Drug WarRant

Jeralyn at TalkLeft notes the Department of Justice is complaining that it is hurting for funds.
Funny. Given the fact that they continually waste money prosecuting medical marijuana suspects in California and tons of small-time drug dealers — heck, they even prosecuted Ed Rosenthal a second time, knowing that the longest sentence they could get was one day he had already served — it appeared to me that the DOJ was so rich they didn’t know what to do with all their money.

Ian Welsh over at The Agonist has an interesting post about Afghanistan and opium and notes the Senlis option

It’s simple. It’d work. But of course since drugs are EVIL, such a common sense solution will never be adopted. It’s interesting to ask why – are Americans, and indeed Europeans, really so inflexible, so indoctrinated with hatred of “drugs”, that they can’t do what it takes to win? […]
the Afghan opium problem is just another example of how we insist, in the face of failure, on doing the same thing that already failed, over and over again.

Chicago Dyke at Corrente follows up on it and gives this fascinating thought:

Legalization, in some form or another, is going to happen. It‰s simply a matter of time. No matter how entrenched the Drug War MIC establishment, eventually it‰s going to be so ugly, corrupt and not effectual that taxpayers around the world will say, “enough.” […]
I just had a conversation with a friend, and I reminded him: it‰s always a good time to advocate sensible drug policy/legalization. Always. That is, as far as that political battle goes, our side is always going to lose. Pushing for drug legalization is a guaranteed no-go, as far as causes are concerned. Until that day that it is not.

“bullet” Give peace a chance. Forget the war on drugs by Anatole Kaletsky in the Times Online (UK)

a ceasefire in the war against drugs would at least give peace a chance Ö not only in Afghanistan, but also in the streets of Britain.

“bullet” War on Drugs Long-Lost Cause by Michael Jones in the Albuquergue Journal (NM)

The tipping point will be reached when people are tired of the abuses of civil rights by the criminal justice system and by the continued endangerment of the nation’s youth by the maintenance of a black market system of drug distribution.

“bullet” The drugs strategies don’t work in The Statesman (Ghana)

The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 must be one of the least effective pieces of legislation ever enacted. […]
Cannabis is an example of the nonsenses created by the 1971 act”s simplistic classification system. Stronger types of cannabis are now on sale, we are told, and research shows a link with schizophrenia.
This is like saying Chablis should be banned because cognac is much stronger and because some people become alcoholics, with dire effects on themselves, their families and society.

It’s hard to imagine a more annoying group of nitwits than the Denver City Council.

“I had a brownie once, there may have even been a bowl going with it,” Councilwoman Marcia Johnson told the newspaper. “I got a good taste and even a case of the giggles, but I voted against (the marijuana measure) because I’m thinking of the message to little children.”

The message to the children. The message to the children is: “It was OK when us politicians did it and it was even fun, but if you do it, we’re going to put you in a position where you can get raped in prison and have your future cut short, ’cause we don’t care a damn thing about you.”

[Mayor] Hickenlooper had previously admitted smoking marijuana.
“As I’ve already been open about in the past — and as I assume many would expect — I made personal choices when I was younger that I neither support nor condone for others and certainly wouldn’t encourage through public policy,” Hickenlooper said.

“Yep. OK for me. Not for thee. And by ‘wouldn’t encourage through public policy,’ I really mean that I want us to have a priority of arresting people for marijuana use.”
(Background on the Denver issue is here)

The DEA is attempting to intimidate New Mexico’s new medical marijuana program, by raiding the home of a paraplegic man certified by the state for medical marijuana.
This is truly disgusting.
Here’s the part that really got to me:

A press release jointly issued by the Pecos Valley Drug Task Force illustrates the political nature of the raid, reading in part, “Citizens of New Mexico need to be aware that they can still be prosecuted on the federal level even though New Mexico has a law permitting marijuana for medicinal use.”

Pecos Valley Drug Task Force. That means a partnership of local, state and federal law enforcement, if it’s like most drug task forces. That means that local and state law enforcement officers are not only breaking state law, but bragging about it and shoving it into people’s faces.
If I lived in that part of New Mexico, I’d be doing everything I could to make sure that the Pecos Valley Drug Task Force got cut off entirely from any state or local funds, including salaries of the officers on that force. If they want to do the bidding of the feds in conflict with state law, then let the feds pay them. Not another dollar from New Mexico.
Interestingly, the Pecos Valley Drug Task Force’s logo reads:

YOU USE Pecos Valley Drug Task Force YOU LOSE!

Sounds about right to me.
The citizens of New Mexico need to stop losing.

High: The True Tale of Marijuana, a documentary that I reviewed here will finally be released for wider distribution in 2008.
Film-maker (and Drug WarRant friend) John Holowach has made the first 13 minutes available to you here (and to anyone who wishes to share this YouTube video)

Dear President Bush,
With Alberto Gonzales leaving in September, it looks like you’ll be needing to find a new Attorney General to serve out the rest of your term. I am willing to offer my services.
I’m not a lawyer and don’t have any work experience specific to the job, but as I understand it, that kind of thing hasn’t really been all that important.
And I have one qualification that the previous two AG’s were lacking — I’ve read and mostly understand the Constitution of the United States. You may not think this is particularly useful, but it does relate to the oath taken, and might be worth checking out.
I also know that you value appointees who follow your wishes, so I am pleased to tell you that, if nominated, I pledge to use your words (taken from an interview in 1999) as a guide: “I believe each state can choose that decision as they so choose.”
Give me a call, and we’ll chat.
Sincerely,
Pete Guither

The recent excellent Washington Post article by Misha Glenny (The Lost War) and Robert S. Weiner’s “rebuttal” (The War Is Not Lost) has sparked some rather heated discussions about the statistics of drug use patterns, both in comments here and over at Drug Law Blog, where Robert Weiner himself responded to Alex’s fisking. Alex does a nice job responding back.

So essentially, we debate whether drug use statistics are being misused or cherry-picked, which sets of statistics are the most accurate, whether the methodology of the survey instrument is properly constructed and how much to account for changes in that methodology over time, whether the survey is capturing actual trends in illicit drug use or trends in perceptions relating to answering questions about illicit drug use.

But to me, this is all just a distraction. Oh, sure, knowing things is important and having better statistical information to draw upon for the purpose of making educated decisions is a good thing. But we’re talking about the wrong question.

The prohibitionists have framed the entire world’s drug policy solution as “We need to reduce the number of illicit drug users.” And all measurements of success or failure are addressed only to that statement. It’s a nice trick, but it’s horribly dishonest. (Note: they also occasionally use the measurements of “Look how much we seized!”, but that’s even less relevant in a non-finite supply chain.)

While I have my own concerns about the statistics of drug use, I am willing to posit that prohibition itself may have actually contributed to some reduction in the number of overall illicit drug users (primarily casual non-problematic drug users). This means, under the framing promoted by prohibitionists, that I agree that the drug war has been a “success.”

But that, of course is ridiculous.

Prohibition framing is dishonest because it promotes a problem (drug addiction, violence, destroyed children, etc.) and pairs it with a solution (reduced number of illicit drug users) that has little direct relevance to the problem.

Why don’t they come out and say “The problem is that there are too many casual illicit drug users out there, and any amount of cost is acceptable to reduce that number.”? Because people would, rightly, object.

If there are problems associated with drug use, wouldn’t the proper solution pairing be to reduce the problems associated with drug use? Ah, but that’s the goal of the harm reduction crowd, who are, for the most part, legalizers, not prohibitionists.

It is the legalizers who are doing more to fight for reducing the problems associated with drug use. Prohibitionists, on the other hand, are more interested in looking for the pony of reduced numbers of illicit drug users.

A sane and reasoned drug policy regime would start by asking the following three essential questions:

1. What are the appropriate goals of drug policy and how can those be achieved?
2. What are the acceptable costs (by type and quantity) for achieving specific aspects of the drug policy goals?
3. What are the measures for determining the success of #1 and #2?

Now you certainly could simply set a goal of reducing the number of illicit drug users. Congress has done exactly that in its directives to the ONDCP. But it’s hardly an appropriate goal, since the numbers game forces government policy to try to reduce drug use by the least problematic drug use populations (the only way to get enough numbers to make proclamations like the one Weiner gives) and therefore does little to address any legitimate problems.

Clearly a much more appropriate goal would be to reduce the problems associated with drug use, and therefore the methods would have to specifically reflect that revised goal.

Now what about #2? This is a critical question, and yet it’s hardly ever addressed by anyone other than legalizers.

Let’s say that Honda (I’m just using them as an example because I just got a fabulous new Honda Fit) decided as a corporate goal to double their car sales this year. So they come up with an approach: drop the price of all their new cars in half. And eureka! It works! They sell more than twice as many cars this year. It’s a success, right? Of course not. The cost of making those cars was more than they were getting, and so the company goes bankrupt, communities all over the world lose automotive plants, people lose jobs, families go hungry, etc. No major corporation would be irresponsible enough to discuss goals without looking at the costs of achieving those goals.

But whenever the drug war is discussed by prohibitionists, it’s as though cost isn’t even part of the equation. Sure, the supply of money to fight the war is sometimes brought up, but the overall cost, which includes not only money but also a huge list of collateral damages, is not mentioned at all.

Some of the costs of prohibition include:

• Enormous taxpayer costs in enforcement, courts, prisons
• Fueling crime through attractive black-market profits
• Creation of a prison/criminal class with endless job opportunities
• Destruction of families and inner cities; welfare costs
• Extraordinary racial implications
• The lures to corruption among public officials
• Loss of civil liberties and the Fourth Amendment
• Denying young people a second chance (financial aid)
• Escalating violence (both sides)
• Foreign policy disasters; harming farmers in poor countries
• Denying medicine to sick people
• Increasing harm for those using drugs
• Lost lives and potential

And I’m sorry, but saying “Hey, we’re developing some great ideas regarding drug courts” doesn’t even begin to cut it.

It’s important to re-emphasize here that costs are not just monetary. I’m sure some prohibitionist is going to get all outraged at this point and say “How can you crassly do a cost-benefit analysis when the lives of our children are at stake?” And it’s precisely because the lives of our children are at stake, along with our freedoms, and the integrity of law enforcement, and on and on. It is extremely irresponsible to avoid the cost-benefit analysis. If it turns out that lives are destroyed in order to reduce the number of casual pot smokers by one, what kind of lame-brained policy is that?

This leads me to the one absolutely incredible piece of blatant hypocrisy in the drug war, and that’s a comparison between the prohibitionists’ analysis of medical marijuana and their lack of meaningful analysis of the drug war.

When we say that medical marijuana is effective in reducing nausea for some cancer and AIDS patients, the drug warrior scoffs and says “That’s totally unacceptable. You must have double-blind proof of efficacy, with years of testing and verification by the FDA. We need to make sure that there’s absolutely no chance that any of these terminal cancer patients will develop bronchitis in 40 years if they smoke pot for their nausea…” etc., etc.

And yet, when it comes to drug policy, no such rigor is even contemplated. Medical marijuana is a choice by a patient with consultation with a doctor, and yet sick people supposedly can’t be allowed to take the mildest chance, while on the other hand, involuntarily imposing an extraordinarily dangerous regime on the entire population is done without consideration of cost to that population.

And if we ask about those costs — prison, corruption, black market profitability, broken families, cities, foreign policy, etc., the prohibitionists promptly stick their fingers in their ears yelling “LA, LA, LA, LA, LA” and then when we’ve finished talking, they respond: “How dare you question the war. Due to our efforts, Joe stopped using drugs. Would you rather he was an addict?”

Sigh.

Now let’s look at those questions again.

1. What are the appropriate goals of drug policy and how can those be achieved?
2. What are the acceptable costs (by type and quantity) for achieving specific aspects of the drug policy goals?
3. What are the measures for determining the success of #1 and #2?

Unless, and until, prohibitionists (or prohibition apologists) are willing to seriously answer those questions, the legalizers and druggies have the upper hand in reasoned, educated arguments.

Even the academics and think tanks are weak in this area. When RAND Drug Policy Center and American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research released their scathing (and important) assessments of the war on drugs in 2005, they seemed to at least understand that such questions might be relevant, but refused to fully address them, instead retreating primarily to the “safe” domain of drug use and prison statistics.

Just because a critical element doesn’t lend itself to easy quantification or palatable political reality doesn’t mean it can be left out of the equation.

Sure, it’s a good thing to have people analyzing MTF and NSDUH and the other survey tools to see what we can learn. But by no means can those figures represent even the beginning of a proper analysis of the appropriate goals, methods, or costs of drug policy.

This has been making the rounds pretty well already, but I want to make sure everyone knows what kind of country this is becoming, thanks to the drug war. (via The Agitator)
Yes, the police can stop you and take your money at gunpoint for no reason than the fact that you have money.

Anastasio Prieto of El Paso gave a state police officer at the weigh station permission to search the truck to see if it contained “needles or cash in excess of $10,000,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the federal lawsuit Thursday.
Prieto told the officer he didn’t have any needles but did have $23,700.
Officers took the money and turned it over to the DEA. DEA agents photographed and fingerprinted Prieto over his objections, then released him without charging him with anything.
Border Patrol agents searched his truck with drug-sniffing dogs, but found no evidence of illegal substances, the ACLU said.
[…]
DEA agents told Prieto he would receive a notice of federal proceedings to permanently forfeit the money within 30 days and that to get it back, he’d have to prove it was his and did not come from illegal drug sales.
They told him the process probably would take a year, the ACLU said.

Can you feel it?