Drug WarRant

Tulia – 35 Pardoned!
On Friday, Texas Governor Rick Perry pardoned 35 people who had been convicted due to an atrocious abuse of drug war tactics, a corrupt undercover deputy, and prosecutorial misconduct, which resulted in the 1999 arrest of 10% of this small town’s black population on drug charges without evidence.
Within hours of the pardons, lawyers for defendants in the case filed a federal civil rights lawsuit naming more than 40 defendants, including the drug task force that supervised the sting and every county belonging to the task force.
For some good background on the case, check out Alternet’s article on race issues in Tulia, PBS’s Tulia timeline, one of Bob Herbert’s articles which brought national attention to the issue, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund work on the Tulia case, and MAPinc list of newspaper articles.
The important thing to remember here is that this is one case. Tulia must be a rallying cry to stop abuses in the war on drugs everywhere. There will be more Tulias as long as our unconstitutional policies continue.

Odds and Ends around the Drug Reform Community
Visit the Drug Policy Alliance Action Center. This is a great way to get involved easily. The site gives you specific action items regarding current legislative bills or issues, and one-click ways to send pre-written (or your own) letters, faxes, or emails to your Congresssional representatives or other public officials. If you wish, it will remember your address, representatives, and which action items you’ve already done. Some of the current action items include:

• Urge Andrea Barthwell of the ONDCP to help approve the UMass Amherst application for a license to produce marijuana for federally-approved research.
• Stop Rave Act II
• Oppose the CLEAN-UP Act
• Restore Student Financial Aid
• Stop Human Rights Abuses in Thailand

Last One Speaks has an excellent piece on Operation Eradication in Columbia.
A candlelight vigil is being planned outside the Supreme Court September 22, as a memorial to medical marijuana patient and activist Cheryl Miller, who died June 7.
The October issue of Playboy magazine (not available online) is out with a feature by Dean Kuipers on the “Siege at Rainbow Farm.” Rainbow Farm was a Michigan meeting ground for marijuana activists. Kuipers’ dramatic re-creation of the deadly five-day standoff documents what really happened. (If you don’t want to pick up Playboy, here’s online info about the Rainbow Farm tragedy.) [Update: Full text now available online.]
Media Awareness Project has a focus alert on Donald Rumsfeld’s recent statements regarding supply side failure.
Drugsense Weekly – a roundup of this week’s news in the drug war.
Stop the Drug War has its new issue of Drug War Chronicle online.

“Patriot Act, Victory Act, Despot Act”

“The cause we have chosen is just.”
With these words, John Ashcroft kicks off his tour to defend the destruction of American freedom.
Attorney General John Ashcroft is giving more than a dozen speeches around the country at taxpayer expense to promote the Patriot Act; and a new even more dangerous bill has just been introduced called the Victory Act (which practically defines drug dealers as terrorists).
— Read the rest of the story —

Reactions to story on Canadian MPs
The Globe and Mail had some followups today on the story of MPs asking John Walter’s office to help defeat a Canadian marijuana bill. The editorial staff, while avoiding full condemnation, observed that “They look like sneaks, and deserve to be criticized.” A delightful letter to the editor gave the MPs a little more specific guidance, and actually brought up the “treason” word.

Canadian politicians ask U.S. to interfere with their legal system
Very interesting article in the Globe and Mail. On July 8, Deputy Drug Czar Barry Crane and other U.S. officials met with a group of Liberal MPs.

According to minutes of the meeting, a written copy of which was seen by The Globe and Mail, one of the MPs said the U.S. drug officials could help halt the bill by warning Canada about potential difficulties at the border and with trade if it were passed.

Another MP was quoted as saying that Dr. Crane and his officials should return to Washington to tell their superiors that they should make the consequences of passing the legislation clear to Canada.

Not that John Walters needed any encouragement to demonize Canada or threaten border retaliations. He had already begun to do that within a day of the introduction of new legislation in Canada.
The startling part of this story, is that officials in the Liberal Party in Canada actually seem to be encouraging a foreign power to interfere with their legislative process! Outrageous.
Of course, lost within all the controversy over Canada’s attempt to decriminalize marijuana (while still keeping tons of penalties, and even adding some stiffer ones), is that fact that, due to a quirk in the law (and the responsible actions of the Canadian judiciary combined with the lack of responsibility among many of the politicians), in many parts of Canada today, there is currently no law prohibiting marijuana possession or use – a very confusing situation to many.
However, despite the fact that many people have been able to smoke marijuana this summer without fear of arrest, morality hasn’t been destroyed, Canada’s youth have not become corrupt, crime hasn’t risen, and the sky hasn’t fallen (well, the lights did go out, but that was Cleveland’s fault).

Where have all the blogs gone?
Sorry if you’ve had trouble accessing this page recently. Salon’s blog servers have gone down at least twice today — this after days of slow access due to increased traffic caused by NY Times article about The Julie/Julia Project. Very frustrating. Please bear with it, and if you can’t get through, check back later.

A Kindred Soul
I was discovered yesterday! Turns out there’s another blogger out there fighting the drug war. The author of a great blog calledLast One Speaks: A Voice of Reason in the Cacophony of Drug War Rhetoric contacted me and we discovered we had quite a bit in common (Last One Speaks wrote some nice things about me today, so we seem to have a mutual admiration society going).
Last One Speaks already reported several weeks ago on the Medscape poll mentioned in the Boston Globe article below. If you get a chance, check out the recent weeks’ archives, where you’ll find some interesting pieces on Bush’s faith-based drug initiatives, Lou Dobbs, Andrea Barthwell of the ONDCP, and other issues.
Great site. Check it out!

The shifting medical view on marijuana

Yesterday’s Boston Globe published an article called The Shifting Medical View on Marijuana by Lester Grinspoon (co-author of Marijuana, The Forbidden Medicine. In it, Grinspoon makes note of the recent Medscape poll that showed “76 percent of physicians and 89 percent of nurses said they thought marijuana should be available as a medicine.” Grinspoon has long been an advocate of medical marijuana, and he takes the argument even a step further:

The only workable way of realizing the full potential of this remarkable substance, including its full medical potential, is to free it from a dual set of regulations — the laws that control prescription drugs, and the often cruel and self-defeating criminal laws that control psychoactive substances used to for nonmedical purposes. These mutually reinforcing laws strangle marijuana’s uniquely multifaceted potential. The only way to liberate the potential is to give marijuana the same legal status as alcohol, a far more dangerous substance.

Kudos to the Boston Globe for running the Grinspoon piece. Articles like this one and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer piece I mentioned on Friday may be a sign that the mainstream media is beginning to allow objective anti-prohibition coverage.

Drug War Victims
Our drug war results in staggeringly tragic losses. Drugs, when abused, can be dangerous, but they are not nearly as lethal as the drug war itself.
In addition to the blights of an imprisoned population, lost rights, broken families, and economic waste, people are dying in this war. No, these are not deaths from drugs, but from prohibition.
It is important to realize that the vast majority of deaths on the drug war simply would not happen without prohibition. When drug dealers fight it out over territory and they or their neighbors are killed in the process, it is a sympton of prohibition, much as when we suffered the scourge of alcohol prohibition many years ago. Prohibition makes violence profitable.
When drug users overdose from tainted drugs, it is the result of prohibition. When they die from overdoses because they were afraid to seek help, it is the result of prohibition.

Increasingly, people are dying because of the tactics of the drug war. Military operations are being conducted on our soil, and collateral damage is inevitable.
When drug task forces dressed in black batter in doors without knocking or announcing themselves, the danger to citizens and police alike is enormous. Sometimes the greatest danger is to (or from) the innocent citizen that understandably believes that they are experiencing a home invasion, and rushes to defend their family and property.
Every now and then, a death happens that is particularly grotesque — that points out the horrific folly of our actions. Drug WarRant has started a page to memorialize these tragedies. Unfortunately, it is a page that will be continually updated.
— “Drug War Victims” —

Signs of Intelligencer
With the federal government attempting to demonize anyone who disagrees with the current war on marijuana use, and even resorting to name-calling (like “cynical, cruel, and immoral”), it’s not surprising that many are reluctant to speak out in favor of any relaxation of laws, let alone outright legalization.

It was very refreshing to read in yesterday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer a bold, clear, and common-sense OpEd by attorney Maureen Brown: “Legalize, tax marijuana to fill budget gap.”
While Maureen’s numbers don’t completely add up (for one thing, her numbers assume no reduction in gross prices, and on the other side she neglects many of the incidental cost savings from ending the marijuana wars), they still paint a remarkable picture.
I have long felt that one of the keys to reforming marijuana laws is coherently explaining economic realities. But it’s going to take a major effort to get the money argument out to the people. Under the current system, those who control the war (and thus have attempted to control the discourse) have found the war very profitable for them, at the expense of the ordinary citizen.