Drug WarRant

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Washington — No nation has suffered as much — or sacrificed more — in the global war on illegal drugs than Colombia, says Karen Tandy, administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

OK, so it wasn’t really an apology. But it should have been.

Interesting new ONDCP ad (via DARE Generation Diary).
Although it uses some stereotypes, the ad is quite refreshing in its approach — particularly because it doesn’t lie (like most of their ads). Plus, I think kids can get into this message without their bullshit detectors going off.

I smoked weed and nobody died
I didn’t get into a car accident
I didn’t O.D. on heroin the next day
Nothing happened.
We sat on Pete’s couch for 11 hours.
Now what’s going to happen on Pete’s couch?
Nothing.
You have a better chance of dying out there in the real world,
Driving hard to the rim, ice-skating with a girl.
No, you wanna keep yourself alive, you go over to Pete’s
and sit on his couch until you’re 86.
Safest thing in the world.
Me. I’ll take my chances out there.
Call me reckless.

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

Busy time right now with first day of classes today back at the university. And I got interviewed again on the DEA exhibit. I’m also working on a few projects, including putting together a challenge to this page at SAMHSA (let me know if you want to help).
So talk amongst yourselves.
“bullet” At Lew Rockwell, some more coverage of the DEA exhibit: DEA Snake Oil
“bullet” Also via Lew Rockwell and Hit and Run. Republicans have almost completely abandoned conservative principles. (How does that affect drug policy reform? Discuss.)
“bullet” The United States of America v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency at The Agitator. What lunacy! Hey, I’ve got an idea! How about The United States of America’s citizens v. The United States Government’s waste of billions of taxpayer dollars?
“bullet” Markie says I should grow up. Should I?

I’ve talked about this video before, but it’s worth showing it again (and for you to view it again), so I’ll accept the challenge, Radley.
I’ve gotten to know a few of the LEAP folks even better in some of our recent efforts with the DEA exhibit, and they’re a really great bunch.
This video should be required viewing for everyone. And if you want to make a difference, show this video to a group of friends, or better yet, arrange to have a LEAP speaker at your Kiwanis or Rotary club.

The U.S. drug prohibitionists are now reeling from a 1-2-3 punch.
1. We start the salvo by hitting the DEA in the Washington Post and elsewhere by tying prohibition with failure and a profitable black market.
2. Afghan opium hits record levels and the drug warriors have no answer.
3. Now there’s Colombia’s Coca Survives U.S. Plan to Uproot It by Juan Forero in the New York Times. Powerful.

The latest chapter in America’s long war on drugs — a six-year, $4.7 billion effort to slash Colombia’s coca crop — has left the price, quality and availability of cocaine on American streets virtually unchanged.
The effort, begun in 2000 and known as Plan Colombia, had a specific goal of halving this country’s coca crop in five years. That has not happened. Instead, drug policy experts say, coca, the essential ingredient for cocaine, has been redistributed to smaller and harder-to-reach plots, adding to the cost and difficulty of the drug war. […]
* As much coca is cultivated today in Colombia as was grown at the start of the large-scale aerial fumigation effort in 2000, according to State Department figures.
* Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, the leading sources of coca and cocaine, produce more than enough cocaine to satisfy world demand, and possibly as much as in the mid-1990’s, the United Nations says.
* In the United States, the government’s tracking over the past quarter century shows that the price of cocaine has tumbled and that purity remains high, signs that the drug is as available as ever. […]
The lingering question is whether America’s drug problem would be worse today had the drug war, nearly 40 years in the making, never been waged. That may be unanswerable.
What is clear is that the war on drugs, the original open-ended war against an elusive and ill-defined enemy, has moved inexorably onward, propelled by decades of mostly unflagging political support on both sides of the Congressional aisle.
Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, echoing other analysts, estimates that the drug war has cost American taxpayers upward of $40 billion annually in recent years, though there is no comprehensive government tally of all its state and federal spending. […]
“The spray program has itself increased the difficulty of carrying out the spray program,” said John Walsh, who tracks American drug policy for the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit research and human rights group. “And as a result it becomes less efficient and it becomes more costly to accomplish the same thing.”
“The bang for the buck that people are expecting hasn’t materialized,” he added.

This is a major article in the Times and has to be demoralizing to the drug warriors.
And did you notice? The question was asked.
It was fleeting and in passing and wasn’t discussed, but it was asked.

The lingering question is whether America’s drug problem would be worse today had the drug war, nearly 40 years in the making, never been waged. That may be unanswerable.

Several years ago, a paragraph like that in a major media outlet would be unthinkable. Actually questioning whether the entire decades long drug war, with all the costs in dollars and lives, may have been… for nothing!
Not just in balance, but in its totality.
And the unspoken implication of that question is that if you can think that, what’s to stop you from wondering if the drug problem might have been less had the drug war never been waged?
This is big stuff. Who knows? Before long, this society might actually reach the point where it is acceptable to mention alternatives to the drug war.
Won’t that be something.
Update: This article in the New York Times was also published in dozens of other papers around the country at the same time, giving it some real visibility. And then UPI reported briefly on the topic with the headline of their article: Report: U.S. coca erradication has failed. Ouch. I can’t wait to see that one enlarged to poster size and presented on the floor of Congress the next time Colombian eradication funding comes up for a vote.

A nice feature in today’s Drug War Chronicle:
SSDP, Drug War Rant Blog Score Media Hit With Attack on DEA Drug-Terror Exhibit.

For those who can’t get enough of the Museum of Science and Industry saga and have nothing better to do — here’s a nice long letter (pdf) I wrote to the legal counsel of the Chicago Park District (which owns and regulates the museum) on Tuesday.
I’m taking bets in comments on how soon they respond and the essence of their response.

I’ve never gone the advertising route on this site, so my first impulse was to discard the email I got today. But then I thought about it and realized I kind of liked the idea. Product placement on Drug WarRant!
You see, Kasora (a seller of special reserve teas) contacted me and said if I mentioned them on my blog, they’d send me a gift.
Now if it was one of those spam products, I wouldn’t even consider it, but as I started looking at the Darjeeling Makaibari Silver Tips, Yin Hao Silver Tips Reserve, and the Stone Blossom Bi Luo Chun on Kasora’s site, I got really interested. Even though I’m primarily a coffee drinker, I’ve always loved good tea, and this stuff looks like the sinsemilla of tea.
And Kasora did say they’d send me a gift (but they didn’t say what — I hope it’s tea.)
Now if I could get some of the companies that sell soft hemp seeds and hemp bars to do the same thing…

Afghan opium cultivation hits a record

Opium cultivation in Afghanistan has hit record levels — up by more than 40 percent from 2005 — despite hundreds of millions in counternarcotics money, Western officials told The Associated Press. […]
Gen. Khodaidad, a top official at the ministry, said virtually all cultivated land in Helmand — including government-owned land — has been planted with opium poppies.

Wait, isn’t the drug-war-fighting-leader-of-the-world United States supposed to be in charge over there? I’m sure of it. I remember — At least, I think I remember… I’m pretty sure we dropped bombs and stuff and we sent troops and we nailed Osama and al Qaeda and eliminated the Taliban, or something, and we were greeted as liberators and the grateful people planted coffee and bananas. Or did I dream that?
In actuality, the United States met an enemy it can’t defeat. No amount of might wielded by the Pentagon can destroy it. No bombs, no planes, no troops can win against this enemy.
No, I’m not talking about Al Qaeda. I’m talking about the economic law of supply and demand.
The drug warriors keep acting like they can defy economic laws — that their pathetic little attempts to eradicate, prohibit, seize and imprison the world will somehow create an alternate universe, where people don’t do drugs and farmers don’t care about growing crops that will actually feed their family, and criminals turn down the opportunity to become fabulously rich.
And they can’t understand why it doesn’t work.
Rumsfeld is trying to deny responsibility for Afghanistan, and Walters is just plain stupid:

But Mr Walters today said that eradicating the opium crop was the only way for Afghanistan to achieve lasting peace.

Prohibition is a delusion implemented by morons.

“bullet” Reefer Gladness, in which Philadelphia City Paper’s Brian Hickey discovers (and falls in love with) Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

I realized this LEAP thing can’t be as easily dismissed as a bunch of hacky-sack-circling, NORML-pamphlet-pushing hippies from Swarthmore. By day’s end, one former judge and two former cops (all local) shared the same convincing message: It’s time to cut our mounting losses and run from the failed War on Drugs.

He’s right, of course. So go to LEAP’s site and find out how you can get them invited to speak to your local rotary club.
“bullet” Club Pot Med by Philip Dawdy in the Seattle Weekly is a fascinating exploration of the challenges of medical marijuana in a confusing and undefined legal structure.

The law has driven the supply system underground, pot patients are getting busted, and some cops, prosecutors, and judges just don’t get it.

Of course, there’s a real workable answer to all of this confusion. Legalize. Just like they’re trying to do in Nevada (give them a hand) — an effort which has gained some real conservative support