Drug WarRant

I swear I would like to stop talking about him, but Sabet seems to be everywhere — a full time shill for marijuana prohibition. Now he’s apparently drawing on the wealth of irresponsible material that the witless enablers Kleiman, Caulkins, Kilmer, and Hawken provided in their latest book to promote UNCERTAINTY as a reason for not changing bad public policy.

It’s tremendously uncertain,” said Kevin Sabet, a former official with the Office of National Drug Control Policy who opposes legalization. “It’s never been done before. So the question Coloradans have to ask themselves is: Do we want to be guinea pigs?”

No, that’s not the question at all. That is, however, the question that Sabet and others would like to have them thinking about rather than the actual facts of the matter.

That’s the real danger of a book like “Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know”. As I pointed out in the book salon…

Henry N. Pollack, author of “Uncertain Science… Uncertain World,” said: “Frequently, ‘scientific uncertainty’ is offered as an excuse to avoid making important policy decisions. We must recognize, however, that delaying decisions because of uncertainty is an implicit endorsement of the status quo and often a thinly veiled excuse for maintaining it. It is a bulwark of the take-no-action policy popularly known as ‘business as usual.'”

And in this case, it’s intended to induce a state of paralysis in public policy reform — fear of the unknown.

Just in case you got the deluded notion from our bashing of the Obama administration that Romney was a good choice as a neighbor or President…

Mitt Romney Once Harangued a Neighbor for Smoking Pot, Then Called the Cops by Mike Riggs

Mitt Romney is one uptight sonofabitch, according to his neighbors in La Jolla, Calif., where the GOP presidential nominee is known to be the kind of guy who will bust your chops if he catches you having a brew and a toke on the sand…

There are so many destructive elements of our drug war, and this is just another one. It’s one that we’ve talked about here numerous times, but The Nation has a new article discussing the impact this year.

Has Florida Created a Trap at the Polls for Ex-Felons?

Lewis runs into Blair Bass, a 44-year-old customer service attendant. He was released from prison in 2009 for a felony conviction from 2001. Upon release, he says he was notified by the state’s elections division that his voting rights had been restored. A few months ago, Bass received another letter from the county telling him that he’s no longer eligible to vote because of his felony conviction. This confused him, because the county had also just sent him his voter identification card. He displays it from his wallet; it shows he registered in April 2011.

Bass wants to know if he should vote in November, but Lewis can’t be sure if he qualifies. She’s worked for years trying to get more black people to the polls, so it pains her to say what comes next. She tells Bass, as she has many others like him, not to vote.

Lewis fears that the former felons are headed into a “trap” set for them, and for the whole voting rights movement—one in which confused felons could end up in legal trouble and accused of voter fraud. Her suspicions are not unfounded.

The unbalanced drug war has created the largest increase in black ex-felons, and states like Florida sure seem to have been trying hard to use voter laws and the drug war as a way of silencing the black vote.

Link

A Staten Island politician called Lady Gaga a “slut” Monday for openly smoking what appeared to be marijuana at a recent concert, and following a day of outrage, repeated the slur on Tuesday.

“There’s Gaga. Here’s this, this, I would call her a slut. This slut is influencing many, many children,” Borough President James Molinaro said on Monday, according to the Staten Island Advance. “My niece has two daughters, 12 and 14, they love this woman. Why? Why? So we have a job to do with these actresses, these actors, these ball players. They use drugs as it’s nothing. We shouldn’t praise them. We shouldn’t honor them. We should really hit them….

To me, she’s not an actress, she’s a slut, in the pure word, in the pure meaning of the word.”

At the time of comments, Molinaro was pointing to photos of the not-actress lighting what appears to be a marijuana cigarette at an Amsterdam concert last week. The photos were displayed alongside a poster that said: “Stop glorifying drug use in the media.”

Americans for Forfeiture Reform reports: OIG releases and audit of DEA adoptive seizure process and equitable sharing requests

• Of instances involving federal adoption of assets seized, 65% of reported samples required DEA headquarter approval to adopt the seizure because the instance lacked all of the following criteria:
  1. the seizure was based on a federal or state judicial seizure warrant;
  2. an arrest was made for a felony violation of the Controlled Substances Act or an equivalent state felony charge that would be a felony if pursued under federal law; and/or
  3. drugs or other contraband associated with a federal felony drug offense were also confiscated at the time of seizure.
• The OIG report notes “for the period of October 1, 2000, through September 30, 2011, the DEA and other federal agencies processed over 150,644 seized assets valued at about $9.2 billion of which $5.5 billion (60 percent) originated from seizures processed by the DEA and $3.7 billion (40 percent) originated from seizures processed by other federal agencies.” [Another $522 million in DEA seizured assets was noted but omitted from analysis for a lack of equitable sharing requests.]

That’s right. In 65% of DEA asset seizure cases, there was no warrant, there was no felony arrest, and there were no drugs seized. Just stuff the DEA wanted to take.

Latin American Leaders: UN should promote debate on alternatives to fighting drug trafficking

Calderon, Santos, and Molina all hit on this theme, without explicitly mentioning legalization (“market alternatives” was used again), but making it clear that the current policy wasn’t acceptable.

If you’re interested in watching Calderon’s fairly strong speech, see it here (skip to around the 32 minute mark. [Thanks, Sanho]

We have a ton of problems here in the United States with out-of-control prosecutors who seem to be completely unaccountable (and immune to lawsuits when they abuse their position).

We’re not the only ones with that problem. Check out this story from Russia.

Zelenina heads a laboratory at the Penza Agricultural Institute, some 600 kilometres southeast of Moscow, one of the best-equipped chemical-analysis labs in Russia. She is a specialist in the biology of hemp and poppy, and is a sought-after expert in legal cases involving narcotics produced from these plants.

In September 2011, the defence attorneys of Sergey Shilov, a Russian businessman under investigation by the Russian Federal Drug Control Service (FDCS), asked her to provide an expert opinion on the amount of opiates that could possibly be extracted from 42 metric tonnes of food poppy seeds that Shilov had imported from Spain in 2010. . .

. . .On the basis of gas-chromatography and mass-spectrometry measurements of samples analysed in her lab, Zelenina calculated the overall morphine and codeine content in the poppy-seed consignment in question to be 0.00069% and 0.00049%, respectively. In such low concentrations, opiates can only be identified or extracted in well-equipped analytical chemistry labs, she wrote.

“This opinion apparently failed to satisfy the prosecutors,” says Irina Levontina, a linguist at the Russian Language Institute in Moscow, who is frequently heard as an expert in libel and drug lawsuits. “It has become quite common for Russian prosecutors to accuse independent experts if they don’t like their opinions. It can be downright dangerous for experts to appear in court.”

Talk about a chilling effect on both science and criminal defense.

She’s been released pending trial, but faces serious charges. More here

Just as a reminder, Russia has an extremely backward zero-tolerance drug policy that outlaws heroin replacement programs and needle exchange — a policy that has resulted in a 10-fold increase in HIV cases in the past decade.

Oh, and the head of the UNODC is Russian representative Yuri Fedotov.

Seems promising…

Dear Hillary,

I am writing to apply for the post of drug war publicist for your Mexico Drug War. I have over ten years of experience publicizing various aspects of the drug war and believe that I could step in immediately and help reinvigorate your drug war visibility.

I’m thrilled to see you’re looking to move in this direction. Clearly, past efforts by the State Department to publicize the drug war have been less than fully effective, as drug war awareness barely reaches the level of political discussion. It certainly hasn’t helped that the ONDCP director has undermined these efforts by bizarrely claiming that the war doesn’t even exist!

I have some great ideas and feel like I’m ready to start on the ground running. I figure one of the first things we can do is more widely distribute some of the most gruesome images of Mexican victims, in media throughout the United States. Then, in the Mexican press, we distribute images of U.S. soldiers (or DEA agents) shooting at Mexican nationals on Mexican soil. This should give us a good start.

I have many more excellent ideas like this and would love to bring them to the State Department’s War on Drugs. I am confident that I can increase the public’s awareness of this war in no time.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

Pete Guither
Experienced Drug War Publicist

Seven Sensational Drug Documentaries

Romney Fat Cat’s Reefer Madness – Maia Szalavitz shines a light on the Semblers.

Seattle Times Editorial: Approve Initiative 502 – It’s time to legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana.

Tweets.

Kevin Sabet: In the South Bronx, 76 of cigarette packs collected avoided the combined NYC and State tax. Legalization doesn’t work. http://t.co/rxH0LP7M

Pete Guither: @KevinSabet EVEN in the poor S. Bronx, portion of packs collected tax and rest were less-violent gray, not black market. Legalization works.

Why legalizing marijuana is a bad idea – the Baker Institute Blog continues its legalization series with a very weak argument by Joan Neuhaus Schaan.

A war that should end A Mennonite calls for Christians to support ending the war on drugs.

A rather curious article by Baker Institute fellow Gary Hale, former chief of intelligence in the Houston Field Division of the DEA: Legalization of marijuana: When, not if

He calls himself a pragmatist who is neither for nor against legalization, but considers it inevitable and argues that we should plan for it, by considering a myriad of legal issues.

It’s interesting speculation, but seems to me, at points, to be a bit of putting the cart before the horse.

Sure, all these things could come up, but not right away, and we don’t even know how legalization is going to occur. There could be (and should be) opportunities for different states to try different regulatory approaches — that’ll cause some chaos, sure, but it’ll help us discover the ones that work the best.

Couple of other points I found telling:

More questions: Will governments be faced with having to pay “reparations” to the families of police officers and federal agents who died while working to destroy marijuana plantations in the United States and abroad? […] What do we say to these men who answered the call of the U.S. government to suppress the supply-side of the marijuana?

Not surprising, but telling, that it didn’t even occur to him to include “reparations” to the civilians who died in the war on marijuana.

I also find it a bit odd that he focuses so much on marijuana as hallucinogen, when in reality its classifcation as such is more a technicality than an actual factor.

…

Other articles in the series, which continues this week, include:

Marijuana: A case for legalization by William Martin

The greatest harms associated with cannabis are not the effects of the drug but of our drug policies…

In a contest with alcohol and tobacco, marijuana wins by Silvia Longmire

There are too many additional arguments on both sides of the issue to list them all here, and it would behoove the reader to do additional research if intent on forming a solid opinion one way or another. But based on the potential (or lack thereof) of harm to the human body, for people to become dependent, and for people to become violent against each other, marijuana wins in a competition against already-legal alcohol and tobacco.

…

It’s worth pointing out that, as usual, this series asks the wrong question, as I’ve made clear in the past: Legalization Isn’t the Question