Drug WarRant

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.

The ONDCP is wants you to Celebrate National Substance Abuse Month. Celebrate?

But “celebrate” isn’t the word that they keep abusing. It is, in fact, “abuse.” Check out their definition.

Millions of Americans suffer from substance abuse, which includes underage drinking, alcohol dependency, non-medical use of prescription drugs, abuse of over-the-counter medications, and illicit drug use. … This abuse touches all aspects of our communities and contributes to an estimated $193 billion in crime, health, and lost productivity costs.

I don’t think it means what they think it means.

It’s kind of like saying that all sex outside of marriage is sexual abuse since it hasn’t been authorized by some bureaucrat.

40 Years of Drug War Failure Represented in a Single Chart

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWr0neESf-M&sns=em

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf9XPlRRvxE&sns=em

The prohibitionists know that the con game they have to sell is a pig in a poke that that the public has seen through, which is why they keep trying to put lipstick on it.

You have Kerlikowske, for example, constantly touting the notion that there is no drug war, and that the ONDCP is moving away from the extremes to a “third way” – a balanced approach including law enforcement. Of course, what all that gobbledegook means is that we have a drug war with some extra money for forced rehab.

It’s also a problem for the nation’s only full-time prohibition-spinner Kevin Sabet, as demonstrated in this debate with Ethan Nadelmann at Reason Marijuana and States’ Rights: A Reason Debate. Drug Policy Alliance’s Ethan Nadelmann and Drug Policy Institute’s Kevin Sabet debate state cannabis initiatives.

Kevin had to know that the Reason crowd wouldn’t be too thrilled with prohibition, so he downplayed the effects of it. Ethan countered:

It’s not true – although I wish it were – that “most places punish the use of small amounts of marijuana similarly to a speeding ticket.” Few people are handcuffed or taken to a police station or incarcerated in a jail for speeding tickets, but all those indignities routinely are applied to people arrested for possession of small amounts of marijuana. Government employees won’t lose their jobs for a speeding ticket but they may very well for a marijuana possession arrest. Punishment can be even more severe if the person arrested is among the roughly five million Americans on parole or probation, often for very minor offenses. Millions of Americans have suffered much worse than the equivalent of a speeding ticket in recent years for nothing more than being caught with a little marijuana.

Now Kevin has often tried to suggest that we shouldn’t treat mere possessors of marijuana so harshly and here he doubles down with this rather bizarre response.

Ethan’s points would make good sense only if our choices were so stark. Besides full blown prohibition-enforcement for marijuana on the one hand, and legalization on the other, there are plenty of things we can do to get rid of the worst parts of our current laws (the things Ethan mentions —job loss, being cuffed, etc.). But that is not a good reason for legalization. That’s a compelling reason for some kind of specific reform. Given the risk we would take by legalizing marijuana — including the risks of increased use, accidents, and health and social costs [pdf] — it seems reckless and uncaring to go to such extremes in order to fix parts of the law that we can all agree are especially egregious. Ethan, would you abandon your legalization efforts if we got rid of the indignities you mention and yet kept marijuana illegal?

What would be the point? If you get rid of all the things that make enforcement of possession laws egregious, then you’re essentially creating a semi-legal product that can only be distributed by criminals. Why not regulate and control the distribution?

This is one of the big lies of the prohibition-spinners. They don’t want to reform prohibition. They like it just fine. They’ll tell you that they don’t want to lock up the small-time user, but they don’t discuss how that small-time user gets supplied.

There is no such thing as a kind and gentle prohibition. It’s harsh and ugly and wreaks a tremendous amount of havoc. And we can’t solve those problems unless we deal with drug use and abuse within a non-prohibition model.

…..

The comments at the debate are quite entertaining. This one from Zeb was my favorite (I’ve long hated the “lost productivity” argument).

“alcohol costs society over $200 billion in lost productivity”

Fuck Off, asshole. My potential productivity does not belong to society.

Christie conditionally vetoes Good Samaritan Emergency Act

“This bill as drafted … fails to carefully consider all the interests that must be balanced when crafting immunities to the protections provided in our criminal laws,” Christie, a former U.S. attorney for New Jersey, wrote in a veto statement. “Thus, although the bill addresses perceived impediments to reporting drug overdoses, the proposal fails to consider the existing approaches to deterrence, public safety, prevention of violence, and the many social problems that accompany the rampant proliferation of drug distribution and use.”

This Good Samaritan bill was a bi-partisan effort. You can bet that the veto came from lobbying by law enforcement and prosecutors.