Drug WarRant

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.

It’s Sunday morning. Take a moment to enjoy the delightful story of Granny Patricia Tabram…

There’s a heavenly kind of abundance about Patricia Tabram’s kitchen that should earn her a place in the Grandmothers’ Hall of Fame. Chocolate cakes and cooking oils jostle for position on several chaotic work surfaces.
Bacon ( smoked and unsmoked ), plum pudding, heaps of cream cheese ( for use in both cheesecake and omelettes ) and kilogram slabs of Dairy Milk are packed into an chock-full fridge.
And there, half obscured – though certainly not hidden – to the left of the cooker, between the sea salt and the Bisto, is the magic ingredient that has just sealed her reputation as one of the nation’s better-known pensioners.
The finely ground marijuana is kept in an old Bramwells pickle jar by the sink, and it looks almost interchangeable with the nearby jars of mixed herbs when Mrs Tabram reaches for it during a morning’s initiation in the art of cooking with cannabis.

Read the rest

There has been much talk in the UK in recent months about recommending changes in how the government handles drug policy, and there’s very little doubt in my mind that the U.S. is eventually going to be led in this area from overseas.
That doesn’t mean that Britain’s government is lacking the elements of inflexible, politically fearful and greedily opportunistic elements that we have within our prohibitionists in the U.S., but they may be less entrenched.
Well a new expert commission report is out

Britain’s antiquated laws have failed to control the rapid spread of drug use over the past 30 years and should be replaced with a system that treats users as victims rather than offenders, the Government has been told.
A two-year survey of drug use reached the damning conclusion that the current legislation is “not fit for purpose”, failing to recognise that alcohol and tobacco can cause more harm than “demonised” substances such as cannabis and ecstasy. The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce Commission on Illegal Drugs said current laws were “driven by a moral panic” and one of its members warned that increasing numbers of primary school children were experimenting with drugs.
The commission, which included academics, community workers and politicians, demanded the abolition of the Misuse of Drugs Act, to be replaced with a broader Misuse of Substances Act.

I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing (pdf) yet (I hope to this weekend), but for the best analysis, I turn you over to the wonderful folks at Transform Drug Policy Foundation blog, who have been doing excellent work in following all the details. They have a full review RSA drugs report: good, but no cigar [Update: page moved and updated ]
They note the brilliance of passages like this one:

Drugs policy should, like our policy on alcohol and tobacco, seek to regulate use and prevent harm rather than to prohibit use altogether. Illegal drugs should be regulated alongside alcohol, tobacco, prescribed medicines and other legal drugs in a single regulatory framework.

But they also note that ultimately the report falls short:

We are left with what is, in many ways, a brilliant, thoughtful and throrough report, but also one that walks you to the door but isnt quite willing to suggest you walk through…

Via EFSDP and NORML discussions, comes this delightful interactive animation showing how different drugs interact with the brain. I’ll count on some of my readers who know more about neuro activity than I do to vouch for the accuracy of the science, but it seems to be a fun, informative and mostly nonjudgmental (other than the occasional use of the word “abuse”) approach to learning about dopamine receptors and such.

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