Drug WarRant

Via Scott at Grits for Breakfast is what appears to be another Tulia-style outrage, foisted upon us by the ever-corrupt drug task force process.
Following a two year investigation by local, state, and federal law enforcement, there has been a massive bust in Anderson County, Texas netting 72 defendents (56 in state court and 16 in federal) arrested on Wednesday. The charges involve building a crack cocaine distribution ring in Anderson County, and all defendents are residents of the county.
Are you wondering why you haven’t heard of Anderson County? After all, with such a large crack cocaine conspiracy network, it must be huge, right?
Anderson County, Texas is a rural county (about 1,000 square miles) featuring agriculture, grazing land and a timber industry. The largest towns are Palestine, Elkhart and Frankston. The entire population of Anderson County, Texas is 55,109.
Now, according to the government’s national data, approximately .3% of the population uses crack. The number goes up to .4% in the south, but down to .2% in rural counties, so let’s use the .3% figure. That means we can expect that there might be 165 crack users in Anderson County. So a 72 person crack cocaine distribution network? Boy, now that’s service!
Imagine only having to share your crack dealer with one or two others! Sort of like your own personal crack assistant. Not sure how they do that with a median household income in the county of $31,000, though.
So now with the arrest of 72 people, what can we expect? Well, in addition to the costs of a two year investigation and all of the costs to prosecute them, there’s incarceration. Most of the defendants are facing 40 years to life. Assuming the minimum, that’s over $60 million to jail them (which would also pay for 4 years of college for every teenager in the county).
Oh, and people will still use drugs.
Scott really hits the nail on the head when he describes how these stings work.

These long-term “investigations” follow a pattern — the undercover operative befriends non-dealers in the black community and after a while asks for assistance purchasing drugs. Most people netted never profited from any drug sale, but either referred or acted as a go-between for someone they thought was a friend. That doesn’t matter to the drug warriors, though.

Of course, that scenario assumes some of the cases aren’t utterly trumped up to begin with. In Tulia and Floresville, TX, drug task force undercover cops actually set up innocent people. In the most famous of the Tulia scenarios, a young woman was able to prove she was cashing a check in Oklahoma City at the time the officer claimed she sold him drugs in Tulia.

Drug Task Forces – a blight on our communities.

Vin Suprynowicz Las Vegas Review-Journal properly ridicules the government’s drug war, focusing on the problems (or interpretation thereof), in Afghanistan:

A huge problem for — and with — the gang in charge in Washington these days is that they define many of their successes as problems, requiring ever more onerous applications of force and looted tax dollars to “solve” what’s already going fine.

In addition, they describe many of their real problems as “insoluble,” when the solutions are right in front of their eyes.

No, we’re not succeeding in creating a modern nation-state.æ But there is good news in Afghanistan: The State Department reports the country is on pace to produce a record opium poppy crop this year.

Yep. Good news. A thriving industry able to support the common worker.

Opium, of course, is one of God’s major gifts to man.æ The first book of the Bible tells us that God gave man every flower- and seed-bearing plant for his use, and few have proved more useful that the poppy, whose sap can be made into codeine and morphine, which ( along with that other Godsend, cocaine ) have relieved the pain and suffering of millions.

So how do the folks in Washington respond to the fact that happy Afghan farmers are once again making an honest living producing a crop which is a Godsend to mankind? …

Needless to say, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was first into the breach, announcing last month that “coalition forces” in Afghanistan will soon have another task to distract them from tracking down Osama bin Laden — burning poppy fields.æ Imagine how Americans would respond if helicopters full of Afghan warriors descended on Virginia and Kentucky, burning our tobacco crops.æ ( Tobacco is more toxic and slightly more addictive than the opiates, according to Dr.æ Andrew Weil of the University of Arizona, who studies such stuff.æ )

But of course, we have determined that certain drugs are arbitrarily termed “evil” and must be eradicated regardless of whether that’s possible or economically viable, or whether the eradication causes more problems.

Legalize all opium products, allow the Afghans to ship through normal channels at reasonable profits, and the criminals will lose their control over the trade and the farmers, both.

It would then make no more sense for terrorists and underworld figures to try and finance their truly evil enterprises through the opium trade than it would for them to go into the business of manufacturing and smuggling aspirin — a product which our fine German friends at Farben-Fabriken Bayer delayed introducing until 1899, the year after they introduced heroin, since their chemists at the time considered aspirin the more dangerous of the two formulations.

Legalize the poppy.æ Problem solved.

Excellent article. Common sense. Impossible for politicians to accept.

Dan Forbes — one of the very best investigative journalists to take on the drug war — sent me an invitation to a book event. Not just any book event — this could be the most unusual and entertaining book event I’ve ever encountered. And yes, it’s been made clear that all my readers are invited to the party.

So, you’re invited to an East Village book bash — no stuffy readings, buy the damn book and read it yourself once you repossess your faculties — to celebrate publication of Disinformation’s latest well-schooled rant: Under the Influence: The Disinformation Guide to Drugs.

ææææææ That’s you and whatever emoluments you have at hand, Thursday, October 21, 9pm to 4am at swank-deluxe Uncle Ming’s, in the heart of it all at 225 Avenue B (that’s at 13th St. for you schmoes). Yeah, it’s free. The drinks ain’t, but they’re cheap.

ææææææ Forget the modest number of immodest go-go dancers, the syncopation from renowned Slipper Room vinyl spinner, DJ Ness, the no-doubt dissolute air rubbing shoulders (let’s say) with strangers similarly possessed of a certain moral casualness. Come, rather, seeking proof of the cruelties, absurdities, malfeasance & propaganda promulgated by your government to prop up an ever shakier War on Some Drugs.

Yep. I sure wish I was in New York this week.

ææææææ DisInfo and editor Preston Peet have corralled the top writers on drugs (verily) for a volume chockablock with the sort of truth-to-power rarely found between soft covers:

ææææææ Libertarian big-foot Jacob Sullum, of the usually eponymous Reason magazine and author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (Tarcher/Putnam); New York Press columnist, author and irasciblist Paul Krassner; Daniel Pinchbeck, author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (Broadway Books); bona fide contemporary shaman, Rick Doblin, who’s actually buffaloed the feds into approving his investigations of post-trauma, therapeutic Ecstasy; and ex-Village Voice columnist, Cynthia Cotts.

ææææææ Not to mention Ethan Nadelmann, avatar of the Drug Policy Alliance and many state drug-reform ballot initiatives; China Syndrome screenwriter, Mike Gray, whose seminal drug policy books include Drug Crazy (Random House); Lonny Shavelson, author of Hooked: Five Addicts Challenge our Misguided Drug Rehab System (The New Press); rock star and ex-High Timeser Steven Wishnia, author of Cannabis Companion (Running Press); our beloved editor, High Timeser Preston Peet, who also edits DrugWar.com; and Daniel Forbes, a feckless freelancer who engendered four congressional hearings and testified at two after revealing that the Clinton White House steered $22 million to the TV networks for government-approved anti-drug TV scripts and has perpetrated numerous stone-down-a-well scoops ever since. And many others too worthy to begin to try to encapsulate in an e-mail.

If you can go to the party, drop me a line afterward. I’d love to hear about it. I’ll talk about the book more some time in the future.

This article in the SFGate notes that

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer sided with two medical marijuana patients Wednesday in their U.S. Supreme Court battle with the Bush administration, arguing that patients who use locally grown marijuana in states that allow it should be protected from federal drug enforcement.

“The federal government has limited authority to interfere with state legislation enacted for the protection of citizen health, safety and welfare, ” Lockyer’s office said in papers filed with the court on behalf of California, Maryland and Washington, three of the 11 states with medical marijuana laws.

This is good news.
Perhaps a little more surprising, however, is the support that has come from other quarters, demonstrating that the ramifications of this case could be huge.
The states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi have also filed briefs against the government. Are you trying to remember when those states passed medical marijuana laws? Don’t strain yourself. They haven’t, and aren’t likely to do so anytime soon.

“This is not a case about drug-control policy or (patients’) fundamental rights,” said lawyers from the Alabama attorney general’s office. “The point is that, as a sovereign member of the federal union, California is entitled to make for itself the tough policy choices that affect its citizens.”

Strong words, but it’s important to remember that there is an essential element to federalism that must not be lost. As Justice Brandeis said:

…to stay experimentation in things social and economic is a grave responsibility.æ Denial of theæright to experiment may be fraught with serious æconsequences to the nation.æ It is one of the happyæincidents of the federal system that a single courageousæstate may, if its citizens choose, serve as aælaboratory, and try novel social and economicæexperiments without risk to the rest of the country.

Scott knows I love it when the Drug Czar’s office gets trashed, so he sent me this gem from the Missoula Independent.

Everyone has heard the joke about how you can tell when operatives from the Bush administration are lying — their lips are moving. …

Moving his lips, [deputy drug czar Scott] Burns got right to the point with his first lie: “I’m not here to tell anyone how to vote,” he said, looking straight into the TV cameras — and then proceeded to tell Montanans that voting for medical marijuana would be a terrible thing. …

Burns said we now “look to experts to tell us what is safe” and claimed: “None of them say smoking this weed is medicine.” Unfortunately, the drug czar must be too busy flying around the country on taxpayer money doing the federal government’s political dirty work to take the time to read the conclusions of medical authorities from all over the world who have found just the opposite — that marijuana is indeed efficacious in treating a number of ailments. …

Rather than get bogged down in messy medical details that disprove his propaganda, Burns simply went on to assure reporters that in every state that had approved the use of medical marijuana, drug use among young people had increased. But an on-going annual study in California found marijuana use by ninth-graders has dropped 45 percent since 1996, when the state legalized medical marijuana.

Instead of interfering in Montana’s elections, the drug czar should have used his federally funded plane ticket to visit Canada. If his preposterous claims were correct, the streets of our northern neighbor should be clogged with stoner youths, barely able to ambulate because of their access to potent B.C. bud. But as many Montanans know from firsthand experience, Canada’s legalization of medical marijuana has produced no such drastic effects. …

Come Nov. 2, Montanans should tell the drug czar to take his lies back to the White House, vote for I-148 and bring legal relief to our most seriously ill citizens.

Oh yeah. Montanans are an independent bunch.

TalkLeft notes that Edwards Calls for Crackdown on Meth Labs.

Edwards said he and presidential nominee John Kerry would propose legislation to limit consumers to two standard packages per day of cold medicines that contain pseudoephedrine, an ingredient used in Sudafed and other drugs. Bulk sales of cold medicines would be more closely monitored to track suspicious sales.

They also would propose spending $30 million annually for 10 years to fund law enforcement efforts and help farmers buy better locks to secure ammonia tanks where drug dealers steal the ammonia they need to make meth.

After a few commenters at TalkLeft said that they appreciated Edwards’ comments, since Meth labs are a growing scourge in the midwest, I had to speak up. My response was essentially:

Sure, talking about criminalizing cold medicine is going to resonate with some people, but it’s false pandering and is not going to result in positive long term effects.
It’s not that drug reformers don’t care. We care, and we want people to stop using meth and creating dangerous meth labs. It’s that prohibition and enforcement aren’t the answers.
You say “People shouldn’t use meth.” Great. I agree. Is a law going to do that? No. We’ve had drug laws for decades and yet 46% of the country has used illegal drugs.
There’s a very complex equation that revolves around the drug war. When enforcement against one drug increases, people who use drugs look to other options. Is it a coincidence that meth appeared during one of the harshest crackdowns in illegal drugs in our history (including crackdowns on safer, pharmaceutical amphetamines)?
Alcohol prohibition resulted in an increase in dangerous backyard stills, which sometimes poisoned their customers (one brewing method involved car radiators), and often blew up or caused fires. Entire towns were destroyed.
Sound familiar?
The answers lie in harm reduction, regulation, and oversight, not in increasing the profits to black market criminals through prohibition.
If you support prohibition, you are part of the drug problem.

One person claimed that my last line was “Glib and memorable, but purposely divisive and thereby tragically counter productive…”
Interesting. Glib and memorable, true. But is such an approach counterproductive? Or is it possible that such a memorable statement could actually wake some people up?
For too long, drug policy reformers have been hampered by fighting two forces.

1. Drug Warriors and their self-interest and propaganda
2. Masses of people who are open to the idea of reform, but don’t consider it to be a critical issue (after all, it’s just about some hippies who want to smoke pot, it’s not like it’s life or death, right?)

This second group has been let off the hook, and therefore have let others get away with murder. Didn’t reform the Rockefeller laws this session? Oh, well, there’s other important stuff for the legislature to do.
Even tacit and passive support of prohibition means that drug policy reform has a much harder time countering the drug warriors, so more people die of drug overdoses who could have lived; violence from black market economies increases; and on and on.
So what do you think? Glib and counterproductive? Glib and memorable? Should it be permanently added to the banner of Drug WarRant?

If you support prohibition, you are part of the drug problem.

Well, Loretta failed to get arrested today, but she had an interesting discussion with a marshall:

While I was standing there waiting on Kev to get back and hating cops in general a Federal Marshal walks over to me and smiles politely and says hello. I returned his gesture and greeting all the while wondering what was about to happen and bracing for a head cracking or some such brutality.

Shockingly though, he began to tell me that he was the Marshal who was in charge of transporting Jonathan Magbie to the jail. He said he was called to the courthouse to pick him up and was expecting just another regular person convicted for smoking pot to be there waiting on him.

He said when he saw Magbie and his condition he was shocked and upset that a person like that could be sent to jail. He said he felt like the lowest piece of scum on earth for having to drive him to jail and that he felt deep down that something horrible might happen.

He told me when he read the story in the Post a few days later he broke down and cried like a baby.

He said he felt responsible to a degree but that as a federal marshal he had to do what he was told. …

He then told me that pot should be legal and that most people even on the federal side as well as regular civilian police officers felt that way as well from what he could tell.

I told him of my plans to enter Judge Retchin‰s courtroom and unfurl my banner at 2 pm and asked him what I could expect from the Marshal‰s. He said that I would be escorted out if I didn‰t get too rowdy and the charge would be disrupting court. He said that if I refused to leave the courtroom or resisted then I would be charged with contempt and arrested.

He said if he were assigned to that courtroom today that he would see that I was handled gently and treated with respect. …

He smiled, thanked me for having the courage to speak out and said with a wink ‹If anyone asks I told you to move on.Š

The judge was gone for the day, so she’s going to try again tomorrow.

Young Jonathan Magbie in 1982 (paralyzed from the chin down), meeting President Reagan during the proclamation of National Respiratory Therapy Week. Last month, he was sentenced to jail for marijuana possession. It turned out to be a death sentence.
Loretta Nall has been protesting outside the courthouse. She writes: “Tomorrow I plan to get arrested because I am going to unfurl a cloth banner in the courtroom that reads…”

I’ve posted a couple of times now about Jonathan Magbie, paralyzed from the chin down and needing a respirator to breath at night, who was arrested for possession of marijuana and sentenced to 10 days in jail where he died without proper breathing equipment
There’s more at D’Alliance, and a new article in the Washington Post: Another Unnecessary Death in DC by Cobert I. King, details the series of bad decisions that led to the death of Magbie.
I’ve been doing some extra reflection about drug laws and our interaction with them after reading
a commenter at Talkleft, who wrote this about the quadriplegic:

He knew the risks he was taking but took them anyway. …thank’s [sic] to the utterly poor choices of Mr. Magbie, Magbie had the biggest role in killing Magbie. … Magbie clearly deserved a sentence of 10 days.

The other commenters jumped on him pretty quickly.
This is, however, not a completely isolated viewpoint.
For example, the link to my Drug War Victims page has been distributed on a lot of message boards around the web, and I often like to check out the comments that people have after reading it. The vast majority is horrified, but there are usually a few who will say, “That’s what they get for getting involved in drugs.” When reminded that many of the drug war victims were innocent, they respond, “Sometimes accidents happen when enforcing the law. That’s just the way it is.”
No, it’s not.
I hear “Well, that’s the law,” as if drug laws were some kind of absolute, like the law of gravity. To them, questioning the law is like blaming the ground for being there at the end after you step off a cliff.
Drug laws are not gravity.
I also hear, “The reason marijuana is illegal is that the government determined it was dangerous and so they outlawed it.” This is not only false, but also shows a stunning lack of understanding of how laws are made in this country (or even how they should be made in this country).
Drug laws are not absolute. Nor are they somehow carefully constructed to serve the general good of the people. In fact, they fall into a special category of law: Bad Law.

• Drug laws Don’t Work. In the 30 or so years of the intensified drug war, drug wars have failed to achieve any of their so-called goals.
• Drug laws have a Negative Cost-Benefit Analysis. There’s simply no way to show that any benefits of the drug war could possibly outweigh the costs (both financial and societal).
• Drug laws are Scientifically Unsound. Drug laws assume that basic principles such as the economic laws of supply and demand will politely step out of the way.
• Drug laws use Cruel and Unusual Punishment. The laws’ disproportionate penalties do far more harm than the drugs they attempt to prevent. It would be like forfeiting your car because the parking meter ran out five minutes ago.
• Drug laws are Contrary to our Nation’s Principles. As Abraham Lincoln said, “A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded… Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.”
• Drug laws Promote Lawlessness. Since almost half of the population has used an illegal drug, there is a tendency to hesitate in actively cooperating with enforcement personnel. Additionally, enforcement efforts aimed at drug laws take away from the focus on other crime.
• Drug laws Promote Dangerous Crime. The demand for drugs under prohibition creates a very profitable black market in the criminal realm. Increased prohibition efforts escalate related violence and other criminal activities.
• Drug laws Endanger the Public Health. The drug laws prevent safety, age and purity regulations, actually making drugs more dangerous.

• Legislating bad law is wrong.
• Legislating law you know to be bad, but that serves a political interest, is not only wrong, but it’s corrupt.
• Enforcing a bad law may be necessary, but it’s wrong.
• Prosecuting a bad law may be necessary, but it’s wrong.
• Prosecuting a bad law enthusiastically, including tacking on charges or sentences that go beyond even the intent of the law is not only wrong, but it’s corrupt.
• Imposing sentences based on bad law may be necessary, but it’s wrong.
• Imposing maximum or increased sentences solely based on bad law in order to send a message or give the accused a lesson is not only wrong, but it’s corrupt.
• Jury conviction based solely on a bad law is not only wrong, but unnecessary.
• Breaking a bad law may be wrong, but that doesn’t make the enforcement or prosecution right.
• Advocating for change of a bad law is not only right, but it is a citizen’s responsibility.
• Promoting a bad law is wrong.
• Promoting a bad law through lying and propaganda in order to further political or financial goals is not only wrong, but it’s corrupt.

There’s only one action in that list that is “right.”
Do the right thing.

“Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

– Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

I say that you cannot administer a wicked law impartially.
You can only destroy.
You can only punish.
I warn you that a wicked law, like cholera, destroys everyone it touches — its upholders as well as its defiers.

– Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, Inherit the Wind

No, it wasn’t Kerry or Bush. Libertarian Candidate Michael Badnarik and Green Candidate David Cobb were arrested trying to enter the debates. Badnarik was carrying an Order to Show Cause, which he intended to serve the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD).
This is newsworthy on this blog, because Badnarik and Cobb recently held their own debate where:

The two also agreed that the U.S. war on drugs has been a failure, and both expressed support for the decriminalization of marijuana.

It sure would have been nice to have that topic discussed at the other debate.