Drug WarRant

Rush Limbaugh was detained at Palm Beach International Airport for having drugs without a valid prescription.
The drug?
Viagra.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has declared today “International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking.” And they’re doing it with the theme “Drugs are Not Child’s Play,” which ranks in terms of pure exploitive hype right alongside National Lampoon’s Buy This [Magazine] or We’ll Shoot This Dog — just not as funny.

UNODC has selected “drugs are not child’s play” as the theme of its 2006 international campaign, in an effort to increase public awareness about the destructive power of drugs and society’s responsibility to care for the well-being of children. The latest estimates indicate that 200 million people, or 5 per cent of the global population age 15-64, have consumed illicit drugs at least once in the last 12 months. But what about kids? What about children (aged 4 to 10)?
Although they are seldom the object of national and international studies, children of all ages are affected by drug abuse and illicit trafficking. Street children, working and living in dire conditions, are vulnerable, as are boys and girls whose family members are buying or selling illicit substances. These kids are exposed not only to bad examples but also to violent behaviour associated to drug abuse. In some instances, children have lost their parents to this scourge and are now cared for by uncles, aunts or grandparents. At school, the situation may not be any better. Teenagers and peers may be pressuring kids to smoke cigarrettes and drink alcohol, at first, and then to try marihuana. Other types of drugs may follow.
UNODC’s anti-drugs campaign urges adults to protect children.

And so we should. One of the first and most important steps would be to dismantle the UNODC. It is, after all, the policies promoted by the UNODC that makes trafficking profitable and increases the danger to children.

Ever have one of those days when you just feel like you’re dealing with jerks and idiots all day? Today’s one of them. Starting out with Anthony Maria Costa and John Walters, and now… Robert Novak (or as John Stewart liked to call him: “Douchebag for Liberty”)
Novak has a particularly ugly, false, and partisan column today in the Chicago Sun Times: Dems Balk At Support For Colombia’s Drug War.
He starts with a profile of our ‘heroic’ drug war efforts in Colombia…

MARIQUITA, Colombia — At the Colombian National Police base here last Wednesday morning, a small air fleet took off. Hours earlier, a Fairchild Metroliner intelligence plane scouted poppy fields in the jungles 40 miles northward. Now several well-armed Huey helicopters embarked. They were followed by three Turbo fixed-wing aircraft spraying the fields to eradicate plants producing narcotics destined for U.S. and European users. Taking off last to complete the day’s operation was a Blackhawk helicopter, fulfilling “search and rescue” requirements.
Such hazardous operations — subject to ground fire from narco-guerrillas — take place in the Colombian Andes every day, amid disapproval from Western European government officials, Democrats in the U.S. Congress and critics inside Colombia. [emphasis added]

And what reason do these critics have for not providing the drug warriors with everything they desire?

“It is the campaign, all over the world, of the drug traffickers to claim there is environmental damage [resulting from aerial eradication],” Serrano told me. He credits the narco-terrorists influencing the European Union’s refusal to participate in aerial eradication even though close to half of Europe’s heroin supply comes from Colombia.

Right. It’s just the traffickers who claim the poisonous chemicals pose a danger. Aided, of course, by those uninformed Democrats and Europeans who object to increasing the already huge dispersal of chemicals that have been heavily implicated in damage to the environment and human reproduction.
And, of course, if it wasn’t for all these dupes of the drug traffickers and their silly environmental concerns, we’d be all done in Colombia.
After all, Novak hears from his drug warrior friends in Colombia that they could win this war, if only they could have 15 more planes for additional aerial eradication efforts.
But apparently the Democrats not only have this environmental hang-up, but they insist on seeing civil war in Colombia, while Novak is somehow able to discern that there is no political war in Colombia — only good guys versus drug traffickers (he undoubtedly has some explanation for the fact that drug revenue has been used by every power structure in that country but neglected to share it with us).
So naturally, Novak’s deluded little mind was outraged when Representative Jim McGovern proposed eliminating $30 million in the foreign aid bill from aerial fumigation in Colombia and transferring it to emergency humanitarian relief for refugees. Novak fumes:

In response to this evidence of Colombia’s escape from degradation as a narco-terrorist state, Democrats in the House voted 161- 28 for McGovern’s disastrous cut in U.S. aid. The House Republicans saved Colombia, but ardent young officers of the national police are anxious to win this war. They need more help from Washington, and they deserve it. [emphasis added]

The House Republicans saved Colombia? By continuing the status quo of spending millions of taxpayer dollars on poisoning crops with nothing to show for it?
Remind me not to call Robert Novak if I need medical attention.
Note: Novak has been a huge fan of aerial chemical eradication efforts in Colombia.

Via Pushing Back:
“Among the key findings of the U.N. World Drug Report…”

Today, the characteristics of cannabis are no longer that different from those of other plant-based drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

—
In other news, mother’s milk determined to share many of the characteristics of other liquid-based beverages such as whisky and rum.

Anthony Maria Costa is sort of John Walters, but on a global scale. He’s in charge of the UN Office on Drug and Crime, which pretty much has as its goal the imposition of United States’ failed drug policy on the rest of the world. (It’s the one part of the UN our government seems to like, since it acts like a U.S. lapdog and mindlessly promotes prohibition.)
According to this Bloomberg article:

Global Drug War Is Being Won, Illegal Use `Contained,’ UN Says
June 26 (Bloomberg) — The world is winning the war on drugs, according to a United Nations report that said opium production might soon be eradicated in Asia’s notorious “Golden Triangle” and coca cultivation in the Andean region of South American has decreased 25 percent since 2000.
“Drug control is working and the world drug problem is being contained,” Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said in a statement accompanying the release today of the agency’s 2006 World Drug Report.

Of course, that’s just like the drug czar’s regular pronouncements here, as Jeffrey Miron notes in the article:

“If you read these reports over time from the UN or the U.S. drug czar, you see a constant up and down, from claims of victory to statements that things are horrible,” Miron said in an interview. “You tend to find that a problem that is solved one place shifts to another. There will always be some uses going up and some going down, and these reports don’t address issues like the costs of drug use from diseases spread by needles or infringements on civil rights from the drug war.”

And that’s so true. Any time a number goes down temporarily, regardless of context, the prohibitionists claim victory specifically attributed to their efforts (usually with no causal evidence). If the number, instead, remains the same or goes up, that’s merely a reason to put out a press release calling for increased vigor (and more funding).
Nice job security.
(Also note that Costa brags about coca cultivation being down in the Andean region, but doesn’t mention the actual distribution of coca. That’s partly because many experts believe that the traffickers have developed higher yields needing less cultivated area, and there’s been no evidence of a reduction in supply.)

Eric Baerren, News Editor of the Mt. Pleasant, Michigan Morning Sun has a strong and detailed response to the recent Michigan Supreme Court decision allowing the discovery of chemical byproducts in the blood to qualify as “impaired” driving.
Baarren takes apart the entire drug war and what it’s led to — more than I can quote here and worth reading in its entirety.
His ending…

Do they really think this was such a smart idea, that this kind of thing won’t lead to arbitrary enforcement of laws and the conviction of people who weren’t actually guilty in the first place? If so, and this is really how we’re fighting our war on drugs, I have a question:
What’s the penalty for desertion?

It’s simply the latest in the series of stories that reveal the administration’s mistaken belief that the 911 terrorists crashed into and destroyed the Constitution instead of the World Trade Center. This one has to do with secret investigations of international (and including domestic) financial transactions.
As reported in the Washington Post:

U.S. counterterrorism officials obtained the financial records from an international banking cooperative called the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. SWIFT, as it is known, is owned and controlled by nearly 8,000 commercial banks in more than 20 countries that use its services.
SWIFT is headquartered in Brussels, but much of its operations are based in the United States, where knowledge of the government’s secret access to its data was not widespread. Of officials at three large U.S. banks who agreed to speak about the program, only one said his institution had knowledge of it before yesterday.

Government officials have gone on the offensive since the program was revealed, saying that the safeguards were strict and that it was “responsible.” That’s all very nice, but in this country, we have this system of government that uses multiple branches checking up on each other, just to be on the safe side. Even that tends to be rather anemic in its protections, but to expect us to “just trust” one branch? That’s outright stupidity.
Interestingly, while the program was to catch terrorists, that’s not all they found…

When information appeared that indicated a non-terrorist crime, such as money laundering or drug trafficking, [Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey] said the source of the information was “sanitized” before it was passed to other law enforcement agencies.

That’s right… “it was passed to other law enforcement agencies.”
This goes against the notion that the program was specifically limited to terrorism. If they found other crimes, they didn’t say “Oh, that’s outside the parameters — we’ll have to forget about it.” No, they passed it on without revealing that the information had come from a secret, probably illegal spy program.
And don’t think that this is necessarily limited to going after the big fish. When you’re conducting a program that involves scouring databases, there’s all sorts of searches you can do. (For instance, what if they did a search of financial transactions between the U.S. and Canada of an amount close to what a package of marijuana seeds from Marc Emery might cost?) Paranoid? Maybe. But that’s what happens when a branch of the government says “Trust me.”
The thing is, the government already has a huge resource of tools for going after financial transactions. Judges will give them a warrant to search any financial information based on the flimsiest of suspicions. But even that is too much of a restriction for this administration. They’re not interested in the hard (and effective) work of investigation. They’re casting a wide net and trolling.
That’s not only illegal and un-American, but … it’s unsportsmanlike.

Today’s Washington Post has a good article by Eric E. Sterling and Julie Stewart: Undo This Legacy of Len Bias’s Death.

One result was the innocuous-sounding Narcotics Penalties and Enforcement Act, which became the first element of the enormous Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, hurried to the floor a little over two months after Bias’s death. But the effect of the penalties and enforcement legislation was to put back into federal law the kind of clumsy mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses that had been done away with 16 years before. And there they remain, 20 years and several hundred thousand defendants later.

For those who missed it, here’s my article on Len Bias.

I’ve added a number of new items at the Drug WarRant Store, utilizing the End Prohibition Now theme.

These and more…

… and proud of it.
It’s an honor to be mentioned this way in this essay by Phillip S. Smith in the Drug War Chronicle”

On the eve of American independence, the colonies were awash with wild-eyed radicals taking pen to hand to denounce the latest iniquities of the British crown. Tom Paine is perhaps the best known of those colonial rabble-rousers; his pamphlet “Common Sense” was a clarion call to rebellion against the injustices of colonial rule. But he was by no means alone; Paine, in fact, was representative of a hands-on, egalitarian impulse that appeared early in American society, an impulse that cried out “I have something to say and every right to be heard!”
More than two centuries later, that impulse is alive and well — at least when it comes to the war on drugs. There is something about the issue that excites people to have their say. Other public policy issues seem to attract less outrage and fewer grassroots efforts to articulate a critique. Where, for example, are the hordes of self-published authors jumping into print with autodidactic tomes on the politics of waste water management or the epidemiology of mumps?
Perhaps it is because the drug war and drug prohibition feels so fundamentally wrong to so many American idealists. You know them: The people who actually believe all that stuff they told us when we were kids. The people who believe America is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The people who believe America is — or should be — a shining beacon of freedom. The people whose attitudes toward government in general and drug prohibition in particular could be summed up by the famous coiled snake flag of the Revolutionary War: “Don’t tread on me.”
These days, would-be pamphleteers have other options. They can take to the Internet and blog away, as do folks like Peter Guither at Drug War Rant, Radley Balko at The Agitator, or Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast. (The latter two sites are broader than drug policy). Or they can become part of the new breed of movement journalists, like rebel radioman Dean Becker of the Drug Truth Network, Richard Cowan of Marijuana News, Preston Peet of Drug War.com, or yours truly with Drug War Chronicle.

You might want to also check out the book reviews at the essay.