Drug WarRant

Glenn Greenwald’s Unclaimed Territory has picked up the ‘House of Death’ story big time with In the other “war” — more of the same.
Glenn’s been a strong opponent of the drug war (he even let me co-post there once) and his blog is extremely important — sort of the voice of the rationally outraged liberal. He gives the issue a scathing treatment (and read the comments — it seemed to uniformly outrage his intelligent readers as well). Perhaps with his chiming in, the story will get the additional attention and scrutiny that it deserves.

“bullet” Sheldon Richman in the Times Gazette (Ohio): Time for government to end the drug war.
“bullet” Vin Suprynowicz in the Las Vegas Review Journal: Hate to say I told you so, but keep those Kevlar jammies handy

Over the decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has heard many cases stemming from police violence against Americans justified by the so-called “War on Drugs.” Never once have the justices seized the opportunity to rule — as they are obliged to rule by their oaths of office — “Oh, and by the way, your so-called ‘War on Drugs’ is totally unconstitutional under the Ninth Amendment. So cut it out.”

“bullet” This isn’t exactly an article… There was a rather ignorant opinion piece in the Red and Black (University of Georgia paper) a few days ago saying that the police were right in the Kathryn Johnston case. Today there are two outstanding letters in response: one by Journalism student Dave Marck, Jr. and one by LEAP speaker Allison Myrden. Read them here.
“bullet” And by the way, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has published an OpEd by Radley Balko. Nice.
Update: More at Grits for Breakfast. See the series at the Lone Star Iconoclast. Also check out the Operation Trick or Treat post.

Let’s take a look at it in basic terms. First — essentially all the violence, from both the drug warriors and the drug traffickers, is a direct result of prohibition. It is a major side effect of the drug war. What is the purpose of the drug war? Well, theoretically, its purpose is to prevent people from using certain drugs. Marijuana, mostly, since that’s the most popular illicit drug. And it’s to prevent people from voluntarily using marijuana (marijuana isn’t like rape or murder or theft — it isn’t done to a person by someone else — it’s a choice).
[Now, forget for a moment the fact that it doesn’t actually work. Assume it does.]
So when you killed Kathryn Johnston, that was to prevent someone from voluntarily smoking marijuana. In other words, you cared more about the supposed harm to a drug user who was doing it to himself, than the life of an innocent person.
How morally bankrupt do you have to be to make such a choice? How many people are you willing to kill to accomplish your goal? How many innocent deaths do you accept in order to stop someone from smoking pot and hanging out on Pete’s couch? If one innocent person dies and 10 people stop smoking pot, is that a good trade-off? How many lives and families are you willing to destroy to stop someone from voluntarily taking heroin?
And horror of horrors, what if (as most certainly is the case), all your killing of innocent people didn’t really have a significant impact on drug use or abuse. When you realize that you have killed these people for nothing… what will you tell their children?

“bullet” It seems that I’m seeing a lot of “Legalize It” articles (of differing approaches) in recent days. In addition to Cynthia Tucker’s excellent piece, here’s one in Sandusky, Ohio by Evan Goodenow (note the Kathryn Johnston mention). There’s this one in the Cambridge Evening News. And there’s one in the Edmonton Sun. Is it just me, or has there been a slight increase in the willingness of the media to give this idea coverage? Perhaps the education efforts of all the drug policy reformers are actually bearing fruit in this way?
“bullet” If you want an opportunity to write letters to an article that’s less positive, you need look no further than the OpEd by former ONDCP speechwriter Kevin Sabet in the Washington Post today. He acts like he’s being reasonable, yet the way he dismisses the discussion of legalization is dishonest.
“bullet” The Agitator has been covering Atlanta extremely well (of course) and discovered (gasp!) that there may have been other cases where the no-knock warrant was used without proper foundation.
“bullet” With the Kathryn Johnston (elderly lady killed in her home in Atlanta) and Sean Bell (unarmed bridegroom killed in New York with police firing 50 bullets) incidents fresh in the media, it seems to me there is an opportunity here to visit with your local city council member and ask what the policies are for SWAT or other military-style engagements by the local police and what safeguards are in place.

With the holidays coming up, I wanted to do my part to give you some interesting opportunities for gifts. So Drug WarRant now has TWO comprehensive stores for your shopping convenience.

First, there is the Drug WarRant CafePress store, now with the new Incarceration Nation dark shirt line, but still with all of your old favorites, including the DEA Targets America line, the End Prohibition Now items, and the most popular item — our marijuana leaf thong.
Then, we now have the Drug WarRant Amazon store. This is an expansion of our old bookstore page, now with a variety of excellent book recommendations, plus DVDs, CDs, hemp foods and clothing, and other fun products (you can even get that great Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon necktie that I wear all the time).
Great deals, great products, and by ordering through Drug WarRant, I get a few cents. It’s all good.

Alternet reported a bizarre new trend: purchasing bullet-proof vests for police dogs at $500 to $1,800 per vest. Apparently this trend comes from the shooting death of a NJ police dog (who shot in the eye and wouldn’t have been helped by the vest). Additionally, the vests are so heavy they cause all sorts of problems for the dogs.
No apparent concern for those with whom dogs come in contact — innocents such as Myra Gutierrez (bit in the breasts and arms) and Indiana schoolgirl Courtney McGarry (bit in the face), or the suspect who had his penis severed by a police dog named Scooby.
If there are dogs who need bullet-proof vests, it’s not the police dogs. The vast majority of dogs that get shot… are shot by police. ‘Cause they always shoot the dogs. No really, they always shoot the dogs. That’s right, they always shoot the dogs.

This is a gruesome story that has been, up to this point, almost exclusively covered by NarcoNews. But now, while the American press won’t touch it, the UK’s Observer has extensive coverage in today’s edition.
The House of Death is the story of U.S. Department of Justice and Homeland Security officials’ willingness to use an informant that, multiple times, and with their knowledge and permission, commits first-degree murder, on behalf of Mexican drug cartels. And even the deaths of innocents were accepted in order to keep the operation going.

‘If Congress and the media start to look at this properly, they will be horrified,’ [former Special Agent in charge of the DEA offfice in El Paso] Sandy Gonzalez says. ‘It needs a special prosecutor, as with the case of Valerie Plame [the CIA agent whose name was leaked to the media when her diplomat husband criticised Bush over Iraq’s missing weapons of mass destruction]. But Valerie is a nice-looking white person and the victims here are brown. Nobody gives a shit.’

Outstanding opinion piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Cynthia Tucker (the editorial page editor): Misguided drug war claims another victim

The investigation may reveal police incompetence, and it may reveal police malfeasance. Unfortunately, however, it is unlikely to point to the root cause of this tragedy — a foolish, decades-long effort to curb illegal drug use through arrests and incarceration. Raging on mindlessly, the war on drugs has caused untold collateral damage — leaving children fatherless, helping to exacerbate the spread of AIDS and filling prisons with people who, with minimal rehabilitation, might be contributing to society rather than draining its resources.

That only begins to tally the destruction, much of it inflicted on black communities. […]

Whatever led Atlanta police to the small, burglar-barred house in a downtrodden Atlanta neighborhood — contradictory claims have been offered about the search warrant — it’s clear that Johnston was no drug dealer. Even if she had been, her crimes would not have justified the intrusive and dangerous tactics police used. Those tactics flow from a failed policy that emphasizes arrests — any arrests, no matter the offender’s stature in the drug-trade hierarchy or the size of the cache of drugs. […]

It’s no wonder, then, that an estimated one-third of young black men are under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system — in prison, on probation or on parole. And once they’ve been tainted with a conviction, they struggle under its stigma for the rest of their lives. They’re less likely to get gainful employment, so they’re less likely to be attractive husbands or responsible fathers.

This country now imprisons its citizens at five to eight times the rate of most other industrialized nations, according to the Sentencing Project. We’ve learned nothing from an earlier period of Prohibition, which produced criminal gangs and an epidemic of lawlessness.[…]

And Kathryn Johnston? She’s not the first victim of our foolish, futile war on drugs. Sadly, she won’t be the last.

It’s a phenomenal piece. And very timely. We need people like Cynthia providing the reminder that the larger policy is implicated in Kathryn Johnston’s death, and not just the police that pulled the trigger or those who ordered the raid.
Update: This piece is even getting picked up in other papers.

This is not good.

The Supreme Court entered into a free-speech dispute Friday involving a high school student suspended over a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner.
The justices accepted an appeal from a school board in Juneau, Alaska, after a federal appeals court allowed a lawsuit by the family of Joseph Frederick to proceed.[…]
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, California [concluded] the school could not show Frederick had disrupted the school’s educational mission by showing a banner off campus.

The fact that the Supreme Court agreed to take such a silly case is troubling, although I don’t know enough about the appeal to know if it’s strictly an attempt to overturn the 9th Circuit free speech decision, or if it has more to do with the right to sue the school and principal over the case.
And of course, it will be high profile, with Kenneth Starr taking on the case for the school board.
We may need to follow this one closely…

The case will test school’s ability to regulate speech on illegal drugs, particularly when it is done off school grounds.

The government would very much like to be able to keep people from telling the truth about drugs. Would schools then be able to prohibit students from participating in groups like Students for Sensible Drug Policy? How many steps away would that be?

“bullet”1 in 32 Americans in jails, on parole

A record 7 million people – or one in every 32 American adults – were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday. […]

“Today’s figures fail to capture incarceration’s impact on the thousands of children left behind by mothers in prison,” Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group supporting criminal justice reform, said in a statement. “Misguided policies that create harsher sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are disproportionately responsible for the increasing rates of women in prisons and jails.”

From 1995 to 2003, inmates in federal prison for drug offenses have accounted for 49 percent of total prison population growth.

“bullet”
The United States has 5% of the world’s population…

… but 25% of the world’s prison population.

We lead the entire world in incarceration rates.

And what the drug war has done to the black community…

• In 1993, under Apartheid, South Africa incarcerated 851 black males per 100,000 population.
• In 2004, under Prohibition, the U.S. incarcerated 4,919 black males per 100,000 population.

For what?