Drug WarRant

Fujairah, United Arab Emirates
Fujairah criminal court has awarded the death sentence to Lisa Tray, who delivered a package containing about 5 ounces of narcotics to an undercover cop. The woman claimed to be unaware of the contents that had been given to her by her step-father.
While there are a few countries who regularly execute people for selling drugs, that’s not yet true in the U.S. (although Newt Gingrich once proposed the death penalty for smuggling marijuana in certain circumstances).
So far, the U.S. tends to stick with long sentences, such as the 55 years for selling three bags of pot, and now in Virginia, a man has been sentenced to 40 years in prison and $500,000 fine for possession of 14 rocks of crack cocaine.

Oral Argument transcript available online. (pdf)
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I’ll be talking about it more later.
Updates: First reaction. The Justices went after Clements (government side) a lot harder than was widely reported.
Line that made me laugh (and gag at the same time):

Clements: And I think it’s wrong to assume that there’s any inherent hostility to the substances at issue here. I mean, the FDA, for example, rescheduled Marinol from Schedule II to Schedule III in a way that had the effect of making it easer to prescribe and more available.

Well, they clearly came after Barnett hard, but it could be because they are uncertain as to how to draw the line that must be drawn somewhere in this case.
I’m still optimistic — anything could happen in this case, and I would give a lot to be in the private sessions with the Justices when they argue it amongst themselves.

In today’s Slate, Hitchens writes Let the Afghan Poppies Bloom:
How the drug war is undermining the war on terrorism.

Do you know anyone who really believes in the “war on drugs” as it is supposedly waged in the United States? It is widely understood to be the main index of pointless and costly and unjust incarceration, a huge source of corruption in police departments, and a cause of crime in its own right as well as a source of tainted and “cut” narcotics. And that is before you even consider absurdities and cruelties like the denial of medical marijuana, or the diversion of personnel and resources from the war against more threatening gangsters. Our entire state policy, at home and abroad, is devoted not to stopping a trade that actually grows every year, but rather to ensuring that all its profitable means of production, distribution, and exchange remain the fiefdom of criminal elements. We consciously deny ourselves access to properly refined and labeled products and to the vast revenue that could accrue to the Treasury instead of to the mobsters here and overseas.

This demented legacy of the Nixon administration will have to be abandoned sooner or later, and I believe that the threatened sacrifice of Afghanistan to the dogma may be the “tipping point.”

Well said.

Jacob Sullum at Hit and Run discusses it, and there’s much more detail in releases from MPP and Drug Policy Alliance:
The Marijuana Policy Project release headline lays it out in a powerful way:

DEA Ruling Makes FDA Approval of Medical Marijuana Impossible:
State and Federal Legislation Now Only Hope for Patients

This headline was clearly a rebuke of Justice Breyer’s suggestion in Raich v. Ashcroft that systems exist to get FDA approval that might be more appropriate than going to the Supreme Court.
Here’s the case in a nutshell:

æOn June 25, 2001, Dr. Craker, director of the university’s Medicinal Plant Program, filed an application with the DEA for approval to establish a facility that would produce marijuana for FDA-approved research. Currently, all marijuana for research in the U.S.æmust come from a National Institute on Drug Abuse-contracted farm in Mississippi. NIDA’s marijuana has been only inconsistently available to researchers and cannot be used for prescription sale. This makes FDA approval of marijuana effectively impossible unless an alternative source is made available, since testing would need to be done on the same product that is sold to patients.

æææææThe DEA’s Dec.æ10 letter to Dr. Craker said that approval of the application “would not be consistent with the public interest.”

One of my favorite lines in the denial letter:

Marijuana is the most heavily abused of all Schedule 1 controlled substances, and limiting the supply of marijuana under these circumstances is reasonable.”

This is absolutely ludicrous and they should be embarrassed to put it in a document. “Most heavily abused”? That’s only because their definition of abuse includes using something that’s illegal. And the notion that adding a controlled and guarded growing facility for research is going to somehow affect the availability of illegal marijuana nationally is also absurd.
They managed 3 1/2 years of stalling to write this stupid 6 page letter.
The good thing is that one more hurdle has been jumped so they can move to the next stage, which is an appeal to… drum roll please… the DEA.
Yep, now they can, within 30 days, file with the Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration a request for a hearing.
Of course, the idea of all of this is for all the sick people who could be helped by medical marijuana to die before the governnment finishes stalling.

“bullet” Go to Last One Speaks for the news that investigative reporter Gary Web has died. Also an update on Tommy Chong and a strange case of long-distance drug possession.
“bullet” Martin at Media Crapola has an interesting post about a recent NY Times article on the drug war.
“bullet” decrimwatch brings us an excellent article by Stanley Crouch.

What we need to do is legalize all the drugs and face the consequences. That’s right. With drug dealers put out of business, I am sure those consequences would be much less dangerous – and much less expensive – to our society. Legalization could not even begin to approach the downside in the illegal dope world – torture, murder, beatings and sexual exploitation.

John Walters, Drug Lord Czar extraordinaire, will be continuing for another term. The only thing that makes this bearable is that Walters is such a polarizing figure that his statements often serve to mobilize drug policy reformers.
He will undoubtedly continue his bizarre offensives against sick people, Canadians, and school children.
Baylen has more at D’Alliance.
Also check out Baylen’s fun little experience with the TSA.

On September 13, 2003, John Perry Barlow was arrested on a flight he boarded in San Francisco (after attending Burning Man), and charged for possession of drugs found in the bottom of a bottle of Ibuprofen in his checked luggage.
While this type of thing happens a lot, the difference here is that John Barlow believes that the 4th Amendment still has some power left in this country.

There is a lot at stake here. Although, as I say, the 4th Amendment is in rough shape, it remains quite clear in its prohibition of “general warrants,” which are searches of unspecified members of the public for evidence of random illegal activity. But, whether by design or “mission drift,” this is what TSA’s checked baggage searches increasingly resemble. They’re not just looking for explosives, folks.

John is fighting the charge and finding that the government is trying to stall or claim national security every time the attorneys try to get information, and the Department of Homeland Security has instructed the private security company that discovered the alleged drugs to stonewall.
However, 15 months later, there will finally be a court hearing this Wednesday on the motion to suppress evidence.
This is one I’ll be following.
Read John Perry Barlow’s story A Taste of the System at his blog.
And just a reminder:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Certainly not our government. Take a look at the latest piece in the New York Observer (via Hit and Run), on homeland security funding in New York.
Not only does the funding across the country have little to do with the likelihood of attacks, but the funding within New York State doesn’t focus on New York City! In fact, some expenditures have had nothing to do with homeland security:

“Officials in Yates and Madison counties said they had strengthened defenses against illicit drug labs.”

The government’s love of the drug war left us unprepared for 9/11, has negatively affected our ability to fight terrorism, and is leaving us less safe every day. For a reminder of some of the other stupidity in this area, see my article from this summer: The Drug War and our response to Terrorism.

I warned you:

The Supreme Court has now dissolved the emergency stay issued last week suspending an injunction forbidding the government to interfere with the rituals of the UdV [O Centro Espirita Beneficients Uniao Do Vegetal], the American branch of a Brazilian church that uses a DMT-containing potion called hoasca or ayahuasca as its sacramental drink.

If you want to understand this further, read Mark Kleiman’s or Marty Ledermans’ posts.
I mention this largely because I earlier reported that this case is likely headed to the Supreme Court. The significance of the lifting of the stay is that this controlled substance can be used in religious ceremonies at least until the government gets the case to the Court (a year). It may then be hard for the feds to show that there’s an imminent threat to their international treaties and law enforcement abilities.
Just another tiny crack in the government’s prohibition efforts.

Kudos to Representative Sam Farr. He had the same reaction to Mark Souder’s proposed “Safe and Effective Drug Act” as I did.
According to today’s Drug War Chronicle:

Skepticism about Souder’s motives has extended to Capitol Hill, where Rep. Sam Farr Tuesday circulated his own “dear colleague” letter. “I would urge all Members to cosponsor this legislation, IF it were truly designed to produce an honest evaluation of the scientific data,” wrote Farr, who earlier this year cosponsored the Patients’ and Providers’ Truth in Trials Act, which would allow a medical necessity defense in federal medical marijuana busts. “I am, however, skeptical that this will be the case, given that the bill only refers to ‘smoked’ marijuana and is proposing that the examination be carried out by NIDA, an agency which is actively blocking medical marijuana research while consistently highlighting and exaggerating the drug’s negative consequences.”

Yep, the two things that just jump right out of Souder’s letter, exposing it as a sham.

Farr also mentioned [a] vaporizer study blocked by NIDA. The blocked study is worth mention, Farr argued, because in his “dear colleague” letter, Souder specified a study of smoked marijuana. “Why should we think that NIDA, under the Souder bill, will study what it has already been able to study for the last year and a half, but wouldn’t?” Farr asked.

An honest evaluation of marijuana, wrote Farr, would reach the same conclusion as DEA chief administrative law judge Francis Young, who, after a two-year study, found in 1988 that “marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known… It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance.”

Farr accused the federal government of “obstructionism” in blocking medical marijuana research, but said it couldn’t stop the truth. “Despite this obstructionism, there is still ample evidence to show that marijuana is a safe and effective medicine. I applaud Rep. Souder for seeking the truth — but the truth must come from objective sources, not an agency already proven disposed to blocking the truth about marijuana.”

Nice to see that someone’s not letting Souder get away with this blatant manipulation.