Drug WarRant

Yay, us.

Via

Glenn Greenwald makes a great comment about government investigative and enforcement powers.

Didn’t we all learn this point early on in school: there are criminals in the world, and allowing the police to break down our doors without warrants would help criminals be caught. Despite that fact, we don’t allow the police to break down our doors without warrants, because the police can catch criminals by searching homes only when they have warrants, a process enshrined in the Constitution in order to avoid the inevitable abuse that comes from allowing the Government to search our homes without any oversight. Thus, people (such as the Founders) who favor the warrant requirement before the police can search our homes aren’t pro-criminal. They know that criminals can be caught while preventing government abuse and lawlessness. Why is it so hard — for some people — to apply that same, quite basic reasoning to eavesdropping and all other forms of surveillance?

Now he was referring the NSA eavesdropping and Canadian terrorists, but the statement applies full well to the drug war.
I sometimes find myself wondering if I was the only one awake when that lesson was taught in school, or if, through some conspiracy, I ended up learning about a different constitution than everyone else. Because so often I hear people complain about “criminals’ rights” or spout the inane “If you don’t have anything to hide…”
Just because they claim it would make their job easier is no justification for government to break the laws that make us free citizens.
So keep in mind that when I complain about police dogs sniffing cars without suspicion, or police breaking down doors in the middle of the night because there might be some marijuana there, or randomly drug testing kids in schools, or searching people of a certain color in a certain neighborhood, it is not just about my belief that we should legalize drugs, and it certainly is not about defending drug dealers. It is about defending my country from my government. It is about protecting the Constitution of the United States, something my elected servants swore an oath to do, but that I seem to care more about actually doing.

The DEA’s New Groove by Arthur Delaney.

WASHINGTON, June 2, 2006 — The federal agency whose agents kick down doors and storm houses with guns drawn will soon pick up a new weapon to wage its war: candles.
At its headquarters in Virginia, the Drug Enforcement Administration, along with a number of drug awareness and prevention organizations, will host a vigil to remember young people who have lost their lives to illegal drug use.
The agency is promoting “A Vigil for Lost Promise,” the first DEA event of its kind, with a Web site, www.vigilforlostpromise.com that profiles eight young people who died from heroin and huffing. […]
Some people who oppose the more familiar tactics of the DEA — pursuing and arresting drug traffickers — are not impressed by the vigil.
“If it’s a drug enforcement agency. Why are they doing this kind of thing?” says Pete Guither, an Illinois University administrator who on the side writes a blog criticizing the war on drugs. He believes many of the problems associated with drug abuse stem simply from the fact that drugs are illegal.
Guither says he feels sorry for families who have lost members to drug abuse, and he would support the vigil if it weren’t part of the DEA’s “propaganda war.”
Guither has put together a spoof site (www.vigilforlostpromise.org) lamenting the loss of lives in drug raids and mocking the DEA’s apparent sympathy.
Guither’s site appears above the DEA’s site when “Vigil for Lost Promise” is typed into Google. It looks just like the DEA’s site, until phrases like “Our view is that the DEA, and the other prohibitionist groups who sponsor that site, are hypocrites, since they are, in fact, partially to blame in many drug deaths” appear.

Welcome, ABC News readers.
And any VigilForLostPromise.com supporters — before you start flaming, remember:

1. Drug Policy reformers care about the lives lost to drugs, and we feel for the loss felt by their families. We also care about the lives lost to the drug war and feel for their families as well.
2. Oppressive laws and enforcement didn’t prevent the deaths being mourned, and there’s no evidence that increasing the penalties would have either.
3. Many overdose deaths have been caused by the drug war. Think in particular about the recent rash of deaths from tainted heroin. As Cliff Thornton says “There is no drug known to man which becomes safer when its production and distribution are handed over to criminals.”
4. More reasons the drug war contributes to drug deaths are listed here.

“bullet” Maia Szalavitz has an excellent article at Reason on the recent trial of Dr. Paul Heberle: The Doctor Wasn’t Cruel Enough: How one physician escaped the panic over prescription drugs.
“bullet” The Aspen Daily News: Marijuana Group Not High on the Patriot Act Our friend Jeralyn Merrit of TalkLeft gets quoted in this article about NORML’s legal seminar: “Once you give the government power, it’s very hard to get it back.”
“bullet” Pierre Lemieux has an entertaining column in the Western Standard (Canada): Dissenters From the Drug War

Journalist H.L. Menken characterized Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Why the busybodies’ own happiness at knowing that others are unhappy is deemed morally superior is an interesting paradox.
Whether some drugs help or hinder happiness should be for each individual to decide for himself.

At the Drug War Chronicle:

It’s a trio that gives the Bush administration nightmares, and they were all together in Bolivia last weekend. Bolivian President Evo Morales hosted Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in what he called an “axis of good” during a visit to Bolivia’s coca-growing Chapare region, and Chavez announced he would support Morales’ call to legalize and industrialize the coca leaf by providing $1 million in funding for research into coca’s uses and factories to turn it into coca flour or tea.

My first reaction is to have a nice chuckle over the likely discomfiture of the drug warriors over this news. And that’s fine. But then I think about how incredibly destructive our drug war has been to Latin America and how difficult it is for them to struggle to find solutions to that overbearing imposition, and I get serious again.

Tony Newman has an excellent piece at AlterNet: The Top 10 Things I Know About Drugs

1. Drugs are everywhere….
2. Different people have different relationships with different drugs….
3. People use drugs for joy and for pain….
4. Drug abuse does not discriminate, but our drug policies do. …
5. Relapse happens. …
6. Smoking five cigarettes is better than smoking 20. Using marijuana is better than using heroin….
7. Drug abuse is bad, but the drug war is worse….
8. Prohibition doesn’t work. Prohibition is responsible for most of the violence associated with drugs….
9. Drugs and the drug war touch most families…
10. We have to learn how to live with drugs, because they aren’t going anywhere….

*Bonus point: The public is ahead of the politicians….

I’ll be heading off to New York Monday for a week of theatre. I’m taking 74 people and showing them the city with walking tours each day, plus seeing 7 shows (Lieutenant of Inishmore, The History Boys, Drowsy Chaperone, Faith Healer, Sweeney Todd, Awake and Sing, Red Light Winter),
So I’ll be pretty busy, but if there are any Drug WarRant regulars in New York who’d like to get together for some coffee and to talk drug policy, I’d love it. Wednesday afternoon would be the best time for me, but there may be other good times during the week.
Email me if you’re interested.

From an OpEd by Ronald Fraser in the Niagara Gazette:

When there is a big gap between the views of ordinary Americans on a public issue and the voting record of their elected representatives in Congress on that issue, something is wrong. In the national debate over the use of marijuana for medical purposes, the people and their representatives in Congress seem to be living on different planets.

Great description.

In this article in National Review Online, Radley Balko nails Sensenbrenner and Hastert for caring more about fellow congressmen than their constituents.

Funny. Congress — especially GOP leaders like Hastert and Sensenbrenner — don’t seem nearly as concerned when much more violent, confrontational raids happen to their own constituents.
In fact, last week, just as Rep. Sensenbrenner was scheduling this week’s hearings, a SWAT team in Dodgeville, Wisconsin broke open a window, rolled in a diversionary grenade, and raided an innocent couple’s home in full battle gear.

At Don’t Try This at Home by Steve Silberman in Wired.

Garage chemistry used to be a rite of passage for geeky kids. But in their search for terrorist cells and meth labs, authorities are making a federal case out of DIY science.

A fascinating article on the legal hurdles placed in the path of the kind of exploring and enquiring minds that invent new products and make our lives better.

In the meantime, more than 30 states have passed laws to restrict sales of chemicals and lab equipment associated with meth production, which has resulted in a decline in domestic meth labs, but makes things daunting for an amateur chemist shopping for supplies. It is illegal in Texas, for example, to buy such basic labware as Erlenmeyer flasks or three-necked beakers without first registering with the state’s Department of Public Safety to declare that they will not be used to make drugs. Among the chemicals the Portland, Oregon, police department lists online as “commonly associated with meth labs” are such scientifically useful compounds as liquid iodine, isopropyl alcohol, sulfuric acid, and hydrogen peroxide, along with chemistry glassware and pH strips. Similar lists appear on hundreds of Web sites.
“To criminalize the necessary materials of discovery is one of the worst things you can do in a free society,” says Shawn Carlson, a 1999 MacArthur fellow and founder of the Society for Amateur Scientists. “The Mr. Coffee machine that every Texas legislator has near his desk has three violations of the law built into it: a filter funnel, a Pyrex beaker, and a heating element. The laws against meth should be the deterrent to making it – not criminalizing activities that train young people to appreciate science.”
The increasingly strict regulatory climate has driven a wedge of paranoia between young chemists and their potential mentors. “I don’t tell anyone about what I do at home,” writes one anonymous high schooler on Sciencemadness.org, an online forum for amateur scientists. “A lot of ignorant people at my school will just spread rumors about me … The teacher will hear about them and I will get into legal trouble … I have so much glassware at my house, any excuse will not cut it. So I keep my mouth shut.”

Of course, it’s not just the drug war that’s causing this — it’s that intentional governmental linkage of the wars on terror and drugs. But it’s a sign of yet another casualty in the war on drugs — and it hurts society. It damages our future.