Drug WarRant

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.

I guess you need one, since the last post had about 1 in 30 comments actually on topic. 🙂 (I hope some people actually watched the Frontline piece.)

Amazing new bridge in Mexico built by the government makes it easier to supply drugs to the U.S.

200 million people use illegal drugs; what is the toll on health? The L.A. Times tries to make something out of ho-hum statistics on drug use and just ends up with a meaningless article.

Sacramento County DA receives funds to fight drug-impaired driving

The Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office has received grants totaling $1.37 million to fight drug-impaired driving.

Appears to be mostly a back-door effort to criminalize internal possession of marijuana.

Tasmania’s Michelle O’Byrne MP appears to mean well in her support for Industrial Hemp, but this statement seemed… odd.

“The poppy industry, where licensing arrangements are also required under the Poisons Act, has developed into a major source of the world’s licit opioid alkaloids with an annual farm gate value of about $100 million.

“There is no reason why the hemp industry would be any different.”

Well, yes, in fact. It’s a different plant. It has different usable substances and those are produced, marketed and distributed in far different ways.

It’s like saying that chickens produce a farm value of “x” so there’s no reason why raising grapes would be any different.

Groups Call For Change In Civil Forfeiture Laws

More and more, it seems that people are waking up on this issue and realizing just how wrong it is. Agencies have gotten so greedy for forfeiture money that the public is becoming aware. And aroused.

Pa. judge dismisses 2,000 juvenile cases in ‘kids for cash’ scandal

As a result of Grim’s efforts, records have been expunged for more than 2,000 juveniles sentenced by Ciavarella.

Ciavarella and another ex-judge are serving federal prison sentences for sending juveniles to for-profit youth detention centers in return for money.

Grim called the handling of juvenile cases in Luzerne County a judicial process “run amok,” and he gave recommendations to prevent such renegade justice again.

War on the war on drugs — LEAP on the political front lines.

SSDP has been doing a great job in New Hampshire as well, questioning candidates about drug policy, with sometimes hilarious results.

Very powerful video story at PBS Frontline worth watching in its entirety: Opium Brides

It’s all about the collateral damage from drug wars and other wars. The government gets what it wants and the traffickers get what they want, and the poor farmers and their families get screwed.

Drug traffickers loan money to very poor farmers who use the money to plant opium crops. The government comes and eradicates the crops and the farmers are unable to pay their debt. Their daughters end up paying the price for the unpaid loan.

Note: many of the commenters at PBS seem to be unclear as to the reasons this problem exists, and could use a hand.

Thank you David Sirota.

How Americans really feel about drugs

A NYT op-ed uses “moderate” double-speak to deny the truth: Most people want marijuana legalized […]

The latest example of this insidious framing comes in the form of a Monday New York Times Op-Ed. The piece is written by Kevin Sabet, formerly one of President Obama’s top drug policy officials. Titled “Overdosing on Extremism,” he employs the “centrist” and “moderate” code words to criticize those pressing for reforms that, for purposes of law enforcement, would treat currently outlawed drugs such as marijuana just like far more dangerous yet legal drugs such as alcohol. [..]

Instead, he (and the New York Times editors and headline writers who published his piece) wholly ignores the indisputable facts and simply deems the millions of Americans in this pro-legalization majority as “extremists” — that is, he pretends that the position in the actual center of public opinion is on the extreme edge of that public opinion. […]

Taken together, Sabet’s goal in his Op-Ed is obvious: He’s a committed drug warrior with a vested (and, based on his Times billing as a “drug policy consultant,” possibly financial) interest in marginalizing those trying to end the drug war. To do that, he’s employed the most tried and true instruments of marginalization — the newly redefined notions of “centrism” and “moderate” policymaking. And he’s employed them even though the actual facts show that, in comparison to the mass public, he’s the fringe extremist.

Put down the Coumadin, Grandma, before we shoot you.