Drug WarRant

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.

Jacob Sullum at Hit and Run has the story.

At a May 3 press conference calling attention to what he described as “growing and compelling evidence…that regular marijuana use can contribute to depression, suicidal thoughts, and schizophrenia,” federal drug czar John Walters presented the parents of a Colorado Springs 15-year-old, Christopher Skaggs, who was caught smoking pot with friends behind his school in January 2004 and committed suicide that July. The press and public were encouraged to believe that marijuana made him do it. But as the Marijuana Policy Project notes (in a press release that’s not online yet [ed. now it is]), it turns out the teenager tested negative for cannabis at the time of his death but positive for alcohol. What’s more, at least four drug tests conducted in the months before his death did not find any traces of pot. […]

Busted.
Add to this, the Drug Czar’s implications regarding Jeff Weise (the Red Lake shooter), and he’s becoming more and more like his hero Harry J. Anslinger every day.
Anslinger in 1961, looking back at his reefer madness career:

“Much of the most irrational juvenile violence and that has written a new chapter of shame and tragedy is traceable directly to this hemp intoxication. A gang of boys tear the clothes from two school girls and rape the screaming girls, one boy after the other. A sixteen-year-old kills his entire family of five in Florida, a man in Minnesota puts a bullet through the head of a stranger on the road; in Colorado husband tries to shoot his wife, kills her grandmother instead and then kills himself. Every one of these crimes had been proceeded [sic] by the smoking of one or more marijuana “reefers.” As the marijuana situation grew worse, I knew action had to be taken to get the proper legislation passed.

I think Walters is channeling Anslinger.

Loyal reader Brian sent this one in to me from Tyler, Texas Morning Telegraph…
POT EATER GIVEN 40 YEARS IN JOINT

Timothy Wayne Whitlock traded a joint for “the joint” – marijuana for 40 years in prison.

The Troup man was convicted of tampering with evidence Wednesday for eating a “doobie” in front of an officer who stopped him for a traffic violation.

A Smith County jury sentenced the man after about one and one-half hours of deliberation and found him guilty after five minutes of consideration.

The third-degree felony was enhanced to a first-degree felony because of the 31-year-old’s three prior trips to the penitentiary. He faced 25 years to life in prison.

Idiot District Attorneys Joe Murphy and Jason Parrish actually asked for the maximum: life in prison.
Now it certainly appears that Whitlock is no choir boy…

He has two felony burglary of a building convictions and a felony driving while intoxicated conviction. He also has eight misdemeanors, including two driving while intoxicated charges, resisting arrest, fleeing police, two thefts and two possession of marijuana charges.

… and I don’t know Whitlock — he may be the scum of the earth and the personification of evil — but that still doesn’t justify 40 years for eating a joint.
A criminal justice system that allows for such a sentence is cruel, is in violation of basic human rights, is un-American, and is in desperate need of radical reform.
Update: Readers disgusted vet and sixtyfps point out this story, and TalkLeft has more about some that aren’t getting 40 years…

The FBI announced today that criminal charges are being filed against 16 current and former U.S. soldiers, cops, prison guards and an INS agent who allowed 1,230 pounds of cocaine to get through Arizona checkpoints and accepted more than $222,000 in bribes.

As disgusted vet says…

The punchline? They might get PROBATION!

Just as recently it seems that more mainstream sources are questioning, or outright condemning, the drug war in Colombia, it’s also nice to see more taking on the DEA and its war on pain.
USA Today has Prescriptions for Painkillers are Harder to Get and the Washington Examiner has an editorial: Pain relief is major casualty of drug war.
The Agitator (who’s been all over this) and TalkLeft, have more on these articles and the issue in general.
The Examiner editorial is quite strong — starts out:

As federal prosecutors target physicians who prescribe large doses of pain-killing drugs because they can also be abused, doctors are increasingly afraid to provide relief for sick people with intractable pain. As Pain Relief Network President Siobhan Reynolds said, “Ninety-eight percent of doctors won’t touch [chronic pain patients] with a 10-foot pole.”

That shows how this effort by the federal government is, in essence, a criminal act of massive proportion (and provides additional justification for the need to get the feds out of medical decisions).
The editorial concludes:

The system is indeed broken when the federal government is more concerned about the welfare of drug addicts than the 25 million Americans identified in a 2002 National Institutes of Health study who live with unrelenting pain – while the means to alleviate it remains just beyond their reach.

Here, I believe the Examiner is being a bit sarcastic. They know that the federal government doesn’t really give a damn about the welfare of drug addicts. And yet, if you look at it, the entire supposed reason to have the feds involved in pain medication diversion is to prevent addicts from getting drugs.
So yes, in this case, the paper is saying that the policy of the DEA is to prevent addicts from getting drugs at the expense of those legitimately in pain (hence, caring more about addicts that pain sufferers).
In actuality, the DEA only cares about getting busts, some notches on its belt, and more funding.
It’s hard for us (who see all the hypocrisy of the drug war) to imagine, but the entire drug war (with all the costs, and prison, and killing) is supposedly fought to prevent some people from voluntarily using drugs.

And, of course, it doesn’t even work.

It’s Jim Lindgren at Volokh Conspiracy this time…
The beginning of the post is a glance at a new study that purports to be able to predict Supreme Court decisions based on the number and tenor of questions asked in the oral arguments. And the numbers correlate fairly well to rule against the party that gets the most questions.
If so, as Jim notes, that would bode poorly for Raich, as Barnett got a lot more questions than the government (although I think that the tenor of them was not so certain).
Of course, the problem with such a method is that it really can hold true only in cases where the Supreme Court has pre-decided the outcome (and it may, in fact, be an indication that most cases are pre-decided and oral arguments have little value). If the Justices had not yet reached a majority in Raich, then the number of questions in oral is probably irrelevant.
Jim goes on to look back again at Wickard and does a good job of getting to the nub of the issue in Raich (something I’ve discussed before).

Reading Wickard, which is a pretty weakly reasoned case by my lights, reminds me that the Supreme Court is in a bind in Raich. Either the Court has to follow the Constitution and strike down federal drug regulation of intrastate noncommercial uses of marijuana (a controversial decision to follow the rule of law), or it has to expand Wickard radically, rendering the Commerce Clause almost (though not quite) a dead letter. Stated another way, the Court either has to expand its federalism jurispridence slightly (eg, Lopez & Morrison, but in the controversial drug area), or it has to limit Lopez & Morrison to their facts by radically expanding federal power under the Commerce Clause. It can’t stand still. Perhaps that is why the Court has been so slow to render an opinion.

Exactly.
This is the point, I think, that many miss. Voting for the government is not a vote to continue things as they are — it is, in fact, a potentially dramatic expansion of federal power. Voting for Raich might seem, on the surface, a radical action, yet such a decision could be narrowly tailored. Tough one.
… and our next possible chance to find out is Monday.

Stupid article of the month goes to Cliff Kinkaid of (In)Accuracy in Media. (Cliff has shown up as a drug war idiot before).
Check out this column that appeared in The Conservative Voice.

Accuracy in Media (AIM) said today that The Washington Post’s coverage of the marijuana problem in today’s paper shows that it has become little more than a house organ of the pro-dope movement and its patron, billionaire George Soros.

In a front-page story today, Dan Eggen of The Washington Post publicizes a report from the Sentencing Project, identified only as a left-leaning “Washington-based think tank,” lamenting the number of arrests of marijuana users and dealers. Eggen neglects to mention that the group is heavily financed by drug-legalizer George Soros and his Open Society Institute (OSI), and that the report was underwritten by OSI and the pro-dope Marijuana Policy Project (MPP).

“The Post concealed the facts about where the so-called study came from and who financed it,” declared Cliff Kincaid, editor of AIM. “These facts are directly relevant to whether it deserves serious consideration, let alone front-page treatment. The Eggen story amounts to a press release for the Soros line on drug policy.”

How irresponsible of the Washington Post. But wait… here’s Rich Lowry of the National Review yesterday with The War on Pot: Wrong drug, wrong war. No mention of Soros. No mention of “left-leaning.” No discrediting of the Sentencing Project. In fact, he agreed with the conclusions fairly strongly. Is Cliff Kinkaid going to go after Lowry and the National Review, too? Are they part of the pro-dope movement patronized by George Soros? Or is Kinkaid just the founding member of the pro-stupid movement?
Kinkaid went further in attempting to demonstrate what “Accuracy in Media” means (at least in his mind):

Kinkaid commented, “Tell that to the families of the victims of the killer student in Red Lake, Minnesota, Jeff Weise, an admitted pothead who bragged about marijuana being his ‘gal of choice’ before he killed nine people and himself.” Weise was also on psychiatric drugs.

There, Kinkaid tries to out-Anslinger Walters. His interpretation of the situation is at best dishonest.
Finally, after complaining that the Post “concealed the facts” about the Sentencing Project, he tosses out this whopper:

Meanwhile, a new government study linking marijuana to mental illness, including depression, schizophrenia and suicide, got only a few sentences from The Post.

Kinkaid wouldn’t know accuracy if it sat on his face. If he had bothered to check, he would have found out that the government’s “study” was a survey and it wasn’t new (it was also useless information — getting a few sentences was way more than it deserved).
Wanker.

In today’s Washington Times…

Rep. Mark Souder, Indiana Republican and subcommittee chairman, holds a hearing today that will examine whether the Defense Department still can fulfill its decade-and-a-half-old mandate to be the lead agency for detecting and monitoring airborne and seaborne efforts to bring illegal drugs into the United States.

The Department of Defense “has been unable or unwilling to fulfill this responsibility,” states the briefing paper

Ooh, catfight!
This, after Souder recently criticized the administration for cuts in certain areas of the drug control budget (even though the overall budget increased).
This could be an interesting fight. Walters, et al, are opportunists — they use the drug war for political purposes and financial/power gains. Souder, on the other hand, is a true believer — a real nutcase who buys every reefer madness claim as holy writ and has convinced himself that prohibition is a mission from God.
So what happens when Souder tells the Pentagon to stop wasting so many resources on terrorists and do a better job seizing marijuana shipments? Hmmm….

In USA Today.

One of the most closely watched decisions involves whether states can shield medical marijuana users from federal prosecution on drug charges. The case, which was heard last November, pits the conservative anti-drug interests of the Bush administration against conservative principles of states’ rights. […]

While many believe the court will back the federal government in the marijuana case, its delay in issuing an opinion so far offers states’ rights advocates hope that justices are wary of further extending federal authority, said Pepperdine law professor Doug Kmiec, a former Justice Department official under President Reagan and the first President Bush.

“It may suggest that the expansive assertion of government power asserted by the Bush administration was deeply troubling to the justices, or at least that the issue is so close that the wording of opinions is being examined and negotiated with far more than the usual care,” he said.

I never understood the assumption held by many that the Supremes would overwhelmingly side with the government in Raich. If they were only looking at it as a marijuana issue, or only noting what happened in the oral arguments, there’s reason to look at it that way. However, if you read all the briefs, it’s almost impossible to see it as a slam-dunk for the government — in fact, it’s pretty obvious that the Supremes would have to be very creative to rule for the government at all.
Now that the decision is taking so long, people are starting to pay a little more attention to the complexities.

Reported in the Knox News Sentinel. In Gatlinburg last week, DEA Head Karen Tandy claimed that the drug war was making progress, but complained “that the media doesn’t report the issue fairly.”

“Good news doesn’t sell,” Tandy said. “You won’t read about it in the press.”

Fortunately for her audience, though, she assured them that the drug war isn’t doing too well…

Tandy said that drug seizures are “on track this year to hit $1 billion” and predicted that amount will eventually climb to $3 billion a year.

“And that’s more money, by the way, that will be going back to you,” she told the assembly of hundreds of law enforcement officers in a reference to state and federal laws that allow funds seized during drug busts to be returned to the agencies that confiscate them.

Ah, so that’s what she means by progress. More money for drug warriors.

Pot Bill is Out of Time

JUNEAU — The governor’s attempt to outlaw at-home marijuana appears dead for this legislative session.

With the Legislature scheduled to adjourn for the year on Tuesday, lawmakers said Saturday the bill is out of time. The news came just two days after Gov. Frank Murkowski declared it one of his “must have” bills.

Perhaps the legislature realizes that the bill is embarrassing?