Drug WarRant

Robert Sharpe has a good letter in the Dallas News in response to Kevin Sabet.

Don’t be fooled by Sabet’s vision of a kinder, gentler drug war.

The vast majority of illicit drug users are marijuana smokers, many of whom have turned their lives around by putting down the bottle and picking up the marijuana pipe.

These former alcoholics no longer wake up with debilitating hangovers. They are no longer at risk of drinking themselves to death. Because they have chosen a safer alternative to alcohol, they now lead productive lives.

Yes, some have substance abuse problems stemming from traumatic life experiences. The last thing they need is Big Brother testing their bodily fluids and threatening jail time. Forcing pot smokers to relapse into alcoholism is not a good use of tax dollars.

The drug war is a cultural inquisition, not a public health campaign.

Interesting point.

Thank you Jimmy Kimmel! Jimmy Kimmel Addresses Marijuana Legalization At White House Correspondents’ Dinner 2012

“I would like everyone in this room to raise your hand if you’ve never smoked pot,” Kimmel said.

Few hands went up.

Noting the crowd’s reaction, Kimmel addressed President Barack Obama directly.

“Marijuana is something that real people care about,” Kimmel said.

New York Times editorial: The Human Cost of Zero Tolerance

New York City’s overly zealous marijuana arrests, coupled with the unreliability and porousness of record-keeping, damage the lives of tens of thousands of people a year. The Legislature needs to fix this. It must drop the public-display distinction for marijuana, which invites far too many abuses. It should also press law enforcement officials and the court system to make sure that criminal records are more accurate to start with and that people who are victimized by errors have a plausible way of getting them corrected.

Employers and government agencies also have a responsibility here. They must not rush to their own judgment about minor offenders.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg needs to recognize that zero-tolerance policing is not the panacea his Police Department seems to think it is. The police need to spend more time tracking down serious crime and less on minor offenses. There is nothing minor about a record that can follow people for the rest of their lives.

Who Still Supports the Drug War? by Republican Precinct Committeeman Chris Ladd.

You won’t find a single major political figure willing to discuss a serious, well-considered plan to advance beyond absolute federal prohibition. At the same time, you have to look long and hard to find anyone who genuinely thinks prohibition is a good idea.

In the absence of a real plan to evaluate the public is left in the lurch. Prohibition is feeding monsters. […]

The cost of our inertia is growing. Our fears of broader marijuana use under looser regulation should be tempered by the escalating damage from our current policy. It’s time to find a sensible alternative to prohibition.

An ominous-sounding tweet from CBS and NIDA:

#60Minutes TONIGHT: Dr. Nora Volkow says the effect of drugs on the brain impacts our ability to have free will. http://cbsn.ws/IhLmyd
Retweeted by NIDAnews

That’s the kind of talk that leads to the government saying “Since, by our definition, you no longer have free will, we are free to impose ours on you.”

No thanks.

I’ll take my chances on maintaining my free will against the lure of drugs and McDonald’s arches versus losing my free will to the likes of Nora Volkow.

Houston

The METRO counter-terrorism exercise didn’t round up any terrorists. Instead, 81 officers arrested 14 people, predominantly alleged prostitutes and dope smokers. More problematic for METRO is that it seemed to anger and confuse some of the agency’s riders who weren’t eager to have their bags searched.

The good news? People are starting to really get pissed off.

Californians — it’s time to retire Feinstein. Seriously, vote for anybody but Feinstein. She’s got too much party clout and she’s a dinosaur. She’s probably also extraordinarily corrupt.

Her column today on The Hill is one of the worst things I’ve read in recent days. She actually channels the ghost of Nancy Reagan’s failed drug war slogan.

First, we should once again make anti-drug campaigns a priority. In the early 1980s, former first lady Nancy Reagan coined the now-famous slogan “Just say no” as part of her national anti-drug campaign.

Although her strategy was criticized, she was able to use the White House as a national platform to address these issues.

Next, Congress should refund the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s youth media campaign — the only national media campaign dedicated to reducing youth drug use. Funding for this program was eliminated last year in spite of the fact that 85 percent of teens are aware of the advertising campaign.

This campaign should be provided with the funding it deserves and expanded to make the connection between U.S. drug use and violence in Mexico.

Beau Kilmer, co-director of RAND’s drug policy research center writes in the Wall Street Journal: The Marijuana Exception

He starts out with some good basic truths (marijuana legalization would save arrests, dollars, etc.) and then gets into the “murky” parts.

Here’s one:

Another big unknown is how marijuana legalization would influence alcohol consumption. It is natural to assume that pot would serve as a substitute (higher use would decrease heavy drinking), but it is equally likely that it would be a complement (higher use would increase heavy drinking). The scientific literature on this is inconclusive.

Equally likely? In what possible world is that equally likely? Is it “equally” likely merely because the literature is inconclusive?

Perhaps Kilmer should turn to the study that RAND helped support: Alcohol, Marijuana, and American Youth: The Unintended Effects of Government Regulation, which found a clear substitution effect. There are other studies online as well.

It’s this magical “equally likely” seemingly snatched out of the air that leads him to baselessly speculate:

By the same token, even a small increase in heavy drinking could outweigh any benefits of legalization.

Then he concludes:

One thing is certain. Nothing we do about marijuana would dramatically reduce the harms associated with the larger “war on drugs.” The market for hard drugs is much larger in dollars, in violence and in the number of offenders behind bars. If these are the critical problems, then marijuana legalization is a sideshow, not the main event.

Really? The elimination of 800,000 arrests isn’t a dramatic harm reduction? What about the corruption in law enforcement from marijuana money and seizures? What about the stop and frisk racial harassment in poor neighborhoods that entirely related to marijuana possession?

Sure, we need to get rid of the entire drug war (so marijuana legalization won’t eliminate drug war harms), but marijuana legalization seems to me to have some pretty dramatic social savings and reductions in drug war harm.

Glenn Greenwald

The same person who directed the DOJ to shield torturers and illegal government eavesdroppers from criminal investigation, and who voted to retroactively immunize the nation’s largest telecom giants when they got caught enabling criminal spying on Americans, and whose DOJ has failed to indict a single Wall Street executive in connection with the 2008 financial crisis or mortgage fraud scandal, suddenly discovers the imperatives of The Rule of Law when it comes to those, in accordance with state law, providing medical marijuana to sick people with a prescription.

Judge: Scott’s Drug Testing Of State Workers Unconsitutional

Miami federal judge Ursula Ungaro has ruled that Governor Rick Scott’s order requiring drug testing for state workers is unconstitutional.

Judge Ungaro said the blanket testing of 85,000 workers violated the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable search and seizures contained in the Fourth Amendment. The ruling could eventually impact another Scott law to permit random worker drug testing.

This was a no-brainer (although that didn’t necessarily mean that I wasn’t worried about the possibility of a bad decision).

Unfortunately, since the Constitution only limits the powers of government, private employers are not bound by this, so they can still require drug testing. But at least this keeps the universality of workplace drug-testing partially at bay.

Governor Scott plans to appeal the decision:

“As I have repeatedly explained, I believe that drug testing employees is a common sense means of ensuring a docile and subservient citizenry, where troublemakers who question government or notice its corruption can be easily disemployed.”

[No, that’s not what Scott said, but it makes as much sense.]

420 rally to celebrate drug-free youth

The Eagle County Sheriff’s Office in collaboration with the Eagle Valley High School’s DADD (Devils Against Drinking and Drugs) Club is hosting its inaugural 420 Drug Free Rally on Friday at the Field House in Edwards.

This event will be celebrated on a local level with a free community barbecue and open pick-up games such as soccer, basketball, volleyball and rock climbing, along with a giant bonfire with s’mores and an outdoor movie. This event will begin at 4:20 p.m. with a National Guard helicopter landing.

Gee, I wonder how that went (and I really want to know what movie they showed).

If this continues as an annual tradition, I foresee many awkward moments in the future: “Hey, you want to join me at a 420 rally?” “Sure!” …

On the other hand, I think that other 420 rallies could learn from this one in that a giant bonfire with s’mores and an outdoor movie sound like a really good idea (skip the helicopter, though).

I found this particularly odd:

Most Coloradans believe 420 sends out the wrong message to our youth by glorifying drug abuse. Others view this as insensitive and a dishonor of the Columbine High School tragedy, which also occurred on April 20.

Why, of course. How dare people do anything else on the day that a tragedy once occurred. People who have birthdays on April 20 must cease enjoying them, and must certainly not have parties. Stop being so insensitive.

While I was busy with other things last week, I missed the chance to talk about the excellent Leonard Pitts, Jr. column If not drug legalization, what, Mr. President?

The president argued that drug dealers might come to “dominate certain countries if they were allowed to operate legally without any constraint.” This dominance, he said, “could be just as corrupting if not more corrupting than the status quo.”

One wonders if the president forgot to engage brain before operating mouth.

Dealers might “dominate certain countries?” Has Obama never heard of Mexico, that country on our southern border where drug dealers operate as a virtual shadow government in some areas? Is he unfamiliar with Colombia — his host nation — where, for years, the government battled a drug cartel brutal and brazen enough to attack the Supreme Court and assassinate the attorney general? That scenario Obama warns against actually came to pass a long time ago.

Similarly, it is a mystery how the manufacture and sale of a legal product could be “just as corrupting if not more corrupting than the status quo.” How could that be, given that there would no longer be a need for drug merchants to bribe judges, politicians and police for protection? What reason is there to believe a legal market in drugs would be any more prone to corruption than the legal markets in cigarettes and alcohol? Or, popcorn and chocolate? […]

The president’s reasoning is about as sturdy as a cardboard box in a monsoon. Even he must know — who can still deny? — that the drug war has failed. […]

Drug legalization is not the answer? OK, Mr. President, fair enough.

What is?

Good stuff, and a good question.

I was reminded about this column today when seeing that the infamous Calvina Faye has a letter responding to the article.

It was pretty eerie, because in the letter Calvina Faye sounds just like the drug czar:

As a drug policy expert, I offer a solution: a comprehensive policy that includes prevention, treatment and viable alternatives to incarceration, such as drug courts.

I would think that should give Gil Kerlikowske the willies.