Drug WarRant

You can bet they’re not happy in the U.S. Drug War HQ today.
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Morales has been a strong advocate of developing and marketing legal uses for the coca plant — the plant that has been used safely for centuries — for chewing, tea, soft drinks, toothpastes, medicines, etc. (Remember where Coca-Cola got its name and its original kick?)

Well, I doubt he’ll be able to live up to the “zero cocaine” boast, but if he succeeds in making coca a viable crop for commercial purposes (he’s even talking about exports), then he should be able to go far in reducing the power of narco-trafficking and the production of cocaine in his country (through both reducing demand within the country, and reducing the comparative incentives for farmers to work with criminal traffickers).
Note: Two years ago, I mentioned that denying Morales a visa was a boneheaded move by the U.S. I’ll stay with that assessment of our foreign policy.

So much going on, I wish I had time to post right now.
“bullet” The Agitator is still working the Cory Maye story.
“bullet” The converstaion with DAMMAD’s Steve Steiner continues at Dare Generation Diary
“bullet” Federal Judge Calls DEA’s View of Hemp ‘Asinine’ (no kidding!)
“bullet” Feingold notes that the sneak and peak provisions of the Patriot Act are mostly used to go after drug cases. (It’s not really about terrorism — it’s about going after our own citizens.) Add the fact that a meth bill was added to the Patriot Act, and it becomes sickeningly transparent that the politicians don’t really care about terrorism, but like having it around to use as a club to scare people into giving up rights.
At the same time, several major media sources revealed that the Bush administration may have been illegally spying on American citizens for several years, and Congress is asking for an investigation.
Perhaps in part because of this, the Patriot Act extension was temporarily derailed yesterday as the Senate failed to invoke cloture (the ending of discussion), but Frist at the last minute switched his vote to no (knowing it was losing) so he can bring it up for a vote again at any time. There will likely be some arm twisting going on.
What will happen? Is it possible for the American public to rise up and say “We won’t give up our rights any longer.”?

Mark Kleiman misses it again. He’s at a conference on “drug markets and violent crime.” He reports:

Now this is interesting. And it’s fascinating to see cigarettes in this equation, as New York has one of the most (if not the most) drastic cigarette taxes in the country. New York State is 8th in the country with $1.50 per pack in taxes, and New York City adds an additional$1.50, bringing it to $3 per pack in taxes.
But now Mark tries to oddly use the cigarette example as a way to stop… well… people like me.

Does that suggest perhaps that the amount of tax has to be taken into consideration? I mean, Mark even said it: “…since a high tax…”
Not when you’ve got a blind spot that you can drive a truck through. Even while admitting both the “high tax” and the “one limit” qualifiers, he dismisses legalization and regulation out-of-hand.
His conclusion?

The right policy response isn’t obvious? Yeah, it sure is tough to figure out. Let’s see…

• Strict Prohibition: Too extreme.
• Light Prohibition: Doesn’t get them off the streets.
• Extemely High taxation: Encourages black markets.
• ???:

Nope. Mark can’t quite come up with anything to put in that fourth option.
(Here’s a hint, Mark. There are many places in the country where cigarette smuggling isn’t a black-market item. You might want to take a look at what happens when the tax rates aren’t extreme.)

Here’s a request for input from all of you. One of the most annoying tricks used by drug prohibitionists is the old “What message would that send to the children?” used in opposition to any drug policy reform, usually when the facts are against them.
I would like to put together a page of actual messages that we send to children by continuing prohibition as it exists.
Things like…

• “Lying is OK when adults are talking about drugs.”
• “Our interest in what’s good for the family is less important than our desire to punish.”
• “If you make a mistake regarding drug use, we’d rather have you die from it than have information that might save your life.”
• “If you make a mistake regarding drug use, we’re going to make sure that your friends are too afraid to get help that might save you.”
• “If you’re going to use drugs, we want to make sure that you get them from a criminal, with uncertain purity and dosage.”
• “We’re really hoping that heroin addicts will get HIV and hepatitus from shared needles and die. That’s why we won’t allow needle exchange.”
• “You have no rights. We can come and test your blood or your urine or search you whenever we feel like it. You’re property.”
• “We use sick people as a tool for our political purposes. We don’t care whether they are in pain or die from a lack of medicine.”
• “We sit in Washington drinking martinis and thinking up ways to destroy the lives of kids who like to smoke pot.”
• “We’ll destroy the livelihoods of poor farmers and decimate their crops in order to make the drug dealers and drug warriors richer.”

In comments, add your own, or adjust the wording of some that I’ve given.

I’ve still got a few more days of craziness to finish up the semester with finals and a trip to Chicago with the Madrigal Singers for their 50th Anniversary (they’ll be performing at the Chicago Cultural Center on Saturday Night and the Palmer House Restaurant on Sunday morning. So, sorry for the lack of posts, but you know what to do.
Dare Generation Diary has been doing great, so read them regularly (and Libby at Last One Speaks and Jeralyn at TalkLeft).
And of course Radley Balko’s posts on Cory Maye have shaken up the entire blogosphere, from Atrios to Instapundit (it would be nice if more of them were discussing the issue of drug raids rather than focusing solely on home self-defense).
The media has actually been reporting the fact that the government is being sued to allow additional marijuana growing for research purposes. Of course, that’s something we’ve been talking about here for months. They trial was on hiatus and has started up again.
The media is also, unusually, continuing to report the GAO’s trashing of Plan Colombia. Could it be that it won’t be swept under the rug this time?
Discuss.

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Americans for Safe Access is organizing a protest of these raids:

More on this later, but for now, you must read The Agitator’s coverage of the Cory Maye story. Read this one and then this.
Cory had been slightly on my radar as part of a drug war victim story, but it appears the real story is even worse. We have a drug war victim that we are in the process even now. The way the story is shaping up:

• A man with no prior record, at home with his daughter in the middle of the night.
• Police serve a warrant to the other resident of the duplex, and an officer mistakes Cory’s door as part of the other resident and busts in unannounced.
• Cory hears someone enter the house and gets his gun to protect himself and his daughter. In the darkness, shoots at the intruder and kills a cop.
• Cory is on death row in Mississippi.

Perhaps this is a drug war victim we can still save.

Haven’t had a chance to post in the past few days — it’s the last week of classes for the semester, and everything is happening at once at the university (I also did production photography for a dance concert and four theatre productions this week.) It’ll be a couple more days before I can get back to speed.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak at Illinois State University’s HempFest — sponsored by Moblizing Activists and Students for Hemp (M.A.S.H.). It was a lot of fun.
So, for any new visitors from the HempFest, make yourself at home. Read some of the articles on the left, including “Drug War Victims” and “Why Is Marijuana Illegal” — one that we discussed.

I’ve mentioned this bill before, but now’s a good time to act on this Alert from ASA.

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Nice to see the GAO recognize the obvious. This report was requested by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), and Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va). It’ll be interesting to see how this affects future funding. The Bush Administration and Congress both are tripping over their own feet in their desire to pour more money down this drain, but now they’ll have to address the concerns in this report to do so.