Drug WarRant

Students for Sensible Drug Policy has been doing a great job getting out to the candidate events in New Hampshire and trying to force the GOP candidates to say something about drug policy (with sometimes bizarre results). This was clearly their easiest one.

Progress?

1. Police advisor says we need to reconsider use of forced entry warrants.

In light of police deaths, training is scrutinized

“It’s time to change our thinking,” says Pat McCarthy, who advises police agencies across the country. “Cops are exposing themselves to increasing danger many times over, and it’s just not necessary.” […]

McCarthy said the deadly confrontation underscores a need for police to rethink their tactics.

“The days of knocking down doors in drug cases should be over. Given what’s going on now, you have to consider other options,” McCarthy said.
He said law enforcement officials should focus more on attempting to lure suspects out into the open or simply “wait them out.”

2. An intelligent piece in the Daily Mail opposing sniffer dogs and random tests in the classroom.

Sniffer dogs and random tests in the classrooms are NOT the way to protect schoolchildren from drugs by Damon Barrett

Not only do these invasive and enforcement-led measures not work, they are counterproductive. Labelling those tested as ‘drug users’ is likely to reduce their confidence, happiness and self-esteem at school. Drug testing cannot distinguish between occasional, recreational drug use and more problematic patterns of use.

So youngsters at very little risk of harm will be ‘labelled’ and drawn into the net of counselling services, ‘treatment’ centres and the criminal justice system. The consequence of a positive test result can also involve suspension or school exclusion. Ask any parent if they want this for their child.

Drug testing also runs the risk of diverting some young people to substances which are likely to be more harmful but less easily identifiable than cannabis, such as alcohol, amphetamines or volatile substances. Some may also play truant to avoid the possibility of being tested. Gyngell herself is concerned about absence from school and it is a key risk factor in initiation into drug use and developing more risky behaviours. Why make matters worse?

Drug testing and running sniffer dogs through schools is at best an expensive waste of time and at worst money spent on harming our own children.

Study: Smoking Marijuana Not Linked with Lung Damage by Maia Szalavitz in TIME.

Marijuana does not impair lung function—at least not in the doses inhaled by the majority of users, according to the largest and longest study ever to consider the issue, which was published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers working on a long-term study of risk factors for cardiovascular disease (the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults or CARDIA study) tested the lung function of 5115 young adults over the course of 20 years, starting in 1985 when they were aged 18 to 30. […]

While tobacco smokers showed the expected drop in lung function over time, the new research found that marijuana smoke had unexpected and apparently positive effects. Low to moderate users actually showed increased lung capacity compared to nonsmokers on two tests, known as FEV1 and FVC. FEV1 is the amount of air someone breathes out in the first second after taking the deepest possible breath; FVC is the total volume of air exhaled after the deepest inhalation.

“FEV1 and FVC both actually increased with moderate and occasional use of marijuana,” says Dr. Mark Pletcher, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco and the lead author of the study.

Not that it really matters from a legalization point of view. Even if marijuana was damaging to lungs, that wouldn’t in any way justify prohibition. But this study makes prohibition “arguments” look even more pathetic.

There are all kinds of anti-drug governmental programs around the world and the UK has its own propaganda mascot called Frank.

Frank is there to help you, and has even opened his head to help you play Spliff Pinball.

Spliff Pinball shows how when you smoke cannabis it releases (space bar) a little ball of weed that bounces around in your head, and if you toke at the wrong time (right/left arrows) it will launch that ball back into your brain and cause brain damage.

Of course, the way the game is constructed (with all hits being negative points), the object of the game can only be “who can damage the brain the most,” which is apparently the challenge Frank wants to give to teens.

A new gallup poll shows 31% of the public identifies themselves as Democrats and 27% as Republicans.

If, when you take a quick look at those numbers, it seems that a whole lot of people aren’t included, your math skills are just fine.

In fact, it’s a record number of self-identified Independents.

Not sure what this means for drug policy, but since both of the major political parties have been willing enablers in all the death and destruction of prohibition, I’m not shedding any tears for their discomfort.

There are still pockets of reefer madness that pop up every now and then. This one from Dr. Ruairi Henley writing in the Irish Times is particularly amusing:

I was aware during my college years of the existence of a few long-term cannabis users. I freely admit I regarded these people as a bunch of brain-dead, attention-seeking idiots suffering from a chronic aversion to personal hygiene.

Unfortunately, these clowns usually attracted a cult following of guitar-strumming, arty types whose idea of a fun weekend was to stand outside Brown Thomas screaming abuse at customers intending to buy fur coats.

Another interesting feature of the male section of this half-witted species was their apparent inability to use a razor on a regular basis.

In fact, I cannot recall ever meeting a clean-shaven pothead. This is an approach to grooming they appear to share with trade union officials and borderline communist politicians.

Check out this whopper of an opening sentence in the Guardian:

The loudest voices in US drug policy debates call either for enforcing prohibition with ever-increasing ferocity or for giving up altogether by letting corporations legally sell the currently illicit drugs much as they do tobacco and alcohol.

That’s in Towards a smarter drugs policy by Keith Humphreys and Jonathan Caulkins.

I guess they wanted to be like Kevin Sabet and invent their opponents out of whole cloth so they could be “centrists.” That’s apparently the “scientific” way.

Even for those drugs that we’d like to see sold like tobacco and alcohol, how is that “giving up”?

If they meant “giving up on failed prohibition policies” than yes, I’d go along with that, but they seem to be using the “surrender” straw man.

And legalization is far from surrender.

I didn’t even read the rest of the article. When you start with such a whopper, how much value is there likely to be in the rest?

…Just some two-bit political analysis on my part.

I’ve been fascinated the past couple of weeks by the vehemence of some of the political pundit discussions regarding Ron Paul’s candidacy.

(Note: Keep in mind that when I talk about progressives/liberals/conservatives in this post, I’m referring to the partisan political writers, not the voters.)

Once it looked like Ron Paul had a chance of taking Iowa, things exploded. Progressives really started having fits. It even got vicious, with some nasty slander directed at Glenn Greenwald and others who were merely trying to point out the indisputable truth that Ron Paul was better than Barack Obama on certain issues that supposedly were important to progressives.

When other Republican candidates were in the lead, progressive sites ridiculed them and discussed their objectionable views, but when Ron Paul took the lead, they went ballistic. They appeared to be really afraid of him.

Probably they had seen the poll that showed Paul doing best of all the GOP candidates in a head-to-head matchup against President Obama.

Additionally, some seemed actually scared of Paul’s small-government views. David Atkins, writing at Digby’s Hullabaloo actually went so far as to say:

Liberalism is and has always been about intervention. It is the opposite of libertarianism, and always has been.

Of course, that’s not only historically inaccurate, it’s a bizarrely frank admission and sounds more like what a critic of liberalism would say.

But ultimately, what was scaring progressive pundits was that progressive voters were finding Ron Paul attractive, despite all his flaws. And they were realizing that they were in danger of losing their own base.

This is a base that they’ve held in check largely by using fear of anti-gay or anti-abortion laws for too many years, as a myriad of other issues of interest to progressive voters (race, drug war, imperialism, government secrecy, etc.) have been ignored or actively undermined by their leadership.

I was particularly interested by how many of the progressive pundits in this set of exchanges actually brought up the drug war. It was usually something along the lines of “You may be attracted to Ron Paul because of his position on the drug war, but keep in mind that the other things he’ll do are so horrible that it’ll destroy civilization as we know it!” Or the rather strange “Ron Paul as President would only do something about federal drug prisoners, not state drug prisoners” (which is, of course, still far better than what Obama is doing).

It’s like every one of these pundits had come to the realization that the drug war has become an issue with real traction — one that they ignore at their own peril. No longer the days of “we have too many important issues to worry about to use up our political capital on fringe things like pot legalization.”

The success of Ron Paul of opening up a national discussion about the drug war may actually end up getting Democrats to start embracing drug policy reform. Wouldn’t that be something?

As if to add even more irony to this situation, on national TV last night, a political leader talked passionately about the destructive and pervasive racism of the drug war. It wasn’t our young African-American progressive President. No, it was Ron Paul, the GOP’s supposed racist old white guy.

Progressives have some problems, and one of the big ones apparently is the drug war. How things have changed.

……

For those interested in some of the recent controversy in progressive writing circles regarding the support of issues for which Ron Paul is better (which is different than support of Ron Paul in general), I highly recommend reading the following two Greenwald pieces:

• Democratic Party Priorities by Glenn Greenwald
• The evil of indefinite detention and those wanting to de-prioritize it by Glenn Greenwald

I have a new helper in the fight against the smuggling of endangered species. It’s a hamster named Sergeant Cheeks. He is able to detect the presence of endangered species or protected elements of endangered species (feathers, tusks, etc.) in someone’s personal possession.

Sergeant Cheeks has gone through specialized training and even has a certificate of proof of training.

The way this works is that I hold Sergeant Cheeks up to someone I think might be holding and if he detects contraband in their pants, for example, he gives me a special signal by wiggling his body a particular way. This way I know that I have probable cause to require the subject to remove their pants so I can search for an endangered animal.

Now you may think that this is an invasion of privacy, but all that Sergeant Cheeks detects is the presence of an endangered species, which a person does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in possessing in the first place.

Yes, there have been complaints from the woman whose bra I searched and found nothing. But that doesn’t mean that Sergeant Cheeks was wrong; merely that whatever had been there (an endangered feather, perhaps) had been removed and he was detecting that residue.

For those who charge that those I search are mostly good looking and female, all I can say is that Sergeant Cheeks is the one making the decisions, not me. Are you accusing the hamster of being sexist?

I’m not worried. I’m sure the Supreme Court will back me up.

Sergeant Cheeks and I will be on the street, searching peoples’ clothes and keeping the world bio-diverse.

Is that an endangered monkey in your pants?

The Supreme Court announced that it will hear the Florida case regarding using a dog sniff as cause to search a house.

This is, of course, the ultimate extension of the atrocious decision authored by Justice Stevens in Caballes v. Illinois that allowed dogs to determine whether there was probable cause to search a car.

In the drug detection case, Florida v. Jardines (docket 11-564), the Court agreed to decide one of the two questions raised. The constitutional issue at stake is whether police must have probable cause — a belief that evidence of a crime will be found — before they may use a dog sniff at the front door of a suspected “grow house,” or a site where marijuana is being grown. The case grows out of a Miami police officer’s use of a drug-detecting dog, “Franky,” in December 2006 to follow up on a “crime stoppers” tip that the house was being used to grow marijuana plants. The Florida Supreme Court ruled that police needed to have probable cause belief in wrongdoing before they could use the dog at the home, on the premise that the drug sniff was a “search” under the Fourth Amendment.

The state of Florida told the Supreme Court that the state ruling conflicts with Supreme Court precedent that a dog sniff is not a search under the Fourth Amendment. “This Court,” the state said, “has explained that a dog sniff is not a search because the sole knowledge that the dog obtains by sniffing is the presence of contraband, which a person does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in possessing in the first place.” The petition cited the Court’s 2005 decision in Illinois v. Caballes, and argued that the Florida courts “are now alone in refusing to follow” that ruling.

The State of Florida is, of course, saying exactly what Stevens did in Caballes, that “the sniff is not a search because the sole knowledge that the dog obtains by sniffing is the presence of contraband, which a person does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in possessing in the first place.”

And that might be true if dogs were 100% correct in their sniffs, but as we know for a fact, they aren’t even close.

They’re playing dangerous language games because the actual fact is that all of us have an expectation of privacy in our personal belongings in our car or house and a dog’s sniff could just as easily result in our house being searched unreasonably.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Florida on this one, then just like with cars, they’ll be giving law enforcement complete free rein to go on fishing expeditions. All they’ll have to do is find a house that they want to search and bring a dog to it. The dog is likely to alert because of the handler’s desires rather than any actual presence of drugs.

The big hope, of course, is that new information and data on the fallibility of drug dog sniffs will cause the Supreme Court to not only rule against Florida, but reject Caballes, too.