Drug WarRant

I’m at a conference in Minneapolis (it’s a really, really busy month).

We’re into the annual craziness of the DEA’s Red Ribbon Week.

No, this isn’t about AIDS (the original Red Ribbon), but rather the DEA’s own manufactured cause to promote themselves and prohibition, usually with bizarre over-the-top events in schools around the country.

Check out the articles through the Google News Link and share some of the silliest things you find.

No, not the one Monday night. But The Tuesday Presidential debate.

Third Party Presidential Debate

Live at 9 pm Eastern (8 pm Central) tonight, October 23. It will be aired on C-Span, al-Jazeera English and RT, or Russia Today, and be streamed live online by Ora TV, Link TV and on the website of debate sponsor Free and Equal Elections Foundation.

The participants will include Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Constitution Party candidate Virgil Goode, and Justice Party candidate Rocky Anderson. The hour and half event is being moderated by former CNN anchor Larry King and Christina Tobin, founder and chair of the Free and Equal Elections Foundation.

Go to the Free and Equal Elections Foundation site for more information, including how to submit your own questions.

And, you can be involved in determining who advances:

As a follow-up to Free & Equal’s October 23 debate at the Hilton Chicago, viewers of the first debate will choose which two candidates advance to the final debate on October 30 via instant runoff voting online. The debate will be broadcast live online and will focus on international issues.

How times have changed. As the new Marijuana Majority site shows, it’s getting easier to find people willing to speak out publicly in favor of ending prohibition in one way or another.

And, at the same time, the prohibitionists are more and more scurrying for cover like cockroaches when the lights come on.

You may remember this bizarre and over-the-top billboard that was put up in Oregon recently:

I’m not sure what this woman’s problem is, but it certainly isn’t marijuana.

Well, after only about two weeks, Clear Channel took down all the billboards due to complaints. Here’s what they found:

“The ads protesting marijuana are being removed because our policy is transparency of advertising campaigns and the advertisers who are sponsoring them. These ads include a misleading website that we believe needed to honestly represent the advertiser so the ads are being removed,” he said in a prepared statement. […]

The boards name protectoursociety.org as a contact, but the website contains no phone number, address or names of members.

The contact phone number listed with Clear Channel for the billboards belongs to St. Petersburg, Fla., group called Save Our Society from Drugs. A spokeswoman there on Friday said they are not affiliated with the advertising and have no information about Protect Our Society.

Interesting. If you look up the registration information for protectoursociety.org (which has the billboard plastered all over its pages), the owner is Calvina Fay and Save Our Society from Drugs.

Another interesting bit…

Umatilla County Sheriff John Trumbo is the spokesman for people opposed to Measure 80 in Oregon, but he told The Oregonian that he doesn’t know anyone with Protect Our Society.

And yet, according to Sam Chapman with the National Cannabis Coalition:

Umatilla County Sheriff John Trumbo lied to The Oregonian last week when he said that he didn’t know anyone affiliated with a group called “Protect Our Society”. Protect Our Society was a Political Action Committee (PAC) that was created for Measure 32, a 2010 initiative which sought to repeal the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act (OMMA).

According to Election records provided by the Oregon Secretary of State, Trumbo was a Chief Petitioner for Protect Our Society which was discontinued on April 10th, 2012.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Now, it could be that the Protectoursociety website is not affiliated with the failed Protect Our Society PAC, but that seems unlikely (especially since Shirley Morgan, the treasurer of the failed PAC, was head of Oregonians Against Legalization of Marijuana, which apparently is connected to Calvina’s group).

Of course, if you follow the trail, somewhere you’ll probably find that it’s our own tax money that’s being used to try to convince us to keep feeding the prohibition beast.

There’s a new site (put together by some very good people I know) called The Marijuana Majority

But too many people who support replacing marijuana prohibition with legalization or decriminalization are afraid to say so. Because they don’t realize that a majority of Americans — including some of the most influential voices from across the political spectrum — feel exactly the same way, these silenced supporters see speaking out as risky.

Marijuana Majority exists to help people understand that ending our ineffective and harmful marijuana prohibition laws not only makes perfect policy sense, but is a completely mainstream position that enjoys broad support.

On this site, we’ve collected in one place quotes and videos from politicians, religious leaders, celebrities, medical professionals, members of law enforcement and others who think it’s time to end the war on marijuana. And we’ve made it easy to search by issue and by type of person or organization so you can, for example, see members of Congress, actors, medical organizations and business leaders who support decriminalizing marijuana, allowing medical marijuana or legalizing and regulating marijuana sales.

They hope to use the site to encourage other influential leaders to speak out and to make it easy for people to share these quotes with their friends through social media.

It’s a good project and worth checking out.

Update: Turns out they included me, as well.

I’m in Chicago hosting a theatre weekend trip, so I have nothing to add right now.

However, if you’re looking for interesting stories in drug policy, be sure to read the comments, because this group is always on top of it!

I was asked about the appearance of Eugene Jarecki on The Daily Show on Tuesday, promoting his new movie: “The House I Live In.” I hadn’t had a chance to check it out yet, so I appreciate the heads up.

It turned into quite an interview with a lengthy extended section for the web only (both sections embedded below, hopefully. If you have trouble getting them to work, go right to the Daily Show site).

Stewart started off a little shaky, trying to inject some humor in ways that felt a bit forced (and you could tell he realized it), but then the interview started working, with Jon playing devil’s advocate and giving Jarecki good openings to not just talk about the movie, but about the entire drug war and criminal justice system. And I thought Jarecki did very well, keeping the discussion on track and not getting thrown by anything.

Check out the calls that are being placed in Colorado right now:

Hello fellow Democrat. Like you I was thrilled to vote for Barack Obama in 2008. In 2008, candidate Obama promised not to use the Justice Department to prosecute medical marijuana in states where it was legal. But the real Obama did just that, more than doubling prosecutions, putting people in prisons and shutting down medical marijuana facilities in Colorado. That’s not the change you wanted on health freedom. But you can still be a force for hope and change by voting for Gary Johnson.

The Johnson campaign is smart. While in most places, they’re more likely to take votes from Romney, in Colorado, they could actually end up taking the state away from Obama. On drug policy alone.

See the full article by David Sirota: The libertarian/marijuana conspiracy to swing the election.

… it is a continuum.

I was reading an article by Tom Chivers in the Telegraph: Drug laws and evidence-based policy: it’s time to start doing experiments on the British people. Interesting article with some good points, but this hit me:

I’m asking these questions to show that it’s a complicated business, the “War” on “Drugs”. Complicated and multilayered, so much so that it’s almost silly to think of it as a single “war” (if we must insist on the martial metaphor) on a single entity called “drugs”. Anyone with a simple, straightforward answer – “Legalise everything” or “String ’em all up”, usually – is almost certainly completely wrong.

He’s right, of course, on the fact that there are a lot of people out there giving attributes to the word “drugs” (harmful, addictive, etc.) as if all drugs were the same. And they’re not.

However, the “‘Legalise everything’ or ‘String ’em all up'” bit is a false equivalency.

Let’s take a look at it (I’m sure Tom would allow us to substitute “all drugs” for “everything” for the sake of this discussion).

“Legalize all drugs” is actually another way of saying “find another way of dealing with drugs other than prohibition.” It isn’t a single solution, nor is it a simple, straightforward answer. It isn’t a statement proclaiming “legalize all drugs and don’t regulate them in any way, unlike every other product on earth.”

No legalizer expects that we will legalize all drugs and have no controls whatsoever. We’ve made it very clear that the definition of legalization includes a whole host of possible regulations (and yes, different ones for different drugs). Read Transform’s Blueprint for Regulation for a prime example of some of the myriad of different options that exist within legalization.

Legalization isn’t an extreme point. It’s a call to no longer use one particular kind of regulation: criminal prohibition.

Criminal prohibition is only one of many ways to regulate drugs. And it’s the worst one.

Don’t miss:

It’s drugs politics, not drug policy, that needs an inquiry – a righteous rant by Simon Jenkins

Britain on drugs is where China is on hanging, Saudi Arabia on beating, Russia on censorship and the Taliban on girls’ education. Drugs policy is the last legislative wilderness where “here be dragons”, a hangover from days when abortion and homosexuality were illegal and divorce expensive. […]

The mere word drugs gives every politician the heebie-jeebies and turns libertarians into control freaks. […]

What should be researched is not drugs policy but drugs politics, the hold that taboo has on those in power, and the thrall that rightwing newspapers have over them. This has nothing to do with public opinion, which is now strongly in favour of reform. Most sensible people find the present regime disastrous and want drugs regulated, rather than the wild west that is the urban drug scene today. It is politicians who think “soft on drugs” implies some loss of potency.

Big press conference today from all the dinosaurs of prohibition, with such names as Bill Bennett, John Walters, Peter Bensinger, Robert DuPont, Calvina Faye, David Evans, and more, pushing to get the Attorney General to speak out against the marijuana legalization votes in November. Here’s the press conference announcement. In small print at the bottom of the page:

This campaign was supported by Grant No. 2005-JL-FX-0128 awarded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice….

Here’s another release from the event, featuring Calvina.

Here’s a slide, from the True Compassion site funded by our tax dollars, that apparently, in addition to being fact challenged, has less of a clue about the definition of irony than Alanis.

Decriminalise drug use, say experts after six-year study. Advisors say no serious rise in consumption is likely if possession of small amounts of controlled drugs is allowed.

Front page major article in the Guardian tomorrow. Also front page of the London Times. This is pretty huge.

The panel didn’t go all the way to legalization, but it included decriminalization of all illicit drugs and even “minimal or no sanctions on those growing cannabis for personal use.”

Brad Pitt blasts U.S. ‘War on Drugs,’ calls for policy rethink in Reuters.

(Reuters) – Brad Pitt has thrown his weight behind a documentary that blasts America’s 40-year war on drugs as a failure, calling policies that imprison huge numbers of drug-users a “charade” in urgent need of a rethink.

The Hollywood actor came aboard recently as an executive producer of filmmaker Eugene Jarecki’s “The House I Live In,” which won the Grand Jury Prize in January at the Sundance Film Festival. The film opened in wide release in the United States on Friday.

Ahead of a Los Angeles screening, Pitt and Jarecki spoke passionately about the “War on Drugs” which, according to the documentary, has cost more than $1 trillion and accounted for over 45 million arrests since 1971, and which preys largely on poor and minority communities.

“I know people are suffering because of it. I know I’ve lived a very privileged life in comparison and I can’t stand for it,” Pitt told Reuters on Friday, calling the government’s War on Drugs policy a “charade.”

Marijuana Legalization’s Tipping Point in The American Conservative.

“More people are recognizing that we cannot afford to continue arresting and prosecuting and locking up people for marijuana,” Angell says. “State legislators and city councilors across the country are now asking themselves, are we going to pay to arrest people for pot or fill some pot holes in the town?”

Just another isolated incident I can’t even keep track of how many “isolated” incidents Radley’s discussed this week. Go read his site and check them all out.

Will legal marijuana make police less effective? Check out this quote from where he basically admits that the police are completely incompetent at their job, so they need some fake reason to arrest people in order to accidentally get bad guys off the street. They’ve gotten so used to it, they don’t even realize how pathetic they sound.

As for who is being arrested now, Pat Slack, commander of the Snohomish Regional Drug Task Force, says it isn’t usually people who are just out to get high.

“Are there people in jail for possession of marijuana? Ya, there are, but most of ’em have violated a parole or probation,” he said.

In other words, he says, their marijuana use led them to do other things.

“So the judge has said you can’t use marijuana, because when you use marijuana you commit other crimes and then they get caught with it and they go to jail,” Slack said.

A handy tool

Slack, who is opposed to legalizing pot, says marijuana busts are an important part of law enforcement’s arsenal when it comes fighting crime.

For example, he says, as an officer, you might get a call to go to the local 7-11 because of a public disturbance. You get there and find the perpetrators have marijuana on them. You can book them and take them to jail.

Or, perhaps, you have a major crime case. The police can hold the suspect on a marijuana charge to buy time while they investigate.

“Whether it’s a robbery or murder or rape or burglary, or whatever. So, yeah, it’s a tool,” he said.