Drug WarRant

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.

The rural Lahontan Valley News came out in favor of Nevada’s marijuana legalization initiative

It’s time to pass this multi-pronged approach to marijuana regulation and end years of speculation and fruitless debates.
What the initiative offers is a chance for voters to change a decades-long war on marijuana that has failed to curb its prevalence among Nevadans of all ages. Long compared to the country’s failed prohibition of alcohol in the 1930s, current marijuana laws foster an illegal market. Nevadans who use marijuana legally for medicinal purposes are forced to grow their own or obtain it through illicit sources.
Detractors of the initiative argue that marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to use of more dangerous substances. But the same could be said of caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, gambling, sex or any other activity that stimulates the brain’s pleasure zones.
Some of the above mentioned activities are legal and regulated in Nevada. In fact, the state’s most powerful industry caters to those same visceral pleasures.
In a state where prostitution is legal in certain counties, bars are not required to close and children can legally possess and use tobacco, objections to marijuana legalization on a moral basis seem hypocritical. Education and parental involvement affect a person’s decisions more profoundly than state policy.

Good stuff. And it caught the attention of the AP, which has been running a story about the editorial.
Kudos to Regulate Marijuana.org for their efforts so far.

Nicholas Sarwark at Hammer of Truth has it right.

Interesting article by Nathan Riley in the Gay City News about upstate New York District Attorney David Soares, who has made quite a bit of news lately.
The important point in this article is noting that here is a drug policy reform politician who stuck to his guns, despite the usual sound-bite attacks, and seems to have succeeded. It’s a lesson for other politicians who believe in drug policy reform, Democrat or Republican — there’s no need to run from the fight.

I was beginning to despair as to whether any of the non-blog media would cover the real story about the aftermath of Len Bias’ death, but a couple have come through.
Kevin Litten of the University of Maryland’s Diamondback had contacted me about Len Bias, and I was able to steer him toward some alternate directions than what all the sports writers were doing. He managed to touch on the harsh mandatory minimums and got some good information from Eric Sterling, but neglected the racial implications.
The Chicago Tribune’s Clarence Page did better. In Bias’ unintended legacy: Basketball star’s overdose hijacked by war on crack cocaine. Page repeats some of Dan Baum’s description of the hysteria at the time, and comments both on the fact that the new laws especially targeted crack (despite Bias using powder) and how the result was racially disparate.
___
Note: The drug czar’s office didn’t particularly distinguish itself with its (hopefully unintended) headline: Len Bias: A Stunning Death Remembered

Radley Balko’s got a good piece at Reason: Buffalo’s Stampede Against Privacy —
City of Light’s finest bomb houses, arrest scores, kill dogs, and achieve nothing