Drug WarRant

Several people have pointed me to a disturbing article in the Washington Post — The Private Arm of the Law — about the proliferation of private security forces and their use by police departments.

With the sleeve patch on his black shirt, the 9mm gun on his hip and the blue light on his patrol car, he looked like an ordinary police officer as he stopped the car on a Friday night last month. Watt works, though, for a business called Capitol Special Police. It is one of dozens of private security companies given police powers by the state of North Carolina — and part of a pattern across the United States in which public safety is shifting into private hands.

Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places — and trying to expand their terrain. The “company police agencies,” as businesses such as Capitol Special Police are called here, are lobbying the state legislature to broaden their jurisdiction, currently limited to the private property of those who hire them, to adjacent streets. […]

Private security guards have outnumbered police officers since the 1980s, predating the heightened concern about security brought on by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. What is new is that police forces, including the Durham Police Department here in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, are increasingly turning to private companies for help. […]

“You can see the public police becoming like the public health system,” said Thomas M. Seamon, a former deputy police commissioner for Philadelphia who is president of Hallcrest Systems Inc., a leading security consultant. “It’s basically, the government provides a certain base level. If you want more than that, you pay for it yourself.” […]

The trend is triggering debate over whether the privatization of public safety is wise. Some police and many security officials say communities benefit from the extra eyes and ears. Yet civil libertarians, academics, tenants rights organizations and even a trade group that represents the nation’s large security firms say some private security officers are not adequately trained or regulated. Ten states in the South and West do not regulate them at all.

Some warn, too, that the constitutional safeguards that cover police questioning and searches do not apply in the private sector. [emphasis added]

This is disturbing on a whole bunch of levels. Will we see the lobbying efforts of private police like we do with the private prison industry? We have a tough enough time with corruption in the regular police force — how will we control that with private cops?

But here’s the part that disturbs me the most. Imagine that the private cops get their wish and can patrol the adjoining streets. And assume the article is right in that private cops don’t have the same constitutional limitations as regular police…

I can envision a future scenario where the kind of abuses inherent in the structure of the multi-jursidictional drug task forces get brought to a whole new level….

Let’s say a merchant’s association (under heavy encouragement from the police) hires some private security guards. Since a whole lot of merchants (at least one on each main street) are involved, the security guards can patrol anywhere. Although ostensibly working for the merchant’s association, the security guard works with a police task force going through town rousting people on the streets. The security guard, unfettered by constitutional restrictions, searches anybody they encounter who is young, black, hispanic, or poor, including those driving through. If he finds drugs he turns the person over to the accompanying cops for the arrest.

So what rights do citizens have when it comes to private cops?

Over at his blog, Matthew Yglesias really comes up with a bizarre post:

I guess this is something liberals and libertarians are supposed to agree about, but I consistently find it bizarre that there are some people who seem to think it would be a good idea if you could just walk into your local convenience store and pick up some heroin or crack along with your Fritos and Diet Coke. At times, people taking this line seem to argue that drug prohibition couldn’t possibly be having any beneficial effects because, after all, you can still find heroin. Naturally enough, you don’t see anyone proposing that the “war on mugging” be ended simply because mugging-prohibition has failed to actually eliminate the proscribed activity. …

OK, this is the standard ignorance that gets spouted by prohibitionists every day, but Matthew has a readership, and boy do they let him have it. Check out the comments. I only got through a portion, but they were overwhelmingly critical of his post.
Here’s a smattering…

I can’t believe Matt posted this garbage. […]

So we’re all agreed that Matt was smoking the crack before he wrote this? […]

Wow, this is the worst post here since the broo-sketta post of a few years back. The straw man, the deliberate misstating of the de-reg argument…perfect! […]

wow. what a terrible post. Did someone slip you a mickey? […]

I will just ask why Matt thinks his local sheriff is better qualified to prescribe his medications than his doctor? Does Matt want to make alcohol and cigarettes just as illegal as marijuana? Does he think alcohol prohibition was a success and Repeal was a big mistake? Or has he ever, in fact, learned anything at all about psychoactive substances and why people use them?

It’s hard to believe he has, judging from this post.

The whole comment thread is quite fascinating, and, while a few prohibition cheerleaders who show up, I am impressed with the knowledge of those refuting Yglesias. This is very encouraging — it shows that there is a large base of informed people out there that will no longer be taken in by the propaganda.
I’ve got to believe that this is a direct result of the increase of sources of real information (including, as a small part of it, this blog) over the past few years.
Go over there and join in the fun.

Quote of the day from new Houston County Sheriff Andy Hughes:

Drug enforcement is another area Hughes plans to invest a lot of resources in. He says, “The drug war is a war we’ll never win and it’s time to attack it on a daily basis and concentrate on drugs.”

Whaa?

The Drug Czar’s “blog” (yes, I went there again and I’m giving them yet another link to increase their stats…) excitedly lists some names:

Congratulations to the newest members of the President’s Drug Free Communities Support Program Advisory Commission!

Ooh, i can’t wait!
So I looked at the list — don’t really know any of them, but it looked like the usual cast of characters: politicos, treatment pimps, etc. Then I saw one that was listed as “Freelance Writer.” Interesting. I wondered what kind of freelance writer would want to get involved in the PDFCSPAC. So I did a little looking. Shouldn’t have been surprised at what I found.
Camille Q. Solberg is a politically active Republican whose father was a political appointee under George H.W. Bush. She’s President of the Coalition for the Preservation of Traditional Marriage and Outreach Chairman for the Wisconsin Federation of Republican Women. She’s married to John Solberg, Executive Director of the Rawhide Boys Ranch – a juvenile boot camp and treatment center. (source, source)
And the freelance writing part? Apparently that refers to articles like this love letter to President Bush published in the Christian News, where she actually “reported” the event as if John Solberg wasn’t her husband:

About 1,500 people attended the Fond du Lac event, including the publisher of Wisconsin Christian News, Rob Pue and his wife. This event differed in that local residents had a chance to ask the President questions. John Solberg, Executive Director of Rawhide Boys ranch asked the President about his Faith Based initiative.

Gee, I wonder if that was spontaneous…
I don’t know how common the name Solberg is, but it seems I’ve heard it before. Ah yes, Mary Ann Solberg is the ONDCP Deputy Director. Mary Ann’s from Michigan. Camille and John are from Wisconsin. Coincidence?
The point is that these are opportunistic ideologues — and that is generally their entire qualification for the position.
On the other hand, I’m confused so far by the choice of the academic in the group — Keith M. Humphreys is an Associate Professor at Stanford School of Medicine, and while not exactly on our side, oddly seems somewhat qualified (although I really don’t know much about him).

The media seems to have just figured out that Obama used cocaine when he was young.
Catch up, folks. That’s old news.
The issue is whether Obama, as an elected official, will act to deny other youths the opportunities he had and push for continuing the drug war, or if he will act to end a policy regime that incarcerates black males at a rate 6 times higher than South Africa during apartheid.
And that we don’t know.

Over at Blame the Drug War, Tanya has an interesting post that takes me to task for part of my FAQ page, where I am somewhat unsympathetic to drug dealers.
She’s got a point — one that’s been raised with me before. And I must admit that I was mostly going for a bit of comic effect with that particular item — essentially pointing out that the only ones benefitting from the drug war are those who profit from it.
I think the problem is in definitions (and the fact that the government sees no distinctions in “dealers”). As Tanya correctly notes, someone passing a joint could be called a drug dealer, and I’m clearly not referring to them.
Maybe I should title that section: “I am a violent drug trafficker who is only interested in huge profits from the black market and don’t care who gets hurt in the process. Why should I support drug policy reform?”
Any other suggestions on differentiating the helpful, peaceful neighborhood drug dealer who wants fair compensation for providing a useful item vs. the violent criminal trafficker?
It’s true that we often demonize the drug dealer in drug policy reform discussion, because one of the key points is that drug legalization will reduce the violence that is related to black market drug commerce. And it’s also true that I want to put most illegal drug dealers out of work by legalizing drugs (perhaps so that the best of them can then use their expertise to move into the legal market). I would hope that to be a goal of the helpful, peaceful neighborhood drug dealer as well.

Via The Drug Update, Mike Males has an OpEd in tomorrow’s New York Times: This Is Your Brain on Drugs, Dad.
Males is extremely critical of the ONDCP’s reliance on teenage self-surveys as a means of getting a picture of national drug issues.
There’s a couple of interesting passages. First, he notes that teenagers are not really the group that should be analyzed, except that it’s more politically advantageous to do so.

As David Musto, a psychiatry professor at Yale and historian of drug abuse, points out, wars on drugs have traditionally depended on ‹linkage between a drug and a feared or rejected group within society.Š Today, however, the fastest-growing population of drug abusers is white, middle-aged Americans. This is a powerful mainstream constituency, and unlike with teenagers or urban minorities, it is hard for the government or the news media to present these drug users as a grave threat to the nation.

Another passage struck me not just as a repudiation of the ONDCP’s reliance on MTF data, but surprising in its potential implications.

I compared teenage drug use trends reported annually by Monitoring the Future since the 1970s with trends for other behaviors and with federal crime, health and education statistics. In years in which a higher percentage of high school seniors told the survey takers they used illicit drugs, teenagers consistently reported and experienced lower rates of crime, murder, drug-related hospital emergencies and deaths, suicides, H.I.V. infection, school dropouts, delinquency, pregnancy, violence, theft in and outside of school, and fights with parents, employers and teachers.

It’s an interesting, though somewhat disjointed OpEd — a little too enamored with the significance of DAWN and other emergency room data, a little too accepting of the link between drugs and crime, and lacking any mention of the link between prohibition and crime.

They just can’t talk about anything without distorting it.
Once again, the Drug Czar’s “blog” in its 2006 in Review: The Drug Problem Gets Smaller post uses traffic figures that no self-respecting blog would use.

ONDCP would like to thank all of the loyal readers of Pushing Back for helping make this blog a success. Thanks in part to you, we are now averaging over 300,000 hits per month!

Note the use of the word “hits.” It may be technically true that Pushing Back is getting 300,000 hits per month, if you use server terminology. In that case, every call of the server counts as a hit, so as a single page is loading it could call upon the server dozens or hundreds of times to load images, run scripts, etc. “Hits” may be useful for analyzing the way you organize your site to reduce server overload, but means very little in terms of the number of people who come to read your site.
Most blogs will talk in terms of “page views” or “visits” and those, of course are always rough counts, but at least get a better handle on number of people actually visiting your site. Drug WarRant gets about 1,000 to 2000 page views per day under the Salon tracking. Here are the page views and visits by month for the past year for Drug WarRant through SiteMeter (both systems include a slightly different set of pages and uses different methodology, so there are minor differences in results).

Would PushingBack.com care to share that kind of information? After all, our tax dollars are paying for it. It would also be interesting to see PushingBack’s referral logs. For instance, I’m betting that the traffic it gets as a result of this post doubles its usual traffic. If it wasn’t for drug policy reformers checking it to see what new lies the Drug Czar is pushing back at us, I doubt that it would have much of a readership at all.
The rest of that particular Drug Czar post about the year in review is just… sad.
If you’ve followed drug policy news of the past year and then read that post, it’s hard not to come away wondering how the staff of the Drug Czar’s office can survive such low self-esteem. The extremely odd mix of things they included (and excluded) from their list is a sign of unhinged desperation and a degree of vindictiveness.

It’s available for pre-order now, and I’m definitely looking forward to it:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics
A Critical Analysis of Claims Made by the Office of National Drug Control Policy
by Matthew B. Robinson and Renee G. Scherlen

This book critically analyzes claims made by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the White House agency of accountability in the nation‰s drug war. Specifically, the book examines six editions of the annual National Drug Control Strategy between 2000 and 2005 to determine if ONDCP accurately and honestly presents information or intentionally distorts evidence to justify continuing the war on drugs.
Matthew B. Robinson and Renee G. Scherlen uncover the many ways in which ONDCP manipulates statistics and visually presents that information to the public. […]
‹The authors have performed a valuable service to our democracy with their meticulous analysis of the White House ONDCP public statements and reports. They have pulled the sheet off what appears to be an official policy of deception using clever and sometimes clumsy attempts at statistical manipulation. This document, at last, gives us a map of the truth.Š Ö Mike Gray, author of Drug Crazy: How We Got into This Mess and How We Can Get Out

If that wasn’t enough to convince me, there’s this quote from a regular reader here:

‹[I]n a word it is magnificent. While the book is quite thorough, it is also amazingly concise and easy to read … an excellent job of completely deconstructing and debunking everything the ONDCP claims.Š — Brian Bennett, Former US Intelligence Analyst and author of truth: the Anti-Drugwar (http://www.briancbennett.com/)

You can pre-order the paperback copy for $27.95 through SUNY Press or you can pre-order it through my bookstore for the same price.

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate has The Bill of Wrongs — The 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006. While it’s a good read and certainly contains some outrageous violations, it’s a bit disconcerting to see such a list with the drug war completely omitted.
It’s not that Dahlia or Slate are in favor of the drug war — Lithwick has written some outstanding pieces and Slate has long been a critic of prohibition.
It’s just that there is this constant danger of being sucked into the numbingly incessant nature of the drug war. After all, what outrageous drug-war-related violation of civil liberties happened this year that hasn’t been happening just about every year?
We must continue to remind people that every day the drug war is an outrageous, surprising, and unacceptable violation of our civil liberties.