Drug WarRant

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.”

There were a couple of articles this week about the situation in Colombia — the more we do there, the messier it gets.
The latest is about this new amnesty offered by Uribe’s “Justice and Peace Law.” Basically it’s a way for traffickers (including mass murderers) to get a light country-club sentence for a few years, and retire on their drug trafficking profits wealthy and free of legal hassles (and, unlike Marc Emery, free of fear of extradition to the U.S.). Special consideration is given to the right-wing AUC.
Apparently, a number of the big guys are looking to cash in and let a new batch of traffickers take over. And in the process, they’re having a clearance sale.
From Daniel Kurtz-Phelan at Slate:

In preparation for getting in on the deal, the drug lords seem to be emptying out their warehousesÖselling off stockpiles of cocaine so they have enough cash on hand to go legit for a few years without giving up their fabulous wealth and swank lifestyles. These stockpiles, by all accounts, are massive. They have allowed traffickers to insulate their business and maintain a steady flow of imports to the United States and Europe regardless of how many coca plants South American soldiers and American defense contractors are killing with machetes and herbicide at any given time. On a recent visit to Bolivia, the head of South America operations for the U.S. Agency for International Development said that traffickers have so much cocaine on hand they could keep exports constant for a year and a half even if production stopped altogether.

The recent slew of seizures is a good sign of a sell-off: According to a basic law of drug-war economics, every increase in the amount of cocaine seized reflects a more-or-less proportionate increase in the amount of cocaine shipped. An American anthropologist doing fieldwork in southern Colombia reports additional evidence that the cocaine market is glutted: Peasant producers of coca paste (the base material for cocaine) are having trouble finding buyers for their productÖan indication that so much cocaine is being shipped from warehouses that traffickers don’t need to buy paste to manufacture more. Over the past few months, paste prices in Putumayo, the heart of Colombian coca country, have fallen between 10 percent and 40 percent.

In the past decade, Washington has poured billions of dollars into Colombia with the ostensible purpose of fighting the drug trade. Meanwhile, the street price of cocaine has steadily declined, from around $250 a gram in the late 1980s to well under $100 today. Now Congress is debating whether to help finance Uribe’s demobilization effort, despite concerns that it’s a lucrative retirement plan for traffickers.

Thank God we’ve been spending millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money over there in order to increase the profit margin to the most ruthless traffickers, so that they can have a luxurious retirement package.
There’s an interesting point made in this article, too. The fact that increased seizures are not an indication of drug war success, but rather of drug war failure. Increased seizures means more has been shipped. Every time police nab a truck full of drugs because the license plate was dangling by a wire, that doesn’t mean that they were successful — it means that there is so much being smuggled that the traffickers were even willing to hire an idiot to drive a valuable shipment. So the next time you hear about a record seizure, read between the lines to imagine what they didn’t get.
[More on the amnesty from Council on Hemispheric Affairs.]

This one’s from my area.
Lincoln, Illinois veteran police officer Diana Short is arrested for growing marijuana and bail is set at $2,500, which she’s able to raise. Then she’s indicted for other counts of drug trafficking and her bail raises to $10,000. Well, she doesn’t have that much money, so she convinces her daughter to buy materials to make meth and tries to recruit inmates in the jail to make it so she can raise bail.
Knowing her phone calls will be monitored, she uses code over the phone, such as telling her daughter to gather as many as 2,000 “little white things.”
Her bail is now $25,000 and her daughter has bail of $10,000.
This is a story that shows rampant stupidity. Not only of this former police officer and her daughter, but of the drug war in general.

The Harris County Organized Crime and Narcotics Task Force is being disbanded. So sad.
This is the group that raided a landscaper’s house because he had hibiscus (with white flowers) in his front yard. They thought it was pot. They also grilled him about his bamboo, watermelons, and cantaloupes.
Now some of these task force members are out of a job. Hmmm… Well, I doubt the florist is going to want to hire them. Same for the grocery store produce department. Maybe… “You want fries with that?”
One interesting part of this article is the speculation of how the crime rate will change. The thing is, since the local police departments are hiring many of them, I’d say they’re going to have better success in actually fighting crime. The task force was (as they nostalgically pointed out) more involved in “memorable” busts and seizures that only took a drop out of the ocean of supply. Regular police work (to the extent that it isn’t wasted on pot busts) is more useful to the community.
Farewell Harris County Organized Crime and Narcotics Task Force. We won’t miss you.

In a recess appointment, John “Got Milk?” Bolton has been appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. His job will be to straighten them out, or piss them off, or dismantle them, or something to that effect.
How much do you want to bet that there’s one part of the U.N. that Bolton will decide is working just fine?

At the Onion

We helped train some of these criminals as part of the effort to go after drug lords. We made criminal drug trade profitable. We’re not only losing the drug war, we are fueling violence through prohibition.
Link

NUEVO LAREDO – Warring Mexican gangs stepped up the urban battle in Nuevo Laredo late last week, prompting the U.S. ambassador in Mexico City to close the consulate in this border town that terrorized citizens compare to a war zone in Baghdad.

The pitched battle — with bazookas and grenades — was so fierce that after the shooting a house at the fighting’s center was riddled with holes the size of melons. Part of it had collapsed. A building across the street was pocked with holes, indicating a response with heavy weapons. Hundreds of bullet casings from AK-47 assault rifles and other weapons littered the street. Cars, many with Texas plates, lay like victims, their windows shattered and their bodies scourged by bullet holes.