Drug WarRant

With the tragic and unnecessary death of Kathryn Johnston in Atlanta and the serious questions regarding criminal misconduct by the police, bad policies, insufficient judicial oversight, and damage to relations in the African American community, naturally, it would make sense to see the political leaders stepping up and asking for investigations and changes.
Well, Senator Vincent Fort (D-Atlanta) is going to do something:

Despite a failed attempt this year to ban candy made to taste like marijuana, the Georgia state Senate’s chief proponent of the law said he will “definitely” bring the issue back up in January.
“Will do. No doubt about it,” said Sen. Vincent Fort, D Atlanta.

Perhaps Senator Fort’s constituents should suggest to him that he remove his head from his ass.

Note: To be fair, Senator Fort was involved in organizing a community meeting about the Kathryn Johnston tragedy (although I’ve not found any public statements by him about the shooting), but still — for marijuana flavored candy to be his legislative focus is just… idiotic.

Tonight at 7 pm ET/PT on Global Television: Damage Done: The Drug War Odyssey
Article:

IMAGINE A CANADA where marijuana is legal and a prescription gets you a hit of heroin or cocaine.
That’s the proposal of Senator Larry Campbell, the former cop and mayor of Vancouver whose life inspired the Da Vinci’s Inquest TV series.
Such controversial and contrarian views are at the heart of the provocative Damage Done: The Drug War Odyssey, airing Saturday at 7 p.m. on Global as part of the Global Currents series of documentaries. […]
“It’s the hypocrisy of it that really appals me. I just can’t quite figure out how we can call ourselves an enlightened society and still turn a blind eye to something that seems to be doing so much damage yet it would be so simply cured if only we would come to terms with our own feelings about substances.”
Damage Done depicts many people who have wrestled with their stance on forbidden substances, most notably members of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. The group claims about 5,000 members and anyone can join, but LEAP was founded by police veterans who gradually concluded that the traditional war on drugs was illogical. […]
“They have the strength of their own convictions. At one point in time they were just ordinary cops. They were just enforcing the law the way it was written. Something happened to change their minds. I think that in the process of that epiphany, if you will, they had to become stronger. It made them heroes, in my opinion,” said Littlefield.
“And that makes them very filmic, so I kind of exploited that. The guy’s riding his horse across the country to protest the drug war. What’s more filmic than that. And the horse only has one eye. I mean, come on.” […]
Tenacity also paid off in securing an interview with former New York City cop Frank Serpico. His one-man crusade against dirty cops was made into a classic ’70s movie starring Al Pacino.
“He’s not a member of LEAP officially, although he totally supports them. He’s just not a joiner, really, as you might think,” said Littlefield. “I’m talking to him about potentially making another documentary about the roots of police corruption.” […]
“Global is airing a 45-minute version this weekend. There’s also a 54-minute version which includes a couple of other American characters and that is what we refer to as the NFB version. It’s hopefully going to be distributed all over the world and through the NFB’s resources in North America and hopefully you’ll even be able to buy your own copy one day.”

“bullet” Nice feature about LEAP member Jerry Cameron, and a positive response to the legalization call, in Tonyaa Weathersbee piece in the Jacksonville Times Union: Decriminalizing Marijuana
“bullet” Washington Post Editorial: Commute This Sentence

A Clemency Case Not Even President Bush Can Ignore — or Can He?
THE SUPREME Court this week declined to review the case of Weldon Angelos, leaving in place his obscene sentence of 55 years in prison for small-time marijuana and gun charges. The high court’s move is no surprise; the justices have tended to uphold draconian sentences against constitutional challenge. But it confronts President Bush with a question he will have to address: Is there any sentence so unfair that he would exert himself to correct it?
So far, Mr. Bush hasn’t found one. […]

Update: Source corrected.

In the current issue of Drug Sense, Bryan Brickner has a feature article: Speak Truth to Power, where he talks about his experience in the debate that I moderated last month.

Great moments, like the ending of the drug war, will perhaps be inaudible to us. In other words, we often do not sense the meaning of moments as they happen. That being the case, when speaking truth to power, one should watch for when “the spell” begins to break.
The spell? The spell is the spell of power. It begins to break when the appearance of the reasons for believing become unbelievable. In the case of the drug war, the reasons for fighting it no longer produce fear. Without the fear of the illegal drug user — in oneself and in others — power has only one remaining effect, that of force. […]

There’s also an interesting juxtaposition in the section of the Drug Sense newsletter dealing with schools, and the levels of powers abused in the name of the drug war. On one hand you have the schools attempting to control what students say (Bong Hits 4 Jesus, the Carson High newspaper article on marijuana legalization and, from some weeks ago, the students who wore a marijuana leaf to support the medical marijuana bill in S.D.), while from a different abuse of power you have the student caught goofing around and pretending to snort Smarties candies who was told by the Principal that he’d have to go undercover and be a narc to avoid suspension.

I’m helping out an organization that is needing some (volunteer or unpaid internship)expertise in web development to help put together a dynamic, interactive site for a major medical marijuana legalization effort.

The site should be a resource for chapters and volunteers to download and print literature and documents.
The site should sign up members, get details about them, and to store them in a database by region to communicate with them for specific actions in the future.
The site should facilitate interchapter communication among volunteers, (talklist or blog, etc.).
The site should attract and receive donations.
The site should allow people to contact their legislator directly.

Obviously, that will take more than simple html expertise, but there’s a lot of open source and freely available web applications for those who know how to work with them.
Contact me if you’d like more details.

This OpEd by second year accounting student Joshua Rabon is a good read… and a great headline.

There have been some additional developments in the case in Atlanta. New information shows that Fabian Sheets (who had been arrested for drugs and was trying to “cooperate”) gave the police Johnston’s address (whether that was a mistaken address or he was just making it up, we don’t know). The police then screwed up royally.
Radley puts it all together in the only way that makes sense:

The pieces fit together like this: This raid was conducted based on nothing more than a tip from Sheats, a convicted drug felon who was looking for leniency. For whatever reason, he sent police to Johnston’s home. The narcotics officers then hid behind the anonymity courts afford to informants, and fabricated the stuff about the buy. They took a shortcut. When the raid went bad, they chased down an informant they’d used in the past — White — and asked him to lie to cover their asses, just as White says they did.
Even worse, it now looks like they were willing to intimidate him if he didn’t cooperate. …

This case isn’t going to go away. The press in Atlanta is pursuing it. The feds are investigating, and national bloggers are staying on top of it. And police chief Pennington seems to be doing all the right things in calling for full investigations. Atlanta may see some positive change out of this, and Kathryn Johnston’s death may actually have some meaning.

Via Drug Policy Alliance

Your voices were heard. We’re happy to report that Senator Biden has negotiated a significant change to the mycoherbicide section of the ONDCP bill. The change would prohibit the study from being conducted outside United States territories. This limits the study to a U.S. lab and ensures that there’s no chance of an environmental disaster in Latin America.

Good job folks!

We urge you to keep up your calls to the House and Senate in opposition to the current version of ONDCP Reauthorization. It does not contain any provisions mandating that the drug czar set annual objectives for reducing drug overdoses and the spread of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis and other infectious diseases. Further more, it changes federal law to prohibit more than five percent of High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) funding from being spent on drug prevention, threatening prevention programs in the Appalachia, California, Florida, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and the Northwest.

In a continuing travesty of justice, the appeal of Richard Paey’s 25 year sentence for possessing his own pain medication was rejected by the Florida District Court of Appeals. For full details, see Radley Balko and Maia Szalavitz.
The dissent by Judge James Seals was the only positive moment:

suggest that it is cruel for a man with an undisputed medical need for a substantial amount of daily medication management to go to prison for twenty-five years for using self-help means to obtain and amply supply himself with the medicine he needed…
I suggest that it is unusual, illogical, and unjust that Mr. 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…
It is illogical, absurd, cruel, and unusual for the government to put Mr. Paey in prison for twenty-five years for foolishly and desperately pursuing his self-help solution to his medical management problems, and then go to prison only to find that the prison medical staff is prescribing the same or similar medication he had sought on the outside but could not legitimately obtain. That fact alone clearly proves what his intent for purchasing the drugs was. What a tragic irony.

The majority essentially said that they had no reason to question whether the sentence was cruel and unusual and that it was up to the legislature. Talk about defaulting on your charge to defend and interpret the constitution!
The thing is, I kind of understand it.
And it’s probably also the reason that the U.S. Supreme Court let Weldon Angelos’ 55-year prison term for marijuana stand by refusing to hear the case on Monday.
The courts just don’t know how to deal with the phrase “cruel and unusual.” How do you define it. If they say that Weldon’s 55 year sentence is cruel and unusual, then the obvious next question is “Well, what about 54? 53? 52? 51? 50?…” The courts are terrified at the notion of being asked to draw specific lines for every crime, so they simply buck it back to the legislature and shake their heads with sympathy for the poor person rotting in jail for the rest of their life. The Justices spend 8th Amendment efforts on debating what form of death penalty is the least painful and run away from the real issues.
Sure, it’s difficult. But it seems to me that it is the responsibility of the courts to find a way to address this. Otherwise they are completely abandoning the 8th Amendment to the whimsy of legislators, and sending the message that their is no jail term that is too long.

That does seem to be the message he’s giving here — he goes to a school to announce a massive $209,662 federal grant to a school district to do drug testing…
Well, unfortunately, for the Drug Czar, they’ve got some smart students in Florida:

Craig Zyburo, a Barron Collier senior, asked Walters why random testing targets these drugs only, while alcohol has been reported to be the most popular drug among high school students and there are more tobacco-related deaths.
“Unfortunately, alcohol does not stay in the blood long enough for the test to detect it,” explained Walters.

Ah. So the purpose of these drug tests is to get kids to switch to alcohol? Now what about the fact that the tests are focused on athletes. Certainly that means they’ll concentrate on performance enhancing drugs, right?

“Athletes should be tested for steroids only because that’s the only drug they use,” said Zyburo after the presentation. However, as Walters explained during a press conference held after the student assembly, the tests required to detect steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, are much more expensive. While a regular drug test costs between $10 and $40 each, steroid testing can cost up to $100 each.

So we’ll just spend a lot of money testing for marijuana because we can.
Everybody line up and pee in a cup for the Drug Czar.