Drug WarRant

Link

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday accused the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration of using its agents for espionage, and said Venezuela was suspending cooperation with the U.S. agency.”

Oops.

Of course, Karen Tandy should never have been confirmed as head of the DEA in the first place (see my post Can Congress Get a Clue (Karen Tandy and the DEA)). At the time, she was unqualified, uninformed, and, previously as a prosecutor, probably guilty of criminal misuse of prosecutorial powers.
During her tenure as head of the DEA, she has overseen a DEA that has gained notoriety for harrassing doctors and patients.
Now, not only has she gone after a foreign citizen (Marc Emery) for marijuana charges, she has bragged that part of the reason was to stifle political dissent.

Today’s arrest of Mark (sic) Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and the founder of a marijuana legalization group, is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on. [Link]

Yes, that’s right. The head of the DEA came out and said that the importance of the bust is not the marijuana that was grown from Emery’s seeds, but rather the stifling of political speech.
The US Marijuana Party has called for Tandy’s resignation. I intend to write to Senator Dick Durbin (the only Senator to question Tandy’s confirmation) and ask him to investigate. You should do the same.

I’ve held off saying too much about the Supreme Court nominee, waiting for more information. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have that much of a judicial record, so he’s a bit of a stealth candidate, but based on this post by TalkLeft, I feel confident in saying that John Roberts is not who we want on the Supreme Court.
We already have a court that has too often sided with the government over the individual, eroding our rights as free citizens — particularly 4th Amendment rights. All the government has to do is say “drug war” and the Supremes roll over and say, “Well, in that case, certainly you should take away more constitutional rights,” regardless of whether the policy even works.
It appears from his record that John Roberts will actually be eager to join in this shredding of the Bill of Rights, and may even become a leader in this effort.
He should not be confirmed.

Link
In addition to the amnesty program for the big traffickers, Colombia has instituted a cash for coca program in one region of the country. Farmers can take their plants to the police and get cash on the spot for them.
Sort of like a government subsidy to grow coca.

Rebels in the region typically traffic in the coca to finance their armed struggle against the Colombian government. Mr. Uribe said recent military operations have forced the rebels into hiding, leaving the farmers without buyers.

The program has come under harsh criticism from lawmakers such as Colombian Sen. Rafael Pardo, who said it would encourage small farmers to grow more coca just so they could sell it to the government, a guaranteed and steady paying customer.

Mr. Pardo — who is a likely presidential candidate in next year’s elections — and other critics say farmers will find ways to continue cultivating illegal crops and selling them to the government, the rebels or right-wing paramilitaries that also produce cocaine for income, or all three.

Of course, Uribe sees this as a wonderful way to eradicate some of the crop!
Aren’t any of these political leaders required to take an economics course at some time in their lives? I admit that I slept through a lot of the classes myself, but I understand supply and demand (even elasticity), and can see a price support when it hits me in the face.
Of course, Uribe counters by noting that the farmers must “sign a legally binding agreement to halt cultivation.” Ah, that solves it. So growing coca is against the law, but if you do break the law, you can take the coca to the police and get paid for it, but then you must agree not to break the law or you’ll be in violation of your agreement not to break the law.
Right.

Link

CRAWFORD, Texas, Aug 4 (Reuters) – U.S. President George W. Bush pledged on Thursday to sustain funding for Colombia’s fight against drugs and violence even as a senior State Department official said Washington would like to reduce its anti-narcotics aid.

[…]

“And we’ll ask the Congress to sustain our commitment to follow-on programs for Plan Colombia so Colombia can build on its progress and win its war against the narcoterrorists,” Bush told reporters before getting behind the wheel of his white pickup truck to give Uribe a tour of his 1,600-acre (650-hectare) ranch.

Words fail me.

Their meeting came in the same week Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice certified Colombia was respecting human rights and distancing itself from paramilitary groups sufficiently to allow U.S. aid to be given to its military.

Uh huh.

I’ve got to take a moment to gloat…
Back in September, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert made some outrageous inferences that George Soros got his money from drug cartels.
Not only was it outrageous, but it made no sense, and I made that clear in this post…

If a “drug group” is going to support anyone with contributions, it would be a drug warrior like Dennis Hastert, not a legalizer like Soros.

… and in this imaginary interview I had on Fox News Sunday …

Guither: “Well, Chris, it was pretty outrageous. No matter how the Speaker tries to spin it after the fact, he was clearly making it up out of thin air. It made no sense. Drug cartels wouldn’t give money to Soros — he’s trying to put them out of business by supporting legalization efforts. And the legalization groups get funds from Soros. They don’t give him funding.”

Wallace: “Why do you think he said it then? Was it just a political attack?”

Guither: “Certainly that was part of it. But there are some who say that Hastert is really trying to deflect attention from his own shadowy connections to drug groups.”

Wallace: “Excuse me?”

Guither: “Yes, this is actually very well established and documented. Speaker Dennis Hastert receives larges amounts of funding from drug groups, who expect him to use his power as speaker on their behalf to continue the excesses of the drug war, and increase their profits.”

Could I have been right?
Via TalkLeft we learn that the new Vanity Fair has an investigative report that asks a lot of questions…

Some of the calls reportedly contained what sounded like references to large scale drug shipments and other crimes,” writes Rose. “One name, however, apparently stood out — a man the Turkish callers often referred to by the nickname “Denny boy.” It was the Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert. According to some of the wiretaps, the FBI’s targets had arranged for thousands of dollars to be paid to Hastert’s campaign funds in small checks.

According to Raw Story, the Bush administration is trying to keep the information secret.
Oh, Denny boy!!

Via FlexYourRights.org comes a disturbing article.
Now at this point it’s charges and denials in a lawsuit, and I have no way to verify what actually happened, but if the charges in the lawsuit are true…
Jason Burnham, age 34, was distraught after the death of his 9-month-old daughter in 2002, and carried her ashes in a sealed pendant that he wore around his neck (not the thing I’d do, but…) He also had a legal prescription to Xanax for depression due to his daughter’s death.
He was stopped by Officer Brad Cline in Florida after Hurricane Charley, who mistook the effects of Xanax for intoxication. After examining his Xanax pills, the officer asked about the pendant.
Thinking it might contain cocaine, he took the pendant, broke the seal, and dumped it on the hood of his car. After seeing that it was ashes and not cocaine, Officer Cline wiped the ashes onto the ground, and sent Burnham on his way.

The seven-count lawsuit accuses the city of false arrest/false imprisonment and detention of Burnham, and violation of his right to privacy. It accuses the city and Cline of invasion of privacy and violation of Burnham’s civil rights. Finally, it accuses Cline of intentional infliction of emotional distress on Burnham.

It seems like just last week that I reported that the War on Terror was over. However, the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism was extremely short-lived, and now the War on Terror has returned.
In other news, the War on Drugs remains…. stupid.

It’s not enough that the feds go after drug users and dealers. They’ve got to invent crimes and then go out and destroy people who are trying to do their jobs and be good citizens.
First, they came after the makers of glass pipes in Operation Pipe Dreams.
Then they try to break up good families, business people and parents, because of marijuana offences in the distant past.
Then they go after doctors who are trying to heal people for prescribing pain medicine to people in pain.
Now they’ve got this thing called Operation Meth Merchant that has bizarrely managed to arrest 32 Indians named Patel for working at convenience stores, following the law, but just not quite understanding the Engliish drug slang used by the undercover cops.
Read the New York Times story (via TalkLeft)
What convenience clerk would ever pay attention to the dregs of humanity that show up to buy stuff in the middle of the night? Now, the court had to be told that “cook” is slang for making meth, and yet these foreign convenience clerks were arrested for “knowing” that these undercover cops (by the sole nature of them using the term “cook” in conversation) were going to make meth.
This is beyond pathetic. We have a criminal federal government.

OK, this is pretty funny. Here’s a case where it seems there was sufficient probable cause (and a driver that shouldn’t be on the road), despite an attempt by the defense to claim that there wasn’t a competent expert to identify the marijuana at the arrest.
But get this statement from Watertown City Court Judge James C. Harberson Jr.:

“This court finds that considering the rampant use of marijuana in all levels of society as a result of an unrelenting effort of the ‘Woodstock’ generation’s proselytizing the legalization of this ‘ditch weed’ – as it was historically known in the South – through the media, the educational institutions and open public use, the average lay witness can be said to be competent to identify marijuana and its effects,” Judge Harberson said in his decision.

Priceless.
Now as far as I’m aware (at least back to my High School days in the 70’s), ‘ditch weed’ has always meant very low grade marijuana — named for the stuff that grew wild everywhere in the ditches.
Unless there’s some part of the South that historically called all marijuana ‘ditch weed’ (and let me know if that’s the case), then it appears that us Woodstock generation proselytizers haven’t done a good enough job to make even the judge competent to “identify marijuana and its effects.”