Drug WarRant

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

Over at the WSJ Opinion Journal today, there is a book review by Russ Smith of Michael A. Lerner’s “Dry Manhattan” — a book that “concentrates on New York City in the Prohibition years.
What caught my attention was the opening paragraph of the review:

It’s nearly impossible to read about America’s failed attempt to outlaw the sale and consumption of alcohol in the 1920s without drawing parallels to modern “nanny state” regulations. No, we experience nothing as draconian as dryness-by-decree, but smoking restrictions, trans-fat bans and crackdowns on “noise pollution”–to mention only a few of today’s more grating attempts to dictate personal conduct–are useful reminders of a hovering paternalism in American life, a killjoy impulse often indulged in the name of public virtue.

Trans-fat and noise pollution? What about marijuana? “Nothing as draconian as dryness-by-decree”? Excuse me, Russ — have you not heard of Prohibition 2: the War on Drugs?
What makes this omission by Russ Smith even more astonishing is the fact that the rest of the article is a treasure trove of hit-you-over-the-head parallels between alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition (just without mentioning the drug prohibition part).

“When the Progressive and dry movements converged in the 1910s, the xenophobia and nativism of both movements inevitably came to the surface,” Mr. Lerner writes. “As the dry lobby gained momentum, it staked its success on its ability to depict foreigners, Catholics, Jews, and city dwellers as threats to everything genuinely American.” To buttress his case, Mr. Lerner cites William Johnson of the Anti-Saloon League, who decried Germans because they “eat like gluttons and drink like swine.” A pamphlet from the dry-allied Progressives, the author tells us, referred to New York City’s Italians as “Dagos, who drink excessively, live in a state of filth and use the knife on slightest provocation.”

Sound familiar? Substitute Mexicans and blacks and you have marijuana prohibition.

The city’s police officers often took bribes from owners of retro-fitted saloons and speakeasies; judges resented the backlog of court cases for liquor violations. Contrary to the hopes of reformers, arrests for public intoxication in New York increased during Prohibition, as did hospital admissions for alcoholism.

Hello, Russ. See it yet?

In the early years of the ban, affluent New Yorkers enjoyed the risk of flirting with crime and relished “slumming” in other parts of the city, such as Harlem, where they’d never been before. […]
Mr. Lerner is at his best when describing the inherent class discrimination of the dry movement. Although the well-off could skirt the law by bribe or influence, the masses of immigrants and working-class citizens could not. Before the ban was enacted, saloons were often the center of immigrant activities, places where foreign-born laborers congregated, catching up with friends, cashing checks, picking up English phrases, and assimilating into the city’s working and popular culture while imbibing beer, wine or whiskey.
“As the dry experiment took shape in the early 1920s,” Mr. Lerner notes, “the city’s Irish, Italian and Eastern European immigrants, its Catholics and Jews, and the masses of other ethnic Americans who populated New York found that the main objective of the dry lobby was to police the habits of the poor, the foreign-born and the working class.”

Wow. Talk about dÚjà vu.

As the decade progressed, Prohibition’s failure to accomplish much besides lending an iffy quality to the nation’s liquor supplies turned the law into something of a joke…

I give up.
This just goes to show, I believe, that we have to keep hammering the “Prohibition” label for the drug war.

Arianna Huffington’s powerful piece “The War on Drugs is Really a War on Minorities,” which was in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, is now reprinted at Alternet today:

While all the major candidates are vying for the black and Latino vote, they are completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting those constituencies: the failed “war on drugs” — a war that has morphed into a war on people of color.

This gives me a chance to promote the article again, while noting the deafening silence produced by its publication on Saturday.
This was a piece with profound political significance, published in a major national paper, yet within all the major online liberal and conservative political communities, there has been nary a peep about it.
Sure, it got mentioned in the drug policy reform and the law and sentencing online communities, plus a couple of livejournals and a single liberal blog (True Blue Liberal) that I hadn’t heard of before. Daily Kos? Not a mention in stories, diaries, or comments that I could find. The other major liberal blogs? Nothing.
What about the conservatives? Where was the “Hey, Arianna Huffington is trashing Clinton and Obama — go watch the fun!”? Nowhere.
Now for a blog to be silent on one article is no big deal. I certainly don’t write about, or link to, everything important that happens regarding drug policy reform. I can’t do that, and blogging is really about highlighting selective items, and creating a tapestry.
But the fact that the entire massive liberal and conservative political online presence essentially ignored Arianna’s column, certainly seems to say something about the political discomfort with the subject.

Event: Prohibition Kills: An Evaluation of the War on Drugs

The Illinois State University chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) presents a program evaluating the “War on Drugs” featuring three experts on the drug war, followed by a discussion period with questions from the audience.

Speakers: Greg Francisco (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), Pete Guither (Drug WarRant.com) and George Pappas (Illinois Drug Education and Legislative Reform)
When: Thursday, March 29 at 7:00 pm
Where: Bone Student Center (Old Main Room), Illinois State University, 110 N. University St, Normal, Illinois

Free and open to the public. If you’re in the area, please check it out.

An OpEd in the Arizona Range News on Wednesday just may be the epitome of anti-legalization arguments: Legalization Of Drugs Is A Bad Idea.
I know I was certainly curious when I saw the headline, and I eagerly read on to find out why. Author Terry Maxwell gets right into it:

Supporters of legalization take the position that the “War on Drugs” has failed to control or reduce drug abuse. They relate that the cost of incarcerating drug offenders and building prisons is rising at an alarming rate. Currently, drug offender’s account for approximately one-third of the federal and state prison population.

OK. That doesn’t sound so bad for legalization. In fact, that’s a pretty good argument for our side. He must be warming up.

Legalization zealots argue that the repeal of drug prohibition laws would significantly reduce the government’s enforcement costs and create new tax revenues from the legal production and sale of drugs. Therefore, states would save at least $10 billion per year that could be used for treatment and job training programs.

Saving money is good. This is another strong argument for legalization. Terry must have something really big to hit us with…

They say crimes of violence would be reduced with legalization, and junkie-related robberies to obtain money to buy illegal drugs would be significantly reduced and the streets of Willcox and surrounding communities would be less prone to crime.

Thanks and all, Terry, for all the good mentions of legalization. Reducing violence and crime sounds excellent. But we’re here to learn your arguments against legalization. Go ahead, give it to us…

The possibility of increased physical addiction to readily available drugs has been a strong argument against legalization. The rebuttal to this position is that there is no valid research to support that hypothesis.

Ah, there we go. No, wait. Now I’m really confused. He just rebutted his only argument so far.

Bob Miller, 59, a U.S. Marine, Viet Nam veteran, and a 14-year resident of Willcox, pointed out illegal drugs have never played a role in his life and never will. “However, I believe that drugs should be legalized for a number of rational reasons,” Miller said, “Prisons are full of addicts at a staggering cost in human suffering and out-of-control prison construction costs.”
“Common sense dictates that the legalization of drugs would reduce the price of drugs and significantly reduce crime in our community.” Miller went on to say, “Our money has been wasted on the so called ‘War on Drugs.’ It should have been used to educate our children, improve health care and fight poverty.”

Right. Now we’re back to arguments for legalization. So what is that so far, something like 10 arguments for legalization and one rebutted argument against? This is supposed to be Terry’s OpEd.
So now, do we finally get some arguments against legalization?
No, Terry jumps straight to the conclusion.

After carefully reviewing the literature for and against the legalization of drugs and assessing the risks involved in making hard drugs easily available without criminal penalties, I believe the proponents of legalization are fundamentally wrong about the extent and severity of the negative consequences of legalization.
The potential human costs of totally legalizing drugs would be so large as to create a public policy disaster. Historically, when drugs have been inexpensive and easy to obtain, addiction dramatically increased.
Can we take the risk of experimenting with legalization at the expense of our children and grandchildren? I don’t think so! The human carnage from drug abuse is already staggering and almost beyond comprehension. To ask the residents of Willcox to possibly bear the pain of losing a loved one to drug abuse, rising health insurance costs, and conceivably subjecting their family to the consequences of increased child and spousal abuse, among numerous other abuses from legalizing drugs is inconceivable and unethical, in my opinion.

Amazing! Now you understand why I say this may be the epitome of anti-legalization arguments? Intellectually, Terry Maxwell understands pretty much all the truths about drug policy. Prohibition doesn’t work, it’s expensive, it makes things worse, fuels crime and violence, etc., etc. And yet, based on nothing but belief, legalization is “inconceivable” and therefore all those hard facts and truths are to be ignored.