Drug WarRant

1. Legal drugs are good for you. Illegal drugs will instantly destroy your life.
2. If you eliminate supply, there will be no demand.
3. There is a finite number of drug dealers. If we can get them all in jail, then there will be no drug sales and we’ll end the drug problem.
4. If police get bigger weapons, the criminals will give up.
5. There is no such thing as smoked medicine.
6. Drug legalizers want your children to use crack.
7. $25,000 a year in prison costs is a reasonable price for taxpayers to pay to keep a pot smoker from getting stoned on his couch.
8. If a young person experiments with drugs, the best way to help them turn around their lives is to keep them out of extracurricular activities and prevent them from attending college.
9. Fumigating fields in Colombia helps us win the hearts and minds of the farmers, saves the rainforests, and brings peace and tranquility to Latin America
10. The reason the Russians failed in Afghanistan is that they didn’t destroy enough crops.
11. Drug-free school zones are an excellent deterrent.
12. DEA agents all receive extensive medical training and are much better qualified than doctors to advise you regarding medication.
13. If you have nothing to hide, you have no reason to worry.
14. Politicians care about the children.

Happy April 1.
Add your own facts in comments.

This gem from a speech by DEA head Karen Tandy back in 2005 has been making the rounds, and it is so true that I had to include it here as the quote of the day:

Our fight against drugs clearly knows no borders, it respects no age, and it respects no jurisdictions. We are all shared partners in the travesty that it wreaks upon our children and the future generations for all our countries.

Yes, Karen, that is a perfect description of your drug war.

You know those horrible, nasty terrorists that they’ve been keeping on Guant½namo? You know how we’ve been giving up all our civil liberties supposedly because we’re in such danger? Well, they finally finished the trial for one of the most “dangerous.”

Australian David Hicks pleaded guilty at the Guant½namo Bay Navy Base yesterday to supporting terrorism in exchange for a nine-month prison sentence under a plea deal that forbids him from claiming he was abused in U.S. custody.
In return, Hicks, 31, will be allowed to leave Guant½namo within 60 days to serve out the sentence in his native Australia. He will be free by New Year’s Eve.

Meanwhile, Richard Paey is still serving 25 years in prison for taking medicine for multiple sclerosis and failed spine surgery.
I am angry on so many levels, I can’t sort through them all right now.

“bullet” Server problems. Sorry for those of you who were having problems accessing the site yesterday. Salonblogs was undergoing emergency server repair and the comments were out (and tended to freeze up the loading of this page).
“bullet” Welcome to WJBC listeners who caught me on the Steve Fast show yesterday. I had a fun time on the show, although it was way too short to really get the points across about the problems with prohibition. If you have any comments, questions, or disagreements, please feel free to post them here.
“bullet” WJBC also has this very short (just a few seconds) audio clip of Greg Francisco from Thursday’s panel. Nice pick.
“bullet” For some light reading, check out this entertaining piece: Bong Hits’ Dude Strikes a Blow for Class Clowns
“bullet” With Passover beginning Monday, there may be some Ashkenazim wishing they were Sephardim.
“bullet” More drug war victims of one kind or another via The Agitator: Botched Drug Raid Kills Ex-Marine (disturbing story with more here); Colorado Makes Way for the Next Peter McWilliams (read the entire Denver Post article — it’s heartwrenching); John Tierney covers the pain doctor re-trial in Opening Salvos at the Hurwitz Trial.

“bullet” Drug Sense Weekly (and yes, the feature article is mine)
“bullet”

There’s an article about it in today’s Pantagraph by Sharon K. Wolfe. The headline: Drug advocates focus efforts on reforming laws is a little misleading (“drug advocates”?), but those are usually written by somebody else. And they spelled my name wrong. But the article itself does a good job of briefly hitting some of the highlights.
I had a great time, and really enjoyed sharing the stage with Greg Francisco and George Pappas. We seemed to complement each other well in terms of the points we covered (and boy, did we give them a lot of good information). The audience was interested and engaged and probably would have stayed beyond the hour of Q&A that we had after the presentations.
A big thanks to the Illinois State University chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy for putting it all together.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get it videotaped. Sorry — I would have loved to share it with you. However, you can see the powerpoint slides we used (converted to web — just click on each page to advance) here, and you’ll get a little idea of some of the points we covered.

“bullet” For those in Central Illinois, don’t forget that Prohibition Kills: An Evaluation of the War on Drugs is tonight at 7 pm.
“bullet” Tomorrow, I will be on the Steve Fast show on WJBC radio at 4:40 pm (Central time) to discuss the issues involved in tonight’s panel.
“bullet” Via Philip Smith, check out Do Skunk Stats Stink at STATS.
“bullet” The drug czar is touting a New Zealand pilot study claiming an increased lung cancer risk from cannabis. Of course, the New Zealand study is nowhere near as detailed and uses a sample that’s only a fraction of the U.S. study (Tashkin) that found that even very heavy marijuana use did not cause cancer, but the ONDCP failed to mention that.
“bullet” A couple of readers have sent me a link to Totally Baked Movie. Based on what I saw of the trailer, I seriously doubt that any Academy Award nominations will be forthcoming.
“bullet” Welcome Bob Barr to the drug policy reform movement. We’ll take converts any day.

Daily Times, Pakistan:

As international efforts to eradicate Afghanistan’s opium production have proven fruitless and the problem keeps getting worse, some European governments are weighing legalisation of the drug trade, a German magazine, Spiegel Online, reported on Tuesday.
“Governments in Berlin, Paris and Rome, along with NATO leadership are discussing a potentially explosive new idea: the legalisation of Afghanistan’s opium production. The plan envisages farmers being able to sell their poppies to officially licensed buyers for the same price they currently get from the drug barons. The product could then be sold to the pharmaceutical industry for pain medication and other products,” says the report.

“explosive new idea” It’s nice to know that more people are finally reading the Senlis Council’s proposals, which have been out there for ages already.
The best thing is the realization that actually discussing and analyzing options (instead of blindly pursuing a path that has been shown to be counterproductive) might be… useful. Something the U.S. doesn’t get.

Link

It’s rare that arguments about something as stupid as a banner declaring “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” make their way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

This has been a fairly common theme in the press. I’ve read a number of articles that have disparaged Joseph Frederick for his stupid, immature banner, and the Supreme Court for choosing such a horrible phrase to challenge first amendment case law, and yet, in most cases, the only reason those articles were written was because of the phrase “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”
It’s a phrase that has uncommon power.
Frederick says he got it off a surfboard sticker and just thought it was a nonsensical and funny way to test his freedom of speech. And it worked. Big time. Frederick hoped that he might get on TV, but he managed even better. He got his speech suppressed by Principal Morse, and “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” was loosed upon the world.
Last August, 3 1/2 years after the event, Anchorage Daily News’ Beth Bragg noted that Frederick had been so massively successful, that a google search for “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” returned 14,100 results.
I just did a search on the exact phrase and got 1.2 million google results. Another 166,000 for the slightly incorrect “Bong Hits for Jesus.” Over 700 current news items. Over 4,000 blog entries. As I saw this, I thought that maybe I should capitalize by selling “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” T-Shirts (and discovered that I wasn’t the first). What other Supreme Court case gets this kind of interest?
There’s something going on here. I think it’s interesting to ask why Principal Morse felt so powerfully compelled to remove the banner. She admits that it was the content, and not merely that there was a banner. Why is Ken Starr to eager to take on the case? Why are people responding so strongly (in one way or the other) to the phrase?
“Bong hits,” by itself, would clearly be about smoking pot. But when you add “Jesus” it all changes. Otherwise, what are these bong hits — something to smoke while worshipping, or a gift of herb to the Lord? Obviously, neither. The significance of “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” is that it draws upon two very controversial (sometimes taboo) subjects and puts them together in a disturbing way using a word structure that is inherently funny. Even the use of the number “4” instead of the word “for” is significant in terms of purposefully reducing literal meaning. This takes an “immature, stupid phrase” and turns it into a statement of individuality and defiance.
Do I think Frederick consciously thought all this out? No. I’m guessing he instinctively recognized the brilliance of the phrase as an abstract statement of rebellion and free speech.
And to people like Morse, they instinctively recognize the phrase as an attack on their authoritarian power, even as they struggle to attach a specific meaning.
In a day where authoritarian power has developed in strength, attacks on that power are revolutionary.
“No Taxation Without Representation.” “Don’t Tread on Me.” “Bong Hits for Jesus”? Hmmm….

Announced yesterday:

Starting today on this web site, www.dea.gov, the public can inform federal drug agents about illegal drug trafficking activity in their communities by submitting a tip on-line.

Yeah, that’s right. The DEA, a federal agency, wants to find more ways to short-circuit local law enforcement and have citizens communicate directly with them. This is, of course, important to them, so they’re able to interfere with those pesky states and municipalities who don’t toe the federal drug war line.
If you want to submit a tip, you can do so here. I assume, but don’t know, that they may have some way of tracking the ip address of those who submit tips. And, of course, I would never do anything so irresponsible as to encourage people to submit fake tips about drug warriors from anonymous public computers. So don’t do that.