Drug WarRant

Obviously, to drug policy reformers, the war on drugs is one of the critical issues of our time — it affects everything, from criminal justice and fundamental Constitutional rights to education to foreign policy to poverty and the inner cities, and on and on.
So it can be baffling to note the degree to which serious discussions about the drug war tend to be missing from the major political blogs on the right and the left. They talk about everything else — abortion, gun control, gay marriage, etc. — but not the drug war, except maybe in passing. [Note, this post is a generalization. I have not read all the blogs all the time, and would be happy to be corrected on this, but it appears to me to be true.]
Drug testing in schools and the workplace? Nothing. Harm reduction? Zip. Medical marijuana? Well, Raich got a bit of play, but where’s the outrage from the left about the jack-booted thugs raiding medical marijuana dispensaries? Where’s the outrage from the right about states’ rights? (Oh, I forgot, that was the old right.)
Mexico? As far as the left is concerned, there is no drug war in Mexico. Some of the right-wing blogs bring it up, but usuall only as an added element to justify a hard-line immigration stance (Mexicans bring disease. And drugs, too.)
Afghanistan? Mostly a side-issue to bash the other side about the war. (“See, the war planning was incompetent.” “See, we need to support the war even more.”)
Criminal justice and sentencing disparity gets some play, mostly due to the tireless efforts of Jeralyn Merritt, the original TalkLeft blogger.
Consider the powerful article by Misha Glenny in the Washington Post yesterday. As of this writing, 40 blogs link to it, but there are no real A-list bloggers there (and you know they all read the Post).
It was interesting, then, to see Brad Plumer concerned (and rather perplexed) in Why the Prison State? He mentions the excellent Daniel Lazare and Glenn Loury pieces I’ve covered regarding incarceration, race, and the drug war.
And it got him thinking…

That’s persuasive, but it still seems incomplete. The War on Drugs, which has contributed more to our mass-incarceration orgy than anything else, strikes me as more than just Jim Crow for the 21st century. […] There seems to be a mass frenzy at work here that goes beyond race, even if that’s how it started.

And then Matthew Yglesias picked up on it, too (although briefly). And both seemed to express some concern over the fact that liberal leaders have been behind much of the historical support of the war on drugs.
I think reading between the lines in the Plumer and Yglesias posts (and the comments) gives a little insight into why so few of the major left or right blogs talk about this — You can’t use the immorality or the injustice of the drug war to score political points. Both sides have been complicit. Both sides have been dupes.
Update: Scott Morgan comments.

Governor of New Mexico (and Presidential candidate) Bill Richardson is not allowing his state to simply be scared by the DEA’s bullying (or to use that as an excuse to not implement its medical marijuana law).
He’s directed state officials to continue to work toward finding a way to implement the law, and has written a letter to the President urging him to end the “White House Office of National Drug Control Policy’s misguided priority and wasted resources spent to intimidate states trying to implement medical marijuana programs.”

Misha Glenny has written an amazing article for tomorrow’s Washington Post. It’s extremely rare to see this degree of… reality… in a mainstream publication.
Read the whole thing, but here are a few quotes just to give you an idea:

Thirty-six years and hundreds of billions of dollars after President Richard M. Nixon launched the war on drugs, consumers worldwide are taking more narcotics and criminals are making fatter profits than ever before. The syndicates that control narcotics production and distribution reap the profits from an annual turnover of $400 billion to $500 billion. And terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are using this money to expand their operations and buy ever more sophisticated weapons, threatening Western security.
In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban’s most effective recruiter in Afghanistan. […]
The trade in illegal narcotics begets violence, poverty and tragedy. And wherever I went around the world, gangsters, cops, victims, academics and politicians delivered the same message: The war on drugs is the underlying cause of the misery. Everywhere, that is, except Washington, where a powerful bipartisan consensus has turned the issue into a political third rail.
The problem starts with prohibition, the basis of the war on drugs. The theory is that if you hurt the producers and consumers of drugs badly enough, they’ll stop doing what they’re doing. But instead, the trade goes underground, which means that the state’s only contact with it is through law enforcement, i.e. busting those involved, whether producers, distributors or users. So vast is the demand for drugs in the United States, the European Union and the Far East that nobody has anything approaching the ability to police the trade.
Prohibition gives narcotics huge added value as a commodity. […]
The drug trade is so lucrative, he said, that when police seize growing operations in houses worth $500,000, suspects simply abandon the properties. “They are making so much money that they don’t care about losing that investment,” he said. […]
In one particularly revealing conversation, a senior official at the British Foreign Office told me, “I often think we will look back at the War on Drugs in a hundred years’ time and tell the tale of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’ This is so stupid.”
How right he is.

Bonus: — Another good article this weekend: Total reform key to war on drugs by Bill Kaufmann

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

Joseph Califano is stinking up the place with his lies once again. He specializes in shocktoids — meaningless alarmist “statistics” (often false) with a purpose to shock the public into demanding even more drug war excesses.
There is a long and rich history of Joseph Califano and his organization CASA (Columbia University‰s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse).
Richard Cowen may have described him best:

Joseph Califano is “a very well-funded prohibitionist propagandist.”

(and he will certainly be in the running for our Anslinger Propaganda Award)
He and CASA have been caught numerous times falsifying statistics or simply making them up out of thin air — but their stock in trade is finding survey questions that will yield answers that sound shocking when presented out of context.
I’ve written out Califano before here and here.
But every year, he trots out some new shocktoid and the press, hearing the name Columbia University, dutifully prints his nonsense exclaiming “Boy that is shocking!” without even critically analyzing.
What sort of irresponsible media outlets give him a voice?
Places like CNN and MSNBC…

Teenagers say drug problems at school are getting worse, and parents express doubts about ever making such schools drug free, a new study says.

Califano also shows up in the Financial Times to try to influence the UK: ‘Drug legalisation is playing Russian roulette’.
Fortunately, Steve R at Transform was on hand to give a point-by-point rebuttal (which is a challenge — I know from experience — when you’re sometime forced to respond to nonsense that has been created from whole cloth) — check it out.

Update: More from Jacob Sullum and Scott Morgan

In the Washington Times: Painful drug war victory

“Opiophobia” is a term that describes doctors’ increasing unwillingness to prescribe opioid painkillers Ö a class of drugs that includes Vicodin and OxyContin Ö and especially high-dose opioids, to those in pain. This fear is rooted in the DEA’s practice of jailing those doctors it deems are prescribing outside “legitimate medical standards.” […]
Call it “opiophobia,” call it a “chilling effect,” or simply, doctors behaving rationally, the result is the same: massive underprescription of opioids and radical undertreatment of pain. A Stanford study puts the number of undermedicated chronic pain patients at about 50 percent. According to the American Pain Society, fewer than 50 percent of cancer patients receive sufficient pain relief.

When New Mexico passed their medical marijuana law that required the state to supply patients with marijuana, that turned some heads — surely this was an interesting end run around the approach of busting medical marijuana dispensaries that the DEA uses in California. How would the DEA bust a state?
The problem, unfortunately, is that folks figured out that the DEA might just go after the individual state employees who are complying with state law and, in the process, violating federal law.
So the state of New Mexico has decided not to comply with state law [thanks, Wayne] so as not to force state employees to be put at risk. And to an extent, I can understand the stated sentiment (although it certainly would be an interesting court case).
What I can’t help wondering, however, is how hard the state is trying. Have they merely come up with an excuse to give up? Don’t they have a responsibility to continue to attempt to find a way to make state law work?
And this got me thinking about a fascinating post by Alex at Drug Law Blog: Daily News on LAPD Involvement in Dispensary Raids. The question there is whether members of the LAPD are actually helping the DEA bust dispensaries that are legal under state law, and what that says about the LAPD. They claim to just be there to maintain order, but what about their responsibility to the law?
I’m not saying that the LAPD should defy the DEA. No gunfights in the street between state and federal cops just yet. Federal law supersedes state law. But that doesn’t mean that the LAPD needs to… assist.
As a Superior Court Judge recently noted:

It is up to the federal government to enforce its laws. Indeed, the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal government from impressing ‘into its service — and at no cost to itself — the police officers of the 50 States.'”

So what should the LAPD do? If they really believed in their responsibility to the people, the law, and the state, then they would protect those all the way up to the point where federal law specifically took over, and then merely step out of the way. I would position police officers to protect marijuana dispensaries in the state, with instructions to step aside for the DEA only if and when the police and California attorney general were completely satisfied with the legal paperwork spelling out the DEA’s jurisdiction in that particular raid and the specific provisions of federal law that trumped state law (and the DEA might have to wait for an hour or two while the proper state officials were brought in to inspect such documents).
Now that would be something to see. And the people of California should demand that of their police departments.

Via TalkLeft come a Boston Globe column by Derrick Z. Jackson about Barack Obama.
Remember that Barack Obama got to where he is today because he never got caught.

That vacillation became evident as he kept talking about crack-vs.-powder sentencing, which has come to symbolize racial injustice in criminal justice. He said that if he were to become president, he would support a commission to issue a report “that allows me to say that based on the expert evidence, this is not working and it’s unfair and unjust. Then I would move legislation forward.”
That was a puzzling statement because the US Sentencing Commission, created by Congress in 1984, has long said the system is not working and reaffirmed in April that the 100-to-1 ratio “significantly undermines” sentencing reform.
Obama asked if he could make a “broader” point. “Even if we fix this, if it was a 1-to-1 ratio, it’s still a problem that folks are selling crack. It’s still a problem that our young men are in a situation where they believe the only recourse for them is the drug trade. So there is a balancing act that has to be done in terms of, do we want to spend all our political capital on a very difficult issue that doesn’t get at some of the underlying issues… [emphasis added]

So I guess we’ll just have to put up with the massive drug war destruction if Obama is President, so we don’t waste too much political capital.
None of Obama’s pet summer school and early childhood programs will mean very much if Mommy and Daddy are in jail.

Congratulations to Transform Drug Policy Foundation for their recognition as special consultative NGO status to the United Nations.
Transform has been doing excellent work in opening up the dialogue for alternative approaches to drug policy in the UK and Europe in particular. They’ll only be one voice among many at the U.N., but it’s a voice that must be heard.
And their downloadable publication: After the War on Drugs: Tools for the debate is outstanding.

If you haven’t read Glen C. Loury’s article Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?, you may want to check it out. It’s a pretty powerful picture of incarceration and race — not all about the drug war, but obviously the drug war is a significant element in the equation.