Drug WarRant

Transform’s Danny Kushlick has a good OpEd in todays Guardian.

UK drug policy is unique. In no other area of social policy do we criminalise at one stroke both recreation and disadvantage. In no other area have we seen so much evidence of the counterproductive effects of a predominantly criminal justice response to a public health problem. And we have seen almost no genuine debate or evidence-based scrutiny from ministers. The last 10 years of this parliament’s tacit and active support for a policy based on moral panic has finally broken the camel’s back. […]
Our current policy is completely at odds with social and legislative norms, a strategy based on criminalising drugs in order to reduce social harm. Yet, as the PM’s strategy unit drugs report of 2003 showed, it is the very illegality of the supply and use of drugs that causes harm. Despite our commitment to harm reduction, drug use exists within a political and legal framework that is harm maximising […]
Throughout the last decade government has shown a pathological unwillingness to debate the efficacy of the current approach. […]
Ultimately, we need a new paradigm for drug policy development, one based around health and wellbeing rather than macho posturing and knee-jerk, short-term responses to the failures of the current criminal justice-based policy.

Link
It really is the height of arrogant butchery when the ONDCP claims to be on the side of the environment.
They spray poisonous chemicals on crops that go on to damage the water and the human and animal life. They make the drug black-market profitable and therefore they enable and encourage criminal enterprises and then push them into the parks and the rainforests where clearcutting endangers the entire world ecosystem.
And then the drug czar plaintively points out that a hummingbird is dying because of people who use cocaine.
No, you Gaia-murdering psychopath, the hummingbird is dying because of your selfish and destructive policies.

Check out this entire editorial in the Register Citizen (CT)

Illegal drug seizures and purchases by police have tripled during the past decade. The dramatic increase indicates there are more illegal drugs on the streets in the Northwest Corner and there are more police officers on the beat to fight the drug local drug infiltration.
It takes money to fight the influx of illegal street drugs and local law enforcement is finding ways to raise the funds needed to hire more police personnel. Getting illegal drugs off the streets is a never-ending and costly battle that all communities must fight.

So we ratchet up the drug war, and the drug war gets bigger, so we need to spend more money to ratchet up the drug war as it gets bigger. Thank God law enforcement is willing to hire more law enforcement, or we’d be unable to ratchet up the efforts to ratchet up the drug war…
Or read this editorial in the Sun-Sentinal (FL)

If you thought the global war on terrorism was tough, the war on drugs is next to impossible. […]
Despite upbeat pronouncements in years past, cocaine prices in the United States have actually dropped and its purity increased, making it a bigger, more affordable draw in an attentive market. More than a decade after the number of illegal drug users fell to a 25-year low of 12 million in 1992, it spiked to 20 million users in 2005.
Things clearly are not going well for the war on drugs. It’s time to retool, or at least rethink, the U.S. strategy, the linchpin of which has been a $5 billion effort to fight the drug industry in Colombia.

Ah, sounding a little like they may have a clue? Not so much…

Plan Colombia, based on combating the drug problem at its source, was a reasonable tactic. Colombia supplies 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in America and much of the crop abused worldwide. And the effort has had some success. This month, the United Nations estimated that the amount of Colombian land used to grow coca, from which cocaine is derived, dropped by nearly 10 percent last year.
But it’s not enough. America, and the world, needs a fresh approach because never has the global fight against drugs, which are used to finance terrorist activity, been more essential.
BOTTOM LINE: Increase Efforts To Combat Drug Abuse

Sigh.
OK, even forget the stupidity about the 10% reduction in land cultivated. That’s been shown to be a highly suspect figure and really more an indication of increased yields (and increased ability to hide production).
But to realize that everything that you’re doing is a failure, yet be unable to even notice the solution of drug policy reform perched on your doorstep, has got to be a kind of mental illness.
I’ve said this before, but I’m bringing it out again…

Some days it feels like I’m watching a house on fire. And one idiot wants to put it out with a machine gun. The other one wants to use grenades. And I’m standing there with a bucket of water and they look at me like I’m crazy.

Oh, and by the way… You know how they ratcheted up the war in Mexico big time? Troops, arrests, battles. That’ll force the drug criminals to cease operations, right?
Maybe in bizarro world, but not on earth.

Mexican drug cartels armed with powerful weapons and angered by a nationwide military crackdown are striking back, killing soldiers in bold, daily attacks that threaten the one force strong enough to take on the gangs. […]
Many Mexicans fear even the army is outgunned. […]
Seizures at the U.S. border indicate the flow of drugs north may actually be increasing – 20 percent more cocaine and 28 percent more marijuana has been seized in the past six months, compared with the same period a year earlier.

The drug war: A blend of depraved venality and gross incompetence wrapped up in the denial of reality and passed off as unimpeachable virtue.

Hawaii has been going overboard in its drug war zeal — the most recent addition being random suspicionless drug tests for all teachers.
Rich Figel has a nice history lesson and challenge in Sunday’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin. He talks about the parallels to alcohol prohibition:

…we’re committing the same mistakes all over again. During the past 30 years, hundreds of billions of your tax dollars have been spent in a futile strategy that has backfired. Just as Prohibition created conditions for moonshiners, bootleggers and the mob to prosper, the War on Drugs has only benefited organized crime, drug dealers and prison contractors. As long as the profit motive exists for black market goods, there will be suppliers who will step forward to fill the need.

and then he issues a challenge:

Let’s start an island-wide discussion about dealing realistically with our drug problem. In future columns, I’ll be writing in more detail about the history of drug use in the United States, the current state of affairs and alternatives worth considering.
I’m inviting members of government, law enforcement, the prison system and addiction experts to share their views. I want you to tell us what you think. There are no easy solutions. But I believe the majority of Americans are pragmatic people, and once we get past certain emotional issues, we’re capable of finding common ground.
Or would you rather let Big Brother call the shots? Because that’s where we’re heading, unless we change course.

I’ll be very interested to see what happens.

Having been raised as the son of a minister (and therefore spending a lot of time considering the fundamental compassionate roots of Christianity), I got a bit of a sad chuckle out of this one (via Jim Henley, via Crooked Timber).
If you’re unfamiliar with the new phenomenon of Conservapedia (billed as the answer to the “liberal” Wikipedia), it can be quite… bizarre. This essay about the Adultress Story is a prime example. The story of Jesus saying “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” is determined to not be authentic in the Bible, primarily because it interferes with people’s desire for bloodthirsty retribution.

Amid this scholarship [denying its authenticity], why is the emphasis on this passage increasing? The answer lies in its liberal message: do not criticize or punish immoral conduct unless you are perfect yourself. But one need not be perfect before he can recognize and punish wrongdoing in himself and others. Civilized society may not depend on stoning to deter immoral crimes, but it does depend on retribution enforced by people who are themselves sinners.

In the post below, the pope talked about divine retribution. These people are looking for divine allowance to practice personal and societal retribution on those who violate their definition of moral behavior, regardless of the flaws of those imposing the punishment.
Christianity and retribution. Not the way I remember it.
But it’s what you see in the sado-moralism of many of the drug warriors. Treatment more cost-effective than incarceration? Who cares! We want retribution. Punishment. Criminalization. Prisons. We want retribution. Death from dirty needles and tainted drugs. We want retribution. Doors smashed in the middle of the night. (But we’re not including our own “youthful indiscretions,” of course.)
William Bennett doesn’t want Jesus telling him not to cast stones when he has a gambling problem himself. Mark Souder doesn’t want anything to put a downer on his psycho-sexual punishment fantasies.
Ah, yes. The new Christianity. “Blessed are those who inflict punishment on others for petty moral crimes, for they shall feel smug.”

“bullet” Senator Tom Harkin (via)

Marijuana is often the drug singled out for legalization. However, marijuana is not the recreational drug that many believe it to be. In a study completed by the Drug Abuse Warning Network, the number of marijuana related emergencies has nearly reached the level of cocaine related emergencies. As this statistic indicates, marijuana use often has fatal consequences.

Now that’s some hall-of-fame logic. You’d think all those health professionals and pharmaceutical companies that gave him over half a million dollars would have been able to teach him something about what emergency room mentions actually mean… Oh. Right.
“bullet” Pope Benedict

Benedict on Saturday turned to the issue of drug trafficking and its damage to society, threatening Latin American drug dealers with divine retribution.
“God will call you to account for your deeds,” Benedict warned drug dealers..

Oops… another unintentionally funny line… wait for it…

“Human dignity cannot be trampled upon in this way,” the pope declared

The pope should try actually having a chat with God. I have my own relationship with the Divine Presence and, while I would never be stupid enough to claim to speak for Him, I get the distinct impression that if He was actually into the divine retribution shtick, drug dealers would be considerably further down on that list than Benedict himself.

Link

Police Mistakenly Raid Wrong House
Officers with the Hendersonville Police Department mistakenly entered the wrong house when executing a search warrant early Saturday morning.
Two teams of officers were executing a search warrant shortly after 1 a.m. at 729 Geneva St., when one team of three officers went to the rear of the wrong house, said Capt. John Nicholson.

here it comes….

“This has never happened before,” Nicholson said.

Link

Oakland medical marijuana patient and activist Angel Raich dropped her
lawsuit against the federal government Thursday, ending a five-year legal
odyssey which had taken her all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I’ve lost all faith in the judicial system, I don’t understand how somebody
can lose their constitutional right to life in this country,” she said
Thursday.

It has become abundantly clear that the courts cannot be depended upon to protect the rights of individuals from government abuse.
Unfortunately, that means our hope lies in the cesspool that is Congress, and it will take a massive uprising of motivated citizenry to rouse them from masticating in their trough and to prod them into an uncharacteristically noble action — righting a wrong.
And in the meantime, despicable parasites like John Walters feed off the anguish of the dying and the shattered lives and communities, and pat Congress on the head saying “It’s OK. Continue gnawing on the bones of the innocent. It’ll all work out. Trust me.”
Fortunately, the voice of drug policy reform is growing stronger every day, and despite stuffing ears with cotton and brains with mush, it is getting very hard to ignore us. We will prevail. We must.

Check out this anti-driving-stoned commercial from MTV Canada.

“bullet”

“bullet” Your wonderful DEA at work: DEA Agent Posed Suspect In Sombrero
“bullet” This has been making the rounds. A former officer and his wife took some marijuana that he had confiscated and baked it into brownies. The pot caused him to freak out, thinking he was dying. The audio of the 911 call is pretty funny. It’s interesting how the dispatcher seems much more aware than the ex-cop of the ridiculousness of dying from eating a marijuana brownie.
“bullet” Drug Sense Weekly