Drug WarRant

You may have already seen this one by now, but I couldn’t resist…

Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy — almost impenetrable forests of marijuana plants 10 feet tall.
General Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defense staff, said Thursday that Taliban fighters were using the forests as cover. In response, the crew of at least one armored car had camouflaged their vehicle with marijuana.
“The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It’s very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices. … And as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don’t dodge in and out of those marijuana forests,” he said in a speech in Ottawa, Canada.
“We tried burning them with white phosphorous — it didn’t work. We tried burning them with diesel — it didn’t work. The plants are so full of water right now … that we simply couldn’t burn them,” he said.
Even successful incineration had its drawbacks.
“A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those [forests] did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action,” Hiller said dryly.
One soldier told him later: “Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I’d say ‘That damn marijuana’.”

Update: [Photo added] As Hope notes in comments, we’re really talking about a hemp field here.

“bullet” At the Drug War Chronicle, in Pinellas County, Florida, it is now illegal to sell something that you reasonably should know would be used for consuming drugs.
“bullet” Interesting article on Dutch coffee shops at AlterNet.
“bullet” Ed Rosenthal has got to do it all over again. Fed Jury Slaps Guru of Ganja With New Pot Charges
“bullet” An editorial in South Dakota: Medical Marijuana Measure Should Pass

At Regulate Marijuana:

I showed up at the TV studio this morning and was greeted by dozens of secret service agents. The drug czar is traveling with a huge security detail, clearly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money just to be here. The interview went very well. Predictably, Walters made some outrageous statements about Question 7. And unbelievably, he announced on NBC this morning that he’s here in Nevada to hand out taxpayer dollars to local opposition groups because they can’t raise enough money on their own to put up TV ads opposing Question 7. This is an outrageous abuse of taxpayer funds by a federal agency. How do you like knowing that your tax dollars are going toward funding groups who oppose passing Question 7?

And, of course, the Drug Czar is giving away money in Colorado as well (the other state with a major marijuana legalization initiative).
I’m calling up my Senator’s office and asking why my federal tax dollars are being used to interfere with a local election. If the federal government has no more important financial needs than that, can I please have those dollars back?
Time to de-fund the Drug Czar.

The Illinois State University Daily Vidette has quoted me two days in a row now.

1. An article about M.A.S.H./S.S.D.P — the student group for which I am faculty advisor. (Formerly Mobilizing Activists and Students for Hemp, but transitioning into an SSDP chapter)
2. An article about marijuana’s potential to help with Alzheimer’s.

I thought it would be a good idea to do a little follow-up on my earlier post today. As has been noted, I was pretty harsh about an article that was actually suggesting reducing the number of incarcerated drug offenders by 50%. Shouldn’t I be celebrating?
Well certainly, that would be incredible. And if I heard something like that from a politician, I’d be doing a happy dance — despite the fact that I would consider it only a partial step toward what needs to be done to reform drug policy.
The problem is that this is, once again, a “scholarly” piece from extremely intelligent, extremely well-informed academicians whose recommendations are considered to carry a certain weight by policy-makers. And once again, these “experts” have told only part of the story. When they do this, they make both the public and policy-makers operate from a position of, ultimately, ignorance. And this is traitorous to academic scholarship and the pursuit of knowledge (something I value and understand to a small degree since I work in a university).
This isn’t just one article. The willful absence of any mention of the “ending prohibition” option from academic discussions of drug policy is typical and rampant.
Take a look at other major works by Jonathan P. Caulkins and Peter Reuter. The first thing that comes to mind is their outstanding work in AEI’s “Are We Losing the War on Drugs?
An Analytic Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy” (David Boyum and Peter Reuter) and RAND’s “How Goes the ‘War on Drugs’?
An Assessment of U.S. Drug Problems and Policy” (Jonathan P. Caulkins, Peter H. Reuter, Martin Y. Iguchi and James Chiesa) — both of which I talked about here. At the time, despite the fantastic information and powerful indictments of current policy contained in those reports, I noted:

In both cases, the studies are grossly flawed in that they operate under the assumption, for the purposes of the study, that prohibition can be the only model. Therefore they almost completely ignore:

• Side-effects of prohibition itself such as prohibition-fueled violence
• The impact of other potential models, such as legalization and regulation, on their recommendations.

Or consider Mark Kleiman’s CRS Report for Congress: Illicit Drugs and the Terrorist Threat: Causal Links and Implications for Domestic Drug Control Policy (pdf) — a report that Kleiman felt was strong: “I was somewhat better-pleased with the product than I am with my average product.”
In this report, after showing how drug trafficking can connect to terrorism (but without ever mentioning the contribution of prohibition to that connection), he goes on to (as all the academicians do so well) properly trash the current drug war efforts. He points out that all three of the conventional wisdom approaches to drug policy — increasing price, shrinking demand, reducing availability — have failed to actually… uh… work. But of course, again no mention of other options such as ending prohibition. His conclusion?

…the institutions of drug abuse control would be wise to factor the impact of their activities on the terrorist threat into their decision-making. Such a focus could
involve employing enforcement to reduce the opportunities that drug trafficking
provides to terrorist groups, and focusing the demand control effort more on the
issue of hard-core user-offenders.

In other words, just modify the failed approach slightly. No need to consider other options. And this is his report to Congress!
Why do they do this? It’s not like they’re unaware of the realities. All of them have written enough to show that they are extraordinarily knowledgeable. And their academic credentials are outstanding.

Jonathan P. Caulkins is a professor of public policy and operations research at Carnegie-Mellon University’s Qatar Campus and Heinz School of Public Policy and Management. Peter Reuter is a professor in the School of Public Policy and Department of Criminology, the University of Maryland, and codirector of RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center.

Well, as some commenters have noted in the previous post, researchers are often thinking about who will fund them, and writing things that don’t agree with funders can keep you from getting paid. That may, unfortunately, be true, and if it’s simply it’s a matter of what overall topics you research, then I can accept that. However, avoiding reporting a valid answer to the question of your research simply to not offend funders is dishonest scholarship. Pure and simple.
Imagine, for example, that I was a medical researcher considering the question: “How can people avoid getting lung cancer?” but was unwilling to include quitting cigarettes as an option in my paper to avoid pissing off my tobacco company patrons. Dishonest scholarship, as is scholarship that considers the question of drug policy and notes prohibition’s failures without even bringing the drug policy option of ending prohibition.
Of course, I don’t know for sure the actual reasons behind the writing of these individuals. I suspect Kleiman’s reasons go beyond funding and into a prejudice against the notion of legalization (that, based on some of his earlier statements, may include a personal animus against some of early legalization personalities). Caulkins and Reuter? Keeping sponsors happy, I suppose. Although I bet they’d tell you that it’s more to do with political realities — that there’s no point bringing up options that people are unwilling to consider politically.
And yet, these academicians have a great opportunity to lead the way in actual valuable drug policy recommendations, and not just in drug policy criticism. Sure, it can be scary out on the political edge, but that’s no reason to stop knowledge.
The motto of my university is “Gladly we learn and teach.” Maybe that’s easier for me because I’m not dependent on research grants or tenure. I just write a blog.

Via Mark Kleiman, comes this piece at Issues in Science and Technology Online: Reorienting U.S. DrugPolicy, by Jonathan P. Caulkins and Peter Reuter.
The article is packed with useful and/or interesting research and conjecture as the authors conclude that “money can be saved and justice improved by simply cutting in half the number of people locked up for drug offenses.” The problem with the piece is less with what they include (although there are some rather gross generalizations), as with what they completely ignore.
In a detailed 4,000+ word “academic” piece about drug policy, that dissects decades of policy and analyzes supply reduction, demand reduction and even coerced abstinence, what is pointedly left out is astonishing:

1. The difference between use and abuse is completely ignored (the words are used as if they mean the same thing and no indication is given that responsible use of any illicit drugs is even possible)
2. The negative consequences (other than incarceration and its financial costs) connected with prohibition are not mentioned at all (while negative consequences of drug use/abuse are mentioned often). The failure of drug policy to impact drug use/abuse is mentioned often. But black markets? Corruption? Fueling criminal enterprises? Nothing.
3. There is no mention of legalization or any notion that an alternative to prohibition exists.

These are not trivial items. To ignore these elements in an “academic” essay is like writing a piece about mathematics and pretending that there are no odd numbers.
If this was a single example of such an approach used in the incestuous clique of self-proclaimed academic drug policy experts, I would call it shoddy scholarship. But it’s not. It’s typical. These folks know that they’re leaving out critical elements. (We’ve told them often enough.) And that, in my mind, makes it dishonest scholarship.

Remember Pete’s Couch? The new ad from the Drug Czar? The one that said all that happened when someone smoked pot was that they spent 11 hours on Pete’s couch?
At the time, I said…

Of course, it does force the obvious question, “Why are we locking people up for doing this?”

Well, it looks like the Drug Czar is going to be asked that question. Big time.
Via Philip Smith at StoptheDrugWar,org

Marijuana Initiative Campaign to Unveil Billboard Highlighting Drug Czar’s Ad Calling Marijuana Use the “Safest Thing in the World”
Amendment 44 proponents welcome the Drug Czar to town with hope that he will continue valuable education campaign
Amendment 44 proponents to hold events in Colorado Springs (9:30 a.m.) and Denver (12:30 p.m.) to coincide with Drug Czar’s visit.

This is happening tomorrow. Sounds like fun!

The drug war that we have created and enhanced through our legislators has a horrible and continual corrupting effect on those we depend on for public safety — our police forces. That alone should be reason to end the war.
Now some will say: “Wait a minute — cops are corrupt or they aren’t. The drug war didn’t make them corrupt.”
That’s fine if you live in a black and white world. But most people live in a gray-scale world. In the real world, there are a lot of people who are good in many ways, but subject to temptations and pressures.
I teach Theatre Management, and one of the things I talk about is systems of control for ticket offices. These systems involve a variety of means of being able to verify your sales income (particularly when cash is involved), including ticket stubs or electronic records, and the rotating two-person rule (it’s harder to steal if you have to involve someone else that you may not know well). One of the things I’ve learned is that these systems can actually be quite comforting to the employees. If you’re getting paid very little and you’re working with thousands of dollars of cash each day and there’s no system in place that would alert someone and get you in trouble if some of it went missing… Well, even an honest person is bound to hear that nagging tempting voice in their head. They may not act on it, but it’s going to bug them.
This temptation increases ten-fold for police officers, partly because they’re fighting a “war” and therefore the people they steal from are the “enemy.”
This article in the Dallas News about cops going to prison, includes this illuminating story…

At 23, and fresh out of the Dallas Police academy, Joe Smith had never broken the law. He became a cop to fight criminals not turn into one, he says. He couldn’t imagine ending up behind bars.
“I had a strong sense of right and wrong,” he says. But “the lines become gray when you’re fighting a war. That’s what it is — drug war.”
Now 34 and with prison behind him for stealing more than $20,000, Mr. Smith says his crime “really wasn’t about the money.” He turned most of it in when he confessed.
He blames a charismatic partner and disillusionment with the criminal justice system for his downfall.
“It didn’t happen overnight,” he says. “It happened gradually over the course of a year.”
Mr. Smith says he began taking money at the urging of his partner, who also went to prison. If they seized $100,000 in a drug arrest, the lion’s share went to the evidence room — the rest into their pockets, with no one the wiser and the drug dealer still facing charges.

This is a very common type of story. So common, that Law Enforcement Against Prohibition’s Captain Peter Christ uses something remarkably similar to talk about the most common way that police officers are drawn into corruption…

Now you came into this thing a bright eyed, shiny young recruit… You’re a police officer four or five years — you see the wasted energy you spend on this drug war. And now you’re standing in a motel room where a drug arrest has just been made. Laying on the bed is a hundred and some thousand dollars which hasn’t been counted yet in cash… In your back pocket is a thirty-eight hundred dollar bill from the plumber that you didn’t know how you were going to pay… And, it doesn’t make any difference anyway. And you take your first taste. And then you’re gone.

As long as we continue this failed prohibition that puts obscene amounts of cash profits into the hands of criminals, we will also have a police force that is constantly tempted into corruption.
And while most cops are not corrupt, the drug war system that exists puts us in a position where the people do not have confidence in the integrity of those whose purpose is to protect and serve.

Nice editorial in the Anniston Star blasts the drug czar and his useless advertising that has been shown to actually encourage drug use.

A war on drugs that creates more drug users.
A war on terror that creates more terrorists.
If, as one wag put it, we could get the government to declare war on the ivory-billed woodpecker, we could bring the bird back from the edge of extinction.

A rather surprising article in the Connecticut Post today: Regulating heroin trade suggested. What’s surprising is that a media source in the U.S. actually has the guts to discuss the subject. (I wonder if Cliff Thornton’s run in that state has opened some discussion topics?)
The article is a well-written piece about former drug warrior, now attorney, Sylvester Salcedo’s proposal to have Bridgeport administer heroin to addicts. Go and read it — it’s an article that I think will connect with people who would normally block out such arguments.
At the close of the story, a local resident asks why the paper is taking pictures of Salcedo, and they explain his proposal to her…

“Now let me get this straight: What you are telling me is that they’d give out heroin at the community center and make sure people took their fix there, nothing left over?” she asks.
Salcedo nods and waits for her reaction. McBride, who appears to be at least a half-foot taller than Salcedo, stares him down for a moment, trying to figure out whether he is serious.
“You know, this idea of yours is kind of out there,” McBride says, her face breaking into a smile that reveals a few missing teeth. “But, hey, like sometimes you got to think outside of the box.”

Related: Via Blog ReLoad — In the five years since Sydney Australia’s heroin safe injection site opened (a different kind of program from the one discussed above), heroin deaths in the state have dropped dramatically.
Update: This might be an appropriate time to note the basic differences between safe injection sites and heroin maintenance programs.
Safe injection sites — like the program in Sydney (and also in Vancouver in North America) — are harm reduction programs. Essentially heroin users are provided a safe, monitored, and controlled environment to inject heroin that they have purchased elsewhere. This dramatically reduces blood born diseases, overdoses, etc. Think greatly enhanced needle exchange programs.
Heroin maintenance programs — like the one started in Switzerland in 1994 — have one major difference. While they also provide a safe, monitored, and controlled environment, they actually dispense the heroin to those already addicted to it. The big advantage is that it drives the drug dealer out of the heroin addiction business (why get someone addicted to your product if they’ll then be able to get their fix for free at the community center?)