Drug WarRant

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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

Good news. Some members of Congress have finally stopped being scared wimps long enough to actually acknowledge that the sentencing disparities between the two forms of cocaine are unfair and unjust.

In the Senate, Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama is drawing bipartisan support for his proposal to ease crack sentences.
“I believe that as a matter of law enforcement and good public policy that crack cocaine sentences are too heavy and can’t be justified,” Sessions says. “People don’t want us to be soft on crime, but I think we ought to make the law more rational.”

So far, so good. So what’s the plan?

Sessions’ bill would lessen the sentencing disparity by increasing punishments for powder cocaine and decreasing them for crack. Crimes involving crack would still draw stiffer sentences, but the difference would not be as dramatic.

Hmmm, maybe I should take back the part about them no longer being scared wimps. The only way to reduce an unjustly harsh penalty is by increasing another harmful harsh penalty? Give me a break.
Of course even this extremely wimpy reform attempt has drawn fire:

“We believe the current federal sentencing policy and guidelines for crack cocaine offenses are reasonable,” Justice spokesman Dean Boyd says.
Higher penalties for crack offenses reflect its greater harm, he says, adding that crack traffickers are more likely to use weapons and have more significant criminal histories than powder cocaine dealers.

For a good analysis of the situation, check out Seeking Justice in the Drug War by Marc Mauer and Kara Gotsch at Tom Paine. The article concludes:

An alternative to Sessions’ bill was introduced in January by Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y. His legislation would equalize the penalties for powder and crack cocaine by raising the quantity of crack that triggers a five-year mandatory sentence to 500 grams. This approach would eliminate the unjustified disparity in sentences for crack and powder and reduce the number of low-level drug offenders sentenced to harsh mandatory minimum sentences. Such a proposal deserves serious consideration by Congress.
With champions for criminal justice reform like Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., heading the judiciary committees in Congress, the opportunity to redress the misguided crack sentencing policy is upon us. Hearings before both committees are long overdue in this arena and would provide the necessary evidence to dispel the misinformation and hysteria that clouded the public debate on crack cocaine in the past. These myths have done a disservice to developing responsible drug policy, while exacerbating the tragic racial disparities that plague our prison system. Now is the time for congressional attention and action.

Maia Szalavitz does a great job of keeping the Richard Paey travesty in view (something lacking in the mainstream media). The latest news is that the Florida Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal (a story that appears to only have been covered so far in the Bradenton Herald and Tampa Bay’s 10).
Maia puts it all in perspective in her article Cruel and Disgusting: Pain Patient Appeal Denied. She does a great job of reminding us just how unjust this 25 year sentence is:

The Florida Court of Appeals had upheld his conviction– despite the lack of evidence of trafficking and despite the fact that most of weight of the substances he was convicted of possessing (higher weights lead to longer sentences) was made up of Tylenol, not narcotics. The majority suggested that Paey seek clemency from the governor, claiming that his plea for mercy “does not fall on deaf ears, but it falls on the wrong ears.”
In a jeremiad of a dissent, Judge James Seals called the sentence “illogical, absurd, unjust and unconstitutional,” noting that Paey “could conceivably go to prison for a longer stretch for peacefully but unlawfully purchasing 100 oxycodone pills from a pharmacist than had he robbed the pharmacist at knife point, stolen fifty oxycodone pills which he intended to sell to children waiting outside, and then stabbed the pharmacist.”
But the Florida Supreme Court disagreed, letting the sentence stand, without comment. It released its cowardly decision in the media quiet of a Friday night. As Siobhan Reynolds, founder of the Pain Relief Network points out, “Where Florida stands now is that individuals have no recourse to the courts when the executive and legislative branches behave tyranically.” Under the Constitution, the role of the judiciary is supposed to be to check the powers of the other branches– not simply to defer to them.

Paey must now look to the U.S. Supreme Court or Governor Crist.

Again, I don’t think he has any kind of real chance of winning the Presidency, but there’s a real possibility that his candidacy will force some important discussions. Even the article mentioning his announcement notes that: “He also supports medicinal marijuana and has argued for a repeal of America’s drug war laws.”
He’s already raised over a half million dollars on the internet for his candidacy.

NORML’s Paul Armentano really nails Mark Souder in the Fort Wayne, Indiana News Sentinel. Go read.

The President tried to paint a positive picture about the drug war we’ve funded in Colombia although security (despite 20,000 troops) wouldn’t let him stay in Bogota for more than seven hours.
Peter Baker writes for the Washington Post:

As Air Force One swooped over the Andes Mountains toward Bogota, Colombia, for the first time in a quarter-century, President Bush and his aides sat in the front compartments with a message about improved security after decades of civil war and narcotrafficking.
But the optimistic message didn’t make it to a rear compartment for Secret Service agents for the first U.S. president to visit Bogota since 1982. “Colombia presents the MOST SIGNIFICANT THREAT ENVIRONMENT of this five-country trip!” the monitor in the compartment warned starkly. The terrorist threat, it went on, was “HIGH.”

And, in general, the trip is not generating the kind of press that the President would like. Check out the language in this piece by Liliana Segura in The Nation and at CBS:

The Bush Administration has been largely mute about the mounting parapolitica scandal. But with the advent of a Democratic-led Congress and the State Department requesting a new round of funding for Latin America, the upheaval in Colombia may become impossible to ignore. For the first time since the passage of Plan Colombia Ö the Clinton-era drug-eradication package that under Bush became a $4.7 billion boon for the Colombian military and American corporations outfitting the drug war Ö Democrats head key committees that under Republican control have funneled U.S. dollars to Bogot½.
Politically, Plan Colombia has benefited from the seamless merging of “war on drugs” rhetoric with that of the “war on terror.” “When it comes to Colombia,” Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern says, “the Bush Administration says two things: One, we’re fighting terrorists, and two, we’re protecting our kids from drugs. Facts don’t matter. And anyone who disagrees is ‘soft on terror.'”

“Facts don’t matter.” If that doesn’t encapsulate the position of the drug warriors! (For example, check out this nonsense by Roger Noriega at AEI)
The San Francisco Gate really goes after it:

“The coca eradication program has not achieved what we were promised,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees U.S. foreign-assistance programs. “The amount of cocaine reaching here is no less than it was five years ago.”
According to the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, U.S. retail cocaine prices fell from above $200 to below $140 per gram and purity rose from 60 percent to above 70 percent between July 2003 and October 2006. Such statistics suggest that the drug’s availability improved at a time when spraying nearly tripled in Colombia, which provides more than 90 percent of cocaine entering the United States, according to the State Department’s 2006 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.
Coca cultivation has increased, despite Plan Colombia’s initial goal of cutting the country’s coca crop in half. The most recent data released by the State Department show that more land was cultivated with coca in 2005 — 144,000 acres — than when the effort began in 2000.
To be sure, drug czar John Walters has credited Plan Colombia with helping President Alvaro Uribe push back cocaine-financed guerrilla groups that have been fighting the state for more than four decades.

(That point by Walters, of course is rendered much less viable with the recent scandal in the Uribe government.)
I’ve read dozens of articles about this visit, and it’s rewarding to see that the press is, at the very minimum, recognizing the failure of Plan Colombia. This is a good step, and it means that there will be some very serious discussions in Congress when it discusses the budget. For now, the discussions will be about what approach toward prohibition is better. One day, maybe the press will have the courage to actually recognize that there could be an alternative.

John isn’t even coherent in this Q and A in the Dallas Morning News:

Q: It’s interesting that you emphasize a public health approach, because there’s a perception in the academic community that studies drug policy that there’s too much emphasis on interdiction and not enough on treatment.
A: The academic community that works on drug policy is almost uniformly second rate. They’re fighting battles over dogma that doesn’t really exist anymore, that’s in the past.

What does that mean? Other than the “second-rate” crack against the academic drug policy community, which is the equivalent of an “F” student accusing a “C” student of being dumb. Care to answer the actual question, John? Or should we move on to another…

Q: What about drugs coming out of South America, mostly heroin and cocaine? Figures from your office show a decrease in supply and purity, but other studies contradict that. Illegal drugs remain cheap and widely available.
A: I certainly recognize that there are particular places in the United States that won’t see the same performance as the aggregate. That’s true of education performance and crime and consumer prices. We’re a big country, and there are variations. But we have seen declines, through a combination of eradication of both poppy and coca, and record seizures.

Regional differences? So… there are certain places within the United States where South American drug interdiction is working, and others where it is not? Isn’t that kind of like saying that we’re winning the Iraq war in Nebraska, but losing it in Kansas?
Sometimes it seems like Walters has stopped trying. He used to at least attempt to make his lies sound plausible.