytheon Technical Services of Reston and Northrop Grumman Information Technology of McLean. The fifth company is Blackwater USA of Moyock, N.C.

Yes, we’re talking about that Blackwater:

Senior Iraqi officials repeatedly complained to U.S. officials about Blackwater USA’s alleged involvement in the deaths of numerous Iraqis, but the Americans took little action to regulate the private security firm until 11 Iraqis were shot dead last Sunday, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. […]
In the United States, Blackwater is facing a possible federal investigation over allegations that it illegally smuggled weapons into Iraq that later might have been sold on the black market.

And we’re also paying them to help fight the drug war. A war that isn’t really a war, but has all the casualties and corruption of war.
“bullet” Closer to home…
Via The Agitator…
A private firm (Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation), has been stopping motorists and asking them to submit to tests of their breath, blood and saliva — assisted by sherrif’s deputies.
Declan McCullagh analyzes this fishy enterprise, learning that it receives over $35 million in taxpayer dollars (its only source of revenue appearing to be government grants and contracts.

PIRE seems to specialize in devising new and intrusive ways of
government meddling in personal lives.

And apparently, this kind of work pays well.

Robert Carpenter, PIRE’s CEO, was paid $221,785 in 2005
Ted Langevin, a VP/CFO, was paid $200,760
Joel Grube, a PIRE research director, was paid $237,075
Ted Miller, a PIRE research director, was paid $192,444
Jan van der Eijk, IS director, was paid $194,532
Paul Gruenwald, a science director, was paid $212,437
Robert Saltz, an associate director, was paid $191,527
Genevive Ames, a staff director, was paid $183,770

Isn’t it nice to know that you’re paying for all this?

I bring this up from time to time… partly in the hopes of provoking a response.
No particular bit of news that set this one off — I just happened to be looking up something at the Black Congressional Caucus website.
Given that blacks are disproportionately impacted by the drug war and that the drug war is the largest factor in the massive disenfranchisement of black voters, I was once again completely dumbfounded that I could find almost nothing at all about the war on drugs anywhere on that site. The closest I found was a mention in a past newsletter that one of its members had sponsored a bill making it harder to buy cold medicines since they can be precursors for methamphetamine!
The drug war is not anywhere on their agenda (pdf) or even their blog. No calls for crack/powder disparity sentencing reform. No calls for legislation preventing the next Tulia.
They do, however, have a riveting report on America’s Switch to Digital Television (pdf).
I had hopes for another group — National African American Drug Policy Coalition, but as far as I can tell from their website and Google/News searches, they don’t appear to actually be doing anything.
So where is the African-American leadership?

• Do they secretly believe that blacks are genetically predisposed to commit crime and that the drug war is necessary to “prune” the race?
• Do they simply believe, by massive coincidence, that a larger percentage of blacks “had it coming”?
• Are they so afraid of losing political power that they’d rather see huge numbers of blacks ripped from their families and incarcerated, rather than publicly touch the “drug war issue”?

(And yes, I am purposely asking offensive questions, and I’ll keep doing it until I hear the leadership speak.)
Sometimes when I see the African-American “leadership”, I feel like I’ve stumbled into some kind of twilight zone episode — a town whose children are regularly sacrificed to an unseen monster, and everyone keeps quiet about it for fear of something bad happening to the town — or, perhaps, The Lottery.
I miss Martin Luther King, Jr.

Link

MEXICO CITY Ö A government-run human rights commission accused soldiers of rape and torture today and recommended the army be pulled out of Mexico’s nationwide drug war.

What’s a little rape and torture? After all, isn’t it worth some raping and torture if it means that the Mexican government is able to make it look like they’re making a valiant though unsuccessful effort to make it a little bit harder for Americans to buy Mexican pot?
I mean, it’s just rape and torture. It’s not like they’re killing anybody.

The fourth case already has been widely reported. On the night of June 1, on a deserted highway in the western state of Sinaloa, soldiers opened fire on a pickup truck packed with people, killing two women and three children.

OK, but they’re not killing a lot of people. And nobody important. Just women and children…

A follow-up to yesterday’s post — A spokesman for U.S. Rep. Jerry Weller has confirmed that he will not seek re-election.