Drug WarRant

“bullet” LA Times editorializes: Ending the Marijuana Monopoly: Federal Officials Should Allow Competition in Growing the Drug for Needed Studies on Its Medical Use.
Good. Puts more pressure on DEA bad girl Michele Leonhart, who has to decide how to ignore the recommendations of DEA Judge Bittner.
“bullet” Scott Morgan rants Testing Positive for Marijuana Doesn’t Mean You’re High
“bullet” In a completely meaningless act, that merely showed that prosecutors are vindictive, that trials where the facts are excluded are shameful, and jurors who survive the process that weeds out the informed are clueless, Ed Rosenthal is again convicted and will be forced to serve zero time in prison.

I’m very busy in New York, seeing shows and giving walking tours all over the city. I’ve brought 79 people from Central Illinois to the city this year for a theatre trip. Saw Grey Gardens last night, Frost/Nixon and Year of Magical Thinking today, then LoveMusik, Moon for the Misbegotten, Spring Awakening, Crazy Mary, and a performance by Momix.
I will find some moments to blog in between all this craziness, but for right now, consider this an open thread.

This editorial in the Edmonton Journal (Canada) responds to the suggestion that Harper will pursue a U.S.-style war on drugs.

If that is the case, it would be an unfortunate mistake with predictable and very disappointing outcomes.
While Washington from time to time trumpets bravely that it has scored a victory in the war on drugs, by all empirical measures it has been an abject failure.

It then goes on to detail the costs of the war in the U.S., and then:

One of the driving forces behind the U.S. war on drugs, especially under the Republican party, is Christianity. The religious right has placed “saving” people from the scourge of drugs as an important American value and tantamount to saving souls. It is one reason that successive administrations have continued to throw increasing resources at a fruitless war. The message, in essence, that the small number of those rescued from the grip of drugs justifies the billions used in the war.
Perpetuating the war also appeals to the military and law enforcement communities. They see it as another almost limitless source of funds to buy new equipment and recruit personnel. If the U.S. were to move toward a more permissive stance on illicit drug use, spending in this area would diminish, as would the number of military personnel, police officers and prison guards. In the U.S., prison and court costs alone for people jailed on drug charges — mostly users and foot soldiers of organized crime, not the kingpins — mean that our neighbours to the south pay out about $10 billion a year.

Interesting point about the Christian influence in the war on drugs. And it is true. There are many who support the war on drugs through a misguided sense of “morality” (which seems to be in the nature of attempting to save one sinner by sending the entire congregation to hell). “Christian” support of the war on drugs is, in actuality, a perversion of Christianity.
Christian morality is a personal choice that must be freely taken by an individual — you don’t achieve it through imposition by a secular government. But this popular tendency to push for criminal laws to enforce moral standards demonstrates self-doubt — a faith that is so weak that they require the secular government to enforce it.
The informed and enlightened Christian (regardless of their beliefs on the morality of drug use) sees the entire picture and is horrified by the suffering imposed upon the people by the state. To participate in, or support such a war, would be immoral.
Additionally, the notion of the mere use of certain drugs as being immoral (oddly just the ones that have been outlawed by the state) has no grounding in Christianity — it is primarily the invention of religious dogma and imposed upon the masses by the church.
Anyway, back to the Edmonton Journal…

Research has shown repeatedly that having young people involved in supervised after-school sports programs is the best way to keep kids and drugs apart.

Absolutely true — although I wouldn’t limit it to sports programs. Music, theatre — any after school activities are far better at preventing youth drug abuse than school drug testing or enforcement activities.

If the Harper government believes that throwing more money into law enforcement and drug interdiction is the right model, it should do so only after explaining how it expects to succeed when all other similar efforts have shown no benefit and, in many cases, have resulted in considerable harm.

Accountability. What a concept!

In today’s Independent on Sunday (UK), Hugh O’Shaughnessy reports:

America has spent billions battling the drug industry in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. And the result? Production as high as ever, street prices at a low, and the governments of the region in open revolt.
The immensely costly “war on drugs” in Latin America is slowly collapsing like a Zeppelin with a puncture. The long-forecast failure for strategies which involve police and military in forcibly suppressing narcotics – first decreed by President Richard Nixon decades ago – is now pitifully evident in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries of the Western hemisphere.
The estimated $25bn ( UKP13bn ) that Washington has spent trying to control narcotics over the past 15 years in Latin America seems to have been wasted. […]
Last month, an inquiry for the UK Drug Policy Commission said: “The research suggests that the greatest reductions in drug-related harm have come from investment in treatment and harm reduction. However, the bulk of expenditure on drug policy in the UK is still devoted to the enforcement of drug laws”.
In Britain, as in Latin America, drugs clearly can’t be controlled by armies and police forces.

The editorial staff of the Independent agrees and chimes in:

You Can’t Fight Drugs With Guns
The worldwide “war on drugs” that relies on armies and police to destroy crops and arrest traffickers has failed. […]
As Hugh O’Shaughnessy argues today, the world is finally beginning to realise that you can’t beat narcotics with machine guns and policemen’s truncheons.

This comment from kaptinemo is worth repeating:

The goal was never to do the impossible, namely, eliminate illicit drugs from urban populations. The goal very simply was to gradually acclimate citizens to increased inroads into their civil liberties, numbing them to the ‘turn-o’-the-screw’ approach to the inevitable tyranny. The effectiveness of this approach is proven by the very distorted view provided by Councilman Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr.’s statement. He just can’t see that we are, for all intent and purposes, operating under martial law when there’s daily trampling upon the 4th Amendment courtesy of the DrugWar. Because it hasn’t bitten him on the arse yet, he thinks it can’t and therefore won’t.
For drug law reformers, who are in essence the ‘canaries in the mineshaft’ regarding civil liberties, we knew the country was in dire straits looooong before the Leftist blogosphere discovered the peril in having such niceties like habeas corpus suspended. We witnessed the long, slow slide into the pit, but no one wanted to hear about it from (dismissive sneer) ‘druggies’. We saw what was coming, warned about it, and were laughed at as being drug-addled alarmists…and we are being ignored, still, despite what we had warned about previously manifesting into reality. Being a modern day Cassandra is no less painful now as it was way back when…

I think this is an extraordinarily powerful comment. We have long been aware that the drug war is much more than drugs — it is a particularly useful tool of authoritarianism.
And the sad thing is that so much of the population eagerly invites it, looking for that fraudulently chimerical trade of liberty for security.
So this little bit of news is just par for the course…

Mexico is expanding its ability to tap telephone calls and e-mail using money from the U.S. government, a move that underlines how the country’s conservative government is increasingly willing to cooperate with the United States on law enforcement.
The expansion comes as President Felipe Calderon is pushing to amend the Mexican Constitution to allow officials to tap phones without a judge’s approval in some cases. Calderon argues that the government needs the authority to combat drug gangs, which have killed hundreds of people this year.

Yes. For the drug war. We can’t afford a Constitution when we have a war to fight. And the authoritarians in Mexico and the U.S. are happy to work together against their citizens to avoid any pesky remaining Constitutional issues.

It’s unclear how broad a net the new surveillance system will cast: Mexicans speak regularly by phone, for example, with millions of relatives living in the U.S. Those conversations appear to be fair game for both governments.
Legal experts say that prosecutors with access to Mexican wiretaps could use the information in U.S. courts. U.S. Supreme Court decisions have held that 4th Amendment protections against illegal wiretaps do not apply outside the United States, particularly if the surveillance is conducted by another country, Georgetown University law professor David Cole said.

Did you catch that? The U.S. gives money to Mexico to spy on its citizens and U.S. citizens as well. If Calderon gets his way, that will be without any Mexican judicial oversight. The results of that spying could then be given to U.S. prosecutors to use without any U.S. Constitutional protection, because it was another country that conducted the surveillance.
The air in the mineshaft just got a little more foul.

“bullet” Drug Sense Weekly.
“bullet”

I’ll be taking 79 people to Manhattan for a week of theatre and walking tours, May 29 through June 5.
I’m going to be extremely busy that week, but if anyone wants to get together for coffee some time to discuss drug policy, let me know.

I fear for the planet. When the leadership of so much of the world is unable to understand the simplest of concepts…
It is criminally irresponsible to assume that the only options to approaching certain problems are military success or surrender, particularly when the war isn’t even a war at all, but rather a policy opposing inanimate objects and economic forces.
Witness Mexican President and idiot Felipe Calderon

Mexican President Felipe Calderon vowed on Thursday not to abandon his military-led war against violent drug gangs, defying a call from a congressional committee for the withdrawal of troop patrols.
Banging his finger on a lectern during a speech in the northern state of Durango, Calderon said his government would not relent in its fight against drug traffickers.
“We cannot leave the children and the young people of Mexico in the claws of organized crime. Our position is clear: not one step backward in the task of defending Mexico,” he said.
“Simply withdrawing, being cowardly and hiding are not the solution,” Calderon said.

Because he is such a cowardly moron, without the cojones to handle a real solution, and because his chilito makes him insecure, he condemns his people to death.
Despicable.
… and he is far from alone.

Philadelphia’s likely next mayor, Michael Nutter, and Baltimore City Council’s Robert W. Curran, seem to be trying to outdo each other in the pro-authoritarian anti-reason tough-on-crime competition.

Under Curran’s plan, the mayor could declare “public-safety-act zones,” which would allow police to close liquor stores and bars, limit the number of people on city sidewalks, and halt traffic during two-week intervals.
Police would be encouraged to aggressively stop and frisk individuals in those zones to search for weapons and drugs. […]
Nutter’s proposal also calls for curfews in crime-plagued neighborhoods.

Wow. So in what third-world country are the cities of Philadephia and Baltimore? Certainly not the United States. We don’t allow our police to just stop and frisk people for no reason, do we… ?

Councilman Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr., a mayoral hopeful, said Curran’s idea was an interesting concept but it raised questions about civil liberties. “We have to make sure we’re not declaring martial law,” he said.

What else would you call it? A block party?

Surprise, surprise.

Farmers in southern Iraq have started to grow opium poppies in their fields for the first time, sparking fears that Iraq might become a serious drugs producer along the lines of Afghanistan.
Rice farmers along the Euphrates, to the west of the city of Diwaniya, south of Baghdad, have stopped cultivating rice, for which the area is famous, and are instead planting poppies, Iraqi sources familiar with the area have told The Independent.

Well, here’s another surprise. USA Today has published an editorial supporting the Senlis proposal: A Better Way To Deal With Afghanistan’s Poppy Crop

The United States is pushing Afghanistan to spray poppy fields with a crop-killing herbicide, much as is done with coca in Colombia, and develop new sources of income for the poppy farmers.
This approach might sound reasonable, but it threatens to make a deteriorating situation even worse. Here’s why. The American and NATO forces in Afghanistan rely on intelligence and support from Afghans. Yet the Afghans’ resentment is rising as civilians increasingly get killed and hurt in operations against Taliban forces. Just the threat of spraying poppy fields is increasing that anger, because spraying could destroy the livelihoods of as many as 3 million farmers and drive them into the arms of the Taliban.
There might be a better way to bridge the clashing agendas of the wars on terror and drugs.
The Senlis Council, a group based in Europe and Afghanistan, proposes legalizing and managing the poppy crops, turning them into medicines such as morphine. It wants to adapt a program that largely eliminated heroin production in Turkey in the 1970s with the support of President Nixon and Congress.
Like the Bush administration in Afghanistan, Nixon at first insisted on spraying the poppy fields. But Turkish leaders refused because of a revolt from their farmers. The compromise included guaranteed markets for the morphine. Within a few years, Turkey was no longer the premier source for heroin.
The Senlis Council is proposing pilot projects under which the morphine factories would be set up in Afghan villages and monitored by village elders and outside groups. The factories could provide employment and income for the villages — and plow some profits into alternative industries.
It’s true, as critics point out, that legal opium fetches about one-third the price of opium sold on the illegal market, and the Senlis proposal envisions Afghan opium being sold relatively cheaply for medications in developing countries.
But the United States and the international community are already spending billions of dollars on development in Afghanistan. Some of that money could be used to help bridge the gap and wean the poppy farmers away from risky, illegal production.
Defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan will require pragmatism, creativity and the support of the Afghan people. Giving “poppies for peace” a chance might just pay dividends in the U.S. war on terror.

Not bad from USA Today. And note that while legal uses will bring in significantly less income than illegal uses, there are two factors to the farmers.

1. In the illegal market, farmers get a very small portion of the value of the opium when it is shipped, which itself is an insignificant portion of the street value of the finished drug, so the value difference to farmers in selling to the legitimate market may not be that great (and will at least appeal to those who would like to be legal).
2. Buying crops from farmers at even a low price so they can feed their families is better in winning hearts and minds than destroying their crops and leaving them to starve.

Of course, the Senlis proposal will not eliminate the black market — only full legalization and regulation can do that.