Drug WarRant

A very interesting debate in four parts between Sean Dunagan (former DEA analyst and LEAP member) and Kevin Sabet (former ONDCP staffer and prohibitionist).

Has Obama Challenged the ‘War On Drugs’ Assumptions’?

One of the nice things about this particular video debate is that they also have the transcripts available, in case you prefer to read than listen/watch (usually my preference).

In the four parts, they cover a fair amount of ground. Parts 1-3 are the most predictable. Sean Dunagan does a good job getting the important points out there. Kevin is his usual self – often agreeing with his opponent at points to seem reasonable and then countering with a list of fallacious arguments a mile long.

One fallacy he likes to use is the Perfect Solution Fallacy, where he denigrates a proposed solution because it won’t solve all the problems.

Here’s one of the most extreme and obvious examples, where the host asks him a question of balancing costs:

JAY: Let me ask a question. Let’s for the sake of argument say that if there was decriminalization or legalization of some form, use would go up. So what? And what I mean by so what: is it worth—even if it has negative consequences (and I would say it would), is the consequences of, for example, the destruction of so many inner cities through gang culture based on drug control, the destruction of Mexico, what’s happening in Central America—like, if you’re balancing a complex problem here, is the war on drugs worth it?

SABET: Yeah, so there are two issues with that. One is that you just made an assumption that all that will go away if drugs were legalized.

What??? No, he didn’t.

SABET:…They’re making money from multiple things. To think with that assumption that you just made that they’re going to go away if only drugs were legal, because it would be like alcohol and tobacco, is to totally not understand and see what the economic impact and how these organizations are in our society.

That’s a really obvious disconnect from the question in a pretty offensive way.

Later on, he does it again

But one of the things, even if you end up taxing it, as have been many of the proposals, the idea that this underground market is necessarily going to go away is ridiculous. The profits they’re making are so big, they’ll lower their price to match—it’s worth it for them to lower their price to match or even go slightly below the government

The argument is not that the underground market will go away entirely, but it certainly is going to be radically diminished, and that’s a huge, huge benefit. But Sabet throws in the Perfect Solution Fallacy to avoid getting in a balancing the costs discussion.

There’s more…

The idea that we’re going to be able to legalize drugs and solve Mexico’s problem right now—which is, I would say we both agree, a huge issue—the idea that that’s going to happen under legalization is totally, again, missing the point. It’s simplistic in that it doesn’t get to the core issues of corruption and the core issues of what’s happening in Mexico.

Or his answer to serious questions about heroin maintenance programs and inner city problems…

I think we can do better than giving heroin to people in controlled settings and assume that their misery’s going to go away in a place like Baltimore.

He uses that several times more.

Unfortunately, Kevin’s use of these fallacies in arguments serves him well, because it often keeps the debate from getting to the real issues. I think Sean Dunagan actually should have avoided getting into the long discussion about numbers of use because that’s a distraction (I’m not blaming Sean, it would have been extremely hard not to get sucked into it) — it’s a distraction from the real balancing-the-costs issue and it ignores the fact that use is a rather meaningless factor when discussing harm.

Part 4 of the debate got into some interesting territory by bringing in Megan Sherman, who grew up on the streets of Baltimore, discussing the larger problem of policing in the inner city. Megan sees the destructive policing issue to be the important one to be solved prior to discussing legalization, but I think she fails to understand the degree to which drug policy allows and encourages bad policing practice.

One minor point from earlier in the debate. I got a real chuckle out of Kevin’s attempt to paint RAND as a completely independent source with “nothing to do with government.”

First of all, the RAND Corporation, which is a nonprofit, independent organization that has nothing to do with government, did a major study on the impact of legalization and what would happen in California when they were going for legalization of marijuana, and found that there would be a significant increase in use because of prices would fall. So, I mean, economics 101, drug policy 101: drug prices under legalization fall and use goes up. Youth are especially sensitive to price. So that—you know, and they who do not have a stake in the political or policy game said that that would happen.

Right. And the Heritage Foundation is bipartisan.

There’s a new thing called Versus Debates through Google and Youtube, and they’re kicking things off on March 13 at 7 pm GMT (which is 2 pm EST) with “The War on Drugs.”

Watch the live debate here on Tuesday 13th March, 7pm GMT. Richard Branson, Russell Brand, Julian Assange, Eliott Spitzer, Vincente Fox, and many more, will be locking horns on this age defining question.

This could be interesting. Mark your calendars.

AdvoCare, Inc., American Civil Liberties Union – National Prison Project, American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO, Center on Policy Initiatives, Communications Workers of America, Detention Watch Network, Enlance, Grassroots Leadership, Human Rights Defense Center, In The Public Interest, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, International CURE, Justice Policy Institute, Justice Strategies, Marijuana Policy Project, NAACP, National Employment Law Project, Private Corrections Institute, Private Corrections Working Group, The Sentencing Project, Service Employees International Union, Southern Center for Human Rights, Southern Poverty Law Center, Southern Region, Workers United, Service Employees International Union, Youth Transformation Center, Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs

Plus: the United Methodist Church General Board of Church and Society, the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ/Justice and Witness Ministries and the Presbyterian Criminal Justice Network, among others.

All these organizations are calling for states to turn down the poisonous offer of Corrections Corporation of America to buy their prisons in exchange for guaranteeing 20 years of 90% capacity.

ACLU has the story and the letters

John Hughes is described as a former editor of the Christian Science Monitor, who writes a biweekly column.

However, when reading GOP candidates need to debate legalizing marijuana, I thought for sure that it was something written by a 7th grader. A stupid 7th grader.

It’s written in an extremely simplistic style, full of fallacies and downright nonsense, completely lacking in logic.

In the current debates among GOP presidential contenders about “values,” I have not heard any discussion about the legalization of marijuana. I think there should be.

Apparently, John Hughes is incapable of googling “GOP debate marijuana” or he’d see this or this. Sure, we’d like to see a lot more discussion about legalization, but to say there hasn’t been any? That’s ridiculous.

Of course, Hughes is a prohibitionist. Not a very smart one. He’s got one argument:

The words of a narcotics agent came back to me when singer Tony Bennett recently supported the legalization of drugs at a pre-Grammy gala where various Hollywood personalities were depicted smoking pot on TV.

The agent’s words were: “I can’t say every pot smoker goes on to get hooked on the hard stuff. But I can say every addict I know on the hard stuff got started on pot.”

If is a meaningless argument, and anyone with more than a 7th grade education should be able to instantly point out the fallacy of such an argument.

Come on, CSM — I know that your editorial policy is sadomoralistic, but can’t you do better than this crap?

First up, via Australia (Thanks Evert) we have The decriminalisation (or even legalisation) of drugs by Chris Berg.

It doesn’t take more than a moment of thought to recognise that the rulings on which drugs are legal or illegal are governed by no particular logic.

No theory from medicine or philosophy or psychology demands alcohol, tobacco and caffeine must be legal while marijuana, cocaine, and heroin must be prohibited.

[…]

Whether a drug is illegal is nothing more than an accident of history. Drug laws were not written dispassionately by a panel of the best medical and ethical minds in the world. The laws bear no relation to the damage those drugs could cause or their danger to society – they were not written to minimise harm or protect health.

Quite the opposite: the current schedule of drugs in the Western world has been driven by politics, expediency, prejudice, and sometimes outright racism.

[…]

But the biggest cultural barrier to such reform is the current status illegal drugs have. In the sort of circular reasoning that only popular discourse can manage, the prohibition of drugs is mostly justified by their pre-existing legal status. Why are certain drugs prohibited? Because they are illicit drugs.

But that status has been set by politics and moral panics, not dispassionate evidence-based risk assessments. Drug prohibition carries the legacy of the ugly politics of the past. Once we realise that, we may start to rethink the justice of a war that is, in truth, not against drugs, but against drug users.

Then, in Canada, we have our friend Eric Sterling trying to advise them from going down our destructive path. Canada is repeating U.S. mistakes on drug sentencing

As Canadian senators meet this week to vote on comprehensive anti-crime Bill C-10, they need to reflect upon the U.S. experience and reject the bill’s entrenchment of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences in Canada. As has been the case in the U.S., mandatory minimums can easily go wrong in Canada, too, in ways entirely predictable. Exploding court and correctional costs for resource-strapped national and provincial governments is one likely calamity that Canadians can expect from mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

In 1986, I played a central role helping the U.S. Congress write the federal mandatory minimum sentences. Soon we saw the devastating effects that this legislation forced upon unprepared court and correctional systems.

[…]

But the political temptation to promote harsh-sounding sentences was too seductive in 1986. Ironically, no opponent of mandatory minimum sentences has ever lost re-election on this issue. We have learned that imprisoning countless marijuana gardeners has no impact on organized crime leaders, doesn’t keep drugs away from kids or kids away from drugs, and actually increases criminals’ profits by driving up prices.

Countless lives have been ruined due to incarceration and criminal records for non-violent drug offences. Based on this irrefutable evidence, and the repeal of mandatory sentencing measures in numerous states, I can see only one reason why Canada’s federal government and some provincial governments would want to go down this wasteful route: the belief it is good electoral politics to parade as tough on drugs and crime. At this time of fiscal limits, taxpayers can’t afford the luxury of expensive and symbolic anti-crime measures.

Parliament must embrace only policies that are effective, respect the taxpayers’ pocketbook and are evidence-based. Mandatory minimums fit none of these important criteria.

Powerful and blistering editorial in the Guatemala Times: US failed war on drugs is killing Guatemala

And they’re absolutely right.

We are paying the ultimate price for the idiotic, myopic and ill conceived anti drug war strategies designed by the US and implemented in Colombia and Mexico ( We wonder is it about drugs or is it about OIL resources?).

Mexico gets billions to make war on narcos; Colombia gets billions to make war on narcos, result: massive narco migration. That is hailed as a success in the war on Drugs.

Well it is no success for Guatemala and other countries who suffer the consequences.

They discuss where Mexico, Colombia, and Guatemala fit in with U.S. interests…

The US considers Mexico a priority: they are neighbors; it is a national security concern and they have a lot of OIL. Colombia is a priority because of the sheer volumes of revenues the narco trade generates that concerns the US, it is an economic concern, and they have a lot of OIL. […]

Guatemala is in the middle, Guatemala does not concern the US because we are unimportant to them, we have no OIL. No economic interest, no security interest, no political interest. So the geniuses of the US Drug war give resources to Colombia and Mexico, but very little to Guatemala. Result: Guatemala will soon have more narcos then chickens. But who cares. Geopolitically Guatemala is disposable.

The conclusion has absolutely the right suggestion.

We have a better suggestion: take the money away from Mexico and Colombia, have the narcos return to their countries of origin. Make an air bridge and import the drugs legally into the US. Mexico prospers, Colombia prospers, the US takes care of their problem and we are out of this idiotic war on drugs. That is what we call a successful strategy to contain the problem.

I wonder if Janet Napolitano has read that and if she’ll try to tell Guatemala that the drug war has been a success.

Part of the Count the Costs Initiative comes this short film by the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union on the Human Rights Costs of the War on Drugs:

Via Transform.

Napolitano: Mexican drug war ‘not a failure’

Clearly realizes that she can’t call it a “success” so she tries to back-door her way through “not a failure.”

And yet, given her stated objectives:

“a continuing effort to keep our peoples from becoming addicted to dangerous drugs.”

… how can it be considered anything else than an abject failure. It hasn’t kept people from anything and has fueled massive levels of violence.

Legalizing marijuana in US has potential for positive effects by Simon Cantarel in The Oklahoma Daily — another excellent OpEd by a student. More SSDP influence?

Interesting juxtaposition of headlines in my newsreader:

• Bolivia’s Flying Coca Farmers
• Colombia buys submarines in anti-drug war

Marijuana Federalism by Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy

… each time another state moves against drug prohibition is another opportunity to reconsider drug prohibition and the nature and extent to which federal resources should be devoted to the war on drugs.

Bob Barr: Libertarians should vote for Gingrich

This provokes the rather obvious question: “Has Bob Barr always been insane?” I’m getting convinced that his “conversion” to libertarianism was little more than his insanity causing him to believe he was a libertarian, much like the psych wards are populated with deluded crackpots believing themselves to be Napoléon Bonaparte.

Federal Money Linked to NYPD’s Muslim Surveillance Program

The Associated Press reports that the New York Police Department’s controversial program to monitor Muslim neighborhoods and organizations was funded, at least in part, by White House grants meant to pay for the drug war. The money was given to the NYPD through the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which was established years ago to fight gangs and drug trafficking. After September 11, 2001, however, local authorities were permitted to redirect some of that money to fight terrorism. The HIDTA has given out around $2.3 billion over the last 10 years, with about $135 million given to officials in the New York/New Jersey metro area.

Both the drug war and the war on terror are largely about authoritarianism — giving the government more power over the people as opposed to giving people more power over the government — and thus their funding is jealously protected by those in power.

Perhaps this incident will help give the HIDTA another black eye. HIDTA is responsible for many of the most outrageous drug war stunts we’ve seen (particularly through drug task forces).

One of the basic foundations of the drug war is that, since it outlaws a fully consensual act, it is difficult to enforce as there are no aggrieved parties to cooperate with the police. Add to that the high demand and the incredibly easy means of supply and you get frustrated prohibitionists.

This leads to a plethora of back-door and sideways attacks by legislators and law enforcement, as they add volumes of laws outlawing things even peripherally related to drugs.

In Ohio, they’re looking to make it illegal to have a hidden compartment in your car.

A proposed state law, advocated by Gov. John Kasich, would make it a fourth-degree felony to own a vehicle equipped with secret compartments. A conviction would mean up to 18 months in jail and a potential $5,000 fine.

Note that with this law it doesn’t matter whether you’re using the secret compartment for anything illegal. It’s the existence of the compartment itself that is banned.

After all, you could have a very legitimate reason to have a secret compartment. If you’re traveling with valuables and you’re concerned about thugs with guns pulling you over and taking your cash for no reason… (Oh, yeah…)

… yes, the asset forfeiture aspect of the drug war has been a huge peripheral part of it, with cash, cars, and buildings being seized merely for the suspicion of being connected to drug trafficking, even if you are not charged.

Drug warriors had a hard time sometimes catching people in the act of selling, so the lawmakers decided to make possession of a certain quantity of drugs proof of selling whether you actually did sell or not. So trafficking can merely mean that you didn’t want to go to a criminal to buy your drugs so often and got a larger quantity for yourself.

And I find almost amusing that if you merely allow a plant to grow by itself in your back yard you can be charged with “manufacturing” (taking a lot of credit away from Mother Nature/God).

Drug-free school zones have nothing to do with selling to kids and merely add on penalties for selling drugs in the city.

Money laundering and conspiracy laws are used to convict people when they don’t have the evidence to convict people.

Drug paraphernalia laws are absurd, since almost anything can have multiple uses, and we have endless dances around what stores can sell, related to other merchandise that they have.

A Chicago politician tried to outlaw small plastic bags. In some states, it’s illegal to sell “rose tubes” (which can also be used as crack pipes). In Georgia, they arrested 32 Indians named Patel, among others, for failing to understand the drug slang that undercover officers were using when the cops bought common household items from them in convenience stores.

Of course, these days all of use have to be careful not to have too many colds. Now you can’t even buy the useful cold medicine with Sudafed at night when you need it, and you risk jail if you buy too much in one month.

And, of course, this hasn’t stopped anything. Meth is still widely available.

The absurdity is pointed out in this delightful tongue-in-cheek article in the Journal of Apocryphal Chemistry: A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From
N-Methylamphetamine by O. Hai, and I. B. Hakkenshit

A novel and straightforward synthesis of pseudoephidrine from
readily available N-methylamphetamine is presented. This practical synthesis is expected to be a disruptive technology replacing the need to find an open pharmacy.

Maybe I’ll try that next time I get a cold.

So, what other bizarre laws related to the drug war do you know?

I remember when this bust happened, and the mention of the books, etc., but I don’t think I commented on it then. This article in DCist reminded me, and some of the wording really hit me.

Capitol Hemp Stops Selling Books Over Fears of Another Raid

If you walked into Capitol Hemp’s Adams Morgan location today, you could buy yourself a “Make Hemp Not War” t-shirt. Or a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap. Or hemp oatmeal, loose-leaf tobacco and even the very water pipes that got the store raided by police last October. But you won’t be able to find a copy of Andrew Sullivan’s “The Cannabis Closet,” a book that focuses on mainstream marijuana use.

Sullivan’s book, along with many others, were quietly removed from shelves in recent weeks over concerns that they could be used to justify another police raid on the store. According to a source close to the store, lawyers for co-owners Adam Eidinger and Alan Amsterdam advised them to stop selling the books for fear that they could be used as pretext for another raid while the two negotiate with prosecutors over charges stemming from October’s raids.

That’s pretty surreal in itself, but it gets worse…

One DVD that police singled out was “10 Rules for Dealing With Police,” part of the Flex Your Rights series. According to the affidavit, police questioned the value of such a DVD unless someone wanted to do something illegal. “The typical citizen would not need to know detailed information as to US Supreme Court case law regarding search and seizure because they are not transporting illegal substances in fear of being caught,” it stated.

Yep. No need to know the Constitution. We’ll take care of it for you. The Constitution is only for criminals to use. If you’re a law-abiding citizen, you don’t need to know it. In fact, maybe we should start getting the records of anyone who downloads the text of the Constitution and search their homes. If they want to read the Constitution, they must be doing something wrong. Too bad we couldn’t get the framers to write it in Latin. The priests had the right idea.

…

This would be a good time to promote 10 Rules for Dealing with Police and also to mention Scott Morgan’s recent article in the Huffington Post: 5 Reasons You Should Never Agree to a Police Search (Even if You Have Nothing to Hide) to which I added a sixth:

Here’s reason 6. You are the employer and the police officer is the employee, being paid with your tax dollars. As an employer, why would you want him wasting his time searching for something that isn’t there when he should be doing his job? Be the employer, not the victim.