Drug WarRant

The Vermont Supreme Court yesterday ruled 3-2 that police need a search warrant to search a car unless there are circumstances such as “when an officer’s safety is threatened, or evidence might be destroyed, or a suspect might flee.”
Reading that, you might think, “Well duh! That’s clear from the Fourth Amendment.”
Except that this is contrary to federal precedent, which allows officers much more latitude in searching cars without a warrant, particularly when the driver has been arrested (as had happened in this case).
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The ruling, which represented a rare departure from frequent unanimity, said the state constitution provides Vermonters with greater protections from unreasonable searches and seizures than does the federal Bill of Rights.

(Actually, the federal Bill of Rights provides greater protections from unreasonable searches and seizures than does the federal government.)
Of course, this ruling has little direct impact outside Vermont, but it may provide an example of “See, it’s possible to conduct police work without trampling on rights.”
Chittenden County State’s Attorney T.J. Donovan is the kind of man we need all over the country serving the citizens in that role. Read his reaction to the ruling:

“Vermont has a proud history of protecting one’s privacy interest, and this is a profound example of Vermont’s uniqueness,” he said. “We’ll respect the law.”

Wow.

I mail myself a copy of the Constitution every morning just on the hope that [the government] will open it and see what it says.

–Bill Maher

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“bullet” Drug Sense Weekly

I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t let my feelings get away like that. And I should have been smart enough to not listen to this radio program featuring ONDCP’s “Dr.” David Murray and gambler/sado-moralist/former drug czar William Bennett.
So Bill Bennett asks about medical marijuana, and this is what David Murray, a federal employee paid by my tax dollars, has to say:

This is really hurting us, and it’s hurting the people because it’s a fraud. There is no medical value to smoked, raw, weed marijuana — the Food and Drug Administration, scientific bodies have weighed in on this. This is not an open, or a contested issue — it’s clear. It is risky. It is dangerous to the people who use it, and it is not therapeutically valuable. It’s not a medicine, so the fraud is to keep offering it as a medicine. And in state initiatives supported by very powerful legalization lobbies with millions of dollars behind it, they’ve sometimes pulled the wool over voters in state initiatives in places like California, and now even New Mexico.

This isn’t worth debunking. This is a guy throwing handfuls of his own feces around the room. When that happens, there’s no point sticking around. You just hope that an attendant will be around soon to put him back in his cell.
So I turned it off. If any of the rest of you want to listen to the rest and see what the callers had to say, let me know what happened.
I’ve got some other thoughts going through my head right now…
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Raich, 41, began sobbing when she was told of the decision and said she would continue using the drug.
“I’m sure not going to let them kill me,” she said. “Oh my God.”

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On June 14, Natalie Fisher went to Peter McWilliams’ home, where she worked as housekeeper to the wheelchair-bound victim of AIDS and cancer. In the bathroom on the second floor, she found his life-less body. He had choked to death on his own vomit. …
I thought about the judge who had denied him his day in court and had ordered him to forgo the medication that kept him alive. I suppose he’s happy, I said to myself, now that he’s murdered Peter.
I’m one of those libertarians who generally tries to look at government policies more as folly than as evil. But sometimes, the evil that government does transcends simple folly. Sometimes I have to be reminded that there is a real human cost of government.

There is a real cost to what the David Murrays of this world do to our country, our citizens, our soul.

Take the quiz. It’s a tricky one.

Two years ago I reported about a particularly heinous police action in Flint, Michigan. Innocent partygoers at Club What’s Next were strip searched and arrested for “frequenting a drug establishment” simply because someone else at the club possessed illegal drugs.
Fortunately, on October 13, a judge threw out the cases. And now today…

Detroit — The American Civil Liberties of Michigan filed a class action lawsuit in Federal District Court today against the City of Flint, the Flint Police Department and Genesee County Sheriff Department on behalf of 40 innocent young men and women who were strip and/or cavity searched and wrongfully arrested during a 2005 raid of a licensed Flint nightclub.
‹These young people simply did what thousands like them do all over the country š they went to a licensed and legal club to listen to music, dance and socialize,Š said Kary Moss, Executive Director of the ACLU of Michigan. ‹A judge has already agreed with us that the arrests were unlawful and we now seek to hold Flint and Genesee County accountable for their reckless disregard for the patrons‰ rights and to ensure that these practices are abolished.Š

Communities have to be made to pay. If that’s the only way to stop the un-American, un-Constitutional, and unacceptable abuses of drug war power, then so be it. Let every community that turns its police force over to an oversight-free multi-jurisdictional task force pay. Every community that turns a blind eye to abuse because they’ve been told it’s “for the children” — let them pay.
And to Corey and all the others who have endured both the indignity of the event and the two years that followed, thanks for being willing to stand up for the rights of all of us.

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The film’s visibility just raised a couple more notches. Think he’ll play Coleman?

“bullet” First the good: Via TalkLeft — Link:

A federal judge threw out criminal charges today against an Oakland man accused of growing medical marijuana, ruling that authorities had vindictively prosecuted him because of remarks he made after he successfully appealed an earlier conviction.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco dismissed charges of tax evasion and money laundering against Ed Rosenthal, an author and activist who has been dubbed the “Guru of Ganja.”
Breyer declared that the government had improperly refiled the tax-evasion and money-laundering case last fall after Rosenthal successfully appealed his 2003 conviction for marijuana cultivation.
“The reasonable observer will interpret the government’s conduct as demonstrating that if defendants successfully appeal, the government will ensure that they face more severe charges and more prison time the next time around,” Breyer said.
“The government’s deeds — and words — create the perception that it added the new charges to make Rosenthal look like a common criminal and thus dissipate the criticism heaped on the government after the first trial,” Breyer said.

This is great news and full vindication.
“bullet” Then the bad: Via The Drug Law Blog

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that a California woman whose doctor says marijuana is the only medicine keeping her alive is not immune from federal prosecution on drug charges.

This one isn’t a big surprise to me. Once the Supreme Court ruled against Raich in the main case, I held out little hope for the follow-up case. As Alex says, we need to turn to Congress to pass the Hinchey-Rohrabacher Amendment this year.
More:

Raich, 41, began sobbing when she was told of the decision and said she would continue using the drug.
“I’m sure not going to let them kill me,” she said. “Oh my God.”

HBO opens up a big new project tomorrow night: Addiction, a 14-part documentary produced by HBO in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
Now HBO has done some excellent work in the past, and I’m guessing that they have put some real effort into this piece, but, quite frankly, I’m not looking forward to it.
Grant Smith at D’Alliance has a review of the first segment and seemed to find it a mixed bag —

Despite this and other down sides to this film, HBO’s “Addiction” does manage to advocate on behalf of people who struggle with drug dependency. There are a number of sequences in the film that help to humanize drug users. Moreover, the film shines a bright spotlight on the managed care industry and its strong reluctance to provide benefit coverage for drug treatment, replacement therapies and counseling. All in all, it’s worth checking out “Addiction” and using it as a vehicle to talk about the wisdom of diverting drug offenders into low-barrier, individually tailored drug treatment.

Join Together is upbeat about it:

An upcoming HBO series on addiction is being viewed as a unique opportunity to educate the public about a disease that affects more than 22 million Americans — and many more family members — but is widely misunderstood.

… and enthuses about the series of Townhall meetings in conjunction with the documentary (the one nearest me would have required me to be approved by A Safe Haven to attend).
Siobhan Reynolds and the Pain Relief Network, on the other hand, are not at all thrilled (and I respect their opinion greatly).

The Federal Government is gearing up for what appears to be their next big crackdown on pain treating physicians. The last time we saw this much propaganda in the press, several dozen physicians were then rounded up on Federal charges of drug distribution. Panic ensued and pain care for the seriously ill has been all but shut down.
This approach of “stampeding” the population was pioneered by the Nixon Administration Ö an event brilliantly portrayed by Edward Jay Epstein in Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America — a book on the creation of the DEA as an extra-constitutional police force at the service of the Executive Branch.
HBO is falling into line with their new series, “Addiction,” which focuses on opioid dependence as though it were a disease. Most striking is the inclusion of pharmaceutical advertisements within HBO’s announcement of “Addiction.”
Our nation’s most esteemed physicians are also lending their credibility to this public relations effort, wringing their hands at the upcoming forum on opioid addiction. Ten million Americans were struggling to live with out-of control pain prior to the Bush Administration’s attack on pain treating doctors. (Read More)
Those who found care during the flowering of the pain movement have since been abandoned by a terrified and complicit medical profession.
This kind of scientific back-peddling in the face of oppressive state authority hasn’t been seen since the psychiatrists in the Soviet Union allowed themselves to be used in government efforts to repress political dissent. Here, patients are being systematically destroyed by the government, many become “drug war” convicts, all the while, academic pain physicians float above the carnage.

I’ll be interested to see what you all think of the HBO documentary. I’m guessing it’ll be somewhere between horrid (drug war porn “stampeding” the population into a heightened fear of an addition epidemic) and mediocre (tear-jerking profiles combined with hard-hitting “exposes” regarding the lack of coerced treatment opportunities). But I don’t expect anything groundbreaking regarding real solutions, nor do I expect much mention of prohibition as the source of most problems.

“bullet” RSA Drugs Report – so near and yet so far. The Transform Drug Policy Foundation Blog has updated and expanded its outstanding analysis of the new RSA report.
“bullet” Another Walter Reed Scandal by Fred Gardner explores the other way in which our veterans are mistreated by their government — denying them a medicine that could dramatically help them.
“bullet” Via TalkLeft comes a statement from Senator Kennedy:

We must find a better solution to our _________ crisis than raids that rip families apart.

(The word in the blank was “immigration,” but “drug” would have worked just as well.)
“bullet” This one’s a little old, but an interesting article that drug policy reformers may have a new ally — gamblers.
“bullet” Ezekial Edwards at DMI notes that 2008 [Presidential] Candidates Agree! Criminal Justice Isn’t Important