Drug WarRant

A couple of articles worth reading on the subject of Law Enforcement. One of the real important reasons for ending the drug war, in my opinion, has been to reclaim the positive relationship between police and their communities. The drug war in particular, along with militarization, has turned the police against those they are supposed to serve, and vice versa.

Why We Need To Stop Exaggerating The Threat To Cops by Radley Balko

When cops are told that every day on the job could be their last, that every morning they say goodbye to their families could be the last time they see their kids, that everyone they encounter is someone who could possibly kill them, it isn’t difficult to see how they might start to see the people they serve as an enemy. Again, in truth, the average cop has no more reason to see the people he interacts with day to day as a threat to his safety than does the average resident of St. Louis or Los Angeles or Nashville, where I live. […]

Of course, there are other factors that have contributed to the psychological isolation of police. One example is the move from foot patrols to squad cars or, more broadly, from proactive to reactive policing. When cops walk beats, they become a part of the communities they patrol. Residents see them out and about. They learn names, faces and places. When police patrol in cruisers, they’re walled off from neighborhoods. […]

So we have cops whose interactions with the public are negative the vast majority of the time, who are constantly told they’re fighting a war, and who are constantly reminded that their job is highly dangerous and getting more dangerous, and that they could be killed by anyone at any time. When they start to see the people they serve as the enemy, they begin to treat them that way. The people in the communities treated that way then respond in kind. Thus, we get the hostile, often volatile cop-community relationships we see in too much of the country today, in which citizens don’t trust cops enough to help them solve crimes, and cops feel so threatened and isolated that even well-meaning officers won’t report fellow officers who break the law.

Saving Law Enforcement Organizations From Themselves by Diane Wattles-Goldstein (LEAP Member). Diane writes about a loathsome statement made by a police union member in support of officers who conducted body searches merely based on the supposed smell of marijuana.

So the Drug War marches on with more victims, collateral damage to a futile attempt to control human nature. All the while, supposed criminal justice professionals like Roberts continue to influence a profession that I loved, changing our course from protecting those we have sworn to serve to victimizing them at unknown cost to our humanity. Professor Roberts, I would simply ask you that if this were your wife, your daughter or someone you loved, would you be so callous? I think not. So I offer a bit of advice that I used to tell my officers: Before you say or do something, ask yourself if your mother would be proud of your words or actions, and would you be happy to see it on the front page of the news? Clearly, with this remark, you failed both standards, and would have done well to remember that even if you are not a real police officer, as the head of their union you don’t just represent yourself, but also a profession that you have brought to a new low.

When Kevin Sabet tweeted a virtual thumbs up to an article, I thought I should go check it out: Not so fast! A case against legalizing marijuana by Daniel K. Duncan, director of community services for the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse–St. Louis Area.

Daniel endorses the S.A.M. position while demonstrating how absurd it is.

The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse-St. Louis Area does not endorse legalization. However we see the benefits in an intelligent decriminalization of using small quantities of the drug. […]

Marijuana may be less harmful than other drugs, but it is far from harmless.

The research clearly indicates that marijuana is not only addictive (approximately 1 out of 6 youths who smoke marijuana will develop a dependence) but that the dangers of marijuana are, in fact, far more pronounced in young people than in adults. Marijuana is unquestionably a gateway to other, more dangerous drug use and, unsurprisingly, recent studies show regular users of marijuana may suffer a significant and permanent drop in IQ. The other health risks attached to smoked marijuana (e.g. stroke, cancer, psychosis) are suggested by early research but still unknown. […]

While it may make sense to intelligently decriminalize the use of marijuana, a legitimate case for full legalization has yet to be made. Introducing another likely “legal” threat to public health — especially the health of our youth — is misguided, premature and ill-advised.

So, to recap, because marijuana has potential risks (that we’ve been unable to clearly demonstrate after decades of study), we should institute a policy where we don’t punish people for using it, but we are careful to leave the distribution of it in the hands of criminal networks with no regulatory oversight.

These ridiculous arguments always seem to come from “treatment experts.” How can you make the argument against regulation if your concern is for the well-being of your charges? How can we not believe that you’re in it to protect profits? Now Sabet claims that it’s not about profit – that treatment folks would make more money from cannabis being legal. That’s nonsense, but let’s assume they believe it. What does that make them then? Just stupid?

Or is it something about being around people all the time who can’t control their drug use? I remember growing up that my Dad (a minister) had almost no contact with anyone who drank alcohol, except when they came to him for counseling becuase they had lost their job, beaten their wife… His view was that all alcohol use must be pretty horrible, because that was all he saw. And he came close to, but avoided, the trap of feeling morally superior to them.

Do these treatment experts suffer from a sense of moral superiority? (Many of them are recovered addicts themselves, and you probably know reformed cigarette smokers, for example, that can be pretty judgemental about current smokers.) Maybe this is a case of knowing prison won’t do any good for their charges, but just not being able to stand the notion of anybody being able to enjoy the drug without some kind of potential justice hanging over their head.

I don’t know.

Maybe it is just profits.

Idaho Court of Appeals overturns marijuana DUI conviction

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The Idaho Court of Appeals has overturned the conviction of a Boise man for driving under the influence of marijuana, a rare reversal for a kind of case legal experts say is typically settled by the science of blood testing.

In a decision issued late last week, the court reversed Geirrod Stark’s 2010 misdemeanor conviction on grounds that the blood tests taken after his arrest only proved he had used marijuana recently, not on the specific day he was pulled over by police.

While there is no question Stark was impaired that day, wrote Judge Pro Tem Jesse Walters, there was no proof that drugs — and not some other condition — caused the erratic driving.

What a notion. If you’re going to charge someone with driving under the influence of marijuana, they should actually be under the influence of marijuana. Such common sense logic is seldom found even in the general neighborhood of our justice system.

A lot of people have been talking about the new Pew Research Poll showing that a majority now supports legalizing marijuana (for the first time in this major poll).

I’m not at all surprised, and, to some extent, I was even more interested by some of the other questions in the survey.

As support for marijuana legalization has grown, there has been a decline in the percentage viewing it as a “gateway drug.” Currently, just 38% agree that “for most people the use of marijuana leads to the use of hard drugs.” In 1977, 60% said its use led to the use of hard drugs.

This has been one of the major arguments used (misused) by prohibitionists for decades. They used a vague definition of “gateway,” consistently conflated correlation with causation, and just plain lied. We knew, of course, but we had an uphill battle getting that understanding to the people. It seems that we’ve made real progress.

Also

More recently, there has been a major shift in attitudes on whether it is immoral to smoke marijuana. Currently, 32% say that smoking marijuana is morally wrong, an 18-point decline since 2006 (50%). Over this period, the percentage saying that smoking marijuana is not a moral issue has risen 15 points (from 35% then to 50% today).

This was a major issue keeping small-government social conservatives supporting criminalization. Take away the moral opposition, and conservatives have very little reason not to support legalization.

I was thinking about how the general public no longer blindly supports the tired old false arguments when I read the Drug Czar’s latest blog post: Director Kerlikowske Joins Secretary Napolitano on Southwest Border

As part of the visit, Director Kerlikowske released a progress update on Administration efforts to strengthen border security. Some of the highlights include:

Increased weapons and drugs seizures. During 2009-2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seized 39 percent more drugs, 71 percent more currency, and 189 percent more weapons along the Southwest border as compared to fiscal years (FY) 2005-2008.

And I was struck at just how… old that kind of argument feels today. So I tweeted to the Czar:

.@ONDCP @RafaelONDCP After decades of bragging on increased seizures, does anyone still buy that as “progress”? http://t.co/ZBV51fmMRN

and

.@ONDCP @RafaelONDCP If you trapped 10 mice in your home last year and 50 this year, would you call that progress? Increase in seizures?

I think the public is quite ready to be receptive to realizing just how stupid the argument is that increased seizures are a measure of drug war success, when they are in fact, the reverse.

It takes a lot of work to undo decades of propaganda, particularly among the public who aren’t at all focused on drug policy, but we’re making real progress.

A very good article by Isabel Macdonald in The Nation: The GOP’s Drug-Testing Dragnet.

The article goes into depth how drug testing industry came about in part as a back-door method to go after marijuana users…

But the Reagan administration saw drug tests as essential for cracking down on a population largely outside the reach of law enforcement: people smoking pot in the privacy of their own homes. “Because anyone using drugs stands a very good chance of being discovered, with disqualification from employment as a possible consequence, many will decide that the price of using drugs is just too high,” read a 1989 White House report.

And, once created, the industry developed a life of its own, spending lots of money to buy votes to keep drug testing profits flourishing.

In the meantime, several Republican lawmakers in Congress have pushed hard for the mandatory drug testing of anyone, anywhere, applying for welfare. Leading the charge in the Senate is Orrin Hatch, longtime conservative stalwart from Utah, who received a $8,000 campaign contribution in 2012 from the political action committee of Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp), a behemoth in the drug-testing industry and a Hoffmann-La Roche spinoff. Hatch has also received $3,000 from another political action committee to which LabCorp contributes—the American Clinical Laboratory Association PAC—as well as $4,000 in campaign contributions from the PAC of another company with major interests in drug testing, Abbott Laboratories. GOP Congressman Charles Boustany is among those pushing welfare drug testing in the House. In the 2012 campaign cycle, he received $15,000 from Abbott Laboratories’ PAC.

So many war profiteers. One of the big challenges we face in reform is taking on those who profit from the destruction of the drug war.

Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic: A Heartbreaking Drug Sentence of Staggering Idiocy

John Horner, a 46-year-old fast-food restaurant worker, lost his eye in a 2000 accident and was prescribed painkillers. Years later, he met and befriended a guy who seemed to be in pain himself. His new friend asked if he could buy some of Horner’s pain pills. Naturally, the friend was a police informant.

Yep. You know what happens next.

25 years.

…

Conor follows that article up the next day with this one: The War on Drugs Is Far More Immoral Than Most Drug Use — in which he counters Peter Wehner’s hypocritical OpEd in the Washington Post.

What he doesn’t seem to understand is that many advocates of individual liberty, myself included, regard liberty itself as a moral imperative. I don’t want to ridicule the “language of morality.” I want to state, as forcefully as possible, that the War on Drugs is deeply, irredeemably immoral; that it corrodes the minds and souls of those who prosecute it, and creates incentives for bad behavior that those living under its contours have always and will always find too powerful to resist. Drug warriors may disagree, but they should not pretend that they are the only ones making moral claims, and that their opponents are indifferent to morality. Reformers are often morally outraged by prohibitionist policies and worry that nannying degrades the character of citizens. […]

See the man in the photo at the top of this article? It isn’t immoral for him to light a plant on fire, inhale the smoke, and enjoy a mild high for a short time, presuming he doesn’t drive while high. But it would be immoral to react to his plant-smoking by sending men with guns to forcibly arrest him, convict him in a court, and lock him up for months or even years for a victimless crime. That’s the choice, dear reader. So take a look at the guy in the photo and make your choice: Is it more moral to let him smoke, or to forcibly cage him with thieves, rapists, and murderers?

In the previous post, I asked the commenters to discuss Mark Kleiman’s statement:

Just 20 percent of users consume 80 percent of all the weed in the U.S., Kleiman said. (Forty-six percent of all alcohol consumed in the U.S. is part of drinking binges, he added).

“The only way to get a lot of revenue is to sell a lot of marijuana,” he said. “The only way to sell a lot or marijuana is to sell to people who smoke a lot of marijuana. And that’s not a good thing.” Policymakers may not want the state “fostering disease,” he said.

You all did a great job. I just wanted to add my two cents in here (some of which has already been mentioned in comments).

First, let’s define binge drinking:

Binge drinking is defined as episodic excessive drinking.[7] There is currently no world wide consensus on how many drinks constitute a “binge”, but in the US, the term is often taken to mean consuming five or more standard drinks (male), or four or more drinks (female), on one occasion. [wikipedia]

Now, lets’ assume that the two numbers given are correct (45% of alcohol consumed in binge drinking, and 80% of marijuana consumed by 20% of users).

That certainly does not mean that everyone who is has had 5/4 drinks in one occasion is diseased, nor does it mean that 20% of all marijuana users are diseased. It simply points out some distribution-of-use facts as conditions currently exist for those two products.

We know that less than 10% of marijuana users have any dependency, so it’s hardly likely that 20% are problem users. Ironically, it’s likely that almost every single person who uses marijuana for medical purposes (ie, to combat disease) would fall in that 20% of users.

And, of course, these numbers have other limitations. With the alcohol figures, you’d probably have a whole different set of numbers if you break down beer versus wine versus hard alcohol, etc. And, with marijuana, you’ll have a completely different mix of users with legalization.

Mark Kleiman likes to believe that the percentage of users of a drug that are problem users is an absolute fixed percentage (i.e., if 10% are problem users and then you legalize, 10% of all new users will be problem users as well). Of course, that doesn’t fit either reality or logic. There is absolutely no data to support such a viewpoint, and the truth is, with marijuana being readily available, criminalization has vastly more of a deterrence factor on casual users than problematic users; hence legalization mostly results in an increase in casual non-problematic use.

So, can you make money on marijuana as a state without fostering disease? Of course. First of all, you cam make money on marijuana even if there is no increase in use at all. And then, yes, it is quite possible to increase sales dramatically without increasing abuse. (Kleiman’s price point isn’t the only tool available, and it’s a pretty poor one, as it leads to substitution, which we don’t want, and also has more of a deterrent on the casual user than the problematic user within any equivalent economic class.)

I think it’s fine for Mark Kleiman to tell the state that the tax revenue numbers that they were expecting are unrealistic. He has said numerous times that his role is simply to advise them on implementation; the voters have already decided on legalization. However, when he makes wild, unsupported statements like this, it sure does seem like he’s still interested in subverting the will of the voters.

I’ve got some things to discuss, but some big deadlines at work are keeping me busy.

Here’s one of the things I wanted to talk about, so why don’t you take a stab at it? Are the economics sound? Are there fallacies here?

Just 20 percent of users consume 80 percent of all the weed in the U.S., Kleiman said. (Forty-six percent of all alcohol consumed in the U.S. is part of drinking binges, he added).

“The only way to get a lot of revenue is to sell a lot of marijuana,” he said. “The only way to sell a lot or marijuana is to sell to people who smoke a lot of marijuana. And that’s not a good thing.” Policymakers may not want the state “fostering disease,” he said.

Link

Some universities focus on liberal arts, others on research; based on their Dean of Students, apparently the University of Maine focuses on hypocrisy.

University of Maine Dean of Students Robert Q. Dana has an OpEd in the Bangor Daily News: Marijuana legalization: An easy way out

We need to honestly acknowledge that for every person dangerously involved with drugs, that abuse always began by experimenting with a substance thought to be less risky. It is often the case that marijuana is the gateway drug, and confronting the fact that we have a drug problem and we need to do something immediately — beyond the simple reflex of “legalizing” — is necessary if our sons and daughters are to be effectively protected.

There’s a lot of other prohibition messages, with no real facts, but a lot of telling people what we should do about cracking down harder on things like marijuana.

But the interesting thing is if you go back a little earlier in this school year, when the University of Maine decided to sell beer at home football games.

Did Dean of Students Robert Q. Dana get upset and protest the decision to make that “substance thought to be less risky” more available on a student campus? Um, no.

“We heard from any number of fans who wanted to have access to adult beverages,” said Dr. Robert Dana, UMaine’s Vice President for Student Affairs. “Used appropriately, in a reasonable environment, that’s exactly what we intend to offer.” […]

“We’re very good at managing these things and it’ll be fun, but not problematic. I’m 100 percent sure of that,” Dana said.

So, if properly managed and used appropriately in a reasonable environment, it’s fine, but only if it’s a product mentioned in the university’s fight song (which begins “Fill the steins to dear old Maine”).

Also note that if you go to the University of Maine, you can take Brewing with Food Science class, where you learn to brew beer, plus… “Other topics will include the history of beer (from world and U.S. perspectives), styles of beer and a beer judge’s perspective of beer.”

… found on Facebook.