Drug WarRant

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.

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….