Drug WarRant

Hammer of Truth has the story.
You may remember this guy. He’s the DEA agent who was doing a presentation in a school and telling the kids to stay away from guns and that he was the only one in the room professional enough to handle a Glock .40. One second later he shot himself in the foot. And it was captured on video. (Hammer of Truth’s got the video in the post. Check it out if you haven’t seen it.)
According to the Smoking Gun, he’s suing the DEA for allowing the tape (recorded by an audience member) to be disseminated.
Apparently he’s had a hard time getting people to take him seriously. Gee, I wonder why.

Link

“We’re not going to stop this stuff coming across the border,” the sheriff said. “They couldn’t stop Prohibition, and we’re not going to stop the drug trade.”

Via Drug Sense (Thanks, Allan):

James Blair, a spinal injury patient arrested on marijuana cultivation charges in 2003, received a check today from the City of Emeryville for $15,000 for marijuana seized by the Emeryville Police Department. Assisted by the patient advocacy group, Americans for Safe Access (ASA), Blair received one of the largest cash settlements to date in a case of wrongful police action in regard to medical marijuana. The City of Emeryville has now adopted a policy of not confiscating medical marijuana from qualified patients who show a valid medical marijuana identification card or doctor’s recommendation.

Nice.
However, there’s also this breaking news from an Oregon attorney (again, thanks Allan):

Received a call around 5pm today from a patient/caregiver/person responsible for the grow site that police were there wanting consent to look at the garden. Turned out police were part of ROCN, the Regional Organized Criminal Narcotics Taskforce, including Portland Police Bureau, Multnomah County Sherrif and a DEA agent.
Law Enforcement said that if consent were given to inspect, and if the garden was out of compliance they would seize the excess and no arrests would be made. Consent based on this condition was granted.
Although the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program had told the police that 7 people had their gardens registered there, paperwork provided at the scene demonstrated that 3 designated caregivers each were caring for 3 patients each, justifying 56 mature plants and 162 starts or seedlings. Fewer plants than these numbers were observed at the location.
The DEA agent, however, was instructed to seize all the plants which he had observed as a part of the conditional consent given. The patients/caregivers advised this agent that they were co-operating, but that they wanted a search warrant so that the federal magistrate was aware that the garden appeared to be in compliance with state law.
The decision to seize the plants was made by the Assistant United States Attorney in charge of drug prosecutions for the District of Oregon, John Diets. Notwithstanding my request of law enforcement on the scene, he refused to speak with me about his decision.
To their credit, Portland Police Bureau officers and the Multhnomah County Sherrif refused to participate in the search and seizure of the medicinal garden and left the scene. DEA agents required the patients/caregivers and I to leave while they awaited the warrant.
More information to be provided, as it develops.

Via Libby at Last One Speaks comes this rather humorous study of jazz musicians, drugs and mental health.
The startling conclusion? Jazz musicians like to use drugs and also have unusual, often troubled minds.
I’ve known some jazz musicians, and other creative people of the same mental intensity. The answer is that they are afflicted with a rare form of genius.

[Testifying before Congress in 1948]
Harry Anslinger: “I need more agents.”
Senate: Why?
Anslinger: “Because there are people out there violating the marijuana laws.”
Senate: Who?
Anslinger: “Musicians… And I don’t mean good musicians; I mean jazz musicians.”

I’m just kidding, of course, but Arianna Huffington’s new post sounds delightfully like a lot of stuff I’ve been talking about here.
First, about the fact that the reasons to oppose the drug war cross political lines:

Let’s face it, it’s not exactly left-wing to come out against a $40-billion-dollar-a-year War on Drugs that has unfairly targeted people of color, siphoned resources from the war on terror, and pitted the government against its own people.
Nor is it left-wing to want to put an end to a War on Drugs that has turned into a war on America’s minority communities. While blacks make up 13 percent of drug users, they account for 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession, 55 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. And the average prison term for black drug offenders is 69% longer [pdf] than for whites.
It’s not left-wing. It’s not right-wing. It’s common sense. And it’s why people from all parts of the political spectrum are finally speaking out on the issue.
As I’ve said before, on how many issues do Jesse Jackson, George Soros, Walter Cronkite, the ACLU, Cato, Bill Buckley, George Shultz and the Heritage Foundation agree?

And then about our political leaders…

The only ones who don’t seem convinced are our political leaders, who continue to hide on the issue — just as so many of them are hiding on the war in Iraq. And they’re doing it for the same reason: they are terrified of being seen as soft on defense, soft on the military, soft on terror, and soft on crime and drugs.
And their fear is making them soft in the head — and soft in the spine.
Aren’t you sick and tired of politicians who are supposed to be on your side betraying you — and betraying common sense — because of their fears?

Nice post.
And today, Balloon Juice’s John Cole linked approvingly to my collaborated post over at Glenn Greenwald’s, while last week Glenn Reynolds suggested legalizing drugs.
It is true. Drug policy reform is left, right, and center. It is libertarian, democratic and republican. It is right for the people and the country.

Here’s a big part of our problem.
In this column by Bill McLellan in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he talks favorably about a visit from LEAP member Howard Woolridge. McLellan, like Woolridge, thinks that all drugs should be legalized and regulated. But what about the politicians?

…I wondered if we are about to reach the second phase of this particular fight. That would be getting the politicians on board.
The people are ahead of the pols on this. […]
But what politician dares speak the truth to this issue? I remember when James Gierach ran in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Illinois in 1994. He was a straight arrow, a former assistant state’s attorney from Cook County. He had reached the same conclusion that Woolbridge has reached. Party leaders treated Gierach as if he were a nut. He was not even allowed to participate in the debates, so he crashed them, and the papers, including this one, made his crusade seem like a farce.
Even now, when I mention legalization to candidates, they say, “Can you imagine what my opponents would do to me in a 30-second attack commercial?”
So the politicians leave the truth to fellows like Woolbridge….

If only politicians could handle the truth! Ah, but I must be some kind of deluded idealist to even imagine such a thing.

Link
Let’s see, at roughly $25,000 per year in taxpayer money to pay for his prison lodging…

President Bush is showing his eagerness to reward failure by declaring tomorrow National DARE Day 2006.
Hammer of Truth got a better idea and declared April 11 an official DARE Generation Day. The DARE Generation are the fabulous members of Students for a Sensible Drug Policy.
Classy idea.

Peter Letang, Delaware’s former chief prosecutor says that we’re losing the drug war. He talks about the costs and the profit incentives connected to prohibition. He doesn’t have a firm solution, but he’s willing to talk about it.

I do not vote anyone else’s proxy in making these comments, but I can report that a number of police officers, members of the Criminal Justice Council, prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys and corrections staff, have spoken to me echoing my thoughts. I am intrigued that those conversations have generally been in hushed tones.
I do not regard a recommendation for dialogue on this subject to be blasphemy, and I do recognize that there are downsides to attempting to reduce the profit from the drug market. I am equally aware, however, that the societal impact of what we have been attempting over the past many years has been frustrating, in large part ineffective and expensive. Candid discussions today will impact the next generation.

This is a sign that we’re making some serious progress. Part of the problem in the past has been that the prohibitionists have created an environment where simply talking about options other than prohibition was considered some kind of equivalent to treason.
But now we’re seeing more people from all walks of life speaking up and, at the very least, questioning the validity of the drug war. These are all cracks in the facade that is propping up prohibition.
Looks like Peter Letang is a potential candidate for joining Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, if he hasn’t already.

And the moron drug warriors keep looking for more ways to destroy people…
“bullet” Illinois House OKs Bill to Neuter Dogs of Drug Suspects

Under the bill, if a dog already has been determined to be vicious according to the state’s Animal Control Act, and its owner is then charged with a felony violation of drug, methamphetamine or marijuana laws, the owner would have to get the dog neutered or spayed.
The operation would have to be performed within a week of a person being charged with the drug crime. Owners who fail to comply would be charged with a misdemeanor.

Apparently, the idea is to have more docile dogs for the inevitable future time when the SWAT team shows up, or something.
“bullet” Officer Posing As High Schooler Leads Drug Sting

She was new in school, a demure blonde with a sob story.
With her mother dead and father chronically absent, the girl said, she needed to get high to kill the pain. For three months, students at Falmouth High bought her story and sold her the drugs she said she needed.
But yesterday, the real story emerged.
The girl who some students yesterday said they knew as Keane was in fact a fresh-faced cop whose three months at Falmouth High School culminated before the start of classes yesterday when nine teenage boys were led out of their homes in handcuffs on charges of selling her marijuana and ecstasy.

This is despicable. You put an attractive blonde girl with a sob story in with a bunch of hormone raging High School boys and they’ll rob a bank for her. Of course, they got drugs for her. I’m sure if they didn’t have any, they found out who did.
Look, I don’t want kids doing drugs, and I think we can find ways to reduce drug use by children, but I also don’t want kids growing up thinking that they can’t trust anybody and nobody trusts them. Being forced to pee in a cup, dealing with dog searches, and having friends who are narcs. What horrible lessons we teach.