Drug WarRant

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.

Living on West Market Street in Bloomington, Illinois, I’m used to seeing a lot of traffic stops. I don’t know if I saw this one, but it’s nice to know that there’s a judge in my area who believes that the Fourth Amendment still is important.

[redacted], was arrested following a traffic stop Feb. 8 on West Market Street. Court records say [redacted] car did not have a functioning light over the rear license plate.
After stopping him, Bloomington police patted him down and found 4.6 grams of marijuana in a plastic bag in one of his pockets, according to court documents. A subsequent search found 10 pounds of marijuana in the trunk of his car.
He was charged with unlawful possession of marijuana and unlawful possession of marijuana with intent to deliver the drug, according to court documents.
“The judge found that the officers discovered the drugs following a search, which was not justified,” said Assistant Public Defender Brian McEldowney. “They did a pat-down search, and the judge found there was no basis for that.”

Of course, such a story is always bound to bring out commenters who complain about a criminal getting off on a technicality, but as always they miss the point — this is about the rule of law, about our rights as Americans, as free citizens, not about technicalities.

“bullet” Also at the Drug Czar’s “blog,” comes this bit of Thanksgiving advice

The good news is that the holiday season often provides us with quality family time and opportunities to talk to young people about the dangers of drugs.

I agree! And they even say: “Give honest answers.” Absolutely! So I’d pass on the false information in their links.
Instead, try Safety First: A Reality-Based Approach to Teens, Drugs, and Drug Education
“bullet” And kids — Thanksgiving is also a good time to educate your parents on the dangers of the drug war. Take a moment to sit down with them and share what you’ve learned. Tell them that drug policy reform is about getting the profits out of the black market and putting criminals out of work. Tell them that prohibition does not stop drug use, but instead fosters violence. Tell them that their tax dollars are going toward making the U.S. the most-incarcerated country on the planet (with 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prison population). And that prohibition does absolutely nothing to help those with drug problems. Tell them that cops and religious leaders want a change, too.
And you older kids… you know who you are… the ones who are grown up and still won’t talk to their parents and friends about the drug war… Stop being afraid to talk about it!
“bullet” The rest of you — if you’re one of the lucky ones without a family member in jail for hurting nobody, take a moment to be thankful. And read a thanksgiving story from a few years ago.

So is the staff of the ONDCP daft, stupid, or just plain incompetent?
How else do you explain the fact that

1. On Wednesday, the Drug Czar’s “blog” brags that…
2. On Monday, the Drug Czar presented a check for $1.1 million to the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program in the Atlanta area, where
3. On Tuesday, a drug raid ended with a 92-year-old lady shot to death, about which everyone is talking.

Do they not have the capability of… literacy?

It just never stops…

ATLANTA — Three Atlanta police officers were shot and wounded and an elderly woman killed at a house in northwest Atlanta Tuesday night.

The woman, who relatives say was 92-years-old, opened fire on the officers from the narcotics division at a house at 933 Neal Street, according to officials. Authorities say they received a tip of drug activity taking place at the home and officers were headed to the house with a search warrant.

Relatives identified the elderly woman as Katherine Johnston.

The woman’s niece, Sarah Dozier, says that she bought her aunt a gun to protect herself and that her aunt had a permit for the gun. Relatives believe Johnston was frightened by the officers and opened fire.

“They kicked her door down talking about drugs, there’s no drugs in that house. And they realize now, they’ve got the wrong house,” Dozier said. “I’m mad as hell.” Officials say they had the correct house and that the warrant they had was legal.

No politicians were harmed in the gunfire.

More here and here, and here, and a discussion here.

Update: More at TalkLeft, and Radley caught the Press Conference.