Drug WarRant

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.

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!