Drug WarRant

A very thoughtful article by William W. Savage III in the oudaily about the different viewpoints that emerge in a discussion about legalizing medical marijuana in Oklahoma.
I think it’s well written because it really get to the heart of where people are coming from on these issues, from the hardcore opposition:

Asked if there is a way to use marijuana responsibly, Balkman said, “Not that I’m aware of. I don’t think there is.” […]
Balkman said he is unaware of marijuana having medical benefits.

… to the enlightened:

“The drug war is very profitable,” said Ron Shewey, president of the Drug Policy Forum of Oklahoma and advocate of Oklahoma’s Compassionate Care Campaign.
“The police and prisons are the two largest growing industries in America today,” Shewey said. “We’ve now got 2.2 million people behind bars in America. We’re No. 1 in incarceration per capita in the world, and a substantial amount of that is drug war. Here in Oklahoma, 32 percent of our prison population is there for drugs.”

and the moderate:

“There would have to be a big educational effort with the public because the public still views marijuana in the same class as other dangerous drugs,” said District 44 State Rep. Bill Nations, D-Norman. “What happened to marijuana is that, it may be much more innocent than methamphetamine and heroin, but in the ’60s, it got put into that dangerous category of drugs.”

It’s important for us to understand and see all the perspectives out there, even when, in the case of Balkman, they have no connection to reality.

Via The Drug Update — ONDCP Press Release ECSTACY MARKET COLLAPSING: Use of the Drug Dramatically Down in the United States; International Seizures Drop Dramatically

Director Walters said, “Thanks to the work of parents, communities, and law enforcement, we are seeing a dramatic decline in the threat that Ecstasy poses to our nation. Conventional wisdom from the late nineties convinced many Americans that there was nothing we could do to stop the spread of Ecstasy abuse among young people. Once again, we have proved that balanced strategies against our drug threats make the drug problem smaller.”

It’s called a fad, John. You had nothing to do with it.
Many drugs go through fad stages. Researchers are just now dealing with how much crack was a fad (and how little laws and law enforcement affected its decline). Years from now, we’ll have the same discussion about meth, and states that built specialized “meth prisons” will be trying to find some other use for them.
Ecstasy, though it had been around for a while, had the freshness of a “new” drug in the late 90’s and got a spike of popularity (fueled in part by media frenzy). After a few years of peak popularity, the newness wore off, casual users went back to other favorite drugs, and the burnouts of the minority who used ecstasy to excess turned off many who otherwise might have tried it. Ecstasy use will level off and stabilize, until some future spike in popularity.
The drug czar has a tough job. He has to justify all the taxpayer money he’s spending, despite the fact that the drug war doesn’t work in the long run. So he has a staff that sifts through stacks of numbers and picks ones he can use. The good thing for John is that he can often use both kinds. If a number shows an increase in use? Well, then, we need to re-double our efforts with an increase in budget. A decrease in use? See, we’re winning the drug war. (Note that they don’t even track changes in levels of abuse since they consider all illegal drug use to be equal to abuse.)
The information contained in the government’s numbers is interesting. The spin is worn-out and tired.

Dick Morris is recycling his moronic advice to President Bush. He thinks he has the answer to get Bush to bounce back, including:

Put the drug fight front and center: Demand drug testing in schools with parental consent, and tax incentives for workplace drug testing. Link cocaine to terrorism, and build a national consensus for tough measures to cut demand.

Maia Szalavitz responds at Huffington Post:

Finally, although in the past, it was quite easy to scream “drug” and have everyone get distracted and drop everything including their pants and their civil liberties, I don’t think Bush will find it especially easy to build the national consensus Morris wants these days.
Attorney general Ashcroft was widely ridiculed for his emphasis on fighting bongs, not bombs when he cracked down on drug paraphernalia merchants after 9/11. And the Superbowl ads that linked teen drug users to terrorists didn’t do much better.
I’m afraid you can’t use fear to sell more than one war at a time, and Bush is stuck with the war he’s got.

I hope she’s right.
And to the extent that she is, it’s got to be partly due to the large number of drug policy reformers who have been tirelessly not letting the drug warriors get away with it.

Go to the DARE Generation Diary — SSDP has released its state by state report on the financial aid elimination penalty.
USA today ran an article on it yesterday, including a quote from our friend Tom Angell:

“I think it’s important that all members (of Congress) know exactly how many of their constituents’ lives have been ruined by this policy,” says Tom Angell, campaigns director for Students for Sensible Drug Policy.

Go get ’em, Tom!

[Note: This is via The Drug Update — a new site to me that could be a good resource. The Drug Update is developing a drug policy news aggregator. I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops.]
Check out the opening of the Drug Czar’s report:

This year we are reporting mixed results for the U.S. government’s just concluded annual survey of coca cultivation in Colombia.

1. Coca cultivation declined by 8 percent, from 114,100 to 105,400 hectares, when those areas surveyed by the US government in 2004 were compared with the same areas in 2005
2. Nevertheless, the survey also found 144,000 hectares of coca under cultivation in 2005 in a search area that was 81 percent larger than that used in 2004. The potential production for the 144,000 hectares of coca found by this year’s survey is 545 metric tons of pure cocaine

In an effort to improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the estimate, this year’s survey expanded by 81 percent the size of the landmass that was imaged and sampled for coca cultivation. The newly imaged areas show about 39,000 additional hectares of coca. Because these areas were not previously surveyed, it is impossible to determine for how long they have been under coca cultivation. Because of this uncertainty and the significantly expanded survey area, a direct year-to-year comparison is not possible. The higher cultivation figure in this year’s estimate does not necessarily mean that coca cultivation increased in the last year; but rather reflects an improved understanding of where coca is now growing in Colombia.

Translation: There was an increase in cultivation from last year to this year, but it doesn’t really count, because we didn’t look in some of those places last year.
So here’s what the report should read.

1. Cultivation that we’re aware of increased by 26% from 114,100 hectares to 144,400 hectares from 2004 to 2005.
2. In areas where we already knew there was cultivation, we were only able to reduce cultivation by 8%.
3. Despite spraying 139,400 hectares of coca this year, we were only able to reduce cultivation in sprayed areas by 10%, and in areas where we haven’t sprayed, cultivation has increased by 12%, showing that we have no ability to keep up with cultivation despite all the effort and money.

Your Tax Dollars on Drugs, by Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project.

Anthony Papa has a good article at Alternet: Two years in jail for a joint?

The war on drugs reached the pinnacle of cruelty when 18-year-old Mitchell Lawrence was sentenced to two years in jail for selling a teaspoonful of marijuana to an undercover police officer for $20. […]
Aguirre approached Mitchell and asked him if he had any weed. Mitchell pulled out a small bag of marijuana. The cop offered him $20. Mitchell hesitated; Aguirre insisted. Mitchell, who had seen Aguirre hanging out with other kids, motioned the cop to follow him up the street where he intended to smoke with him. Aguirre waved the $20 in his face. Mitchell, who was broke at the time, took the money, the first time he had ever accepted money in exchange for marijuana.
In the months that followed, Aguirre approached Mitchell again for marijuana. This time, however, Mitchell refused. Weeks later, a crew of undercover cops stormed Mitchell’s home and placed him under arrest. Mitchell was found guilty of distribution of marijuana, committing a drug violation within a drug-free school zone and possession.
On March 22, 2006, Mitchell Lawrence was sentenced to two years in prison.

This case is an indictment of the drug war, the entrapment methods used to make criminals out of those who are not, and the travesty of school zone laws.

Via DARE Generation Blog, comes a piece at Slate by Ryan Grim: A lie college students might want to tell.
It’s about the provision of the Higher Education Act that denies financial aid to those with drug convictions. A bad law (written and promoted by Mark Souder of Indiana) that also makes no sense. It serves no useful purpose whatsoever. It has nothing to do with whether the student is doing well in school-work — financial aid already has provisions for keeping your grades up. And it has nothing to do with being a law-abiding citizen — people aren’t denied aid for rape, assault, burglary, traffic violations, tax fraud, or drunk driving. It’s about additionally punishing drug users — and not just any drug users, but those who really want to make something of their lives by going to college.
Students for Sensible Drug Policy have been fighting this provision for years, and made significant progress recently with a change to reduce the negative impact, but they’re still working on getting rid of it entirely. They also had to fight the Department of Education to get actual statistics, but they got them, and frankly, the statistics floored me.
189,065 students were denied financial aid because of drug convictions.
I work at a university with 20,000 students and I see all the hope and promise of young people learning about themselves and their future. We’re talking about taking the equivalent of 10 universities this size and dashing the hopes and promise of those students.
Tragic.
There were a couple of other interesting points in the Slate article. First, it appears that Souder’s constituents reaped what he sowed…

If this law betters the lives of young people–Souder calls it a way to reduce youth drug use by reducing demand–then no state has done better than Souder’s own Indiana. As of August 2005, nearly 9,000 Indiana students–one in 200–have been denied aid since the law passed. That’s the highest proportion of students affected in any state by a wide margin.

(Of course, Souder just makes up the notion that the law reduces demand.)
Second, it appears the law mostly penalizes people for telling the truth.

There’s another funny thing about the Department of Education’s numbers: They don’t show the number of college applicants punished for drug convictions. They show the number punished for owning up to drug convictions. On their financial-aid applications, students are asked to check a box if they’ve been convicted of selling or possessing drugs. But the department has no way to verify students’ answers. Officials can cross-check the answers with federal arrest records, but they make up a very small percentage of all drug convictions.
So far, about 190,000 students across the country (and abroad) have told the truth and been denied financial aid. It’s impossible to know how many lied and headed off to college, federal aid in hand.

Reported at the Washington Post
The University of Maryland becomes the fifth school to pass a student referendum that says marijuana violations should be treated no more harshly than alcohol violations. This is part of the Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation (SAFER) movement. The idea is that for most students, both alcohol and marijuana are illegal, yet marijuana violations often end up with suspensions or being kicked out of housing, while alcohol violations do not. Their view is that alcohol is actually more dangerous than marijuana, so marijuana should not result in higher penalties. This is not about changing the law, but rather school policy, and such referendum is non-binding (no school has yet changed their policy). The U-MD referendum passed with roughly 2/3 voting in favor.
The administration reaction?

The university’s vice president for student affairs said the administration takes any strong message from student elections very seriously. But she doesn’t think the school will be able to treat drug and alcohol violations the same way.
“You’ve got to look at these two issues differently,” Linda Clement said, because marijuana can bring harder drugs, dealers and crime. “Our campus police believe very strongly that drug activity attracts people to the campus who are dangerous.”
The vote comes just as the school, which has enjoyed a growing national reputation for its academics in recent years, also is fighting off the bad publicity that postgame student riots have brought. Last week, drunken students celebrated the women’s basketball national championship win by setting fires and shaking buses in College Park.

Who are the dangerous ones again?
Stupid reaction award goes to:

Gwendolyn Dungy, executive director of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, laughed when she heard about the vote. She doesn’t know of any college in the country that treats drug and alcohol violations the same — mostly because of the law, she said, because, unlike smoking marijuana, drinking is legal after 21.

Um, yes, but we’re talking about the policy for those who are under 21, when both are illegal, and both have university policy penalties separate from criminal sanctions. It’s nice to know that Gwendolyn can laugh about students getting suspended or being denied housing for harming nobody.

John Fugelsang has an extensive (and quite witty) rant on the drug war over at Huffington Post.
Here are a couple of excerpts:

They always told us “Pot makes you violent. And Lazy.” Which never scared any kids I knew. I always thought if the violent people were lazy, we’d have a lot less crime. Imagine the thug who threatens, “I’m gonna kill you, man. Right after this burrito.”
And this is why so many kids have a hard time taking the drug war seriously. We’re always changing the reasons, but the message stays the same. We keep telling them “drugs are bad! Drugs are bad! Drugs are bad!” and that, my friends, is not the problem.
The problem is not that drugs are bad. The problem is that drugs are great.
[…]
Back then, Chinese immigrants were the group everybody was allowed to hate, and people really didn’t like the thought of good Christian folks going to smoke in the opium dens of “the heathen Chinese.” . White people took opium too, but they usually ate it, or shot it up. You know, the wholesome way.
So they passed a law taxing imported smokable opium. This is noteworthy, since besides the obvious racism, it was the first time the government used taxes not to raise money (as the founders intended), but to punish and control private behavior. Thus began a long tradition of drug laws that work about as well as British toothpaste.
[…]
And since it’s April, it’s worth mentioning that from the 1600s to the 1800s, cannabis hemp was used as a currency – legal tender. In fact for over 200 years you could pay your taxes in cannabis hemp. So next April 15th, try to send the IRS a few loose marijuana cigarettes. I’m sure they’ll appreciate your knowledge of our history, and you can even file it as a “joint return.”
[…]
In 1996 the voters of California approved a medical marijuana proposal. The Clinton White House promptly put the kibosh on it. George W. Bush is also opposed to medical marijuana. Now both of these presidents have been vague, at best, about their drug histories. But they’ve had no problem locking up others for the same behaviors. Which I take as a sign that neither of them truly believes in the drug war.
Because if they really felt at their core that illegal drug use was evil, they’d confess their crimes and ask forgiveness. Remember – if they thought it was a sin, they’d turn themselves in. Imagine Johnnie Cochran saying it – it’ll sound better.

Go ahead and read the rest, and then tell me if you can spot the common, but significant logic flaw in Val’s statement in the comments there.