Drug WarRant

As regular readers know, I love to trash the concept of drug task forces — they really are a danger to our country in many ways — and I’ve been a fan of the work done in this area by the Texas ACLU. This connected me with Scott Henson who has this fascinating post:

One of my biggest beefs is the use of drug enforcement strategies that create new crime instead of investigating current ones. A Tennessee drug task force roped in a Florida woman on money laundering charges recently, but it turned out she was uninvolved, and a confidential informant (who had a long criminal record) had manufactured the allegedly criminal situation.

This is very common, especially for drug task forces funded by the federal Byrne grant program. In Hearne, Texas ACLU is suing because a confidential informant set up innocent people and attempted to manufacture crimes where none existed. In response, the 2001 (77th) Texas Legislature passed House Bill 2351 requiring corroboration for testimony by confidential informants in undercover drug stings. To my knowledge, no other state has enforced that restriction. The requirement for corroborating evidence, though, is as old as the concept of justice itself — in Mosaic law in the Bible, corroboration was mandated for the equivalent of criminal convictions, and both Jesus and the Aposle Paul confirmed the necessity for corroboration in the New Testament.

Also check out Scott’s post on Gypsy Cops, the most notable being “Tulia’s” Tom Coleman.

“bullet” Last One Speaks on the successful protest yesterday at Health and Human Services and a voice of reason in the US House of Representatives.
“bullet” Vice Squad on the shift of FBI resources away from drug investigations (I’ll have more on that later).
“bullet” D’Alliance on Afghanistan, Thailand, and DC.
“bullet” Decrimwatch on Chicago looking for more ways to save money.

decrimwatch was actually at the hearings yesterday and has a report.

Not all the committee members attended the hearing, but those who showed up clearly “got it.” The legislators offered sympathy and respect to the patients who testified, while challenging brainless assertions by the state’s apparently dwindling faction of drug warriors.

There were only a few prohibitionists on hand to speak, and they were relics, typified by Peter Bensinger, former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration from 1976-1981. After reciting a good portion of his lengthy resume, Bensinger got down to business and said… well, it was kind of hard to pull a central point out of the jumble of scary statistics and self-righteous platitudes.

Loretta Nall (of the US Marijuana Party) has written to say that she’s in Washington DC to organize a vigil to protest the death of Jonathan Magbie.
The vigil will start at 2 pm and go until 5 pm today, and then 9 am to 5 pm Wednesday through Friday and possibly into next week. She is looking for people to join her at Carl Moultrie Jr. Courthouse, which is entered at roughly 6th and Indiana Ave. NW, (at D Street) a block from the Judiciary Square Metro station on the red line.
She also notes that Marc Emery has pledged $500 bail/attorney fee money to any American who makes the trip to DC and is arrested for protesting. [Note: Drug WarRant does not endorse or recommend illegal activity.]
If you plan to go to DC and would like Loretta’s phone number to contact her when you get there, let me know.

Speaking of using every tool at your disposal, here’s an action alert for tomorrow (maybe today depending on when you read this) – Tuesday, October 5, 2004.
Phone/ Fax Slam to Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health & Human Servicesæ – Tuesday, Oct 5
Send a free Fax or Email from the Americans for Safe Access online action center on Tuesday. http://www.safeaccessnow.org/ Follow up with a toll-free phone call to 877-696-6775. Tell Tommy Thomson, the head of Health and Human Services:

• Marijuana does have a currentlyæaccepted use inæmedicalætreatment.
• Please remember that the health and safety ofæpeopleæwhoæbenefit fromæthe medical use ofæmarijuana is in your hands.

WHY HHS?æ To ensure safe access for ALL patients, marijuana must be rescheduled, and its medicinal value recognized on the federal level. Health and Human Services (HHS) has the power to make this change. If HSS allows that marijuana has medical value, the DEA must recommend rescheduling. However, in 2001, HHS ruled that marijuana had, “No currently accepted medical use in treatment.” They did not address the mountain of data recognizing cannabis as a useful treatment. This allowed the DEA to reject rescheduling and gave them implicit permission to raid patients.

Six months later, the DEA started raiding and closing California dispensaries. Our highest health officials can stop this abuse simplyæby doing their job and applying sound science to this policy debate. Reschedule marijuana now!

This is fascinating:

Americans for Safe Access, a Berkeley, Calif., coalition of patients and doctors wanting easier access to pot for research and patient use, plans to file a petition with the Department of Health and Human Services charging the agency with spreading inaccurate information about the drug’s medical value.

Unlike previous efforts to ease marijuana access, which relied on the courts and have dragged on for years, the petition invokes the Data Quality Act, a little-known but powerful law that gives people the right to challenge scientific information disseminated by federal agencies.æ The law demands that agencies respond to petitions within two months.

The act’s use by marijuana advocates represents a peculiar political twist.æ The act was written by a tobacco industry lobbyist and slipped into a huge piece of legislation after the 2000 election without any congressional discussion or debate.æ It has been used almost exclusively by corporations challenging the validity of scientific information that they fear might lead to costly regulations.

I love it! Use every tool, every means at your disposal. We’ve got voter initiatives, a case in the Supreme Court, cities exploring alternate approaches, TV Shows and much more.
And that’s what it’ll take. Eventually we’ll reach a point of saturation where politicians will be embarrassed to oppose medical marijuana or even marijuana legalization.

“bullet” In today’s Boston Globe, a nice article on Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) and Jack Cole: Former Cop Changes Sides in Nation’s War on Drugs:

”Right now the people that control and regulate drugs are the dealers,” Cole said. ”They tell us what will be distributed to the community, what the purity will be, how much it will cost and who and where it will be sold. And then we see to it that they get all the profits.”

Cole wants drugs controlled by the government, heavily taxed, and easily accessible to adults. And he wants to see some of the $69 billion a year ”thrown down the rat hole” used to educate Americans about drugs. He points to the campaign to inform Americans about tobacco, which cut use nearly in half in eight years. ”And we did it without incarcerating a single human being.”

“bullet” It’s nice to see that the Anchorage Press (Alaska) has reprinted Ethan Nadelmann’s wonderful article that first appeared in the National Review last month: An End to Marijuana Prohibition. It’s particularly good that Alaska is seeing that article — it could have a positive impact on the referendum.
It’s also worth reading again. It’s really good. And it’s a perfect article for you to give to someone who is wanting to learn more about every aspect of marijuana and legalization. Ethan answers all the major propaganda, myths, and frequently asked questions about marijuana.

I’m not sure where the seizure happened, but I live in Bloomington, just a few blocks from I-55, so it was pretty close. Reported in the Pantagraph:

BLOOMINGTON — What began as a routine traffic stop Thursday on Interstate 55 ended with the arrest of a Texas man and the seizure of 1,600 pounds of marijuana valued at $1.6 million, prosecutors say. …

In court Friday, Assistant State’s Attorney Jeff Horve said an Illinois State Police trooper stopped Anguiano on I-55 because the license plate on his semitrailer truck was dangling from a wire.æ An inspection followed in which police found 17 pallets containing 1,600 pounds of marijuana, Horve said. …

Anguiano, 32, reportedly has no prior record.æ He is from Weslaco, a town of 26,935 people on the southernmost tip of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley.

Of course, Anguiano is just the driver — probably some poor slob who knows nothing operation, but was promised the opportunity to get rich quick.
The interesting thing to me is that the truck had the license plate dangling from a wire. It’s sloppy. Now it’s possible that everyone from the top down is equally dumb, but I doubt it. It seems to indicate that $1.6 million worth of pot is simply such a small part of the operation that it’s not worth the effort to oversee the details of such things like vehicle inspections. Yep, they lose a truck, 1,600 pounds of pot, and a schmuck driver, and they probably write it off as a normal cost of business — not much different to them than the DVD that gets shoplifted at Wal-Mart.
Gives you a sense of the economic scale of the criminal black-market that is created by prohibition, doesn’t it?

The ACLU has a guide to this year’s Supreme Court term. Here’s their description of a few cases related to drug policy.

The issue in United States v. Booker (04-104) and United States v. Fanfan (04-105), is whether the federal sentencing guidelines are similarly [as in Blakely v. Washington] invalid because the guideline score that is used to determine a defendant’s sentence often rests on facts that are never presented to the jury — such as the actual quantity of drugs involved in a particular transaction. Instead, those critical findings are made by a judge based on a preponderance of the evidence at a post-conviction hearing where reasonable doubt is no longer the standard.

Thousands of federal sentences could be affected by the Supreme Court’s decisions in Booker and Fanfan. …

Too often, as we know, the consequences of incarceration do not end with incarceration. Many states disenfranchise former felons. This issue achieved national prominence when approximately 600,000 people were prevented from voting in Florida in the 2000 election because of felony convictions. Felon disenfranchisement laws, however, exist throughout the country. According to a recent study, one out of four black men in Providence, Rhode Island will be barred from voting in this year’s election. Two cases now pending before the Court on petitions for certiorari — one from the Second Circuit (Muntaqim v. Coombe, 04-175), and one from the Ninth Circuit (Locke v. Farrakhan, 03-1597) — ask the Court to decide whether the racially disproportionate impact of felon disenfranchisement violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Race is not an explicit issue in Illinois v. Caballes (03-923), but it is an issue nonetheless. The formal question presented is whether the Fourth Amendment requires individualized suspicion before the police employ a canine unit to sniff for drugs during a routine traffic stop. While most people feel anxious during any police encounter, the presence of a police dog fundamentally changes the nature of the seizure, as the ACLU points out in its amicus brief, making it both more intimidating and a more serious intrusion on privacy. Even beyond those generalized concerns, there is good reason to fear that minority drivers will more often be subject to this invasive practice in the absence of individualized suspicion given everything we have learned in recent years about the prevalence of racial profiling by law enforcement.

Another aspect of the misguided “war on drugs” will be before the Court in Ashcroft v. Raich (03-1454), where the federal government is defending its right to prosecute two critically ill patients in California who cultivated marijuana for their own personal use after it was recommended by their doctors in accordance with California law. The Ninth Circuit held that this exercise of federal power violates the Commerce Clause, and this case undoubtedly raises important questions of Commerce Clause jurisprudence. There is, nonetheless, something profoundly disturbing about the government’s effort to treat the case as merely about commerce, thereby obscuring the important liberty interest involved when patients who often have no other option seek to use marijuana to obtain relief from unbearable pain.

I’m going to be following all of these with great interest, but especially Ashcroft v. Raich, which will be argued November 29, 2004 at 10:00 am.

In a follow-up to my post yesterday, comes today’s editorial in the Washington Post: An Inmate’s Death.

Jonathan Magbie, a 27-year-old quadriplegic who had been unable to breathe on his own since he was 4, was sent to a Corrections Department facility for 10 days for marijuana possession. Four days later he was dead. The short period between sentencing and his death is a story of what can happen when an impersonal system treats inmates as if they are nobodies with no one to turn to.

…

Then the buck-passing began. After arriving at the D.C. jail, Mr. Magbie was evaluated as needing “acute medical attention” and nearly nine hours later was shipped to Greater Southeast Community Hospital, which has handled inmate hospitalizations since the closure of D.C. General Hospital. Greater Southeast, however, discharged Mr. Magbie the next day and sent him to the Correctional Treatment Facility (CTF), another Corrections Department unit near the jail. A physician at the CTF concluded that Mr. Magbie belonged at the hospital and asked that he be taken back, but Greater Southeast refused. The physician then asked Judge Retchin to order the hospital to take Mr. Magbie, but the judge said she didn’t have the power. And there at CTF Mr. Magbie stayed.

After his mother, Mary Scott, and his lawyer haggled with the medical staff for two days, she was finally permitted to bring his ventilator to the building. By the time Ms. Scott got there, her son had been taken back to Greater Southeast. He died that night.

Yesterday, we asked the chief judge’s office if the matter of Jonathan Magbie was closed or under review. The case is closed, we were told …

Why is his case closed?

For more on this, please read Baylen’s passionate post at D’Alliance: Judge and Executioner
Also, more at Media Crapola and TalkLeft (where a strange and passionate discussion took place in the comments led off by an idiot that somehow thought Magbie deserved it).