Drug WarRant

Well, I finish my run in Marat/Sade this evening. It’s been a wonderful show and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, but losing every evening for the past 8 weeks has taken its toll. I now will need some time to recover and catch up with other work, but I’ll try to get back to more posting here quickly.
For now, check these out:
“bullet” Militarizing Mayberry at The Agitator. Standard knock-down-the-door-slam-the-residents-to-the-floor-and-cuff-them drug warrior approach for 2.5 grams of marijuana. And sure, ignore the fact that the woman is havin a heart attack. When it comes to busting marijuana, who cares about human life, anyway? The woman survived and is suing.
“bullet” A new political approach? Politician admits using cocaine and his poll numbers immediately go up. Hmmm… Bush could use some help right now… (Thanks, Lee) [Also, I see Joel Miller had the same thought]
“bullet” Jews Lead the Charge for Medical Pot — interesting article by Joe Eskenazi of Jewish News Weekly. The article talks about Irv Rosenfeld, Robert Raich, Ed Rosenthal, and others. One of my favorite anecdotes in the article is from attorney Bill Panzer:

A good article at Reason by David Weigel: When Patriots Dissent —
Surprise: Standing up to the PATRIOT Act can be good politics.
The article gives a nice background of the erosion of support for the Patriot Act, and while the drug war isn’t mentioned, it’s relevant.
The Patriot Act was touted as a way to apply drug warrior tactics to terrorism, and then, behold, the new provisions were often primarily used to give drug warriors more weapons to use against Americans’ rights.

Thanks to Daksya —
Check out this excellent re-cap by Dahlia Lithwick of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on Georgia v. Randolph. You can get a real sense of what mattered (particularly in 4th amendment terms) to the different Justices (and it doesn’t look good with our new Chief Justice).
I agree with Dahlia’s conclusion:

Here’s my earlier post on the subject.

Via MPP:

A couple of interesting pieces to read if you’ve got a little extra time.
“bullet” Ambassador de Sade, By John Gorenfeld in AlterNet.
Bush’s ambassador to Italy doesn’t speak Italian, and his qualifications seem to be a history of running a program that tortured kids. That’s right. Ambassador Mel Sembler and his wife ran STRAIGHT, Inc….

Despite all the lawsuits and legal actions, since the Semblers were political contributors, STRAIGHT, Inc managed to change its name to the Drug Free America Foundation, receiving government subsidies and spinning off organizations like SAFE, and the Semblers got to party it up in Italy, where they still keep busy…

It’s a pretty sickening article.
“bullet” Give me Cognitive Liberty by Salim Muwakkil in In These Times.

Probably not the most effective argument to use when debating your local prohibitionist, but an Interesting article with some points worth discussing.

Ethan wrote an OPED last week in the Scotsman that’s worth reading: Don’t Follow Us into a Disastrous War on Drugs
With some pressure in the UK for government to revert cannabis to class B (harsher penalties), Ethan uses the United States as a prime example of how idiotic that would be.
It’s an interesting read — nothing particularly new to us, but good background for Europeans on how stupid we are about drug policy in the U.S.
I particularly liked this quote (a good one to use when talking to those who fear that legalization will somehow turn society into a drug-free-for-all):

An Assistant District Attorney from New York stopped by Drug WarRant and dropped a comment on the item below:

Um, yes, I have an agenda I wish to advance. I’ve been fairly clear about that. I want to end the ineffective and destructive drug war that’s been waged against the American people and find alternativess to a prohibition scheme that increases black market profits and encourages corruption in government. However, I’m not sure about this notion of life sentences being “blown completely out of proportion.”
The Garrison Keillor post referenced noted: “As a result, a marijuana grower can land in prison for life without parole while a murderer might be in for eight years.” How is that blown out of proportion? It doesn’t say that all or most drug infractions are life sentences, but it says that it’s possible. That’s the truth, and it’s a horrific travesty. I don’t care if nobody gets a life sentence — the fact that such a sentence is even on the books for growing a relatively harmless plant is morally and intellectually wrong and should be clear to anyone with half a brain.
Our prosecutor, in the post on his website, oddly complains about people over-generalizing from limited examples and then goes and attempts to counter by using only one anecdotal case.
I have never indicated that most people get life sentences, or even double-digit sentences, but the numbers show that we are incarcerating a ton of people for a very long time for drug offences. Why is it that over half of federal inmates and more than 20% of state inmates are in for drug offences? This is appalling. In New York, it’s worse than the average for the other states — in 1980, 11% of those in prison were for drug felonies; in 2003, it was 38%.
Interestingly, in his attempt to show that the drug laws are not excessive, our prosecutor notes:

So our evidence that drug sentences are not that harsh is that someone who was low on the totem pole was allowed by our compassionate prosecutor to plead down to 3 years to life, and because he was eligible, could participate in shock incarceration to get out earlier.
Whoever, you are, The People, we welcome you to the debate, and hope to hear more from you.
A final note: The title of your post is “If you can’t do the time…” — a nice nod to the old Baretta show, but really irrelevant. The question is not whether people can do the time, but whether the time makes any sense at all.

Garrison Keillor takes his own party to task:

This is a message that Democrats need to hear and heed.

(Note: The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act passed the House 392-16 and the Senate 97-2)

Thanks to Adam, (and I see that Libby at Last One Speaks has already covered this, but it’s important) —
The Washington Post reported yesterday that the DEA has been stripped of one of its roles:

Are people waking up? Realizing that the DEA has no business inserting itself in medical issues? I give a significant amount of credit for this to Radley Balko and others who have been reaching a lot of decision makers with their articles about the DEA’s abuses.
(Of course, there are still a lot of roles that we need to strip from the DEA.)

Check out the brand new group blog: DARE Generation Diary (another fine effort from SSDP)
An outstanding group of contributors from a wonderful organization. I expect great things. (The pressure’s on, Tom).