Drug WarRant

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim November 30, 2006, as National Methamphetamine Awareness Day. I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate programs and activities.

OK.
Well, let’s see, I assume the Drug Czar will be observing this in some way… Oh, yes.

… it is an opportunity to reaffirm a commitment to a drug-free future…

Look! It’s the mythical drug-free bird. Catch it – quick! Dang.
Since he’s got the drug-free part covered, I figured I’d mention a few things he isn’t…

• Meth Epidemic? There’s been very little change (and maybe even a decrease) in first-time users of methamphetamines from the early 1970s to the present.
• The U.S. Government dispensed methamphetamine to our soldiers in World War II and Korea and even today, U.S. fighter pilots in Afghanistan were given amphetamines (a milder chemical relation) to stay awake on bombing runs.
• …”The term ‘meth addicted baby’ is no less defensible. Addiction is a technical term that refers to compulsive behavior that continues in spite of adverse consequences. By definition, babies cannot be ‘addicted’ to methamphetamines or anything else. The news media continues to ignore this fact. “In utero physiologic dependence on opiates (not addiction), known as Neonatal Narcotic Abstinence Syndrome, is readily diagnosable and treatable, but no such symptoms have been found to occur following prenatal cocaine or methamphetamine exposure.” (Open letter from 93 medical and psychological researchers)
• Much like the dangerous alcohol stills in the first prohibition, clandestine meth labs are a product of drug prohibition.
• Unfortunately, the American strategy of drug control since the early 20th Century has emphasized an approach of prevention based on instilling fear about a substance through dramatized descriptions and images of the consequences of use coupled with a notion of treating people with harsh punishments out-of-step with the harm caused by the drug. Historically, the domestic response to drug use has been to demonize the drug and the people who use it while exaggerating the impact of its use (“You’ll be hooked the first time you try it”). This strategy has been complemented in the past two decades with mandatory minimums, sentencing enhancements, and a ban on access to services such as public housing, income assistance, and federal educational aid as the result of a drug conviction. (Link)

And some stupid meth tricks…

• If you listened to government drug propaganda, you’d think that millions of teens were about to die from meth. It’s not true.
• A U.S. Attorney in Hawaii lied about the prevalance of the meth problem to try to convince lawmakers to amend the state constitution to expand wiretapping and search/seizure provisions.
• A prosecutor in North Carolina tried to charge meth lab defendants with two counts of manufacturing a nuclear or chemical weapon (a judge later laughed him out of court).

For more on meth, visit the Vaults.
Update: I almost forgot the biggest stupid meth trick — arresting 32 convenience clerks named Patel for not understanding American drug slang.

Join us tomorrow (Thursday) at Illinois State University for the Winter Hempfest from 2 pm to 10 pm in the Prairie Room of the Bone Student Center. There will be prizes, opportunities for making hemp jewelry and tie-dye shirts, plus bands, useful information, and more.
Schedule:

• 2:00-3:00 Bryan Alvarez
• 3:00-4:15 Andrew Kenning and Jamie Esler (jam session – bring your own instrument)
• 4:15-4:45 Pete Guither leads a roundtable discussion of current drug policy
• 4:30-5:30 Mike from Mother Murphy’s
• 5:30-6:30 Pappa Jim
• 6:30-8:00 Lost in Blue
• 8:00-10:00 Bag of Dank

It’s a comfortable and relaxed event. Come for a while and join in. Sponsored by Illinois State University’s chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy/Moblizing Activists and Students for Hemp — http://www.ProhibitionKills.org

It seems all of Radley Balko’s fine work is opening the crack just a little bit in public awareness. While his excellent book Overkill didn’t get the splash many had hoped for when it was released, it has picked up steam, and it’s getting referenced in a variety of articles, including Washington Examiner, Christian Science Monitor, and Popular Mechanics. (The Kathryn Johnston story in particular is starting to make more people pay attention.)

Link

“History teaches us that it will take a generation to render Afghanistan opium-free,” UNODC executive director Antonio Maria Costa said in a statement.

Um, no. History teaches us that people who use the word “free” to describe some imagined future absence of drugs are morons.
Of course, Costa is using this to cover for the fact that his approach to international drug control is a ludicrous failure. His solution?

“I … propose that development support to farmers, the arrest of corrupt officials and eradication measures be concentrated in half a dozen provinces with low cultivation in 2006 so as to free them from the scourge of opium.”

There’s that word “free” again. But do you see what he’s saying? That the “arrest of corrupt officials” should be concentrated in just a few areas? That’s a plan?
The U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime is pathetic. They should all take six months off and be required to do an internship at the Senlis Council, where they might learn something useful.
For a variety of reasons, poppies will always bloom in Afghanistan. There is no poppy-free Afghanistan in our future. The best and only truly workable solutions will include finding ways to coexist with this plant.

This story helps point out some of the absolute insanity of what we’re doing…

On Nov. 2, the 16-year-old senior at Southwest High School in Fort Worth consented to have her car searched in the campus parking lot after a drug-sniffing dog indicated that it smelled something.
School officials searched the car and say they found a marijuana seed in the driver’s seat and a small piece of a plant on the floorboard.

That’s right — a seed and a small piece of plant. It was enough to get this honor student sentenced to 25 days of alternate school.
Interestingly, while just about everyone thinks she was innocent of actually possessing pot, her best defense comes from her father — a policeman who is likely the unwitting source of the seed and stem — probably tracked in from his work. Of course, she has her father to go to bat for her — most students don’t have that advantage.
There are several points that come from this story…

1. Any kind of sanction for anyone for a quantity of drugs that small is completely stupid and morally reprehensible.
2. There’s every likelihood that the dog was lying (or just trying to please its owner). A seed and a piece of plant inside a car is not enough to get a dog’s reaction (if it was, that would be damning in another way).
3. Never give permission to search. Ever. For any reason. Even if you have nothing to hide. There’s just no way to know if somebody else tracked something into your car. And you’ll have a tougher time explaining it than Ms. Gaworski.

At The Agitator
Chief Pennington has suspended seven narcotics officers and asked the FBI to investigate.
Apparently the confidential informant is saying he never purchased drugs at Kathryn Johnston’s address and was told by police to lie about it.
Kathryn Johnston is still dead.

The really tough way to control drugs is to license them by Simon Jenkins in the Times Online (UK) is a delightful ranting OpEd that skewers prohibitionists over and over for their failures, and faults politicians for lacking the guts to act on legalizing and licensing drugs.
The whole thing is an enjoyable read, but here are a few excerpts:

The drug market is totally unregulated and as a result totally dangerous. Welcome to 10 years of Tony Blair’s “war on drugs”. […]
British drugs policy is a disaster. Parliament’s refusal for more than a third of a century even to amend the prohibitionist 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act is the most damning comment on the state of politics today, in thrall to the tabloid mob. The 1971 act must be the only criminal justice statute not to have been rewritten a dozen times by Tory and Labour governments. Charles Clarke and John Reid pass four terrorism acts a year, yet not one to tackle the drug market. The act contributes to the deaths of hundreds of young people each year. It stokes violent crime and impoverishes families and communities, while giving Britain the biggest prison population in Europe. Yet nobody in politics has the guts to touch it. […]
The Dutch and Swiss have achieved significant reductions in heroin addiction by treatment through controlled prescription. They have also achieved a marked fall in crime by addicts. Yet Downing Street seems unable to “join up” its drugs policy as can other countries.
Not just policemen but judges, prison reformers and charities such as DrugScope, Drugsline, Addaction, Adapt, and Action on Addiction cry continually for a review of policy. There have been enough independent reviews to fill a library. […] Yet all Vernon Coaker, the hapless drugs minister, could reply was that drugs policy was “a matter of political judgment”. In other words, he had delegated it to the staff of The Sun.
This week an international group of present and former police chiefs called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition is in Britain to lobby for reform. Jack Cole, its American spokesman, points out that when alcohol prohibition was ended in 1933 “we put Al Capone out of business overnight — and we can do the same to the drug lords and terrorists who make over $500 billion a year selling illegal drugs round the world”. […]
The prohibition lobby has held the floor for more than 30 years and has run out of both arguments and time. The home secretary could hire gangs of vigilantes to roam every community and shoot drug users on sight. This might increase street prices, stem consumption for a year or two and deter some middle-class offspring. But this is not serious debate. Southeast Asia has capital punishment for drug use and yet drug use is rife. […]
There must be more drug enforcement bureaucrats in Whitehall and police headquarters across the country, achieving nothing, than there are workers combating addiction in the field.
The prohibitionists think that by passing laws they are curing a problem. […]
Britain must find a way of legalising supplies. Only then can smuggling and racketeering be suppressed. How this is achieved is a subsidiary matter and a good subject for a committee. But the prohibitionist softies must first be outgunned. They are the true enemies of drug control. This market will never go away. The only tough policy is to regulate it.
More people die each year from adulterated drugs than from terrorism. The cost of prohibition both to the state and to the community is colossal. The illicit market in drugs undermines Britain’s communities and subverts British values far more than any Muslim cleric or rucksack bomber.
It will never be confronted until the counterproductive prohibitionist 1971 act is repealed.

Bravo! Powerful stuff. (I particularly got a kick out of the digs: “in thrall to the tabloid mob” and “delegated it to the staff of The Sun.”)

OK, Time Magazine is entitled to their own list of the top 100 influential albums of all time.
But can you possibly take a list like that seriously when it doesn’t include Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”? I mean, how can that even be a consideration? It’s not a border-line option.
I mean, come on — it was on Billboard’s Top 200 list for 741 consecutive weeks (over 14 years).
Multiple generations of college students got stoned and found something… amazing… in this album (and the wonderful thing is, each of them found something different).
Today, over 30 years after the album came out, I often wear a tie with a simple prism design and people stop me to tell me how much they like it (often with a knowing wink). How many albums on Time’s list had that kind of influence?

Radley has an outstanding (and horrifying — even though I’ve read about all those cases before, it still hurts) piece putting the Johnston story in perspective, with examples from other bad raids.

People like Maye and Johnston are supposed to show remarkable poise and judgment, despite the fact that armed men are breaking into their homes..
When police make mistakes, however, they’re nearly always forgiven. Because we’re supposed to understand how an officer in such a volatile situation might misjudge an everyday object for a gun, or shoot a completely innocent, unarmed man — all perfectly understandable, given the volatile, confrontational circumstances surrounding SWAT raids. Such deaths — while tragic — are mere collateral damage. We have to keep fighting the war on drugs. And we have to protect our police officers by allowing them to break down doors while people are sleeping. The deaths of a few innocent people are the price we pay for the privilege of having the government tell us what we are and aren’t allowed to put into our bodies.
It’s an abhorrent double standard.

Read the whole thing.
Now I know that some people around the web are chiding people like us for jumping on the story too quickly — that we don’t know all the facts yet, so how can we possibly claim that a tragedy occurred in the Katrhyn Johnston case?
It’s possible that she was a 92-year-old drug dealing kingpin (and they just didn’t happen to find anything at her place). Maybe she was letting her house be used by drug dealers. Maybe she had created an elaborate hidden identity during the decades she lived in that house. Who knows? I don’t. And I don’t care. Because it just doesn’t matter.
When the shooting happened is not when things went wrong. As Atlanta’s photodude says:

But I do know this. No violent crime had been committed or observed to obtain this warrant. There was no evidence of anyone in the home being held against their will. The circumstances seemed to contain no imminent danger … whatsoever.

And that’s the point that Radley has to keep repeating to the dimwitted apologists for our drug war. They just don’t seem to get the fact that it is the policy that is completely and insanely out of control. The calamitous policy that says that it is somehow appropriate to use military home invasion techniques for drug charges.
To use armed invasion as a sanctioned method to arrest someone for marijuana offenses is as insane as if we had police fire rocket propelled grenades at cars exceeding the speed limit.

A refreshing OpEd in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: Friedman made right call on legalization

… In a Newsweek article Friedman wrote in 1972, he took a step outside his realm of monetary policy and free marketeering and laid out in clear, unequivocal terms what kind of social disaster we were buying with Nixon’s drug war. Thirty years later, we know he couldn’t have been more right. […]
We have spent $1 trillion on the drug war since 1972 and we arrest 1.7 million people for nonviolent drug offenses every year. When you put a rapist in prison another one doesn’t get recruited to take his place, but that is precisely what happens in drug dealing. Take one guy off the streets and that becomes a job opportunity for someone else in the neighborhood. […]
Albert Einstein is credited with saying that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” We must really be nuts. […]
Legalization of drugs is Friedman’s best economic and moral thesis that has been left untried; and one day, when courage returns to politics and we take this sensible step, experience will bear that out.

Beautiful.
Update: Another great OpEd this weekend — this one at the Aspen Daily News by LEAP’s Tony Ryan — End The War On Drugs.