Drug WarRant

Great piece by Doug Struck in today’s Washington Post:
High Crimes, or a Tokin’ Figure?: Canadians find the ‘Prince of Pot’ Harmless. The DEA begs to differ.
It’s a full 3-page profile on Marc and his Marijuana crusades, that points out how clearly public he had been about his activities.

Until recently, nobody much cared, it seemed. The police hadn’t bothered to come around for eight years. Before that, they busted Emery for seed sales and raided him four times. But he just got fined — once with “a nice speech from the judge saying what a nice person I was and how marijuana probably shouldn’t be illegal,” Emery says — and the police stopped trying.
In truth, Emery hated being ignored. He tried to stir up notoriety. Every year, he filled out his income taxes listing his occupation as “Marijuana Seed Vendor,” paying heftily and honestly, he says, on his multimillion-dollar business. The Canadian Revenue Service never questioned him.
He told the Canada post office he was getting and sending his seeds through the mail. They never stopped delivery. He started the B.C. Marijuana Party, fielded 79 candidates in 2001, and ran repeatedly for local and federal offices. He never won.
He broadcast “Pot-TV” on the Internet, entertained politicians, and openly funded marches, lawsuits and marijuana-legalization drives from Arizona to Israel to Washington, D.C.
When it was too quiet at home, he would go somewhere to rattle up a pro-pot demonstration. He would light up a fat joint in front of a police station, daring the cops to arrest him.
Twenty-one times they did. Usually he got off, or was released after a night in jail, or fined. His longest stretch was 61 days in jail in 2004, ordered by a Saskatoon judge clearly irked at Emery’s in-your-face apologia. No big deal, Emery says. He read the Bible behind bars.
Then came the DEA.

Read the whole thing.
Between 60 Minutes and the Washington Post, Marc is starting to get some real momentum in the mainstream, and it’s all coming out as fairly positive press for him. People see him as a nice, quirky guy, not some monster. They notice that Canada had no interest in putting him away, and so the DEA comes off in not so great a light.
I think there’s a long-term chipping away that has been occurring, through a complete lack of understanding about public relations on the part of the DEA. The public has gotten bored with seizure photo-ops and are starting to realize that they have no meaning long-term. At the same time, they see DEA busts of medical marijuana patients with revulsion. And the Marc Emery extradition is not going to help the DEA at all.

Via NORML

Nearly one out of two Americans support amending federal law “to let states legally regulate and tax marijuana the way they do liquor and gambling,” according to a national poll of 1,004 likely voters by Zogby International and commissioned by the NORML Foundation.
Forty-six percent of respondents — including a majority of those polled on the east (53 percent) and west (55 percent) coasts — say they support allowing states to regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol. Forty-nine percent of respondents opposed taxing and regulating cannabis, and five percent were undecided.
“Public support for replacing the illicit marijuana market with a legally regulated, controlled market similar to alcohol — complete with age restrictions and quality controls — continues to grow,” NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre said. “NORML’s challenge is to convert this growing public support into a tangible public policy that no longer criminalizes those adults who use marijuana responsibly.”
Respondents’ support for marijuana law reform was strongly influenced by age and political affiliation. Nearly two-thirds of 18-29 year-olds (65 percent) and half of 50-64 year-olds think federal law should be amended to allow states the option to regulate marijuana, while majorities of 30-49 year-olds (58 percent) and seniors 65 and older (52 percent) oppose such a change.
Among those respondents who identified themselves as Democrats, 59 percent back taxing and regulating marijuana compared to only 33 percent of Republicans. Forty-four percent of Independents and 85 percent of Libertarians say they supported the law change.
Respondents’ opinions were also influenced by religious affiliation. Nearly 70 percent of respondents who identified themselves as Jewish, and nearly 60 percent of respondents who said they were non-religious believe that states should regulate cannabis, while only 48 percent of Catholics and 38 percent of Protestants support such a policy.

I found this article from the Philippine Star interesting, even though the butchering of the English language makes it sometimes a little confusing.
Basically it says that, despite the fact that the United States called the Philippines “a drug trafficker’s paradise,” saying the illegal drug trade in the country has evolved into a billion-dollar industry, the chief of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency ( PDEA ) says the government is winning the war on drugs.
How do you explain this discrepancy? The chief claims that it’s part of the strategy:

“The report, made annually by the US State Department, is used by their decision makers in allocating funds for the anti-drug campaign for other countries,” Avenido said.
He said if the US tags a country as drug free, they will no longer give support to that particularly country, he explained.

So it seems the trick for other countries is, in order to get the most money from our taxpayers, you need to be seen to be cracking down very hard, but not really accomplishing anything. Fortunately for them, that strategy is a perfect fit with the drug war.

Via TalkLeft
U.S. District Court Judge Gregory Presnell in Orlando, FL refused to apply the Federal crack cocaine sentencing guidelines. He ruled:

This arbitrary and discriminatory disparity between powder and crack cocaine implicates the Section 3553(a)(2)(A) factors. Unless one assumes the penalties for powder cocaine are vastly too low, then the far-higher penalties for crack are at odds with the seriousness of the offense. The absence of a logical rationale for such a disparity and its disproportionate impact on one historically disfavored race promotes disrespect for the law and suggests that the resulting sentences are unjust. Accordingly, these statutory factors weigh heavily against the imposition of a Guidelines sentence.

The fact that this sentencing disparity has not yet been corrected by Congress is a powerful racist stain on our government.

Not only can’t the Drug Czar go around unchallenged any more, even the Press is realizing that they can’t automatically believe everything he says, and is asking questions (and catching the lies).

The White House drug czar yesterday sounded the alarm on high school kids drinking and drugging during spring break but backed away from assertions that 1 in 7 high schoolers under age 18 are partying unsupervised in hotspots like Cancun and Miami Beach.
“It was in fact a very real human error,” Rosanna Maietta, spokeswoman for the Bush administration’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, said of the agency’s faulty math, which suggested that 15 percent of all high schoolers under age 18 were unleashed to go wild during the annual vacation.
[…]
Late yesterday, after several inquiries from the Herald, the Drug Control Office, through its public relation arm, Fleishman-Hillard, admitted it lacked the statistics to back up its claim.

“lacked the statistics” Nice euphemism. Try that yourself sometime (“Honey, remember last Friday when I told you I was playing cards with the guys? Well, it turns out I lack the statistics to back up that claim.”)

Jennifer Kern at Drug Policy Alliance writes about her experience at the Czar’s drug testing summit on Wednesday.
Due to the efforts of an incredible number of people in a variety of organizations, it’s becoming impossible for the Drug Czar to operate completely unchallenged.

Just when I think we can sink no lower.
Buried in the ONDCP re-authorization that the House passed with only 5 “no” votes was this piece of crap (pdf, see page 30):

(n) REQUIREMENT FOR SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF MYCOHERBICIDE IN ILLICIT DRUG CROP ERADICATION.-Not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy shall submit to the Congress a report that includes a plan to conduct, on an expedited basis, a scientific study of the use of mycoherbicide as a means of illicit drug crop elimination by an appropriate Government scientific research entity, including a complete and thorough scientific peer review. The study shall include an evaluation of the likely human health and environmental impacts of such use. The report shall also include a plan to conduct controlled scientific testing in a major drug producing nation of mycoherbicide naturally existing in the producing nation.

Marc Souder sponsored the overall ONDCP re-authorization, and the specific biological warfare section was inserted by Dan Burton (also from Indiana).
More information on this is available at the U.N. Observer, which notes:

Speaking to the Colombian daily El Tiempo on Monday, former Colombian President AndrÚs Pastrana, now Bogot½’s Ambassador in Washington, emphatically reiterated Colombia’s opposition to the plan, telling the paper, “During my government we opposed it. And Colombia’s position, now under President lvaro Uribe, has not changed.” […]
The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) prohibits all biological warfare, including attacks on crops. The BWC has no exemptions – not for the Drug War, nor for the US Congress. The US eradication project thus violates the BWC’s Article I, which prohibits development and stockpiling of biological weapons.
The main biological weapons agents under US consideration are strains of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum that attack coca and other illicit crops. With its serious human health and environmental risks, F. oxysporum has been dubbed “Agent Green” by civil society opponents, who liken it to the defoliant Agent Orange that was used by the US in Vietnam. In the US conception, huge amounts of specially-formulated Fusarium would be sprayed from large military aircraft to blanket large portions of Colombia and, potentially, other countries.
The HR 2829 provision does not specifically mention Colombia or Fusarium, although it does specify that the testing plan should be for a “major drug producing nation”. This opens the possibility that the tests could be conducted elsewhere, such as Central Asia, where the US has supported development of biological weapons for use against opium poppy. Given past events, however, the bill’s language is widely interpreted to refer to Colombia.

The moral poverty of our Congress is astonishing.

I discussed at some length the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) report on drug policy by David Boyum and Peter Reuter.
AEI recently hosted a discussion about the report, bringing in the authors and several drug policy “experts.” (I use quotation marks, because that description can be somewhat hard to define.)
The entire session video is available online, and was… instructional. The session was hosted by James Q. Wilson, with presentations by David Boyum, Peter Reuter, Rand Beers, Edwin Meese, and Jacob Sullum (plus an audience Q&A session).
Many of the criticisms of the AEI study I mentioned in my article (despite the fact that the study savaged current policy) were reinforced in the session. Foremost is the fact that legalization was not allowed to be discussed in the study — of course.
The moderator (Wilson) tried to address this, noting that the study purposely did not include the option of legalization in part because both political parties are opposed to it, and there is no significant political movement in the country for legalization. And then Wilson tried to offer his own additional reason in this incoherent statement:

I infer there’s a second reason… research I have done
have led me to believe… that the legalization of drugs might well not reduce the number of drug addicts, but might increase it, and if it increases, depending again on how we finance these matters, this could lead to either an increase in crime, a decrease in crime, or no change in crime. Uh, much depends on those circumstances.

Well, that explains it!
Boyum and Reuter’s presentations were the rather standard academic circle-jerk of noting that current policies are an abject failure, and shifting some resources from enforcement to treatment would certainly be an improvement, we don’t have enough data, and since legalization is not an option, our recommendation is for the government to do… uh… less.
Then came Rand Beers, architect of Plan Colombia. He mostly talked about how he agreed that treatment was an improvement over enforcement, but that it was politically difficult to promote — suggesting that perhaps treatment as part of enforcement would be more politically possible.
Edwin Meese talked a nice game, but clearly went off the deep end in the morality mode. He talked about the importance on focusing on the drug problem as part of social disintegration. He misused tons of statistics, and then complained that the rest of the group weren’t talking enough about the increasing dangers of marijuana potency and how medical research was discovering all sorts of carcinogenic effects and mental health problems evidencing that marijuana is a much more serious drug than was previously supposed.
Meese’s contribution to the treatment question was to suggest that we increase the treatment facilities in prisons (clearly he was having none of the reduction of enforcement arguments. And finally, he entertained the group with a fantasy of how Plan Colombia was a shining example of major improvements in security, stability, human rights, reduction of coca growing, and tremendous improvement in the Colombian economy.
Jacob Sullum, of course, was the one who really had something to say. (The video page has links to the different points in the video, so if you don’t have time to watch it all, you can always jump right to Sullum’s section — worth it.) For those who don’t know, he’s a regular contributor at Reason’s Hit and Run, and author of the excellent Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.)
Sullum had some really fine points to share, including discussing the notion of two views of harm reduction that are useful in discussing drug policy: micro harm reduction and macro harm reduction. Micro harm reduction measures the harm related to a policy as it impacts an individual. For example, allowing needle exchange for heroin use is clearly beneficial in micro harm reduction, because it reduces potential for blood-borne illnesses, whereas not allowing it does not provide any benefit. From a macro harm reduction analysis, you would look at the overall societal cost/benefit. So in the case of needle exchange, you’d see if the policy caused more people overall to use drugs, get addicted, cause problems, etc. and if that negative outweighed the positive of reducing blood-borne illnesses (as it turns out, needle exchange has proved to be positive at the macro level as well).
This micro and macro analysis seems to provide one of the best notions of a real discussion of cost/benefit. But as Sullum notes, there are still problems in definition. For example, he does not think that self-harm done by an individual should count as great as harm done to someone else, and particularly not as high as harm done by the government to people. (Most prohibitionists count self-harm highly, misattribute collateral damage as drug use related rather than prohibition related, and ignore harm done by the government.
Sullum also noted that the “all use is abuse” approach by the government is “one of the biggest barriers to clear thinking in drug policy.” He noted that if tomorrow, you were able to reduce the number of people using marijuana by 50% and didn’t have any affect on those who were abusing drugs, the government would celebrate as if it had won a major victory, when in fact, by any valid measurement, there would be no benefit to society whatsoever.
Really good stuff, there.
The Q&A was less interesting. Some good questions by some very familiar folks, but the answers tended to involve lies (Meese and Rand), or confusion (Reuter and Boyum).

In the piece about Morales giving Rice a guitar with coca leaves on it, I noted that the U.S. government has no understanding of the cultural background of these countries.
This article by Niko Kyriakou really points out that gap.

The war against coca–the plant used to make cocaine–has become a defining issue for U.S. policy in South America, yet many Americans know little about the plant their country is fighting. […]
In Bolivia’s Andean neighbor Peru, a spokesman for second-place presidential candidate and retired Lt. Col. Ollanta Humala this week announced Humala’s support for a plan to feed a small amount of coca to school children as a way to improve their overall diet.
If the left-wing Humala wins Peru’s presidency in April, he plans to serve poor children bread made from flour containing five percent coca.
Giving children coca in the United States not only would be political suicide, it would be considered a criminal act. And that difference in stance reflects a vast gap between U.S. and South American experience of a substance with a known history stretching back to long before Christopher Columbus’s landfall, times when the Incas controlled much of the continent.
For thousands of years, coca has been a rich source of nutrients for poor South Americans.
Today, use of the leaf is so common that in Bolivia, for example, police carry out U.S.-funded coca eradication with wads of coca in their mouths, said Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.
Coca leaves often are chewed or made into a tea rich in calcium, iron, and vitamin A, said Tree, adding that by contrast, coffee ”leeches all the vitamins out of your body.”
Coca also has health benefits as a salve for arthritis and gout, as toothpaste, and as a cure for altitude sickness.
Even the U.S. embassy in Bolivia recommends on its Web site that travelers consume coca tea to help alleviate altitude sickness.

But of course here in the states, the only message is “eradicate.” In Congress, the only word is “eradicate.” To the ignorant masses in Congress and elsewhere in this country, coca=cocaine, and the two as one are pure evil. No other message is allowed.

Tom Angell of Dare Generation Diary is live-blogging the Drug Testing Summit in Falls Church, Virginia.
They’ve brought in the big guns. The Drug Czar himself is there to promote his government-sponsored fetish of watching children pee in a cup.
SSDP has been doing a great job keeping on top of this issue. You can be sure that even though this event is a one-sided government snow-job attempt, they won’t get away with it, because the other side will be there to get interviewed by the media and to get our message out to the educators.
Related: An editorial in the Newport News, Virginia Daily Press somewhat gently chided those strident parents who were outraged that only a voluntary drug testing program had been implemented.

Empowering Parents Works Better Than Supplanting Them
“Please, someone, please – be the parent.”
That was the echo that seemed to reverberate around many of the pleas by parents, students and community members, as they stood before the Williamsburg-James City County School Board and begged it to implement student drug testing. They told heartfelt and heart-wrenching stories of children, siblings and friends whose lives had been left in shambles, or taken entirely, by drugs. Over and over they asked: If there had been drug testing, might the problem have been detected and the tragedy headed off?
What they were searching for was someone to do that testing, to get involved. Someone to act like a parent.
The School Board wisely realized that its job is not to fill that function by imposing drug testing on students, but to help parents fulfill it by offering a voluntary testing program parents can choose to take advantage of. […]
And, of course, parents don’t have to wait for a program. Those home kits are on the shelves of drug stores, and local labs are open for business.

The rebuke is a soft one, but it’s clearly there.