Drug WarRant

Matt Welch at Reason has a great article on the propaganda issue: Bamboozlers On the Loose.

Of course, this is all just peanuts compared to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which since 1998 has spent $1 billion trying (and failing) to convince us that smoking the odd joint might kill you, or at least cause terrorism. When the TV networks squawked about the lost ad time, the ONDCP foreshadowed the Armstrong Williams payola scheme by suggesting some anti-drug story lines instead. It was a win-win, really.

There are two profoundly undemocratic through-lines in the state’s repeated purchase of propaganda. The first is the foul notion that we are a nation of people who literally can’t handle the truth, and so must be influenced in ways we don’t even realize by a government that knows our best interests better than we do. …

The second is an alarmingly cavalier approach to pissing away taxpayer money. …

Also, the editorial in today’s Valley Morning Star (Harlingen, TX): Feds cross the line with fake news.

When comedian Norm McDonald was on “Saturday Night Live,” he was the anchorman on the show’s Weekend Update skit. He would read headlines from that week’s news and change portions of the stories to make them funny. At the end of the segment, he would sign off with the words, “And that’s the fake news.” It was funny as part of a comedy skit, but it has no place in the real world of journalism. More importantly, it has no place in government. …

One of the foundations of a free society is an independent press, completely free of government influence. Although some news outlets are often accused of supporting one faction or another of government, they are independent from those factions and don’t get their marching orders from any political party.

The press’ role in a free society is to keep citizens informed about what government is doing and to hold officials accountable to the Constitution they’ve sworn to uphold.

That’s not possible if the media are spoon-fed supposed news stories that support government agendas. The feds should stay out of the news business and the media should be more careful about their sources.

Via TalkLeft.
Cocaine, a new documentary by award-winning director Angus Macqueen, will air on British Television next week over several days. Full article.

Celebrated documentary-maker Angus Macqueen spent 18 months on the cocaine trail across Latin America from the dirt-poor valleys of Peru to the shanty towns of Rio. Here he recalls the journey that revolutionised his views and explains why he believes ‘the dandruff of the Andes’ should be sold in Boots …

This journey has left me thinking the politically unthinkable. With an election looming, the Blair government has made the war on drugs a populist law-and-order priority, once again conflating the taking of drugs with the crime and violence that surrounds them. But it is the war itself that is the problem. The politicians rightly warn that demand will go up if it is legalised. Not good but not the nightmare they summon up. Neither cocaine or heroin is a cancer. In quantities it destroys your nose and is bad for your brain, but it very rarely kills – unlike that other addictive plant we can use legally: tobacco. Nor is it a direct cause of violence, like alcohol.

Let’s be honest. People try drugs, whether in the form of alcohol or pills, because they are fun. Tens of thousands of UK citizens regularly consume cocaine; hundreds of thousands more use other illegal drugs, completely discrediting the law. In his book Cocaine, Dominic Streatfield quotes the monetarist Milton Friedman: ‘I do not think you can eradicate demand. The lesson we have failed to learn is that prohibition never works. It makes things worse not better.’

Streatfield quotes the extraordinary statistics involved in fighting cocaine and drugs. Here are a couple: over the past 15 years, the US has spent £150 billion trying to stop its people getting hold of drugs. In Britain and the US almost 20 per cent of the prison population is inside for drugs offences. So what is left? We can muddle on or we can legalise cocaine – and indeed all drugs.

This won’t solve the social ills of poverty or inequality here or in Latin America but it would remove vast sums of money from the criminal world. We should allow the farmers to grow coca and sell it for decent prices direct to government-controlled factories which can produce a high-quality product. And then it should be sold over the counter from registered chemists such as Boots to anyone over 18 at a reasonable, taxed price that does not encourage a black market. At least then we will know it is pure. Then we must attack demand by using some of the millions saved to invest in education drives that are honest. Look how effective a generation of anti-smoking education has been in bringing the public behind stringent restrictions on smoking in public, but not an outright ban. …

The whole article is worth reading.

Link

IRAQI militant group Army of Ansar al-Sunna said it killed what it called a drug dealer in the northern city of Mosul and posted a video of the shooting on its website today.

The video showed a man standing in front of a banner bearing the group’s name and holding packets of pills in his hands.

“My name is Hussein Ali Hussein, also known as Hussein Haya, and I sell narcotics,” the man said before he was blindfolded and shot in the back of the head.

The Sunni Muslim group, which has claimed several attacks and kidnappings in Iraq, has said that the country should be governed by Islamic sharia law and blasted planned national elections this month as an “infidel” practice.æ

Nice little segment on The Daily Show tonight — Jon led it off with the illegal media pieces by the Drug Czar and segued into the Dept. of Education payola scandal. And had a little fun with it as always.
Stewart:

ONDCP – That’s the Office of National Drug Control Policy, voted least fun Christmas party 12 years running.

Interesting column in the New York Daily News by Denis Hamill

In 1969, as a hippie kid at Woodstock, I sat in the mud with a score of Brooklyn pilgrims from Prospect Park’s Hippie Hill listening to festival organizers shouting over the loudspeakers to the 400,000 zonked-out druggies, “Beware of the brown acid, man! If you’ve dropped the bad brown acid, report immediately to the medical tent, man!” …

Judging by recent events, you get more truth from drug culture than pharmaceutical companies and the Food and Drug Administration.

On three separate holiday-related occasions, I was sitting around gabbing with friends in Brooklyn and Queens and one of the first topics to arise was the reluctant revelations by the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies that they are literally killing us by the tens of thousands with these deadly prescription drugs they are hawking with less conscience than streetcorner dope pushers.

Scott comes through for me (as always) with the full details of the Jam Cruise 3 drug bust (including, bizarrely, photos of all those arrested and video of the news coverage).
“Jam Cruise 3” Lands Twelve in Jail Before Ship Ever Leaves The Dock

The scenario was the same, over and over. As more than 1,200 passengers passed through the Jaxport terminal, they stopped for a photo, then proceeded on to Customs for a pre-boarding inspection.
Over a span of six hours, a dozen of those passengers were ‘outed’ by a proficient U.S. Customs and Border Protection drug dog named Megan.

So these were all people in the U.S., boarding a boat in Jacksonville, Florida and going through U.S. customs.
Now I’m trying to understand this. Isn’t it the job of Customs to prevent things from coming in to the United States? Yes, I know that the cruise goes outside our national waters, so Customs gets involved, but shouldn’t that be when the boat returns?
Is this at all an appropriate use of Customs personnel? We don’t have the resources to check more than a small percent of the cargo containers coming in to the country (any of which could contain terrorist weapons). But we can have Customs personnel checking for cruise passengers with some pot hidden in their crotch?
That’s criminal use of our homeland security forces.

“bullet” Loretta Nall’s debate last night turned out relatively non-controversial as her “opponent” was mostly in agreement. (It’s hard to get the real prohibitionists to debate since their position has so little factual base.) You can get the story (and listen to the show) at Loretta’s blog.
“bullet” John at High: The true tale of American Marijuana has completed the first part of his rebuttal of the Drug Czar’s ridiculous publication: “Marijuana Myths & Facts: The Truth Behind 10 Popular Misperceptions”. The rebuttal of the intro is a good start and I look forward to see where he goes from here. Here’s a couple of brief observations I made on that publication back in November (and if you look at the comments on that post, you’ll see that Lorax has started work on a different kind of refutation.) Of course, for the real Marijuana Myths and Facts, you can go to Zimmer and Morgan’s Marijuana Myths Marijuana Facts – an excellent book.
“bullet” Power and Control has a little piece on a drug bust at a Carnival Cruise which caught my attention. Unfortunately, the news on it is very spotty, and I haven’t been able to find more details (such as whether there was any legitimate legal cause/justification to do a search). But the notion of using a “captive” location (like a cruise) to do random drug searches is disturbing to my view of what’s left of the constitution.
“bullet” And finally, Happy Birthday to Libby at Last One Speaks.

In yesterday’s Houston Chronicle, defense attorney Brian Samuelson has written an outstanding piece: Lawyer’s Plea on Pot Penalty.
Basically, he’s calling for decriminalization and gives quite a number of excellent practical reasons for it. He also, though, lays on the line the truths that are seldom told in public.
Here’s a taste:

In fact, the overwhelming evidence available today strongly indicates that marijuana use is not nearly as harmful as once believed, and actually has therapeutic and medicinal values. Unlike nicotine and alcohol, marijuana is not physically addictive. There is no convincing scientific evidence that marijuana kills brain cells, impairs long-term memory or causes mental or physical illness.

The only “harmful” effects from the use of marijuana that have been proven are that an individual under the influence of marijuana will realize a loss of short-term memory, difficulty learning and recalling new information, and a temporary impairment of psychomotor function.

Yes, marijuana temporarily dulls the senses. But, unlike alcohol, a person who intends to operate a motor vehicle after smoking marijuana can immediately eliminate the loss of perception, and its other temporary effects on the brain, by eating a small meal.

As a criminal defense attorney, I can assure you that arrests for driving under the influence of marijuana are extremely rare.

Every serious scholar and government commission that has examined the relationship between marijuana use and crime have reached the same conclusion: Marijuana use does not lead to crime. Almost all human and animal studies indicate that marijuana decreases rather than increases physical aggression.

Not bad. I hope a lot of people read it.

“bullet” At 8 pm (ET) tomorrow, Loretta Nall will be debating Western Carolina University Police Chief McAbee on the Free Speech Radio program at Western North Carolina University.
“bullet” At Grits for Breakfast, Scott has a guest blogger who will be covering the Tom Colemen perjury trial.
“bullet” This week’s Drug War Chronicle is a fascinating read. The first two items point out the challenges involved in Afghanistan, where the war on terror and the war on drugs are incompatible and are coming to a collision.

So I guess I should feel honored. Drug Czar John Walters picked my question to answer in the White House chat yesterday. I tried to frame it in a way that would be critical, yet not too critical (so he wouldn’t answer it). So here’s what ended up:

Pete, from Bloomington, Illinois writes:
Isn’t there a problem with giving kids misleading information regarding marijuana that overstates the actual dangers? I worry that when they find out we’ve been lying to them about marijuana that they’ll stop believing us when it comes to more dangerous drugs. After all, when you call Canadian pot the “crack cocaine of marijuana,” the message kids may hear is that crack must not be too bad.
John Walters
Actually Pete, you’ve got the question exactly backwards. Marijuana is a much bigger part of the American addiction problem than most people — teens or adults — realize. There are now more teens going into treatment for marijuana dependency than for all other drugs combined. And there are more teens now seeking treatment for marijuana than for alcohol. Today’s marijuana is also twice as strong as it was in the mid 80’s. One of the reasons we have such a serious problem with marijuana in our country is because of the misinformation that has been spread about it over the past 30 years — that marijuana is “harmless” or a “soft drug” or a “rite of passage.” These are all myths — and for too many Americans they are costly myths. We need to educate Americans about the real harms of marijuana if we want to sustain the gains we’ve made over the past three years.

We’ve recently released a report entitled “Marijuana Myths & Facts: The Truth Behind 10 Popular Misperceptions” to help get the facts out about marijuana.

So I accuse Walters of downplaying the dangers of other drugs by hyping marijuana, and in his answer he does exactly that. He again overstates the dangers of marijuana (which leads to lack of confidence by teens that they’re getting the truth). And he significanly downplays the dangers of alcohol.
Of course, he pulls the same stunt that his office has been doing ad nauseum — the false implication regarding treatment. The truth is that treatment percentages connect to referrals, not addiction, so the reason that marijuana numbers are high has nothing to do with the danger of the drug (marijuana only has mild dependency capability), but rather that people go into treatment to avoid expulsion from school or as a condition for a positive drug test on the job, or to avoid jail.
As for the Drug Czar’s “report” — “Marijuana Myths & Facts is a joke. One of the commenters here is working on a detailed rebuttal to that publication — I’ll post a link to it when it’s available.
Of course, this was not a good format for me. I ask a question and he gets to answer it any way he wants to without rebuttal. So, for the record, I’ll state once again — I’ll debate the Drug Czar anywhere, any time. I’ll even pay my own way. Just let me know and I’ll be there.