Drug WarRant

The recent explosion and fallout from Ron Paul’s appearance in the Republican debate (see here, here, here, here for just a taste) has been instructive, and, I think, useful.
While some may argue that Paul’s points were delivered inelegantly and that he lacked political astuteness, there’s no doubt that he has provoked discussion within a political sphere that has actively worked to avoid discussion, thought, or knowledge. And that’s a good thing.
The dust-up has given him visibility, and that’s also a good thing. It’s possible, just possible, that his presence in the race will help to underscore the fact that the authoritarian cabal that has been running the Republican party of late has very little connection to conservative principles of liberty and limited government, and has, in fact, completely repudiated them. There are a lot of conservatives out there who believe in these principles but have been in denial regarding the massive betrayal perpetrated by Republican leadership in cahoots with opportunistic special interests.
Hearing a Republican in the race say the things Paul is saying is unsettling. And that’s a good thing.

I’m off to Chicago to perform in a murder mystery tonight.
“bullet” Gravel: Bush should be jailed, all drugs legalized
“bullet” Both the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune have interesting articles about the dangers of the use of the army in the drug war in Mexico.
“bullet”

From a Green Party Press Release

Green Party leaders called for a national discussion on how the US’s ‘war on drugs’ has turned into a war on young people, the poor, and African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color.
“The human and economic devastation caused by the war on drugs is missing from the range of debate among both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Politicians from these parties, when asked about drug policies, prefer to posture about law and order and endorse failed measures. These politicians don’t realize that going along to get along makes one complicit said Cliff Thornton, Green candidate for Governor of Connecticut in 2006 […]
Green leaders also strongly criticized the punitive denial of financial aid to students with drug convictions, and supported Students for a Sensible Drug Policy in their effort to persuade Congress to reinstate such aid.
“The war on drugs is an excuse to ignore the US Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, with long prison sentences for minor and nonviolent offenses. The drug war is meant to be waged, not won,” added Mr. Thornton. “This is in part a result of pressure on elected officials from the private prison industry lobby, which seeks to build new prisons and fill up cells in order to win government giveaways and increase corporate profits. The Green Party calls for a public debate that challenges the rhetoric of Democratic and Republican politicians who are under influence of these companies, and that recognizes how the war on drugs has only resulted in more crime and violence.” […]
The Green Party’s national platform endorses decriminalization of victimless crimes, such as the possession of small amounts of marijuana; an end to the war on drugs; expanded drug counseling and treatment; and an end to ‘medical marijuana’ arrests and prosecution.

“bullet” Poppy Fields are Now a Front Line in Afghan War” in the New York Times. What a bizarre article. Rebecca Ogle at DARE Generation Diary comments. Scott Morgan comments on another article on the same topic.
Oh yeah, Colombia is such a fine model for Afghanistan to folow! …. Colombia Orders The Arrest Of 19 Politicians
“bullet” Officers find a half-ounce of pot and a water pipe, but in the process somehow collide with the suspect’s house. With their vehicle. They seized personal and professional property from the guy with the pot who apparently had not driven into anything. Isn’t that backwards? Shouldn’t we be taking away the vehicle of the out-of-control officer who drives into houses?
“bullet” Making a federal case out of an obscure leaf” — fascinating article about the huge lengths the feds are going to to go after khat

Courts to decide if khat is an illicit drug or more like a double espresso

When you read this entire article, it gives you a chilling look at the intensely stupid single-mindedness of the drug warrior.
“bullet” Bud Bundy smokes pot? Big surprise.

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.