Drug WarRant

“bullet” Whenever Maia Szalavitz has a new article about the drug war, I have come to expect brilliance, and today’s is no exception: Increasing Agony, Not Fighting Addiction

Think about it: we have the ability to ease the pain of the dying, even when we can’t treat their illnesses or injuries, for pennies a day. But we don’t do so — in fact, we directly prohibit them from getting these medicines — because we are afraid that either we will addict the dying or that addicts will somehow get access to this medicine somewhere along the supply line.
What kind of insanity is this? If you are dying, what does it matter if you are physically dependent on a drug? What does it matter, even, if you develop a compulsive desire for more of it? And why should people who live with painful conditions that will not kill them suffer, either, for that matter? We are so misguided in our thinking about addiction that we prefer people to live and die in unspeakable agony rather than risk them having a bit of extra euphoria!

“bullet” I’ve been a big fan of LEAP’s Jack Cole, so this feature on him in the Guardian Unlimited was a delightful read: Badge of honour by Alexandra Topping

Cole’s voice drops: “The undercover cop would stand watching the guys file past so they would know you had evidence against them, and wouldn’t bother pleading not guilty.” But when the good Samaritan walked by, he looked Cole in the eye and said: “Man, I was just trying to be your friend.” Cole’s voice falters. “I realised then that we were sending the wrong people to jail, and it had to stop. How many of those young folks would have gone on to have a perfectly productive life had I not intervened?

“bullet” The third piece of reading was in the Politico, and I hadn’t noticed the byline before reading it. I was really impressed with the piece and had to know… Of course, it was Radley Balko: Federalism should extend to marijuana raids

It‰s difficult to understand how the same party that (correctly, in my view) argues that the federal government has no business telling the states how they should regulate their businesses, set their speed limits, keep their air and water free of pollution or regulate the sale of firearms within their borders can at the same time feel that the federal government can and should tell states that they aren‰t allowed to let sick people obtain relief wherever they might find it.

Enjoy.

A very nice story about the working medical marijuana program in Rhode Island: For more than 300 Rhode Islanders, marijuana provides legal relief
The article references our friend Tom Angell:

O‰Donnell, now 44, was a dynamo in a wheelchair, lobbying at the State House for marijuana to be made legal for the chronically ill in Rhode Island. Her son Tom Angell had brainstormed the idea with a friend in his dorm room at the University of Rhode Island. Angell, who was president of Students for a Sensible Drug Policy at the time, had heard a speaker hosted by the group whose wife used marijuana to relieve her pain. He thought about his mother.

Tom — don’t you know that kids in dorm rooms are supposed to be smoking pot — not plotting to overthrow the government and help sick people?
Another interesting moment in the article is this DEA comment:

Anthony Pettigrew, agent for the New England field office of the DEA, said that while marijuana possession is against federal law, ‹the DEA never targets the sick and dying.Š The agency is more interested in organized drug traffickers, Pettigrew said. ‹I‰ve been here for 22 years,Š he said, and ‹realistically, I‰ve never seen anyone go to federal jail for possessing a joint.Š

Scott Morgan notes:

If DEA won’t arrest patients and state police can’t arrest patients, then medical marijuana laws work very well. […]
It doesn’t matter whether DEA’s policy of not arresting patients is motivated by compassion, political sensibilities, funding constraints, or some combination thereof. The fact of the matter is that state laws are effective at protecting medical marijuana users from prosecution, which is their intended purpose.

And that’s true, with one caveat. The trick is, of course, that possessing one joint doesn’t solve the supply problem, and the point at which the amount you’re needing to grow or buy or have grown for you reaches the level of drug trafficking may be (and is) defined differently by patients, state laws, and the DEA — problem that could be easily solved by simply allowing marijuana to be regulated.

Diego Montoya, a reputed major Colombian drug trafficker and mass murderer was captured yesterday.
If what he is accused of is true, then I join the drug czar in celebrating his arrest.
However, unlike the drug czar, I understand that it is United States drug policy that created the conditions for a Diego Montoya to emerge and that the same drug policy will create a vacuum after his capture that will encourage the development of future Diego Montoyas.
And, as Alex says, why are we giving Diego Montoya the power to be the FDA of recreational drugs?

I’ve always been pretty big Doonesbury fan, and have recently found myself pulling out some of the old books of strips from the early years. And I also happened upon a Knight Lecture talk given by Garry Trudeau at Stanford University in March, 2000 titled “What a Long, Strange Strip It’s Been” — now available for free on iTunes. Quite delightful.
Here’s a little piece of it…

Given the sea change in attitudes, it seems even to me, quite incredible that I could have depicted a culture so tolerant of recreational drugs, but in fact that was our reality. That tolerance, which is now largely forgotten, is what has made the past so haunting and difficult for baby boom politicians when confronted with queries about past behaviors.
As you know, most public figures have used the budding scientist defense — the claim that they were engaged in experimentation. Thus when President Clinton finally came clean, it was only to admit that he too had been bitten by the research bug, but had been plagued by flawed methodology.
Many other public figures have used this approach, from Al Gore, to Newt Gingrich to Mustang Sally – Susan Molinari, but all of them have adhered to the confessional guidelines laid down during the Ginsburg Supreme Court hearings.
Judge Douglas Ginsburg, you may recall, conducted his experiments while he was law school professor, at which exalted station one is expected to have already concluded one’s benchwork and re-joined one’s better senses. Having forfeited the youthful indiscretion defense, Ginsburg was toast.
In contrast, Justice Clarence Thomas, another confessed lab rat, wrapped up his experiments by senior year, so he now occupies the chair that would have been occupied by Justice Souter had Judge Ginsburg completed his experiments in a more timely fashion. The irony, of course, being that Justice Souter, who didn’t conduct any experiments at all, is the only one of the three who probably could have benefitted from them. […]
How refreshing it would be to hear a baby boom Congressman step up and say “Hey, I don’t remember my Freshman year. Get over it.”
The fact is an estimated 80 million of our countrymen have used Cannabis to date. At one time such unlikely sources as Jimmy Carter, and Dan Quail, and Richard Nixon’s Marijuana Commission all favored decriminalizing the stuff, but since the early 80’s nearly 5 million people have been arrested for marijuana-related offenses.
One of the weirder outcomes of the drug war is that much of America has to behave like the criminals they technically are. They have to lie. A lot. Job applications, medical forms, insurance forms, recruitment papers, all of them are opportunities to deny “youthful indiscretion.”
So. Would I ever admit to using pot? Of course not. I never experimented with marijuana. Nor did I every drive a motorcycle, or have an alcoholic beverage until my 21st birthday, or have a sexual experience of any kind until well into my third year of marriage.
In other words, I’m a parent. […]

A disturbing article in the New York Times: Drugs Banned, Many of World‰s Poor Suffer in Pain

Like millions of others in the world‰s poorest countries, she is destined to die in pain. She cannot get the drug she needs Ö one that is cheap, effective, perfectly legal for medical uses under treaties signed by virtually every country, made in large quantities, and has been around since Hippocrates praised its source, the opium poppy. She cannot get morphine.
That is not merely because of her poverty, or that of Sierra Leone. Narcotics incite fear: doctors fear addicting patients, and law enforcement officials fear drug crime. Often, the government elite who can afford medicine for themselves are indifferent to the sufferings of the poor.
The World Health Organization estimates that 4.8 million people a year with moderate to severe cancer pain receive no appropriate treatment. Nor do another 1.4 million with late-stage AIDS. For other causes of lingering pain Ö burns, car accidents, gunshots, diabetic nerve damage, sickle-cell disease and so on Ö it issues no estimates but believes that millions go untreated.

Pain is dangerously under-treated in the United States, and yet…

In 2004, consumption of morphine per person in the United States was about 17,000 times that in Sierra Leone.

What kind of sick, sadistic drug policy would spend billions of dollars and countless lives to eradicate useful drugs, while doing nothing to help those in pain?
Oh yeah. Ours.

Link

(AP) BOGOTA, Colombia – Colombia‰s vice president said Sunday that a U.S.-backed program to fumigate coca fields is failing to stem cocaine trafficking and called for anti-drug efforts to shift away from the practice.

Hmm, not so well, then.
…
So, How’s that war going?
Link

Local law enforcement still fighting war on drugs

Narcotics officers and recovering addicts alike agree that drug-related crimes like murders, thefts, rapes and domestic violence will plague local communities until an end comes to the war on drugs.

Hmm, not so well, then.

Apparently, if you don’t actually put your name on every one of your possessions, police are entitled to take them for their own personal use.

More unsurprising bombshells in Colombia. Today in the Washington Post

BOGOTA, Colombia — An investigation by the Colombian Defense Ministry has found that drug traffickers and rebels from the country’s largest guerrilla group infiltrated the U.S.-backed military here, paying high-ranking officers for classified information to help elude capture and continue smuggling cocaine.

It is part of a set of immutable laws of economics (informally stated):

• When a product in high demand, supply will find a way to meet demand.
• Prohibition of a demand product causes high black-market profits, as supply is forced to operate outside of legal commerce.
• High black-market profits are always protected, inevitably through non-legal means, including violence and corruption.
• Government pay cannot compete with what the black market can offer.

IAt TalkLeft:

An appeals court in Tennessee has ruled the state’s tax on illegal drugs unconstitutional calling it “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable.”

I’ve mentioned the Tennessee Tax before and I’ve talked about the whole notion of state illegal drug taxes several times.
In case this is new to you, the idea is that the state requires you to purchase a stamp for your illegal drugs (sort of like the state stamp on cigarette packages, but an actual stamp). You’re supposed to affix this to your illegal drugs to show that you’ve paid your tax. Of course, the real intent of the law is nothing of the kind. What they do is after they’ve arrested you for drug possession, they weigh the drugs, figure out how much tax you should have paid and then seize that amount of money/possessions/house from you and then still prosecute you for drug possession. It’s really just another way to have the government rob people, and part of the despicable drug war tactics of “piling on.”
About the only ones who actually purchase drug stamps are stamp collectors or those looking at them as novelty items. I have Tennessee (unauthorized substances), North Carolina (marijuana), Utah (marijuana), Texas (marijuana), and Massachusetts (marijuana) stamps, and would love to add to my collection….
Wisconsin’s drug tax law was rendered unconstitutional several years ago by a federal appeals court saying it amounting to double jeopardy.
In the Tennessee case, Judge Sharon G. Lee wrote:

“Because it seeks to levy a tax on the privilege to engage in an activity that the Legislature has previously declared to be a crime, not a privilege, we must necessarily conclude that the drug tax is arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable, and therefore, invalid under the constitution of this state,”

This is good news, and I hope that the drug tax will be challenged elsewhere.
Of course, there’s one way that the drug tax stamp would get my support.
As Ben Masel famously said:

No taxation without legalization.

Update: SayUncle isn’t holding his breath regarding any actual changes as a result of the ruling.

“bullet” Excellent article by Juan Forero: New gangs challenge Colombia’s drug war — demonstrates the absolute destructive futility of our drug war in Colombia (although that doesn’t stop Walters from spouting inane claims of victory).
“bullet” The Trouble with Plan Mexico from the Guardian
“bullet” From the left: The War on Drugs’ Bloody Face by Joseph Grosso
“bullet” Senator Durbin supports medical marijuana
“bullet” In case you missed it… The Ethan Nadelmann article in Foreign Policy was not fully available when I blogged about it — here is the full text.
“bullet” Drug forfeiture funds used to purchase tasers — turning recreational drugs into weapons. [Via]
“bullet” Why are doctors such opiate prudes?by Brianna Hersey [Thanks, Ben]
“bullet” Breaking taboos: – it’s time we recognised that illegal drugs are fun by Michael Duffy [Thanks, Richard and Allan]
“bullet” “drcnet”