Drug WarRant

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.

Remember the RAND study that found that crime increased in areas after medical marijuana dispensaries were shut down? RAND made no causality claims, only correlation, yet the results enraged certain political entities, most notably the L.A. city attorney’s office.

After a lot of pressure, RAND retracted the study. In their news release, they said that the reason they voluntarily retracted it was that they “determined the crime data used in the analysis are insufficient to answer the questions targeted by the study.”

They did not find contradictory information, or any reason to necessarily doubt the findings, but rather decided that the amount of data was insufficient to make the conclusions solely based on that data. They claimed they intended to redo the study with more data, but we’ve heard nothing since.

What’s interesting, of course (though not at all surprising) is the way the retraction has been seen by some as a kind of proof that the findings were false – that, in fact, the closing of dispensaries were not followed by an increase in crime.

That has resurfaced with Scientific American’s article Doh! Top Science Journal Retractions of 2011

#5: Los Angeles marijuana dispensaries lead to drop in crime.

Keep smoking. The RAND Corporation retracted its own report in October after realizing its sloppy data collection.

The tone is annoying, and “sloppy” is a possible overstatement, but the retraction is news, so I have no issue with that.

But it doesn’t stop there. Nick Schou at OC Weekly pens a particularly ignorant column: Rand Study On Medical Pot Among Year’s Worst, Scientific American Says (Notice how it magically escalated from “top five retractions” to “among year’s worst”?) which is then positively linked to by the drug czar’s office.

Keith Humphreys goes even further and claims that the retraction means that the finding that “Closing medical marijuana dispensaries increases crime” was “inaccurate” and “false.”

Humphreys bizarrely accuses others of believing that “a retraction is the ultimate confirmation that a study’s results are true” while at the same time ignoring the fact that he has used it as the ultimate confirmation that a study’s results are false.

The retraction of a study means absolutely nothing regarding the truth or falsity of the conclusion, only that the study has now been made irrelevant to that discussion.

An excellent piece on Siobhan Reynolds and her importance to the field of pain relief in Time Magazine by Maia Szalavitz.

Why, she asked, when opioids can help treat chronic pain, are they frequently only available to the dying—but not if your agony will last years? Why, when addiction to opioids is actually rare, do we treat them as though everyone who takes these drugs is likely to get instantly hooked? And why do we seem to see addiction—even in the dying— as a worse side effect than agony or even death?

Sabet’s latest article is in the New York Times: Overdosing on Extremism

… extremists on both sides have taken over the conversation. Unless we change the tone of the debate to give drug-policy centrists a voice, America’s drug problem will only get worse.

The problem is, Kevin is clueless when it comes to defining extremism. He seems to think that the extremes are “legalization” and “enforcement only”:

a few tough-on-crime conservatives and die-hard libertarians dominate news coverage and make it appear as if legalizing drugs and “enforcement only” strategies were the only options

Here’s the problem with his argument. Legalization isn’t an extreme. It is, rather, an entire range of options — essentially all of the options available to society except for the single destructive and failed policy of prohibition (where drug distribution is put in the hands of criminals).

Sabet is looking for nuances in the policy of criminal drug distribution, and that’s just absurd.

Legalization is where you find the centrists. Take a look at LEAP, for example. Many LEAP members are opposed to drug use and strongly advocate extensive regulation of drugs. That’s certainly not the free-for-all libertarian model that Kevin Sabet seems to imagine to be the entire legalization world.

Legalization encompasses a wide range of options. Certainly not everyone here has the same view of how legalization should look — only that the extremist position of prohibition is dangerous and destructive.

Kevin should read Transform’s Blueprint for Regulation for a fine centrist view of drug policy.

And as far as Sabet’s bizarre implication that legalization isn’t worth discussing since the public doesn’t support it, in fact the public supports it surprisingly well considering the decades of lies they’ve been fed by “public servants” like Kevin Sabet.

Happy New Year!

Glenn Greenwald has a comprehensive must-read election piece about the problems with progressives who put all criticism of Barack Obama off-limits and dismiss Ron Paul out-of-hand.

Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies

Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform — certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party — who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote — Barack Obama — advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.

Greenwald also mentions the war on drugs numerous times in this powerful piece. For example, on Obama:

He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason.

And he explains why some progressives react so vehemently against Paul…

The parallel reality — the undeniable fact — is that all of these listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates, only by Ron Paul. For that reason, Paul’s candidacy forces progressives to face the hideous positions and actions of their candidate, of the person they want to empower for another four years.

Excellent critical analysis in an election season of sound-bites and partisan politics.

After all, you can’t load it in the back of a truck, or sneak it out after dark. But apparently motel theft isn’t as unlikely as you might think.

Tewksbury Owner Fights Feds’ Attempt To Seize Alleged Drug Motel

Caswell’s lawyers say a comparable amount of drug activity happens at any budget motel, but the Motel Caswell was seen as an easier candidate for forfeiture because it is not part of a large chain. It’s also family-owned and mortgage-free, says Scott Bullock, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a Washington, D.C., libertarian public interest law firm representing Caswell.

While criminal forfeiture laws require someone to be convicted of a crime before property can be taken, civil forfeiture allows prosecutors to take properties without convicting anyone.

So what’s the deal, here, has the owner been involved in drug trafficking? No.

Have the police been repeatedly asking the owner to help them stop drug trafficking at the motel?

Caswell said he has tried repeatedly to get information from police about drug activity, but they always tell him they can’t talk about investigations.

So, no.

They just want to seize the motel from him, sell it, and pocket a cool million.

That’s how you steal a motel in broad daylight.

As many of you know, I find the decision written by Justice Stevens in Caballes v. Illinois to have the jurisprudential value of the what comes out of the other end of the sniffer in question.

At the time, some of the more level-headed realized that this was a potential future nightmare, with police using dogs to sniff around parked cars, and even homes. Yep. That’s what they want to do in Florida.

Scott Greenfield’s Simple Justice has an excellent post: A Sniff Too Far that also contains reactions from Orin Kerr at Volokh.

[Kerr] The question is, does the Caballes rule apply when the dog is brought to the front door of a home rather than a car? A divided Florida Supreme Court ruled in Jardines v. State that Caballes does not apply and that probable cause is required to bring the dog up to the home for a sniff.

[Greenfield] Florida is seeking cert, so this may come before the Supremes. While most of us would hope that if the Supreme Court grabs hold of this case, it would use it to backdoor out of Caballes on the basis of dog sniffs being unworthy of constituting probable cause.

It certainly would be nice to think that, particularly armed with the new studies regarding the unreliability of dog sniffs, a new case at the Supremes would make them reconsider and throw away Caballes (Stevens is gone, after all).

On the other hand, if the Supremes continue to follow the drug war exception to the Bill of Rights, we could soon be faced with an army of cops with dogs going door to door, knocking on doors to helpfully ask if everything’s OK or whether there’s been any suspicious activity in the neighborhood, inevitably followed by “What’s that, Fido? You say you smell some marijuana residue?”