Drug WarRant

One thing I’ll say about about John Hawkins piece In Defense of the Drug War at Right Wing News — it’s drawn a tremendous amount of fire from the libertarian and conservative (read: not authoritarian) circles (it’s less likely that many of the liberal sites have noticed it).
Read this exceptional and insightful analysis by Lee at Right-Thinking from the Left Coast: My response to In Defense of the Drug War.
Also, a couple of nice pieces at Code Monkey Ramblings (here and here).
Also, Mona has a little good fun at my expense at Unqualified Offerings and JohnJ over at RightLinx responds to me both in his post and in comments.
(In addition to the ones I listed below).

DEA head Karen Tandy on the recent extradition of Mexican cartel leaders:

Number of violent Mexican criminals extradited: 15
Distance and time traveled to get them here: 750 miles and 2 hours
Number of Mexican drug cartels impacted: 4

U.S. and Mexican victory against powerful drug syndicates: priceless.

Um… no. There are a number of prices attached to that extradition. It’s just that the American people are paying Karen Tandy’s exorbitant MasterCard bills.
And, of course, all the extraditions will do is create violent competition for job openings as other criminals rush in to fill the black-market void and go for the profits.
So, a more accurate description…

Number of violent Mexican criminals extradited: 15
Distance and time traveled to get them here: 750 miles and 2 hours
Number of Mexican drug cartels impacted: 4

U.S. and Mexican victory against powerful drug syndicates: valueless.

“bullet” Two new additions to Guest Drug WarRant from submitters (remember that readers are always welcome to submit items for Guest Drug WarRant, or you can discuss items at the messageboard).

1. Fascist Insect — a diatribe rejected by Wikipedia
2. End the War on Drugs — a letter by Ned Behrensmeyer published in the Quincy Herald Whig

“bullet” I’ve started a page for the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” Supreme Court case. I know there are some who say that it’s the wrong case for drug policy reformers to touch, but as a drug policy reformer and free speech advocate and educator, it’s one I can’t possibly ignore.
Additionally, I have serious concerns that Kenn Starr and the amici curiae (which includes D.A.R.E.) are trying to get the Supreme Court to expand the power of schools to determine that any speech by students anywhere that conflicts with their zero-tolerance/drug-free/abstinence-only message can be censored.
Plus I kind of like the idea of the little Alaskan lawyer against Ken Starr, the U.S. Government, D.A.R.E., and the National School Board Association.

We’ve been subjected to some pretty extraordinary moronity in recent days.
Let’s start with Right Wing News’ John Hawkins writing in Human Events Online: In Defense of the Drug War. At first I was interested because I thought “Hey, maybe this will be an actual thoughtful attempt to be pro-drug war that will be interesting to debunk.” But no. Tired old fallacies and unsupported false assumptions.
And the kickers in the article that really make it not worth the bother…

1. Hawkins refers to some specific data regarding alcohol prohibition, and uses as his source… a book by Ann Coulter. How stupid is that? That’s like me giving statistics on relative dependency rates of various drugs and quoting the characters that Cheech and Chong play in Up In Smoke as the source!
2. Hawkins plays the “murder” card. In “rebutting” the legalizers’ call for not jailing so many people, he notes that we’re not going to win the war on murder, robbery and rape, either. This is that delightful combination of straw man, slippery slope, and reductio ad absurdum fallacies (which also occur elsewhere in Hawkins’ piece).

The murder nonsense also showed up in the Wichita Eagle, where there was an outstanding OpEd by Jack Cole of LEAP: War on drugs has been a whopper of a failure on Tuesday, which was followed by a “rebuttal” yesterday (Legalization would be a mistake) by U.S. Attorney Eric Melgren, who spews the same fallacious propaganda line:

Should we legalize murder because we’ve been fighting it since Cain killed Abel, yet murder persists? Should we decriminalize sexual assault, because the billions we have poured into eradicating it could have been better spent by treating the effects “as a medical problem”?

Now anybody who has at least a 12th grade education knows that this argument is intellectually dishonest, yet we continue to hear it from people who should know better. This leads me to believe that those who say it:

1. Know better, but are willfully attempting to deceive the public, or
2. Are so blinded by their hatred of drugs, drug users or the class/social status/political viewpoint/race of people who use drugs, that they are unable to see the faults in their own arguments.

Those in the first category I can do nothing about, other than hope that one day their fate will be that of the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
So let me try a simple exercise for those in the second category who are too blinded for their hatred for all things drug-related…
Imagine, if you will, that through some strange and irrational set of circumstances, the wearing of gloves on your hands has been made illegal (maybe it was to prevent those who had been masturbating from hiding the hair that grew on the palms of their hands — who knows why these laws get passed sometimes). Now in many parts of the country it gets cold, and people would wear gloves to stay warm regardless of the law, and some of them would get caught and put in jail. This had no real effect on the numbers of people wearing gloves (or masturbating, for that matter). So perhaps you suggested that wearing gloves should be made legal — that we should stop filling jails with people who were merely trying to keep their hands warm. But some ignorant moron says “Everyone knows we shouldn’t legalize murder, so we shouldn’t legalize glove-wearing either.”
Do you understand how stupid that sounds?
Now there are plenty of other differences between Murder and Marijuana, including the notion of victim, and there is also the factor to be considered of the actual effective purposes of, and reasons for, enforcement and incarceration (the discussion of which has been unfortunately AWOL in this country in recent years). But ultimately, those don’t really matter in this sense, because even the notion of analogizing the legalization of drugs and the legalization of murder is bereft of logic.
And as we speak of the lack of logic, let us now turn to one who should have excellent intellectual training. Someone who has gone to law school and become a Judge, and even teaches law and finance at a university. Someone like Timothy G. Hicks.
Timothy Hicks was the judge for a sordid case involving two men (Sibson and Weissert) who were involved in selling marijuana. Although the case had many complexities, apparently Weissert hired a couple of men to steal the drugs and money from Sibson, and in the process, Sibson was killed in his home. Anyone seeing this story would see a tale of murder and home invasion, resulting from criminal greed.
But not the Honorable Timothy G. Hicks. According to the Muskegon Chronicle:

Before sentencing Weissert, Hicks addressed what he called a series of “urban myths.”
“Urban myth number one” is that “drug use is a victimless crime,” Hicks said from the bench. “Here we have orphaned children, devastated families.”
Myth number two: ” ‘It’s only marijuana,’ ” Hicks said. “Marijuana is as evil as the rest of this stuff. … Marijuana indirectly caused all the carnage.” […]

Now fortunately Phillip Smith at Stop the Drug War has saved me the time of having to stoop to responding to this reprehensible sewage, and has already made many of the points that immediately jumped out in my mind…

The robbers went after the marijuana dealer because there were valuable items they could take. Would the judge have railed against alcohol if someone had been murdered in a liquor store robbery? […]
I wonder if the judge would call cold, hard cash “evil” because someone robbed an armored car to steal some. […]

I wouldn’t be surprised if he blamed a woman being attractive as a cause of her own rape. And you know, I’ve often heard that escaping criminals have committed murder to avoid being taken before a judge. Wouldn’t that make the judge indirectly to blame for the murder? (It makes as much logical non-sense as Hicks’ position). This man has no business practicing law or teaching students.
It bothers and disturbs me that I had to even write this post. And I find it somewhat ironic that those who write in favor of prohibition always seem not to have full mental acuity, and you find the drug legalizers appealing to intellectual reason and facts.
Marijuana. Murder. Not the same. One is the premeditated killing of another human being, and the other is a leafy plant.

Update: If you really want to be depressed, check out some of the ignorant rantings in the massive comments section of Hawkins’ blog entry.
2nd Update: Several fiskings of the Hawkins nonsense — from the conservative xrlq: This Is Your Brain on Drug Wars. Any Questions?, from Liberty Papers: A Lame Defense of the Drug War, and from Walter in Denver Dumbest Thing I’ve Read Today.
On the other hand, RightLinx links approvingly to Hawkins, with a moronic addition:

If society feels that making a substance illegal is in its best interest, it should have the freedom to do so.

What a horrendous use of the word “freedom.”

“bullet” Garden of Weedin’ — this is a really fascinating article by Zach Dundas about the medical marijuana in Oregon. It’s uplifting, but it also makes you realize just how much time we’ve lost in the potential advancements and research that could be happening in medical marijuana.
“bullet” Let Them Have Their Pot by Manuel S. Klausner in the Los Angeles Times.
“bullet” Medical Marijuana: Justice goes awry – editorial in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Here’s this week’s issue.

About two years ago, former ONDCP staffer and con-artist Andrea Barthwell put together a series of lectures in Illinois to attack our medical marijuana efforts. I was able to catch her falsifying sponsorship information, which marked essentially the end of the lecture series. Today, the original IllinoisMarijuanaLectures.org website, apparently being allowed to die through expiration, became a spam advertising page.

Link

Rebuffing months of U.S. pressure, Afghan President Hamid Karzai decided against a Colombia-style program to spray this country’s heroin-producing poppies after the Cabinet worried herbicide would hurt legitimate crops, animals and humans, officials said Thursday.

Turns out Canada’s not too thrilled about it either…

A senior State Department official says troops from NATO nations must provide security for opium crop-eradication projects, including new plans for chemical spraying of poppy fields Ö which is something Canada rejects. […]
Plowing up poppy fields angers Afghan farmers who rely on the crops for their livelihood, and fosters a climate of grievance that helps the Taliban in their recruiting efforts.
Canadian commanders in Kandahar have said that any direct involvement by their troops in eradication programs would put their soldiers at risk, and impede their efforts to win the ‹hearts and mindsŠ of the Afghan people.

Anybody else? The UK has some concerns…

THE Afghan government is to launch a poppy eradication campaign in Helmand province which UK military commanders fear will antagonise farmers and drive them into the arms of the Taliban. […]
British commanders have distanced themselves from the initiative, but still fear a backlash against the 5200-strong UK garrison because the Kabul authorities have ruled out compensation for crops.
One said: “The whole thing is being driven by the US, which has become impatient with the lack of progress in cutting poppy cultivation and opium production.
“Our concern is that local villagers tend not to differentiate greatly between armed and uniformed strangers sent by their own government and armed and uniformed strangers from abroad. All they can see is someone in authority destroying their livelihood.
“When that happens, everyone perceived to be involved becomes a target.”

Could it be that other countries are beginning to understand that U.S. drug policy is not only moronic, but is likely to get them killed?

Ryan Grim at The Politico reports on the efforts of the National Institute on Drug Abuse to remove the Wikipedia information about them that is controversial, and replace it with glowing propaganda.

In late August, someone with an IP address that originated from the National Institutes of Health drastically edited the Wikipedia entry for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which operates within NIH. Wikipedia determined the edit to be vandalism and automatically changed the definition back to the original. On Sept. 18, the NIH vandal returned, according to a history of the site’s edits posted by Wikipedia. This time, the definition was gradually changed, presumably to avoid the vandalism detector.
NIDA spokeswoman Dorie Hightower confirmed that her agency was behind the editing. She said in an e-mail that the definition was changed “to reflect the science.”
A little more than science-reflecting was done to the site. Gone first was the “Controversial research” section that included comments critical of NIDA. Next went the section on the NIDA-sponsored program that grows marijuana for research and medical purposes. The next slice of the federal editor’s knife left all outside references on the cutting-room floor, replaced with links to government Web sites.

One of the things they cut, by the way, was a link to Drug WarRant that was on the page.
Today, much of the original material is back up — Wikipedia doesn’t react well to censorship.
If you’d like to see what the page looked like at various stages, you can actually see its history (scroll down on each page past the two columns of change indications to see the look and content of the page at that time).

1. Page after NIDA’s first blatant attempt to wipe it clean
2. Page restored as it was
3. Page at one point when Drug WarRant was listed as an outside resource
4. Page after later gradual attempt to turn it into a pro-NIDA propaganda page.
5. Page as it currently exists (which, as of this moment, even includes a section with links to today’s articles regarding NIDA’s attempt to take over the page.)

They saw an opportunity. Nobody wants to go to the drug warrior sites and read their propaganda, so they decided to make Wikipedia’s entry over in the way they wished. It doesn’t work that way.

“bullet” Grits for Breakfast notes that, in Texas, a conservative GOP senator who is a medical doctor has filed a bill authorizing local governments to implement needle exchange programs. It’s going to be a tricky one for the prohibitionists. I wonder how they’ll try to demonize him?
“bullet” Blame the Drug War has been following the Yorkton vigilante case in Canada, where a father went over to his daughter’s drug-dealing boyfriend’s house and shot and killed him. Start here, then here.
“bullet” The ONDCP yesterday claims that legal opium from Afghanistan can’t work because there’s an oversupply of opium based products. But on the same day…

Afghanistan’s opium poppies should be used to alleviate a shortage of painkillers in the NHS, the British Medical Association has said. […] Diamorphine, which is derived from opium poppies and which is also known as heroin, is used to relieve pain after operations. But there is a critical shortage of the drug in Britain, forcing doctors to use more expensive and less effective alternatives.

Phillip Smith has more.
“bullet” Transform Drug Policy Foundation blog has been doing an outstanding job of following the recent political maneuverings regarding drug policy in the UK. Their most recent post discusses the ways in which the policy of prescribing addictive drugs for the purpose of reducing crime is being… considered.