Drug WarRant

I’m only here for a couple of days and the conference is packed with such wonderful events, that I hadn’t really dealt in any coherent way with the fact that I’m in our nation’s capital (and I haven’t visited for about 15 years.
Quite frankly, I wasn’t very happy about being here. I’ve had a pretty sour view of politics and our nation’s “leaders.” And my first night here, I ate at a restaurant filled with pissant preppy political popinjays. I sat there quietly and listened to them talk — and to them, Washington was simply a big game of Monopoly, and the country was just a bunch of colored squares. I can’t imagine that they even care about drug war victims, or what mandatory minimums do to a community.
But late tonight I put my cynicism aside and took a little walk. From the hotel, I walked to the Capitol and then through the Mall to the Washington Monument. Past the fountains and the reflecting pool and up the stairs to Abe Lincoln’s Memorial.
I had to block the added security measures and construction from my mind, but very soon I started to feel the beauty and power. There was a presence. And I realized that the idiot politicians in office are ephemeral. They don’t have the power to destroy such historical power and significance.
And there was hope.

The final plenary session of the day.
Eric Sterling, Criminal Justice Policy Foundation

Many reformers have a problem with the word “decriminalization.” However, from his perspective, the definition of decriminalization has potentially undergone some change.
Original: Decriminalization means a minor sanction, users won’t be punished by we’ll still go after the traffickers. That doesn’t make sense.
However, new thought:
Using the word “legalization” puts the burden on the legalizer to define how that will be accomplished.
But new version of “decriminalization” puts burden of proof on the status quo to answer: Why should the state punish drug use? What in the conduct of drug users merits punishment?

Interesting point.

Drug use is a right. It’s hard to imagine anything more intimate than the control of our own neurotransmitters. …
If we want to make a big difference, we need to convince business that drug prohibition hurts their bottom line.

His proposals for ‘after prohibition’:

• Marijuana — growing license similar to getting a hunting license.
• Psychedelics — Psychadelic trip leaders who are insured and licensed professionals
• Other drugs — a Consulting Pharmacist (just like getting advice from a stockbroker) who would advise people on the effects, interactions with other things you might be doing. Might advise you to use a different drug based on what you want to do.
• Treatment on demand. You should be able to get treatment as easily as ordering a pizza.
• Parents and teachers should be able to tell you the truth.
• There will be challenges — we cannot say for certain what the market will look like, so we need to be able to respond and change.

Marsha Rosenbaum, Drug Policy Alliance
The drug prevention industry is impossible to penetrate. It’s a depressing situation. After all the proof, DARE is still out there.
Marsha and DPA has worked on trying to reach parents and get them the real information. That has been successful.
Marsha wrote this letter to her son when he entered High School eight years ago. She reported that two days ago, her son wrote a letter to her about how he took her advice…
It’s a beautiful letter and I hope you’ll get a chance to read it sometime. No way I could type fast enough to get it to you now. I just needed to listen. It’s a powerful letter that vindicates her initial letter to him.
Here’s a couple of pamphlets that you might want to get:

• Safety First: A Reality-Based Approach to Teens, Drugs, and Drug Education
• Beyond Zero Tolerance

Marsha then showed a video upFront: A Reality-Based Approach to Drug Education about a program at Oakland High School — a fact-based/not fear-based program with real information. What a notion! (Also see UpFrontPrograms.org.)
Nick Gillespie, Reason Magazine

“Drug war screws with everything it touches and it touches everything.”
Why are kids being taken away from math and science to be talked to about drugs at all?
We need to create a post-prohibitionist mindset.
For 50 years, everything in America was geared and oriented to the cold war. From the olympics to chess. America became like the Soviet Union to defeat it.
Today, the prohibitionist mindset infuses everything in our lives Tour de France, baseball, foreign policy, education, … You can’t even take a piss in this country without being told “Just say No to drugs” at the bottom of the urinal.

His approach:

Smarter to regulate all drugs (including prescription drugs) something like beer and alcohol.
We need to move to a post-prohibitionist mindset.
We need to fight the drug war like the allies fought World War II. Everywhere and all the time. We need to be making moral, fiscal and every other argument.
We need to show the cost benefit ratio, including the fact that physical pleasure needs to be added to the calculation.
We have prisons dotting this country like concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
It would be hard to swing a dead bratwurst without hitting some kind of camp. And its true hear now with prisons and drug offenders.
We need to publicize the fact that the drug war is being fought at all times in all corners. And the drug war may be the forever war, because it’s a basic human impulse to alter your consciousness. Drugs are one of the tools of choice in that.
We’ll have to go beyond the cost-benefit ration analysis and move beyond that. Those of us who use drugs have to fundamentally alter the way we talk about drugs. Individuals have more power to remake themselves than ever before in human history.
It’s easier to be gay today than it was in 1940, 1950, 1960, etc. The same thing will be true with being a drug user.
We need to start re-conceiving the idea of drugs — collapse the arbitrary differences — as one tool toward becoming what we want to become. Drugs are like exercise and fashion and surgery….
We will need to stop imbuing inanimate objects with super-human powers.
The end of the war starts in our head.
We must take seriously the credo of the Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as Gods and we might as well get good at it.”

Rachel Kurtz, King County Bar Association
She talked about the wonderful work that KCBA has done. See their reports at King County Bar Association, including Effective Drug Control: Toward a New Legal Framework
We need to come up with even more alternatives to the drug war — She encouraged students to do more research in this area.

Scott Morgan (FlexYourRights), Radley Balko (Agitator and Reason), Nick Gillespie (Reason), Pete Guither (DrugWarRant)
Gee, I wonder if Mark Kleiman is going to want a picture with me?
[Update: He shook my hand, but was clearly not pleased to meet me, and laid in to me pretty severely for my accusations regarding his scholarship. When I said I have admired his critiques of prohibition, but have still been waiting for him to articulate his objections to legalization, he said that I should look at his paper in 1992 in Daedalus. So I have tracked it down and ordered a copy — I promised him that I would read it and respond and I will do so as soon as I get it.]

The mid-day plenary featured Bill Press (MSNBC), Clarence Page (Chicago Tribune) and was moderated by Ryan Grim (Capitol Leader and Slate.com).
Clarence Page: The #1 sin in journalism is being inaccurate. The #2 sin is being dull. He defends the fact that the press often treats drugs and the drug war as a funny thing on that basis.
Bill Press thinks reporters are afraid to talk about drugs, partly because they are afraid they’ll lose their jobs or reveal to much about their past. He talked about his own conversion…

I discovered I’m a conservative — I was opposed to big government programs that wasted a lot of taxpayer dollars and didn’t accomplish anything.

Clarence Page was interested in Kris Krane’s comment about the fact that the media reports on “drug-related” crime and not “prohibition-related” crime. I think he realized that there was a framing issue in the media. I get the impression that Page is not with us fully, but dipping his toes in the water. He wants a change, but isn’t sure how much, nor has he fully accommodated in his mind all the aspects of drug policy reform.
Bill Press called Bob Novak “The Prince of Darkness”
Bill Press (back to framing): Gingrich, during the Republican takeover, came up with lists of words to use to frame the issue. He mentioned some good words that we use:

• Reform
• Fiscal Responsibility
• Decriminalization (as opposed to “legalization”)
• State’s Rights

Both said that medical marijuana is the right approach to softening public opinion. So is the financial aid issue that SSDP has been pursuing. Both seemed to think that the incremental approach is the only way that it’ll work.
Reach out, inform, and educate the media. Don’t just complain about them. Make your case. Contact them. Meet with editorial boards. It’s easier if you’re a group, but it’s essential.
Ryan Grim gave props to Tom Angell of SSDP for his persistence in getting press releases out and keeping contact with the media. (Notes that it’s not just about the release, but the follow-up, and also getting some exclusivity.) Create personal interaction with the media.
Clarence Page: “If we’re going to have a Drug Czar who’s going to be dishonest, then there’s no point in having a Drug Czar.”

Today’s activities are underway at the Students for Sensible Drug Policy conference. I’m going to try to live blog in sections throughout the weekend, so bear with me if some of this is sketchy or paraphrased. It’s all happening too fast to do much editing and re-writes!
Before the start of the opening session, I had the opportunity to meet Howard Woolridge of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. What a ball of fire! You may have heard of his horseback rides across the country wearing a T-shirt saying “Cops Say Legalize Drugs — Ask Me Why.” He’s great fun to talk with and is wonderfully involved in
Opening plenary session began with a very stirring charge by SSDP Executive Director Kris Krane, who established the SSDP’s student activism as the anti-war movement of this generation, and rightly mentioned the drug war as being the underlying source of everything else from the Patriot Act to other abuses in the war on terror.
The opening panel included Steph Sherer, Executive Director, Americans for Safe Access,
Allen St. Pierre, Executive Director, National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and Ethan Nadelmann, Founder, Drug Policy Alliance.
All were great — Ethan gave a very powerful speech, including defining the movement (paraphrased)

We care about racial justice, about the constitution, about the U.S. being a responsible member of the world, about not leading the world in incarceration. We are the people who love drugs, who hate drugs and who don’t give a damn about drugs, but we all believe that the war on drugs is not the way to deal with drugs.

Ethan talked about how he sees that the war on drugs is morphing — drug testing, urine testing, air testing, room testing, GPS bracelets — toward a total surveillance society. With prison costs, instead of locking them up, he suggested that we’ll be using surveillance — getting people accustomed to losing little bits of freedom.
The beginnings of a totalitarian society.
He talked about the recent Zogby survery that found 45% of Americans open to the possibility of banning cigarettes, and the disturbing fact that the majority of young people agreed (more than fundamentalists). He talked about how the younger generation has to be smart and not become the creators of the next prohibition movement.

We want policy that is dealing with all substances with maturity and wisdom, not prohibition and idiocy.

Rob Kampia couldn’t be there, Aaron Houston, Director of Government Relations, with the Marijuana Policy Project, gave a updates, including the notion that the Hinchey Amendment is in closer reach after the last election.

I found this article amusing: Home Office chided over ‘hairy chest’ policy

A LEADING chief constable attacked the Government’s “hairy chest” approach to law and order yesterday after Tony Blair announced a series of Home Office measures to tackle crime.
Terry Grange criticised the constant introduction of new legislation which, he said, was done without planned thinking and was based largely on the need to respond to critics.

Boy, if that isn’t a description of politicians’ approach to crime legislation in general!
Of course, you might as well call it the “My dick is bigger than yours” approach, which is immediately countered by “No, I’ve got a big one, too.” It’s impossible to be smart on drugs or crime when the brain has been shut off and the members of Congress are busy comparing… members.

This is only a preliminary ruling, a California Superior Court Judge has slapped down three counties that were trying to back out of medical marijuana. San Diego, San Bernardino and Merced counties were trying to buck the voters and claim that they didn’t have to allow medical marijuana because the state law conflicted with federal law.
The preliminary ruling indicated that the state law could coexist with the federal prohibition, which means that the counties must obey the state law.

I always enjoy reading his letters. Here’s one today in the Oregon Statesman Journal.

We’re not doing the Colombian people any favors by funding civil war. Nor are Americans being protected from drugs.
Destroy the Colombian coca crop and production will boom in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador.
Destroy every last plant in South America and domestic methamphetamine production will increase to meet the demand for cocaine-like drugs.
The self-professed champions of the free market in Congress are seemingly incapable of applying basic economic principles to drug policy. Instead of waging a futile supply-side drug war abroad, we should be funding cost-effective drug treatment here at home. [emphasis added]

James Kilpatrick has an OpEd on the Supreme Court case of Florida v. Rabb. This should be an interesting 4th Amendment case — simply boils down to whether the state can use a dog to sniff the outside of your house and based on what the dog has to say, then search your house.
This case will give the Supremes a chance to show whether they really believe in the sanctity of the home as they play off cases like Kyllo (can’t use heat imaging devices on homes) with cases like Caballes (dog sniff OK on cars even without other suspicion). The court has already pretty much given up on car ownership rights — we’ll have to see what happens with your home.
A loss on this one would be devastating — The police would be able to take a dog (and note that drug-sniffing dogs are not particularly reliable in their results) to any home and get it to “point,” and you’d be subject to a full search of your home.

I’m off to Washington, DC to the SSDP conference, and I’ll be blogging from there as I get a chance. Just look at this amazing line-up — I’m going to have some really tough choices to make in the break-out sessions.
Update: Of course, the first step will be to actually get a working plane out of here. I’m getting to know the Bloomington, Illinois airport a little more than I planned.