Drug WarRant

As you may know, Alaska governor Frank Murkowski has been pissed off at the Alaska Supreme Court and his own state’s constitution, because it gives its citizens the right of privacy. See, the Alaska Supreme Court has ruled that the government can’t go after adults who possess up to 4 ounces of pot in their own homes, because it’s not dangerous enough to justify taking away rights.
Well, what’s the fun of being governor if you can’t send storm troopers into homes to bust adults who are peacefully smoking a joint?
So now he’s trying to get the legislature to declare marijuana to be very dangerous to attempt again to outlaw private possession.
Where to turn? Well if you want someone to lie about marijuana, the first place to go is the federal government — specifically, the ONDCP. Check out this outrageous phoned in testimony:

Researcher David Murray of the White House’s Office on National Drug Control Policy told a Senate committee that marijuana users develop serious cases of psychosis and other problems from inhaling doses of carcinogenic chemicals.

“This is a dirty, dirty drug,” Murray said. He testified via phone at the request of Assistant Attorney General Dean Guaneli, who is spearheading the governor’s bill.

Dirty?
Then they got the Health and Social Services Committee Chairman to explain how marijuana use causes violence. Check this out:

Fielder said smoking marijuana leads to violent behavior down the road. “If I smoke marijuana, I may not be led to rob a store. But I can lose my job and then be motivated to steal,” he said.

Oh my God! Oversleeping then must also lead to violent behavior!
Fortunately, not everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid. There are quite a number of legislators who are not convinced, and callers (as well as some other testifiers) have not been following the Governor’s crusade, which is upsetting the bill’s proponents.
According to the Anchorage Daily News (which has an onerous registration page with bad html coding), after hearing all sorts of public officials speak (lie) in favor of a bill that would take away the rights of citizens (and was proposed by a public official),

Fairbanks Sen. Gary Wilken sharply criticized the head of the state public defenders agency for testifying against the bill in her official position.

“I’m really disappointed in your testimony today. … I’m shocked,” the Fairbanks Republican told Barbara Brink, director of the agency.

Shocked, I tell you!
And,

[Committee Chair Senator Fred] Dyson charged at the hearing that some of the bill’s opponents went too far in calls to his legislative office.

“They’ve been plugging up our phone lines,” Dyson said.

How dare they call their Senator, who has important things to do with his phone lines — like find new ways to violate the rights of Alaskan citizens?

I’d like to give a big promotion to a new Drug War blogging community — Nephalim’s Drug War Revealed.
It’s just getting started, but it’s already got quite a bit of great material. Nephalim is one of the few Daily Kos members who has been regularly writing about the drug war, and he’s designed this site to have some of the same structure as Kos.
Visitors can register and create their own diaries, which can get promoted to the front page, etc., and Nephalim will have guests writing on the front page as well.
It’s a wonderful opportunity for those who would like to write about the drug war on occassion, without maintaining their own site or blog.
I will be doing some writing for Nephalim.org when I have time. In the meantime, check it out, and give Nephalim some encouragement — a comment at least.

Libby at Last One Speaks reminds me about Flex Your Rights and their excellent video: “Busted: The Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters.” I thought I was pretty well informed, but I learned a few things from the DVD (only $25 at their site). It’s an excellent, perhaps essential, part of the education of citizens in a world where the vast majority of people are not even aware of their rights — and routinely give them away to ever expanding enforcement techniques.
Flex Your Rights is now offering the video for only $5 as a BitTorrent computer download. A great deal if you’re set up for that type of download.

I neglected to mention that the Becker-Posner Blog has addressed the drug war, first by Economist Gary Becker and then a response by Judge Richard Posner
These are a couple of highly respected scholars, and so it’s nice to see them talk about the failure of the drug war, and to see them apply the tools of their trade to the problem. (I’ve always felt that economists should be stepping up more to explain to our politicians that drug demand is inelastic — and what inelastic demand means.)
Becker has the better argument in his call for legalization. Posner is uncomfortable with it (although he agrees that the cost of the drug war has not been worth it, despite what he believes is a “partial victory” in the war), so he tries to talk economics, in which he comes off completely incompetent (he should leave that to Becker, and stick to the legal stuff). Also, as Tbag notes on his blog Posner has some bizarre notions of legal substitutes for illegal drugs (cigarettes for pot? liquor for heroin?). I know what he’s trying to say, but it doesn’t work very well.
Tbag also has an interesting comment regarding his own views on the drug war…

Without sending my libertarian allies on this issue running for the woods, I’d like to propose government control over distribution.

I wouldn’t worry about it, Tbag. I think this is one issue where libertarians would prefer government control over the current system… at least for now.

In the Sun-Times today, the article Blagojevich focuses ire on drug-based game has some oddities:

Gov. Blagojevich is using the roll-out of “Narc,” a new video game set in the drug underworld, to promote legislation that would ban the sale of violent and sexually explicit games to minors.

“These kinds of games teach kids to do the very things that in real life, we put people in jail for,” …

The game, to be released today, has automatic weapons, gore and the fictitious officer Jack Forzenski, who spits out lines such as “You have the right to shut the hell up.”

Players can become “narcotics officers” who arrest dealers and use confiscated dope to change the look and speed of “Narc” to score more points.

Hmmm… instead of teaching kids to do the very things we put people in jail for, it seems to be teaching them to do the very things that we pay big taxpayer dollars for.

The Charlottesville Daily Progress has an interesting article by Liesel Nowak: Tough on crime means losing drug war, critics say

Critics have said that the traditionally harsh penalties in federal court have led to jury nullification, in which jurors rule with their conscience instead of the law, and that the tough-on-crime spirit of the federal system is losing the war on drugs.

Take the recent case of a Charlottesville man. Jurors in a 2004 federal trial acquitted city resident Todd Jones, charged in a violent drug conspiracy, though they convicted two others in the same case. At least one juror believed Jones was guilty.

The article goes on to examine the failure of the drug war.

Since the inception of mandatory guidelines in 1987, drugs have continued to move through society even as an increasing number of men and women are locked up.

“If you want to use the war on drugs analogy, then let’s use it. We’re losing,” lawyer J. Lloyd Snook III said. “If the definition of insanity is doing something over and over and hoping for a different result, then this is insane.”

According to the National Office of Drug Control Policy, in 2003 the federal government spent $19 billion on the war on drugs – a rate of about $600 per second. And the Bureau of Prisons reports that 89 percent of federal prisoners were convicted of drug crimes.

Not a bad article.

Available here:
rtsp://video.c-span.org/15days/wj032105_walters.rm
If the link doesn’t work for you, just type ‘Walters’ in the video search on the homepage. (Thanks to Tom Angell of SSDP, who also asked a very good question.)

John Walters will be on C-Span’s Washington Journal from 9-9:30 am Eastern on Monday morning. (Thanks, Bob!)
If you’re going to call in, here are a few suggestions:

1. Write out your question and have it in front of you. Otherwise, you’ll get so anxious about being on air, that you’ll get tongue-tied.
2. Limit yourself. Find one specific point that you want to approach and really hone in on that one. Don’t try to ask a multiple-part question — it dilutes your clarity to the audiences and gives him the opportunity to answer whichever part he likes the most and ignore the rest.
3. Focus. You won’t be given much time, so be prepared to keep it as short as possible.
4. Speak to your audience. You don’t care what Walters thinks (you’re not going to change his mind) — it’s what the listeners get that’s important. Don’t talk about detailed conspiracies — stick to the simple points that listeners will understand — things like:
   • Why do you want to throw sick people in jail for following the advice of their doctors?
   • Why are you spending federal taxpayers’ money to campaign against state medical marijuana initiatives? Are you willing to publish how much you have spent on that?
   • If there really is a link between potent pot and treatment as you constantly imply, why won’t you talk about it on the ONDCP website where it would be subject to data quality review?
5. Remember that it’s not about winning — Walters has a huge advantage in this situation in that you cannot cross examine after he spins his answer in a completely new direction. It’s about getting your point across to the listeners through a well-crafted question.

The Ottawa Citizen comes through in this article by Dan Gardner yesterday.
Gardner takes apart all the claims of massive increases in potency, and shows that it’s a combination of different measuring techniques, and the range of higher and lower THC concentrations that have always been available, with a conclusion that there have been some overall average increases in potency due to better horticultural techniques, but not the levels claimed by prohibitionists.
He then goes on to debunk Walters’ implied link to increased treatment and emergency room statistics, and concludes with a section on how smokers automatically self-regulat:

Mr.æ Earleywine notes that surveys asking users how high they get show no change since the 1970s, despite the increase in marijuana potency.æ “It’s just that they’re smoking less of it, rather than getting higher.”

Oddly enough, this suggests that rising marijuana potency may produce a modest health benefit.æ “When smoking stronger pot, you smoke less and you have less exposure to tars and respiratory irritants,” Mr.æ Earleywine says, adding with a laugh, “so in some ways it’s worth smoking the best pot you can afford.”

Then today, Gardner finishes up with part 2: How Science Is Skewed to Fuel Fears of Marijuana in which he takes on the junk science and bad reporting that add to misconceptions about pot.
For example, recent claims that link marijuana to psychosis have gotten some major press, particularly in England. Yet, Gardner notes that the methodology is potentially suspect (subjects were not evaluated for psychosis, but merely asked a series of questions, including: feeling that other people cannot be trusted; feeling that you are being watched or talked about by others; never feeling close to a person; and having ideas and beliefs that others do not share. Some of these could be more a result of the illegality of marijuana than any indications of psychosis.
And even with this suspect methodology, the scientists who ran the study themselves are not happy with the press coverage:

“It is quite clear that media claims that our research shows cannabis use causes psychosis are exaggerated,” Mr.æ Fergusson says.æ

Science is being subordinated to politics, Mr.æ Fergusson feels.

Good articles.

Interesting article shows how complex and silly state leglislative activities can get.

Medical marijuana was one of this session’s most glaring examples of how bills can be delayed, held hostage and even killed as a result of political spats between lawmakers.

In this case, Rep. Dan Silva, D-Albuquerque, admitted this week he was working to hold up SB 795 until the Senate Judiciary Committee heard a bill of his dealing with impact fees on Albuquerque developers.

The connection was Sen. Cisco McSorley, D-Albuquerque, the chairman of the judiciary committee as well as the sponsor of the medical-marijuana bill.

The medical marijuana bill died without being heard because they literally ran out of time. Governor Bill Richardson said he would have signed it.