Drug WarRant

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?”

Ron Paul: Drug War In U.S. Has Racist Origins by Ryan Grim in the Huffington Post.

Gary Johnson Goes Full Libertarian: “I am excited. I am liberated. And I am committed to shaking the system as it has never been shaken before.” Mike Riggs at Reason reports on Gary Johnson’s official entry into the Libertarian Party nomination race.

In this article: Legalization a Controversial Weapon in Mexico’s Drug War, we find the usual talk about Latin American leaders calling for discussions of legalization, and Kerlikowse’s nonsense rebuttals.

But I enjoyed the go-it-alone suggestion:

This has led some advocates to suggest Mexico should go it alone. At the very least, they say, allowing drug production and sale in Mexico would relieve law enforcement of the obligation to fight cartels.

According to Castaneda, that would make stopping the flow of drugs – and the violence that goes with it – the US’s problem.

‘You don’t have to do it,’ he said. ‘You tell the Americans, you guys do it, if you’re so excited about this. But we don’t have to do it anymore because it’s not the law in Mexico.”

That would sure ruffle some feathers.

If that were to happen, it would be interesting to see how quickly some ignorant Representative from the southern states called for a military invasion of Mexico.

Sad news. Pain treatment advocate and leader of the Pain Relief Network Siobhan Reynolds was killed this weekend in a plane crash.

See Radley Balko’s excellent post on Siobhan along with his links to others who have written tributes.

I never got to meet her, although I corresponded with her on occasion, and she liked Drug WarRant. She was absolutely tireless in her advocacy and made a real and lasting difference. Much of the national awareness of the government imposed deficit in pain relief is due to Siobhan Reynolds’ efforts.

She’ll be missed.

DEA, IRS give local police ‘holiday gift’ from confiscated drug money

OAKLAND — Federal agents issued the ultimate stocking stuffer Thursday when they gave more than $1.2 million in drug money confiscated from a former Hayward medical marijuana store to five Bay Area police agencies.

Defy the will of local citizens, ignore state law, and give your true allegiance to the feds and ye shall be richly rewarded.