Drug WarRant

I’ve been busy today and haven’t had a chance to watch/listen to this, but I thought you might want to know that there’s a Bloggingheads.tv video featuring Mark Kleiman debating “Chasing the Scream’s” Johann Hari.

This isn’t a real surprise, but it’s still a big story.

U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.

For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.

It turns out the DEA was the worst offender…

The DEA used its data collection extensively and in ways that the NSA is now prohibited from doing. Agents gathered the records without court approval, searched them more often in a day than the spy agency does in a year and automatically linked the numbers the agency gathered to large electronic collections of investigative reports, domestic call records accumulated by its agents and intelligence data from overseas.

And it took Edward Snowden to stop the program.

Holder halted the data collection in September 2013 amid the fallout from Snowden’s revelations about other surveillance programs.

And, of course, they knew it wasn’t right.

To keep the program secret, the DEA sought not to use the information as evidence in criminal prosecutions or in its justification for warrants or other searches.

From a scientific, public health, and public policy perspective, needle exchange programs aren’t even controversial. They save lives, reduce disease, and don’t result in increased drug abuse.

Yet politically, there are still flat-earthers out there somehow concerned about the message sent by saving people’s lives.

Indiana begins needle exchange in county with outbreak

Scott County’s needle-exchange program was created through an emergency executive order signed by Republican Gov. Mike Pence in an attempt to curb the state’s largest-ever HIV outbreak. Pence’s 30-day order temporarily suspended Indiana’s ban on such programs, but only for the southeastern Indiana county that’s about 30 miles north of Louisville, Kentucky.

“While (Pence) has been clear that he does not support needle exchange as anti-drug policy on an ongoing basis, he’s been equally clear about his concern over this outbreak, and has taken a critical step to end this outbreak by allowing this needle exchange to occur,” said State Health Commissioner Jerome Adams, the News and Tribune reported.

That is an incredible disconnect. They understand that it is absolutely essential to public health, yet they don’t support it and will only allow it on a limited basis in one county.

Welcome to those who participated in a most enjoyable event last night at Indiana University. I had a great time with my presentation, and a wonderful discussion with the folks there. Special kudos for making that wonderful Drug War Victims poster based on the Drug War Victims page.

If this is your first time visiting the site, have a seat on the couch — we’ve got some great folks here, who have a ton of good information.

Oh, and for the wonderful gentleman who traveled a long distance to hear the talk and was foiled by Indiana time zones, I’m sorry you missed a good portion of it, but glad I got to meet you.

Former Blackwater gets rich as Afghan drug production hits record high

Yet there is a clear winner in the anti-drug effort – not the Afghan people, but the infamous mercenary company formerly known as Blackwater.

Statistics released on Tuesday reveal that the rebranded private security firm, known since 2011 as Academi, reaped over half a billion dollars from the futile Defense Department push to eradicate Afghan narcotics, some 32% of the $1.8bn in contracting money the Pentagon has devoted to the job since 2002.

The company is by far the biggest beneficiary of counternarcotics largesse in Afghanistan. Its closest competition, the defense giant Northrop Grumman, claimed $250m.

That’s a lot of money. What has been the result?

Far from eradicating the deep-rooted opiate trade, US counternarcotics efforts have proven useless, according to a series of recent official inquiries. Other aspects of the billions that the US has poured into Afghanistan over the last 13 years of war have even contributed to the opium boom.

In December, the United Nations reported a 60% growth in Afghan land used for opium poppy cultivation since 2011, up to 209,000 hectares. The estimated $3bn value of Afghan heroin and morphine represents some 15% of Afghan GDP.

The extent of the money-grabbing connected to the drug war is mind-boggling.

Talk Radio Host Bryan Fischer has been getting a lot of Twitter ridicule for this tweet regarding the situation in Indiana:

This worry about Big Gay… sound familiar? It’s just like Kevin Sabet and his constant concern trolling about Big Marijuana.

It seems like there’s an entrepreneurial opportunity here — maybe Big Gay and Big Marijuana should join forces and open a string of Big Gay Marijuana businesses (excluding bigots and Kevin Sabet).

Perhaps with Big Gay Ice Cream next door…

Doctors Group Opposes Student Drug Testing, reported by Tom Angell of Marijuana Majority

A group representing 62,000 pediatricians said Monday that schools should not randomly drug test students.[…]

Beyond drug testing’s futility, the group’s policy statement cites a number of harms the practice can cause:

“Other concerns regarding school-based drug testing include the potential for breach of privacy (eg, when a student’s prescribed medications are identified on a drug test); detrimental consequences, such as suspension or expulsion for students who have positive drug test results; school dropout or increased truancy for students who fear they would fail a drug test; or increased use of substances not easily detectable on a drug screen.”

In a technical report accompanying the new policy statement, the pediatricians also note the “unfair stigmatization” that can result from false-positive test results. “Consequences related to false-positive drug test results (school suspension, exclusion from extracurricular activities, interpersonal relationship stressors with parents, peers, teachers, and school administrators) can have significant effects on a high school student.”

We still have school districts all over the country instituting drug testing for students, and it’s going to take some time to reverse the trend.

I know I’ve discussed this here before, but I am opposed to suspicionless drug testing for any group, including suspicionless employment drug testing, suspicionless student drug testing, and suspicionless public assistance drug testing.

As an overall notion, it is offensive to American principles to set up procedures requiring people to prove their “innocence.” And, time and time again, the more that these policies are properly analyzed in context, we find that they are more harmful overall than helpful.

Related: School Suspensions Cause More, Not Less, Student Marijuana Use

Students who attend schools that use out-of-school suspension as a punishment for illegal drug use were 1.6 times more likely to use marijuana in the next year than those at schools without such policies, researchers from the University of Washington and various institutions in Australia found in the paper, published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health.

On Wednesday, April 1 (no joke), I’m traveling to Indiana to talk about some bad laws (no, not that one… some others).

This event is hosted by Young Americans for Liberty at Indiana University and Student Peace Alliance

If you’re in the area, hope to see you there!

Colorado has responded to the Supreme court complaint by Nebraska and Oklahoma with this brief.

I think it’s extremely well-written and well-argued, pointing out the absurdity of the claims by the other states.

Here’s a taste:

The Complaint, however, does not challenge marijuana legalization as a general matter. For example, the Plaintiff States do not object to Colorado’s legalization and regulation of medical marijuana, although medical marijuana makes up over half of the State’s $700 million marijuana industry and, like recreational marijuana, is also vulnerable to out-of-state diversion. See Raich, 545 U.S. at 31–32. And the Plaintiff States disclaim any argument that a State can be forced “to criminalize marijuana.” […]

The Complaint instead asks the Court to strike down only those laws that empower Colorado to authorize, monitor, and regulate recreational marijuana businesses. Compl. at 28–29. In other words, if Plaintiffs’ requested relief is granted, recreational marijuana would remain legal, but Colorado would lose the ability to monitor and regulate its retail supply and distribution.

Interesting little dig in the statement from the Attorney General in conjunction with the brief… “This lawsuit, however, even if successful, won’t fix America’s national drug policy—at least not without leadership from Washington, D.C., which remains noticeably absent.”

On twitter:

[…] Now, is there any way to keep prohibition and limit the excesses of drug law enforcement? That’s the hard one.

Yep.

Kevin always talks about there being a way to solve the problems of the drug war without legalizing, but never seems to be willing to share his “secret” plan. And while Kleiman supports marijuana legalization as a concept, he always seems unwilling to grant people the authority to make decisions for their own lives.

The reality is that there are two answers to the question.

1. No. There has never been any evidence that prohibition can exist without excesses of drug law enforcement. We’ve dealt with various kinds of prohibition for decades and there is no evidence of the potential of a benevolent prohibition.

2. The question assumes that prohibition (if somehow done “right”) is a “value,” but it is not. Prohibition is a fatally flawed concept from the beginning, because it makes a crime out of things that are not a crime. In a wrong-headed effort to tackle a particular perceived societal ill, basic human rights are infringed, and that is simply unacceptable.