Drug WarRant

… but Harper won’t listen.

U.S. law panel urges Harper to avoid ‘costly failure’ of mandatory minimum pot punishments

A high-profile group of current and former U.S. law enforcement officials has sent a letter to the Harper government with a surprising message: Take it from us, the war on drugs has been a “costly failure.”

The officials are urging the Canadian government to reconsider mandatory minimum sentences for “minor” marijuana offences under its “tough-on-crime bill” and said a better approach would be to legalize marijuana under a policy of taxation and regulation.

“We are … extremely concerned that Canada is implementing mandatory minimum sentencing legislation for minor marijuana-related offences similar to those that have been such costly failures in the United States,” the letter reads. “These policies have bankrupted state budgets as limited tax dollars pay to imprison non-violent drug offenders at record rates instead of programs that can actually improve community safety.”

Something about this drug war – in the decades that it’s been waged, politicians have been completely uninterested in learning from the past.

But the Harper government remains unswayed.

In a statement Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said the government has “no intention to decriminalize or legalize marijuana” and “remains committed to ensuring criminals are held fully accountable for their actions.”

Link

“State prisons have a 96% occupancy rate, while federal prisons are at almost 140% of capacity. And the prison population [is] growing at 5% annually. The market potential also remains huge, with only 8% of prisons privatized so far.”

The only possible downside they note is the potential for legalization of marijuana.

Link

The newest member of the San Francisco Police Department drools a little when he gets excited.

Mark A.R. Kleiman has an excellent OpEd in The American Interest: Triage in the Drug War

In particular, Kleiman’s analysis of the falsehoods and fallacies of the drug war really hits the mark.

Certainly, he has a more optimistic view of the potential uses of prohibition in certain circumstances than I, but in an article discussing short-term triage, that’s OK – it’s not all going to come down at once anyway. As far as his solutions, the HOPE program appears to be a good one and his “big stick” approach to reducing the violence of the most violent drug trafficking organizations might work (although I fear that without an accompanying “carrot” it’s likely to get bogged down).

As some of you know, Mark and I have had some blistering differences over the years regarding drug policy, but I’ve always felt that when it comes to analyzing the problems with prohibition, he really does understand.

Update: It seems the consensus is that the readers are much less willing to give Kleiman any props for what he wrote in this OpEd.

Of course Mark Kleiman is still a prohibitionist apologist and he has a drug policy blind spot the size of Texas when it comes to his fear of cocaine. That hasn’t changed, nor do I expect it to change in the near future. His opinions, however, are widely respected in certain circles and it is nice to see him publicly dismantling core drug warrior arguments, particularly without the usual obligatory unsupported plague-on-both-your-houses/ but-the-legalizers-are-just-as-bad statement.

Link

“It is time we were honest about the problems we face with the drug trade. Drugs are a source of criminal profit, and that has led to shootings and even murders. Just like we learned in the 1920s with the prohibition of alcohol, prohibition of marijuana is fueling violent activity,” the mayor said in the written version of his speech. […]

“I know every one of the city council members sitting to my left and right believe as I do: it’s time for this state to legalize marijuana, and stop the violence, stop the incarceration, stop the erosion of civil liberties, and urge the federal government to stop the failed war on drugs.”

Hope for the future

Check out this outstanding OpEd by Brown University Junior Jared Moffat: U.S. drug policies are a crime against humanity

Myanmar declares a war on opium

Gee, I wonder why nobody thought of that before. A war on drugs? Yeah, that’ll work.

“Every year the international community spends millions of dollars (on anti-narcotics initiatives) in countries like Afghanistan and Colombia, and the outcome is not satisfactory,” Sit Aye, senior legal advisor to President Thein Sein, said in an interview. “Here, with international assistance, we guarantee to wipe out the opium problem by 2014.”

Abraham Lincoln Was A Hempster

Some enjoyable reading for Presidents’ Day.

Interesting reading over at Cato Unbound for those who like philosophical discussions about law and rights: What is Due Process?

It’s an entire series of articles and responses on the subject. I’m particularly impressed with much of what Tim Sandefur has to say in the discussion:

My point here is to explain briefly how the Constitution’s promise that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law” means not only that government must take certain procedural steps (hearings, trials, and so forth) when it imposes a deprivation, but also that some acts are off limits for government, “regardless of the fairness of the procedures used to implement them.”

In a later response (Is Everything Congress Passes Really a Law?), Sandefur passes on this gem from Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 33:

acts of the [federal government] which are not pursuant to its constitutional powers…will [not] become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such. Hence we perceive that the clause which declares the supremacy of the laws of the Union…only declares a truth, which flows immediately and necessarily from the institution of a federal government. It will not, I presume, have escaped observation, that it expressly confines this supremacy to laws made pursuant to the Constitution

Somewhat odd article in Christian Science Monitor: Why military hawks are leading drug legalization debate in Latin America

The underlying justification for most prohibitionists (other than sadomoralists) is that prohibition somehow is responsible for massive reductions in the use of drugs (and therefore a host of imagined societal-destroying maladies caused by drug use). Although you’ll pretty much never find them willing to specifically compare the massive list of prohibition’s costs to this imagined societal value, it’s implied that the reduction in drug use is more than enough to put up with this “collateral” damage.

And yet, of course, no actual evidence has ever supported this view.

And here, yet again, is evidence that refutes it.

Why the Government should take lessons from Peter Tosh

Check out this chart of nine European countries that have had changes in penalties for marijuana use, and the shifts in marijuana use prior to and after that penalty change.:

There are a lot of reasons for fluctuations in drug use in various countries. Legal penalties clearly don’t make a difference.

So, for the 100,000th time, softening drug penalties does not “send the wrong message”, or apparently any message at all. The vapid “drugs are harmful so we should keep them illegal” argument is straightforwardly wrong: some drugs are harmful, but it makes no difference keeping them illegal, except that it gives lots of criminals lots of money, causes crime and damages people health. It’s a strange day indeed when Peter Tosh has a more nuanced approach to government policy than the Government does.

Maybe not that strange.

In Vancouver:

“If we are allowed to deal with our eternity and all that we believe in spiritually, and if we’re allowed to read any book that we want under freedom of speech, why is it we can’t put into our body whatever we want?” Paul proclaimed from Vancouver.

When President Otto Perez of Guatemala proposed legalization of drugs, an interesting question was how and whether the U.S. would respond. Well, the U.S. is actually sending someone to talk with him about legalization!

US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will visit Guatemala next week for talks on President Otto Perez’s bold proposal to legalize drug production and consumption, authorities said Saturday.

Wait.

Who?

As Sanho Tree tweeted: “Why not someone from State? Is CentAm part of US homeland?”

Personally, I have always found the name of that department somewhat creepy. Giving it global reach doesn’t help.

I’ve mentioned the asset forfeiture case of the Motel Caswell before, but here is some good additional coverage.

The issue is that the Motel Caswell, which Russ Caswell and his family have owned free and clear for two generations, is located in an area where there is some crime. A number of drug busts have taken place at the Motel, although this is an insignificant number compared to the number of stays overall. The police agree that Russ and his family are not involved in drug activity in any way and that Russ has tried to work with police, reporting drug activity to the police and evicting troublemakers. Yet the police and the Department of Justice are trying to seize the property, worth one million dollars.

Civil Forfeiture Abuse Case to be Argued Today before Federal Court in Boston from the Institute of Justice, includes a video about the Motel and the forfeiture abuse.

Congress already passed a law that forbids the DOJ from taking the Motel Caswell. The DOJ is ignoring it. at Forfeiture Reform. Good discussion by Scott Alexander Meiner about the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 which addressed exactly this kind of forfeiture abuse.