Drug WarRant

I always love reading Robert Sharpe. Such clarity in his writing, and he’s always able to hit all the important points in a way that is palatable to, and resonates with, those not in the reform community. Check out his OpEd in the Charlotte Observer.

Given that marijuana is arguably safer than legal alcohol — the plant has never been shown to cause an overdose death — it makes no sense to waste tax dollars on failed policies that finance organized crime and facilitate hard drug use.

Drug policy reform may send the wrong message to children, but I like to think the children are more important than the message.

A real bad apple:

[Thomas] Pfortmiller, a 14-year police officer before he resigned in May 2004, pleaded no contest on July 15 to 17 counts of perjury, 11 counts of theft of more than $500 but less than $25,000, 11 counts of forgery and 11 counts of official misconduct. Pfortmiller, who originally was charged with 100 felonies and misdemeanors, was convicted of 50 felonies based on his plea.

Pfortmiller took $20,855 in police funds, claiming it was to go to an informant who would buy illegal drugs. The drug buys never took place, Steve Karrer, a Shawnee County assistant district attorney, said during Pfortmiller’s plea in July, but reports led to false arrest warrants being issued.

OK, this is some really horrific behavior by a police officer — particularly when it led to false arrests — destroying other people’s lives.
District Judge Eric Rosen made it clear that this was indefensible in the strongest words:

“Major cases have been dismissed, and most shocking, citizens of our community have been set up, accused and warrants issued for their arrest for crimes they did not commit,” said Rosen, comparing it to dictatorships, including the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In writing false affidavits against defendants, “your actions constitute an abuse of power of the highest degree,” Rosen said. “When a law enforcer becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for the law. It invites everyone to become the law unto themselves. It invites anarchy.”

So the judge threw the book at him.
The sentence?
Instead of the usual sentence of probation, the judge sentenced Pfortmiller to 16 months.
What????
What kind of a country is this? Someone can get dozens of years in prison for consentual sales of a relatively harmless drug, but betraying the public trust and framing innocent people as part of 50 felonies gets an officer only a year and a half.
This is outrageous.
Those who are public servants must be held to higher standards. This kind of sentence is an insult to all the good officers out there.
Link

Letter to the editor in the Globe and Mail by Robert Melamede, associate professor and chair, Biology Department, University of Colorado:

I hope Canadians have the intelligence and courage not to be mindless slaves to the oppressive stupidity of America’s drug war. This war has its roots in racism, ignorance and greed. Sadly, the U.S. is run by religious zealots who deny science and are incapable of understanding that marijuana is a miracle medicine for many because it is the only plant that mimics the way our bodies try to maintain balance.

We all produce marijuana-like compounds known as endocannabinoids. And cannabinoids, among their many functions, regulate open-mindedness. I trust the Canadian government and judicial system are not as biologically defective as found in the United States. Protect Marc Emery; he is a Canadian asset.

Go see Daksya’s new blog, Psychotonic.
He’s done a great job of laying out the Downing Street Report (something he had sent to me, but I had not gotten around to posting).
Here it is in four installments:

At Salon, Maia Szalavitz takes on the ONDCP’s advertising campaigns, including some of the borderline and outright lies about mental illness, depression, and cancer. Nothing new to those of us who follow this regularly, and it’s not particularly compelling reading, but still nice to see it as the lead article on Salon.com.
Salon once was a real leader in this area (particularly with the Daniel Forbes investigative reporting and Arianna Huffington’s opinion pieces back in 2000), but needs to get more regularly involved in exposing the drug war.

Via Last One Speaks and US Marijuana Party, comes this gem.
So here’s the deal…

• Cops think they see marijuana plants in a back yard.
• They take pictures
• They show the pictures to the district attorney
• The district attorney takes a search warrant application to a judge
• The judge signs it
• Officers search the property
• During the search, “at least 10 officers went through the Smiths’ house, checking drawers and closets and videotaping everything”

Now, in a free society, if we weren’t already used to the complete surrender of rights to this obsession over a plant, this would already seem to be a bizarre story.
But wait! There’s more…

• It was the former mayor’s house, and the back yard is where the former mayor’s wife entertained local senior citizen groups
• The plants were actually sunflowers, not marijuana
• The search took place in Bel Aire, Kansas
• Kansas is the Sunflower State

Even if none of the plants were blooming, sunflower leaves aren’t in the least bit similar to marijuana leaves.
Now this is a silly story — a funny story. But it shouldn’t be.
It should be a really f*cking scary story. The fact is that we’ve reached a point in the drug war where searching a home is considered a routine function, not demanding diligence or competence. A decision to send 10 men through your house videotaping your closets and drawers is not one to be taken lightly.
Update: Here’s another article, including actual picture of the plants (picture at right is from that photo by Les Anderson of the Ark Valley News).
One of the things we learn is that the officers actually still thought it was marijuana after searching the place and took some with them!
The whole article is incredible. Read it all. The more details you read, the more pissed off you’ll get.
Here’s a sample:

When the officers were in their home, she kept trying to find out why the officers were searching it.

“I asked the police chief (Chris Ludiker), ‘Why would you think this?'” she said. “You know us,” she told him. “My husband hired you when he was mayor. We’ve lived here 40 years in the same house. Why would you think this? We’re senior citizens.”

Smith, a marriage and family counselor in Wichita, said the officers questioned her and her husband about why they had more than two vehicles. She said he told her that two people didn’t need more than two vehicles.

“One of them is my Jeep,” she said. “I drive my Jeep to Utah every year when we go backpacking there. We’ve gone there with our family for 15 or 16 years. I really enjoy driving my Jeep on trips.”

The officers asked them “over and over,” Smith said, about whether they had someone living there with them.

“They said younger men had been seen going into our house,” she said. “I told them we had two sons, the one in Wilson who gave me the seeds and the other one who is an electrician in El Dorado. One visited us on July Fourth, and one was here overnight over Labor Day weekend. There hasn’t been anyone else here.”

Smith said Ludiker also referred to the sign on their fence near the gate to the back yard. The sign reads “Guard dog on duty.” A separate sign under that sign reads “No trespassing.”

“I told him it was a joke–that’s why I bought it,” she said. “All we have is our little dog. He asked about other dogs. There aren’t any.”

When their family members initially heard about the drug raid, Smith said they laughed. Then they got mad.

That’s right. Get mad!
And here’s more info on the sunflower plant.

The Las Vegas Review Journal nails Boulder City Attorney David Olsen in this scathing editorial

Southern Nevada has a new general in the drug war: Boulder City Attorney David Olsen. And Mr. Olsen isn’t concerned about sacrificing freedom to wage his campaign.

Mr. Olsen is attempting to use the state’s civil forfeiture laws to seize the home of Cynthia Warren, a Boulder City resident who pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor drug charge for possessing six marijuana plants. Although Ms. Warren has not been convicted of selling illegal drugs, Mr. Olsen is convinced she’s a six-figure drug dealer with a home-based operation that threatens his community.

So why isn’t Mr. Olsen making sure this 55-year-old woman is locked up with pushers from the Rollin’ 60s and the Kingsmen? Why didn’t the city orchestrate a sting to ensnare this dealer during a big sale? Because the evidence wasn’t there.[…]

No matter. Mr. Olsen wants her house. “I’m not concerned about the criminal charges against her,” he said. “This doesn’t have anything to do with her criminal case.”[…]

Mr. Olsen should drop the civil case. If he won’t, District Judge Michael Cherry should shred it for him. Then lawmakers should reform state forfeiture laws to prevent such blatant abuses in the future.

A good start. David Olsen may just end up being such an idiot that he’ll help the cause of asset forfeiture reform.

In today’s Providence Journal, a good read by Froma Harrop

[…]Possession of cocaine, a felony, did not interfere with [George W. Bush or Lincoln Chaffee’s] Ivy League education. Nor did it stop them from seeking and attaining high public office. Today, taxpayers cover both men’s salaries and health-care costs, and will eventually provide their government pensions. All, apparently, is forgiven.

But when some low-income kid gets convicted of smoking a joint (a misdemeanor), America gathers up its moral indignation and strips him of his federal student loan. This is a sick double standard, and it will continue unless changes are made in the Higher Education Act.

The article really nails the problems with the Higher Education Act financial aid provision.

As things now stand, police swoop down on some college party and drag off the pot-smoking kids. Come the next semester, rich daddies write the usual checks, and the children of doctors, lawyers and U.S. presidents are back in class. Poor and working-class students go home. So far, 175,000 young people have lost federal student aid because of the Drug Provision.

The whole War on Drugs is a lesson in class discrimination. “A ton of drugs are taken by middle-class kids,” says Tom Angell, a director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. “Middle- and upper-class people often don’t get caught. And they can afford good lawyers to avoid a conviction in the first place.”

Way to go, Tom.

The first narcotics informant to be tried in this Dallas case was found guilty yesterday.
An earlier report spelled out how the scam was organized.

Crooked narcotics informants on the Dallas police payroll in 2001 operated like a highly regimented drug gang, planting powdery packages containing worthless billiards chalk on innocent people, witnesses in the trial of one of the informants testified Tuesday.

Each informant had specific duties. Some purchased cones of billiards chalk by the caseload. Others crushed the cones into powder before compressing it into bricks and wrapping it with cellophane to resemble kilo-sized packages of cocaine. Still others took part in the insidious task of selecting innocent people for arrest, witnesses said.

The bigger the buy, the more the police would pay them.
One police officer has already been convicted of lying and several others face a bunch of charges.
Over a year ago, the Dallas News said:

We need to get to the bottom of what happened, and the city has every right to dig and dig until it hits the floor — no matter how much dust is kicked up in the process.

This case points out one of the problems with the drug war in general. It encourages poor and/or corrupt police work and corruption, and the use of unreliable and/or dishonest informants.

Link

President Bush has taken Venezuela off his list of allies in the war on drugs, saying that the government of President Hugo Chavez spurned anti-drug cooperation with U.S. officials and fired its effective law enforcement officers.

But the White House waived the cuts in U.S. foreign aid usually attached to the “decertification” so that it can continue to support Venezuelan pro-democracy groups that oppose the leftist Chavez.

Bush’s decision is expected to sharply exacerbate already bitter U.S.-Venezuelan relations roiled by Washington’s charges that Chavez is promoting subversion around the hemisphere and the Venezuelan president’s allegations that Bush is out to kill him.

The U.S. State Department’s No. 3 official, Nicholas Burns, announced the Bush administration decision Thursday in New York City around the time Chavez was arriving there for a U.N. summit gathering. The only other nation decertified this year was Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

Accompanying Burns, U.S. drug czar John Walters said that in the past Venezuelan cooperation on drugs was “quite successful and extensive” but that now it seemed that Chavez “no longer wants a productive relationship.”

Venezuelan Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel said of the annual certification process required by U.S. law, “We reject it. … it’s infantile.”

This could get ugly. Now I don’t claim to be any kind of expert on what’s happening in Venezuela, but I do know our own players pretty well.
When Walters talks about a “production relationship,” that means one where Venezuela bends over and does whatever the U.S. tells it to, regardless of legality, morality, or effectiveness. Too much of the world has agreed to do just that. It’s actually nice to see a country question it.
And Rangel is right — the certification process is infantile.
I suspect that this has very little to do with an actual concern on the part of the U.S. regarding drug trafficking — that’s just the excuse. The U.S. was using the DEA as a cover to infiltrate and Chavez knew it. And the fact that the U.S. is decertifying without cutting aid for groups opposing Chavez kind of makes it obvious (since decertification is supposed to stop aid).
Could it be that the administration is setting up a scenario where they can justify overthrowing Chavez in order to “protect us from drugs”?
Oh yeah, and don’t forget: “Venezuela provides 12 to 15 percent of U.S. oil imports.”