Drug WarRant

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).

“I’m not saying that he shouldn’t have been punished, because he did smoke the marijuana,” his mother, Mary Scott, said yesterday, a day after burying her son. “I just don’t think it should have cost him his life.”

That’s the story in today’s Washington Post.

Jonathan Magbie, a 27-year-old Mitchellville man, was sent to jail in the District last week for 10 days for marijuana possession.

He never made it home.

Paralyzed as a child and unable to even breathe on his own, Magbie died last Friday after being shuttled between the D.C. jail complex and Greater Southeast Community Hospital.

At the center of the many questions surrounding his death is whether D.C. Superior Court and the D.C. Department of Corrections did enough to ensure adequate care for the quadriplegic inmate.

An investigation is underway, but that is little solace to his family, which marched on the courthouse this week with signs accusing the judge of killing Magbie.

The pre-sentencing report had recommended probation.

New to the drug policy blogs… decrimwatch

Keeping an eye on cannabis decrimiminalization news, particularly in Chicago

I chased criminal plants. I tore up fields of hemp. … I started a war to repress the people of Bolivia and Columbia … I contributed to the loss of Bill of Rights for all Americans … I turned some neighborhoods into shooting gallerys where armed bands fought over marketing rights in various territories. … I worked hard to get children to inform on their parents. … And while making war on 5 to 10% of all Americans I ignored any warnings of terrorist threats and concentrated on the civil war against users of the wrong kinds of drugs. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. …

M. Simon of Rockford, Illinois first had this piece published on December 15, 2001. But as he says: “It’s still true.”
Read it.
He also adds:

This weeks saying:

What is the difference between drug prohibition and alcohol prohibition?
Seventy four years so far.

Ask a politician:

Do you support drug prohibition because it finances criminals at home or because it finances terrorists abroad?

I’ll start watching debates when they’re ready to talk seriously about drug policy. Odds are, that won’t happen.
Let me know if I’m wrong.
I’ll be coming out with my endorsement and analysis of the Presidential race sometime in October so watch for it. I’ll also be working on more state voting guides.

Thanks to Scott (of course), comes this amazing piece in the Houston Press. It’s a five (web) page article on medical marijuana by Michael Serazio called Reefer Madness.
I’m just going to quote extensively from it (although this is still just a brief taste of the article).
Along with the tape from the Montel show, this is required reading for people considering the pros and cons of legalizing medical marijuana.

When he emerged from 13 straight months in the hospital and rehab, Jones choked back a steady diet of assorted pills: Demerol, Vistaril, Valium, Halcion and Lioresal, among others. He describes the feeling in his back “like somebody’s got an ice pick and they just keep jabbing it in and out of that same damn spot, constantly.” The pills, he found, didn’t work well enough.

“I was at the point that I was taking 280 milligrams of baclofen,” or generic Lioresal. “And the maximum dosage on that is 80 milligrams a day,” he says. “Just to try to control spasticity. I’d be sitting in my wheelchair. I would get a spasm out of nowhere. Next thing I knew, I was trying to block my head from hitting the ground. It just threw me right out of my chair. Threw me over backwards.”

He says that in the early ’90s his doctor recommended, unofficially, trying marijuana for the pain. Nowadays, Jones needs only a strong aspirin, a Benadryl for his sinuses and most critically — he points to the table — cannabis. …

_______

Dr. Alan Robison, who chaired the pharmacology department at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston before retiring, conducted some of the earliest research on marijuana’s toxicity level.

“That was the first and only drug I ever studied in my career that was so nontoxic that no matter how much of it you gave to a mouse or a rat, you couldn’t kill the damn thing,” says Robison, the founder of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas. “As an industrial chemical, it’s a real loser, because you can’t even kill a cockroach with it.” …

_______

The self-described “straight-edge” teen had seen cocaine wreck her mother’s life and initially shied away from medicating with cannabis. When her cancer returned, though, in the midst of a painful chemotherapy run, she gave it a shot. It worked, at least for her depression and nausea.

“Without smoking pot, I don’t eat. At all.” She pauses. “Just, I don’t eat at all.” She later adds, “The marijuana works with the pain. It actually, like, relaxes — like, when you’re in pain for so long, your body gets so on edge and you get so tense and it just makes the pain worse. And usually it results, when you’re in that kind of pain, you have to go to the ER and get IV pain medication.” …

_______

A 2001 Pew Research Center study found the public supports prescription marijuana by a more than three-to-one ratio, and a Time/CNN survey one year later had it at 80 percent. But despite the fact that marijuana’s medical use enjoys widespread and consistent public support, it’s a source of a paralysis on the part of elected officials — perhaps the strangest paradox in politics. Both conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr.’s writings and the NORML Web site, odd bedfellows in the fight to legalize, lament this pervasive fear of looking “soft on drugs.”

“You know why it’s not legal,” says Paul. “It’s because people are afraid to vote that way. You know, people get hysterical” — he fakes a shrieky voice — “Oh, I can’t do that. I agree with you, but the people’ll think I’m pro-drugs… The whole thing is just carried away. So Congress is way behind what the people are thinking. If this were a really, really bad position, I couldn’t be in office, because it’s been used against me continuously.” The point is salient not only to Paul, but it speaks to a second, perhaps stranger paradox: Despite the issue’s volatility, no one can think of a single case of someone significant losing their seat because of a stance on medical marijuana.

“Ron Paul should’ve been gone 20 years ago if that were the case,” says Alan Bock, author of Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana. “I think partly what this is, most people, early in their political careers, some consultant told them: ‘Don’t touch that. Your career’s over.’ And they’ve never rethought it. Even if they’ve had fairly serious questions about it.”

None of this is particularly new to those who follow drug policy reform closely — you’ve heard me talk about the problem with politicians being afraid of being considered “soft” on drugs again and again — but it’s powerful to see this kind of article in the press.

Flash animation at Drug Policy Alliance. Go watch.

Via Vice Squad comes news that the US Coast Guard has seized 56,000 pounds in two recent interdictions.

Total amount of cocaine seized by the DEA since 1986: over 1,000 tons.
The degree to which that has reduced availability: approximately 0.