Drug WarRant

A new report was issued this week about drug incarceration in Illinois, and I got a chance to glance at the actual report last night. Online versions of the report should be available soon. Some really powerful statistics. The Chicago Tribune reports:

After two decades of steadily toughening laws, Illinois now puts more people in prison for drug crimes than any state except California, according to a study released Tuesday by Roosevelt University.
The report also found that more people are being incarcerated for possessing narcotics than for selling them and that the state’s prisons hold about five black inmates convicted of drug offenses for every white inmate–one of the largest racial disparities in the country.
The findings cast doubt on the fairness and effectiveness of Illinois’ long campaign against illegal drugs, said Kathleen Kane-Willis, a researcher at Roosevelt’s Institute for Metropolitan Affairs.
“Just locking folks up is not reducing our drug problems, but it’s sure costing us a lot of money,” she said.

And here’s a pretty revealing statistic:

Illinois incarceration by drug offense:

	Sale	Possession
1983	264	180
2002	5,761	6,999

Update: Title of post changed to make more sense.

[Via Hit and Run]
In my lifetime, I have eaten in restaurants in Chicago thousands of times, yet I don’t remember ever seeing foie gras on the menu. The people of the Windy City are great eaters, and they love their deep dish pizza, polish sausage, italian beef, ribs, and a whole lot more. But Chicago foie gras? You won’t find it at the Taste. Oh, I’m sure there are plenty of places that had it — it’s just that most people don’t go to those places.
That didn’t stop the Chicago city council from deciding to prohibit foie gras. That’s right, a law against goose liver. The ban went into effect yesterday, and the results could have been predicted.

CHICAGO, Aug. 22 — On Tuesday, this city’s lawbreakers were serving foie gras.
The illicit substance could be spotted in places it was rarely seen when it was legal: buried in Chicago’s famed deep-dish pizza, in soul food on the South Side, beside beef downtown.
In one of the more unlikely (and opulent) demonstrations of civil disobedience, a handful of restaurants here that never carry foie gras, the fattened livers of ducks and geese, featured it on the very day that Chicago became the first city in the nation to outlaw sale of the delicacy.
“This ban is embarrassing Chicago,” said Grant DePorter of Harry Caray’s Restaurant, which dreamed up an appetizer of pan-seared foie gras and scallops ($14.95) and a Vesuvio-style entree pairing foie gras and tenderloin ($33.95) just to buck the new ordinance. “We really don’t think the City Council should decide what Chicagoans eat. What’s next? Some other city outlaws brussels sprouts? Another outlaws chicken? Another, green beans?” […]
Jerry Stout, a lunchtime diner at Connie’s Pizza, said city leaders should have more pressing matters to worry about than fattened duck liver. Hardly a foie gras connoisseur — he could not remember whether he had ever tasted it before — Mr. Stout, 54, tried it on his pizza and said he would recommend it because of its mild flavor.

Now I’m not going to take a position on animal raising ethics here, but clearly, if people have a problem with foie gras, they can educate and influence people not to eat it. That might actually work. But prohibition? Just look how people responded to the prohibition of something as irrelevant to them as goose liver!
Prohibition not only has disastrous side effects, but… it doesn’t work. Prohibition not only doesn’t work, but… it can be counter-productive.
Prohibition is… a disease, that infects and corrupts everything it touches.

(Not the Frank who lost in Alaska.) Via the Transform Drug Policy Foundation blog, I have discovered the UK’s version of our anti-drug websites. It’s Frank!
Of course, whenever I come to a site like this, the first thing I do is check to see whether they are misleading or lying. So I went right to the Cannabis information page and found

Cannabis, like tobacco, has chemical ‘nasties’ which can cause lung disease and cancer with long term or heavy use.

Lying. But I did find interesting that they had “self control tips” like:

• To reduce the risk of overdoing it, try to space out the days between using cannabis.
• Don’t buy more than you need thinking you will save some for tomorrow – you probably won’t.

You’d never find such advice on a U.S. anti-drug site.
But here’s the best part. They have a new game you can play on the site — Dope Dash. You have to run to avoid hash boy, bong girl, and skunk zombie who are chasing you and trying to blow pot smoke into your face! Make sure you grab a couple of tasty hot dogs while you’re on the run and watch how the pot blurs your vision and affects your coordination. Eventually, you’ll get too stoned and have to retire to the couch (there’s that damned couch again!)
If you last a couple of minutes or more, you get to be on the leader board, where, if you’ve got no better name to use, you could always give your name as DrugWarRant com and send some visitors this way.

Good news, and a bit of a shocker.
Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski, who has waged a one-man war to re-criminalize the personal possession of small amounts of marijuana in that state (despite the Alaska state constitution and Supreme Court rulings)….
… has lost in the primary!
I don’t know anything about the other candidates for the general election there, but having Frank out of there has got to be great news for us.

A timely parody from the DARE Generation

Link

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.