Drug WarRant

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.

Senator son of slain Colombian cartel fighter proposes drug legalization

BOGOTA, Colombia: A Colombian senator and son of a presidential candidate assassinated by deceased drug kingpin Pablo Escobar has called for a congressional debate on the taboo subject of drug legalization.
“The current repressive approach against drug trafficking hasn’t worked despite the huge amounts of blood we Colombians have shed,” Sen. Juan Manuel Galan, of the opposition Liberal Party, told The Associated Press on Thursday. “It’s time to look at different options, together with other drug-production nations, as a way to break the back of the drug traffickers.” […]
“Two decades into the drug war we continue having illegal mafias that spread violence across the country, we continue having guerrillas, we continue having paramilitaries,” said Galan, who has yet to receive his party’s backing for the proposed debate. “And despite it all there’s no real solution in sight to the problem.”

From Resolutions for Sacramento in 2007:

New Year’s resolution: California’s law enforcement should stop letting the “drug war” skew the criminals it targets, and redirect resources to capturing violent felons. Tax-funded police resources should be used in protecting law-abiding citizens from violent felons, not busting someone for personal possession of marijuana. Nor should medically approved marijuana users who grow pot plants for personal prescribed use be arrested or hassled.

What are your resolutions for the New Year for the drug war? What do you think we can/should accomplish in 2007?

What’s going on in your world? How are your holidays? Have you talked to your friends and family about the drug war?

Still on the road and I haven’t had time to read it all yet, but this seems interesting.
This LA Times article gives Mark Kleiman an orgasm, but fails to impress Alex.
Read them and tell me what you think.
And of course, there is yet another question: why are we wasting resources on criminal justice solutions for non-violent drug offenders at all?