Drug WarRant

From today’s Roll Call: Potheads vs. Narcs by Mary Ann Akers

It would have been the zaniest game of the softball season. But it seems the Narcs are too chicken to play a bunch of stoners.

The One Hitters, the softball team of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, claim they’ve been trying to play ball — literally — against the Office of National Drug Control Policy for years. Finally, this year, it looked like the Bush administration’s ONDCP office, also known as the drug czar, was going to come through.

The game was all set for Wednesday, June 8, between the One Hitters and We Czar the Champions. But then the drug czar’s office removed the game from their schedule, saying they couldn’t muster enough players for that particular game. (They did, however, have enough players last week in their game against the Commerce Department.)

The One Hitters tried to reschedule, but the captain of We Czar the Champions said they were “booked through August.”

Now the once-docile potheads are irate.

“Obviously one of the ‘higher ups’ at ONDCP saw the schedule and nixed the game,” NORML’s spokesman, Nick Thimmesch, told HOH. “Perhaps they were spooked by the notion of BYOB — bring your own bong!”

Kris Krane, NORML’s associate director and co-captain of the One Hitters, said: “For years the ONDCP has been unwilling to engage drug policy reformers in a serious debate on the issues. Now they even refuse to engage us in a friendly game of softball.”

Of course, there’s another good reason for their refusal. They ONDCP can’t have liked the odds. It’s a no-win situation for them. They’re playing Potheads! And if they lost?

Tom Riley, a spokesman for the drug czar’s office, said there was “no grand policy formulation” to dodge playing the One Hitters. He said the stoners couldn’t possibly have tried to play We Czar the Champions for years, because the team is brand new.

“This just goes to show the effects of marijuana use on judgment and reasoning,” Riley joked.

At first he toed the party line and blamed his team’s decision not to play the One Hitters on a dearth of players. But then he thought better of it and decided it was a policy decision after all.

“I wouldn’t think we would play any team that promotes drug use,” Riley said, adding, “that includes teams that promote smoking meth or smoking crack.”

Ah, it looks like there was a winner after all. The Potheads came off gracious and fun. As far as the Narcs… well let’s just call Riley the douchebag of the day — was there a need to add “meth or crack” in the same category as marijuana once again?

Regarding my post yesterday about Hugh O’Shaughnessy’s article claiming that Condoleezza Rice had announced that the U.S. was “abandoning” Plan Colombia…
I just talked with a spokesman for the State Department and he says that is incorrect, and that he does not know where O’Shaughnessy got his story.
The State Department spokesman said there are no plans to abandon Plan Colombia, and while the original plan expires this year, they are working with Congress for additional funding to keep it going.
This fits in with all the other information I had heard. I don’t expect the administration to back off on Plan Colombia. But given the amount of negative press, there’s a chance that Congress will be harder to persuade this time.

Want to read a great take-down of the DEA’s Karen Tandy?
Radley Balko’s got it.

Let’s recycle some speculation. It’s fun, and helps pass the 14,515,200 seconds that have slipped by while waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on Raich (that’s 168 days for the rest of you).
Larry wrote today and asked

“Kennedy wrote the wine case decision. Is that good news for Raich?”

Larry was referring back to my May 3 post, where I linked to speculation by Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog regarding the authorship of the remaining cases:

Three Justices have not published majority opinions from the December sitting and therefore are presumably the authors of three of the four remaining cases: Stevens, Kennedy, and Souter. […]

Stevens, Kennedy, and Souter were among the most active Justices at all four arguments. Each of them has expertise or recent experience with the issues in more than one of the cases. […]

[Kennedy] is a likely author for Raich if, as most people assume, the government is going to win, because in the predecessor Oakland Cannabis case Justice Stevens wrote and Justice Souter joined an opinion expressing some sympathy for medical marijuana use.

So now we know that Kennedy wrote the decision on the wine case that was released today, so… it’s possible to speculate that Souter or Stevens may be writing the majority opinion in Raich. If so… it’s hard not to think back on the concurrance in US v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Collective, written by Stevens and joined by Souter and Ginsburg:

Most notably, whether the defense might be available to a seriously ill patient for whom there is no alternative means of avoiding starvation or extraordinary suffering is a difficult issue that is not presented here. […]

The overbroad language of the Court’s opinion is especially unfortunate given the importance of showing respect for the sovereign States that comprise our Federal Union. That respect imposes a duty on federal courts, whenever possible, to avoid or minimize conflict between federal and state law, particularly in situations in which the citizens of a State have chosen to “serve as a laboratory” in the trial of “novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U. S. 262, 311 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting). In my view, this is such a case. By passing Proposition 215, California voters have decided that seriously ill patients and their primary caregivers should be exempt from prosecution under state laws for cultivating and possessing marijuana if the patient’s physician recommends using the drug for treatment.

Sounds potentially promising.
The only other remaining cases from the December sitting:

• Miller-El v. Dretke on Batson and race-based preemptory challenges
• Veneman v. Livestock Marketing Ass’n (and 1 other consolidated case) on commodity promotion programs and the government speech doctrine.

I’m sticking with my prediction given on my Raich page: Unanimous decision for Raich (OK, what I really said was 8-0 because at the time, I thought the Chief might be out). I’m sticking with it partly to be ornery (I gave it, perhaps overly optimistically, but I’m not giving in to peer pressure), and partly to be able to stick it to everybody else if it actually went that way.
Note: Some people have asked me how I know when the next possible date is that there could be a decision. Simple. It’s on the Supreme Court Calendar (pdf)
Next possible dates: Monday, May 23; Tuesday, May 31; Monday, June 6; Monday, June 13; Monday, Jun 20; Monday, June 27.
Update: Tom Goldstein reminds me in comments that if the Justices run out of dates in June and haven’t finished all their opinions, they’ll add more dates on the fly.
Further Update: Tom revises his authorship speculation. Could the Chief be writing?

This just in from Hugh O’Shaughnessy in The Independent:

Washington’s “war on drugs” in Colombia is collapsing in chaos and corruption, and the drug producers are winning. The so-called Plan Colombia, which has cost the US more than $3bn (£1.6bn) in the past five years, is being abandoned, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has announced.

I don’t have any other confirmation. If this is true, it’s huge!

Update: I’m taking this one very cautiously. Several other international papers have picked this up, but only as a reprint of the O’Shaughnessy article. Nothing on the State Department press site, and as of Thursday, Rice was still talking about asking for more money for the Andean drug initiative.

Still no Raich v. Ashcroft decision (next opportunity is next Monday). However, the Justices did rule on the other commerce clause case (although it’s the Dormant Commerce Clause) in a 5-4 decision stating that states could not prevent out-of-state wineries from shipping directly to customers in their state.
It’s really hard to say whether you can read anything from that into the coming Raich decision.

It’s time to talk, once again, about one of the worst bills around —
H.R.1528: Defending America’s Most Vulnerable: Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act of 2005, sponsored by James F. Sensenbrenner (WI-5).
TalkLeft and Last One Speaks have some good descriptions (and TalkLeft has now added a great one here), and I’ve written about it a few times as well. Families Against Mandatory Minimums has some good info, including an excellent Summary (pdf) by Mary Price and Jim Cho.
Everybody really needs to take action on this one. NORML has an action alert, as does Drug Policy Alliance. (No excuse not to do it — all it takes is a minute online.)
Jackl (a regular reader), has spent some time at the House of Representatives site of the hearing that was held on April 12, including watching the full video (he’s got a lot more fortitude than I). As he said to me: “I was struck by how retrograde the thinking of this subcommittee was. It’s like these guys have been living in a cave for 35 years to not see how clueless and harmful their ideology is…”
So let’s take a quick look first at the guests invited to testify at the hearing:

• Ronald E. Brooks, President, National Narcotics Officer’s Association Coalition. OK, now this guy is a dangerous, semi-illiterate goon. He’ll also say just about anything to protect narcotics budgets. Check out my earlier post about him.
• Jodi L. Avergun, Chief of Staff, Drug Enforcement Administration — the usual DEA/Justice Dept. type advocate for more government power. (don’t know too much about her)



• Lori Moriarty, President, Colorado Alliance for Drug Endangered Children. Awww, the nice lady is in charge of a children’s organization. How nice. Except that Lori Moriarty is also Commander of the Denver North Metro Drug Task Force — one of the worst task forces in the country. It was her task force that forced a woman to strip naked in the parking lot of her condominium in full view of her neighbors while male law enforcement officers conducted an unjustified, humiliating, and degrading “decontamination” ritual that had no legitimate purpose. It was her task force that ignored the constitution and tried to force the Tattered Cover Book Store into releasing the records of what books their customers bought. Her task force has interfered with medical marijuana patients, and rides up to their drug busts in a retrofitted 1981 Peacekeeper armored personnel carrier. Can you say psycho bitch from hell?
• William Brownsberger, Associate Director for Public Policy Division on Addictions, Harvard Medical School. Now Jackl tells me that he turns out (on the video) to be as much a prohibitionist as the rest, but he did bring the one dissenting opinion, having to do with school zones.

Brownsberger discussed the extensive school drug zones that had been tried in Massachusetts. He said the zones, since they were so large, had no deterrent effect, and made almost every drug sale in high population areas, subject to school zone enhancements (despite the fact that less than 1% of the sales involved school kids and most took place when school was not in session).
This is particularly relevant, since HR 1528 expands school zones from 100 feet to 1,000 feet and adds other categories (the exclusion zones would include schools, pools, day care centers, libraries, video arcades, and drug treatment facilities).
So I decided to try an experiment with my community. This is my local area with an estimate of the enhanced penalty zones only including day care centers and schools that showed up in Google (not including video arcades, pools, libraries or drug treatment facilities).

Note that not only are there very few places not covered, but it would be impossible for a drug dealer to know the location of all the enhanced-penalty zones. And this is in a neighborhood that isn’t very densely populated (almost nothing above 2 stories tall). Inner city areas would have virtually no “open” locations.
Now check out another provision of 1528: a new penalty for selling or giving drugs to someone who is in drug treatment, or is scheduled to be in drug treatment, or who has been in drug treatment in the past. Now how can such a law possibly affect what a drug dealer might do. Would they start asking for proof that someone’s never been in treatment? Impossible.
It is clear that the lawmakers have absolutely no interest in deterrence. There’s no way that these provisions can have a deterrent effect. What they want is weapons to use against certain segments of society — primarily inner city, poor areas — where they can pile on charges to put relatively harmless individuals away for 5 years, 10 years, or even life.
And almost every provision in this bill is going after the small fish with a huge club.
The bill also eliminates almost all discretion in sentencing, except for power given specifically to the prosecutor. (Can someone remind me where the founding fathers said that our rights and justice should be turned over solely to prosecutors?) Those who have information to trade may get a break, but those who don’t know anything will have the full sentence with no possible options.
The “turn in your friends and neighbors or go to jail” rule: This is truly offensive, and I would be a criminal under this provision. This is in the “Failure to protect children from drug trafficking activities” section. This would include a 2-year sentence for those who witness or learn about drug distribution near colleges and do not report it to authorities within 24 hours and do not provide full assistance investigating, apprehending, and prosecuting the offender. I work at a university. It’s impossible not to learn of drug sales unless you’re completely clueless. Most of the students themselves would be in violation of this snitch law.
[Hey, why don’t we take this snitch law into other areas. Two year in prison for anyone seeing someone drive above the speed limit with children in the car, who doesn’t write down the license plate number and report it within 24 hours. Or better yet, two years in prison for a legislator who sees another legislator draft unconstitutional bills and doesn’t report it to the ethics committee.]
There’s a bunch of other offenses that require snitching under this bill as well. And there are so many other offensive sections of this bill. Read the entire summary (pdf) to see what I mean.
I’d like to believe that our Congress would recognize this as an odious bill and reject it out of hand… I’d like to believe that, but I don’t. We need to do everything we can to apply pressure to make sure that they won’t pass this.

Citizens Against Government Waste just released a powerful special report: Up In Smoke: ONDCP’s Wasted Efforts In the War on Drugs, by Angela French.
The report covers the Drug Czar’s agency since its beginning, and the cumulative waste and corruption detailed is astonishing. Check out the introduction:

Established in 1988 to oversee all aspects of America’s war on drugs and to coordinate U.S. domestic and international anti-drug efforts, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has morphed into a federal wasteland, throwing taxpayer money toward numerous high-priced drug control programs that have failed to show results. After 17 years of operation and funding, ONDCP has not achieved its objectives of reducing “illicit drug use, manufacturing, and trafficking, drug-related crime and violence, and drug-related health consequences.”[1]

Instead of curbing America’s drug problem, ONDCP has wasted $4.2 billion since fiscal 1997 on media advertising, fighting state legislation, and deficient anti-drug trafficking programs.

Has morphed into a federal wasteland. Yep.
The report several times notes that the ONDCP has not only been wasteful, but has repeatedly broken federal laws.
Areas discussed in the report include the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign…

One of ONDCP’s cornerstone programs, the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, has been an utter failure. The five-year effort has wasted $2 billion on propaganda with no measurable results.

…along with covert government propaganda efforts uncovered by investigative reporter Daniel Forbes (for those who don’t remember, the ONDCP was bribing TV producers to approve their storylines and messages, including “ER,” “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Chicago Hope,” “The Drew Carey Show,” and “7th Heaven”)…
… the Anti-Medicinal Marijuana Campaigns…

While ONDCP has failed to reveal the total of these expenditures, it is nonetheless an inappropriate use of federal tax dollars to fly to Nevada on two separate occasions to voice opposition to a state law.

Big Brother also stepped in during the 2004 elections. ONDCP officials visited Vermont to stop its medicinal marijuana bill, even though the law had already passed the state Senate and was on its way to a House committee. Deputy drug czar Scott Burns visited Montana to stop its pot proposition and stood firm that U.S. citizens should “look to experts to tell us what is safe”[44] and “none of them say smoking this weed is medicine.”[45]

The rights of states to regulate medicine is continuously challenged by the federal government, costing taxpayers millions of dollars in court fees.

… and the pork-ridden High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program…

Another ONDCP program that has left the taxpayers high and dry is the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program (HIDTA). Designed chiefly to curb drug trafficking across America’s borders, the program has become a drug prevention funding free-for-all for power-hungry politicians to bring home the bacon to their districts at the taxpayers’ expense, and has decreased drug enforcement in areas where it is critically needed.

Powerful stuff. And an excerpt from the conclusion:

ONDCP was created to coordinate all aspects of America’s war on drugs. Yet, the office has not been successful in its efforts to reduce the presence of illicit drugs in America. Instead, ONDCP burns through tax dollars by funding wasteful and unnecessary projects. Partly to thwart state efforts to regulate marijuana, the drug czar created a $2 billion national anti-drug campaign, produced expensive propaganda ads that failed to reduce drug use among America’s youth, and in the process, violated federal law. Furthermore, the office wastes federal resources by opposing any legalization of marijuana, including medicinal use, which has nothing to do with the war on drugs.

Finally, ONDCP’s HIDTA program is an example of a well-intentioned project going to waste.

Like other recent reports, the Citizens Against Government Waste Report hits the ONDCP big time (and multiple times) for its emphasis on the propaganda campaign against marijuana.
As it should.
This would be a good report to send to your Congressperson.

Washington: A new report issued today by the Bureau of Government Statistics came out with the startling news that close to 95 million American pot smokers had not yet committed suicide despite the so-called Scaggs evidence. This large group of Americans includes both heavy users and those who just used it at some point in their past.
16-year-old Alyse Caton tearfully confided on local talk radio show “Breakfast with Les and Bess”: “My parents caught me smoking pot almost a year ago. I know I’m supposed to kill myself, but I just don’t feel like it.” Her parents say they are concerned, but support their daughter.
We caught up with 103-year-old lifetime marijuana smoker Ida Mae Johnson organizing a pot-luck supper at church. “Don’t look at me,” she snapped. “I’ve been busy.”
Bruce Birken, from the radical pro-drug group Marijuana Policy Alliance suggested “Maybe we should look at other factors besides marijuana?”
This brought an angry response from Jennifer L. Unbalanced, of the ONDCP: “These 95 million Americans are in denial, pure and simple, and to suggest otherwise tarnishes the memory of all those who will soon be gone.”
The Bureau of Government Statistics report also noted that this problem could affect the future of Social Security, with warnings that the lack of suicides would likely bankrupt the system sometime between the year 2685 and next Tuesday.

Regarding last night’s post about how the drug czar’s office used the suicide death of a 15-year-old to imply the relationship between marijuana and suicide — despite the fact that the teenager had tested negative for pot four times and only had alcohol in his blood at the time of the suicide…
The Marijuana Policy Project called them on it, and in this article in the Rocky Mountain News, the parents and ONDCP go nuclear.
The grieving, but seriously delusional, father said:

“You can tell those dumb b——- up there I buried my 15-year-old son because of marijuana, and that’s how I feel,” Ernest Skaggs said. “Ain’t no one using me at all.”

That’s fine. You’re welcome to feel that way. But once you decide to take your son’s story public and do interviews, don’t get bent out of shape when someone calls you on clear contradictions.
And then came the really offensive:

ONDCP spokeswoman Jennifer de Vallance said she was outraged by the group’s attacks.

“Mr. and Mrs. Skaggs have demonstrated tremendous courage and really are doing a public service to tell their very painful story in the hopes that other families and other parents won’t go through the same thing,” de Vallance said.

“It truly is despicable to belittle their very courageous and important contribution to this public health effort,” de Vallance said.

Using someone’s death as an excuse to lie, and then trying to shift that onto the one who points it out — that’s despicable.
Update: In comments over at Hit and Run, Independent Worm brings out the sarcasm:

Well, there ya go. Victims are always right, after all. Suffering a tragedy bestows infallibility upon the victim — a kind of karmic reward for having lost something.

Which is why it makes so much sense to base law and policy on the hysterical ravings of angry, freaked-out victims. They and they alone possess the clarity of thought and the kind of wise, sober, carefully crafted ideas that make for good policy.