Drug WarRant

Federal Government would rather have poor children become drug dealers than get an education.
One of the many stupid laws to be passed in the name of the war on drugs is the 1998 revision to the Higher Education Act, which included a new provision that blocked college opportunities to students revealing drug convictions on their Application for Federal Student Aid. If you’ve raped someone, it doesn’t affect your financial aid, but if you’ve had an arrest in your past for smoking a joint, forget about getting federal assistance. This, of course, doesn’t affect the children of congressmen — they can afford college without aid.
Apparently, nobody in Congress thought about the practical aspects. Imagine a promising boy who had some youthful indiscretions, including a bust for possessing a substance that is safer than what the congressman drinks at business lunches. The young person has paid the price for his indiscretion and now wants to make something of himself by going to college. “Sorry. No college for you.” So what does he do? No education. Not many jobs in his community except…
Anyway, Senator Kennedy is planning to soon introduce a bill to overturn this provision. He needs a Republican co-sponsor, and there are a few who could possibly be convinced. So if you live in the states of Senators Mike DeWine (OH), Jeff
Sessions (AL), John Warner (VA), Sam Brownback (KS), Lincoln Chafee (RI), Olympia Snowe (ME), or Arlen Specter (PA), click on their name to send a targeted letter to them.
For more information, and to write your representatives in general about the HEA, or sign the petition, go to Raise Your Voice.
Oh, and if you live in the district of Mark Souder (IN), who authored this piece of crap, vote him out.
By the way, I’m proud to say that my institution – Illinois State University – was one of the earliest to endorse a resolution calling for the repeal of this horrible provision.

Judiciary Face-off
As I mentioned earlier this week, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a directive requiring prosecutors to snitch on judges who use their own discretion and provide lighter sentences than Ashcroft wants. Senator Edward Kennedy accused Ashcroft of engaging in an “ongoing attack on judicial independence.”
Now another Kennedy has entered the fray — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. While not directly responding to Ashcroft, Kennedy took the opportunity in an address to the annual meeting of the American Bar Association yesterday to blast mandatory minimum sentences.

“I can accept neither the necessity nor the wisdom of federal mandatory minimum sentences,” Kennedy said. “In all too many cases, mandatory minimum sentences are unjust.”

Although Kennedy himself has voted on the Court to uphold mandatory minimums and finds them constitutional he noted that our “resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long,” and that it is “a grave mistake to retain a policy just because a court finds it constitutional.”

As Congress and the Administration continues to take pot-shots at the judiciary (not to mention Pat Robertson, who has organized prayer groups to convince God to “remove” several Supreme Court justices), it will be interesting to see whether or how the judiciary finds additional ways to assert itself.
Here’s an idea. When the next medical marijuana case makes it to the Supreme Court, the justices could send a strong message to the administration by affirming that the Federal Government does not have the right to interfere with state law that is designed to protect the health of its citizens.

Can someone explain this?
On the DEA website, there is a Drug Intelligence Brief titled: “Area Codes: Frequently Asked Questions (June 2003)”.

After giving a page of general information about how area codes work, and how they’re assigned to different geographic regions, etc., the credits at the bottom note that “This report was prepared by the DEA Intelligence Division, Office of Strategic Intelligence, Domestic Strategic Intelligence Unit and the Dangerous Drugs Strategic Intelligence Unit.”
I’m having a hard time here. Is this really the DEA’s idea of an intelligence briefing? Is the concept of an intelligence briefing given by the DEA an oxymoron? Do they believe that drug dealers are using area codes for some nefarious purpose? Is the DEA looking to take over long distance? Will Carrot-Top start urging us to dial 1-800-CALL-DEA?
Or, perhaps, the DEA is just panicked that when we run out of area codes it will be harder to keep track of the citizens it wants to control.

Well, duh!
Bush Administration Misuses Science Data, Report Says. “The Bush administration persistently manipulates scientific data to serve its ideology and protect the interests of its political supporters, a report by the minority staff of the House Committee on Government Reform says.” The New York Times article (also covered in other media) gives an overview of a new report called “Politics and Science in the Bush Administration.”
Of course, the drug policy reform world has been quite aware of this fact. From the lies and exaggerations coming from the ONDCP to the ignorance of major scientific evidence on the part of the new Administrator of the DEA, science has been ignored and altered to fit the drug policy agenda of the administration.
This new report doesn’t cover very much, and the one reference to drug policy is old news, but I thought it was worth including it here (full report available as a pdf – thanks to David Harris for the link):

The Administration undermined its ability to obtain scientific advice on substance abuse by using an apparent political litmus test for appointees to an important drug abuse research committee.
In 2002, Dr. William R. Miller, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at University of New Mexico, was invited to join the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse. This advisory committee guides policy and funding on drug abuse at NIH. Before Dr. Miller could be appointed, however, an official from Secretary Thompson’s office called him to ask several questions. These questions included whether he was sympathetic to faith-based initiatives, whether he supported abortion rights, whether he supported the death penalty for drug kingpins, and whether he had voted for President Bush.
Dr. Miller recalled that Secretary Thompson’s aide said, “I need to vet you to determine whether you might have any views that would be an embarrassment to the president.” After Dr. Miller answered that he does support needle exchange — a public health intervention proven to save lives but opposed by social conservatives — the aide responded, “That’s a problem.” When asked whether he voted for Bush, Dr. Miller said that he had not. The aide asked, “Why didn’t you support the President?”
The aide told Dr. Miller he would determine whether his views were acceptable. Dr. Miller was never called back, and his name was not on the final list of appointees. Informed of what happened, Dr. Donald Kennedy, past president of Stanford University and editor of Science, commented: “I don’t think any administration has penetrated so deeply into the advisory committee structure as this one, and I think it matters . . . . If you start picking people by their ideology instead of their scientific credentials, you are inevitably reducing the quality of the advisory group.”

And now for something completely different…
Check out the page on Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) and the controversy surrounding this substance which has been linked to cancer and apparently is used a great deal in the dairy industry. How long will it take for the DEA to add this to the Schedule of Controlled Substances?

Odds and Ends
— Media Awareness Project has a new letter writing alert regarding a US Attorney for Hawaii who used grossly inflated “ice” numbers in order to try to justify a weakening of constitutional protections. Go there and add your voice.
— John Ashcroft is trying to control sentencing by requiring prosecutors to snitch on judges who use their own discretion and provide lighter sentences than Ashcroft wants. (Boston Globe)
— The last issue of The Week Online with DRCNet is available online (beginning next week it will be called the Drug War Chronicle). Check out the article on the marinol prescription death sentence.
— The new issue of Drug Sense Weekly is also out, with an excellent sampling of drug war news from around the world. (and thanks for the plug!)
— If you have been denied financial aid for college due to a past drug arrest, check out the John W. Perry Fund scholarship. Also visit that page to see how you can help with donations or getting the outrageous Higher Education Act provision changed.

“DEA Bad Girl Michele Leonhart”

The new nominee for Deputy Administrator of the DEA is a gung-ho drug warrior with questionable ties to a discredited super-snitch.

The Bush administration wants to head up the Drug Enforcement Agency with two women for the first time in the history of the agency.
The Senate has already confirmed Karen Tandy as DEA administrator by unanimous consent in a late-night session last Thursday. As Jason Vest reported in A New Hard-Liner at the DEA, Tandy has a history of “prosecutorial overzealousness” and “ignorance of key drug policy studies.”

Now President Bush has announced his intention to nominate Michele M. Leonhart, Special Agent in Charge of DEA’s Los Angeles Division, for the position of Deputy Administrator.
Leonhart has already established herself as another hard-liner who will not be popular in the drug reform community.
In June of 2001, she blasted ecstasy use at raves with her statement that “some of the dances in the desert are no longer just dances, they’re like violent crack houses set to music.”
She has also been a visible part of the DEA’s attacks on California’s medical marijuana laws. On January 9, 1998, when U.S. Attorney Michael Yamaguchi announced in a press conference that the government would take action against California medical marijuana clubs (arguably the start of the DEA’s current war against the sick), Leonhart was standing at his side.
Read the rest of the story…

That’s a lot of cocaine… or is it?
Bolivian police, acting on tips from the DEA and Spanish police, seized 5 tons of cocaine destined for Spain, the largest seizure in Bolivia’s history. They found 2 tons on Friday, and another 3 tons in a mashed potato shipment on Saturday.

Now this is enough cocaine for over 4 million doses. Expect to hear quite a bit from the drug warriors on this topic in the next few weeks, and how they’re “winning” the war on drugs. After all, 5 tons has got to put a huge dent in the supply, right? You’d think so, unless you looked at the DEA’s own numbers and realized that they’ve seized around 1,000 tons of cocaine since 1986, without affecting the availability or street price in any significant way.

“Can Congress Get a Clue? (Karen Tandy and the DEA)”

Late Thursday night, the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed Karen P. Tandy as the new head of the DEA, following former administrator Asa Hutchinson’s move to Homeland Security.
The Washington Post reported the confirmation, without mentioning some of the more disturbing facts of her past, or the lack of critical knowledge she exhibited in her confirmation hearing.
Jason Vest’s excellent article in The Nation – A New Hard-Liner at the DEA details some of the issues which should have received close scrutiny by the White House, the Senate, or at least by the Senate Judiciary Committee, including the fact that her assignments as a Justice Department prosecutor and administrator involved:

• busting mail order bong sellers
• busting medical marijuana operations in California and Oregon

Additionally, Karen Tandy:

• was “disqualified and prohibited from directly or indirectly participating” in an investigation by Judge Albert Bryan Jr. because she read documents the court had ruled were protected by attorney-client privilege
• in one case waited until only three days before trial before giving defense attorneys over 60,000 pages of critical documents, all unindexed
• supposedly threatened to withhold family visits unless a defendant said what she wanted him to say
• seized the property of a defendant’s family member even though there was no evidence he was involved
• changed the wording of a plea agreement without the knowledge of the defendant, defense attorney, or judge, in order to set up the defendant for a subsequent arrest
• failed to turn over exculpatory evidence in a cocaine trial
• seized the business and property of a man despite a lack of evidence – a judge was so upset by the lack of evidence that he dismissed the charges “with prejudice”

…
Read the full story

Today in Marijuana History

August 2, 1937: The Marijuana Tax Act is passed, enacting federal marijuana prohibition for the first time. Harry Anslinger commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, tells Congress during a remarkably brief hearing, “Marihuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.” William Woodward, representative of the AMA testifies against the legislation, saying “The American Medical Association knows of no evidence that marihuana is a dangerous drug.” On the floor of the house, the entire discussion was:

• Member from upstate New York: “Mr. Speaker, what is this bill about?”
• Speaker Rayburn: “I don’t know. It has something to do with a thing called marihuana. I think it’s a narcotic of some kind.”
• “Mr. Speaker, does the American Medical Association support this bill?”
• Member on the committee jumps up and says: “Their Doctor Wentworth came down here. They support this bill 100 percent.”

Not true, but good enough to get Republican support and passage.

August 2, 1977: President Jimmy Carter tells Congress, “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana.”

Thanks to The Week Online with DRCNet (soon to be called “The Drug War Chronicle”)