Drug WarRant

A small Nevada gambling resort just south of the Idaho state border called Jackpot intends to set up recreational cannabis dispensaries. An editorial by Stephen Hartgen in an Idaho newspaper exposes the impending peril and doom Idaho residents and its public officials feel as cannabis intrudes upon their comfort zone:

…it’s a fair question whether marijuana sales on Southern Idaho’s border is a good social move. The Elko County sheriff says Idaho law enforcement sees the issue as one of Nevada’s politics, not one of Idaho’s concern…. That sends a clear signal, does it not, that Idaho may not set out to quash incoming traffic.

Still, the costs to Idaho by increased marijuana availability aren’t hard to spot: more drug arrests, jail expenses, law enforcement staffing, plus the well-established linkage of marijuana use to a host of other criminal and socially irresponsible behaviors.

Yea, we’ve heard all the arguments. Recreational marijuana use is a personal thing; it doesn’t affect anyone else; would open up “new” business, etc. But privately, law enforcement officers, social workers, medical professionals and educators will mostly tell you there’s an obvious link from marijuana use to other crimes. […]

You don’t have to look far to see marijuana use as an underlying feature of many social and criminal activity. As part of its recent investigation, Oregon police learned last week that the antifa killer in the Portland shooting had sent a text message to his teenage son that read, “Sell me the gun for a quarter pound of weed and $100 I’m getting tired of this shxx. I need a piece now.” (Oregonian, 9/4). Interesting that the “teenage son” has both access to firearms and drugs. Such goes modern parenting. […]

Despite his misgivings about cannabis, credit is due to Stephen Hartgen for giving the world a heads-up that Idaho law enforcement views marijuana convictions as an excellent way to arrest otherwise innocent people and felonize them for life before they actually do anything that’s criminal in nature.

On July 22, Donald Trump called for a “surge of federal law enforcement into American communities plagued by violent crime.” Seeking to exploit crime-drama distractions prior to the presidential election, U.S. Attorney General William J Barr sent thirty-five federal special agents to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to solve homicides and to arrest members of violent street gangs. Operation Legend, as it’s called, is turning out to be a legendary joke. Mr Barr’s secret agents look for drugs and guns instead of murderers and gang members.

…federal agents are posing undercover as drug users and soliciting drugs and guns from people on the street in order to induce the commission of felony crimes. As one source told us, federal agents are “just running right up to you asking for drugs and guns. Anybody they see moving around here with bags, they’re profiling. And I don’t know why they figure they can get to the drugs and guns off the homeless.” […]

Barr described Operation Legend as “an initiative to combat rising violent crime in a number of our cities,” but the people we talked to on the street describe it as an aggressive, at times clumsy, entrapment operation by agents unfamiliar with Albuquerque and unable to keep their cover. This “kid comes up to us,” one person told us “and says he’s dope sick and starts asking for drugs, but like asking for all the drugs. What is that? No one asks for heroin and cocaine. And he had a bike and so we knew he was a Fed when he said he wouldn’t give it up. What junkie doesn’t give up a bike?”

Another person told us that when agents first arrived, they were approaching people near Albuquerque’s downtown and were “asking for crystal.” This tipped people off because “we don’t use the word crystal,” they told us. “They’ll ask for black. Now they’re asking for shards and dark, and they’re asking for pistols.” All of them “are asking for heroin” but they don’t act like heroin addicts. They’re “alive, awake, sitting in areas for four to six hours. Four to six hours,” our source repeated. “An addict doesn’t act that way.” […]

The mayor of Albuquerque, Tim Keller, called the agents “Trump’s secret police,” and said he’d not been briefed on Operation Legend, which Mayor Keller says he vigilantly opposes. In fact, the Albuquerque city police had already been coordinating with AG Barr’s federal agents six days earlier.

A Mississippi federal judge has challenged the qualified immunity defense that police officers use to deflect responsibility for their degrading treatment of suspects and innocent citizens.

In Jamison v. McClendon, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves recently concluded that Officer Nick McClendon violated Clarence Jamison’s Fourth Amendment rights when he subjected Jamison to a nearly two-hour ordeal that included badgering, pressuring, lying and intrusively searching his car. But the judge’s hands were tied by the qualified immunity doctrine so he was forced to deny Jamison’s legal claim. Reeves, an African American man, traced the development of the law and the institutional racism and police brutality that continue to plague our society. “Black people in this country are acutely aware of the danger traffic stops pose to Black lives,” the judge wrote.

Police behavior in the Jamison case is reminiscent of the United States in the 1930s when American citizens considered themselves safer on the streets than inside their local police precincts. Rubber-hose torture was a way of beating a confession or information out of a hapless captive of any color or creed while leaving their outer skin largely unmarked. Its use was common until the Supreme Court outlawed it. Times have changed. The domestic terror and psychological abuse of the rubber-hose treatment has emerged again with the aid of plausible disguises afforded by the drug war. Jamison v. McClendon is likely to be appealed and decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sharp legal and social distinctions are often made between medicinal and recreational marijuana, with indistinguishable recreational marijuana typically having a dark cloud cast over it. Why the distinction? At universities in Zurich and The Netherlands the need for hedonism and recreation is getting a major overhaul.

We all set ourselves long-term goals from time to time, such as finally getting into shape, eating less sugar or learning a foreign language. Research has devoted much time to finding out how we can reach these goals more effectively. The prevailing view is that self-control helps us prioritize long-term goals over momentary pleasure and that if you are good at self-control, this will usually result in a happier and more successful life.

“It’s time for a rethink,” says Katharina Bernecker, researcher in motivational psychology at the University of Zurich. “Of course self-control is important, but research on self-regulation should pay just as much attention to hedonism, or short-term pleasure.” That’s because Bernecker’s new research shows that people’s capacity to experience pleasure or enjoyment contributes at least as much to a happy and satisfied life as successful self-control. […]

Bernecker and her colleague Daniela Becker of Radboud University…found that certain people get distracted by intrusive thoughts in moments of relaxation or enjoyment by thinking about activities or tasks that they should be doing instead. “For example, when lying on the couch you might keep thinking of the sport you are not doing,” says Becker. “Those thoughts about conflicting long-term goals undermine the immediate need to relax.” On the other hand, people who can fully enjoy themselves in those situations tend to have a higher sense of well-being in general, not only in the short term, and are less likely to suffer from depression and anxiety, among other things. […]

Anti-hedonism in Western culture is linked not only to self-control but to a custom originating with Plotinus (204/5 – 270 C.E.); a neo-Platonist who maintained that hedonism leads to too much happiness and thereby an unwelcome death. The average life expectancy in the early Christian-Roman period was 26. Today’s average life expectancy in the United States is roughly 79. With death less immediate for many, and for quality of life issues in which death anxiety is reduced using psilocybin, there exist alternatives to prohibition and to drug wars.

It’s as if everything the drug war touches is corrupted or destroyed. The U.S. child foster care system is no exception.

From 2000 to 2011, researchers estimate one third of children in the U.S. were subject to a child neglect or abuse investigation — including more than 50 percent of Black children, according to a groundbreaking report…researcher Lisa Sangoi of the Movement for Family Power…exposes the foster system as rife with drug war attitudes and state violence. […]

The number of children taken from their parents and placed in foster care has risen in recent years, most often for “neglect” and “drug use,” although critics say child protective services (CPS) agencies often conflate drug use and neglect…In 2017, 83 percent investigations into alleged child maltreatment were closed after no evidence of mistreatment was found. […]

In 2014, the foster system allocated nearly three time as much money on removing and maintaining children outside of their original homes than on services aimed at keeping families together… a significant portion of the cases in family courts allege parental neglect based on drug use. Data varies across the country, but by some estimates, about 80 percent all foster system cases involve drug use at some point in the life of the case…. While these cases range from occasional cannabis use to debilitating substance use disorders, parents and their advocates agree that virtually every case is characterized by “gross misinformation” on the science of drug use…. The system also conflates treatment noncompliance with bad parenting, even as parents are attempting to juggle time-consuming [drug] treatment programs with making money and taking care of their kids.

“The judge stated I had been utilizing poor coping mechanisms because I discussed the potential of buying marijuana … and that justified removing my children from my care and removing me from home and making me homeless,” Brico said.

The racist myth that Black and Brown mothers were giving birth to drug-addicted “crack babies” has been thoroughly debunked, but at the time, the term was thrown around recklessly by pundits and lawmakers eager to blame poor people for the conditions of their poverty. Researchers now know that prenatal exposure to cocaine, has little to no effect on a child’s long-term physical and cognitive development. The same goes for cannabis, which some pregnant people use to treat morning sickness. Research shows that the stresses and harms of poverty, however, can have a tremendous impact on child development. […]

Myth-busting common drug stereotypes would likely have succeeded whereas drug-busting failed to preserve the lives of citizens like George Floyd who died because of a myth that says Black men on drugs are violent and require physical restraint. Many others are cut down in some way by botched or racist drug enforcement that seeks to cure poverty by eliminating the impoverished.