Drug WarRant

Fernando Henrique Cardoso must be reading my blog…

Amsterdam, November 22, 2011 – “Would legal regulation and control of drugs better protect children?” is a question posed by former President of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso in an editorial to be published in the January issue of Elsevier’s International Journal of Drug Policy (IJDP).

The editorial, “Children and drug law reform” follows the March 2011 report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, chaired by Cardoso, which made a series of recommendations for reforms of drug laws, including experiments with legal regulation and control.

“If we believe that the best interests of the child should be a primary consideration in all policies that affect them, as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, then children have the right to be placed front and centre in drug policy discussions”, writes the former president.

Recognising the harms that have befallen children and young people around the world due to drugs prohibition, and the failure of current approaches to protect children from drug use and drug related harms, Cardoso calls for debate on a range of issues including what legal regulation and control of drugs would mean for children.

“I am convinced that the recommendations of the Global Commission will have significant benefits for children and young people,” he writes, “I would not support such policies if I did not believe that current approaches have singularly failed in this respect.” […]

“To protect children from drugs it is to my mind now beyond debate that drug laws need to be reformed. From what we already know, the ongoing and future identified harms of current drug policies to our children must be considered not as unintended, but a result of negligence, recklessness or simple disregard,” concludes Cardoso.

“President Cardoso’s editorial is a challenge to politicians, researchers and activists and is a much needed contribution to an important part of the drug policy debate we all too often overlook”, said Professor Gerry Stimson, Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Drug Policy. “This is no doubt a very difficult and controversial area and I wholeheartedly agree with President Cardoso, we need to create an environment where it is safer to openly discuss these issues.”

In the Ottawa Citizen: Kelly Egan: Pot problem: parents won’t go for legalization

Ordinary people are not going to read academic studies, unravel complex science on addictions, or solve a harm-benefit equation.

They are probably going to ask themselves: Would you buy a bag of weed and give it to your teenager?

The hell you would, Mom and Dad.

One afternoon this week, I sat down with a mother who wanted to quietly scream about the media’s depiction of marijuana as a soft, even helpful drug, that the state should legalize and control.

She has a son, 20. He began using marijuana when he was about 14. It soon turned into daily use, sometimes before school. So school became a problem.

“He just seemed so spaced out all the time,” said his mother, a 50-ish federal public servant. “He became very secretive about where he was going.”

Within a couple of years, he was dealing. Then he was expelled.

He was a good athlete, but gave up sports, gave up his sports friends and soon ran with another crowd. It changed the whole dynamic of the family.

“I would dread coming home at night because I didn’t know who I’d find there.”

Not a completely unfamiliar story. And there is so much going on in there that requires thoughtful analysis, particularly when you learn more about him…

The boy grew up in a middle-class suburb, with many advantages. He was taken to counsellors, psychologists, doctors. He couldn’t seem to stick with a program. His parents have joined support groups and sought help from the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre.

The boy has an older brother, who is thriving. It vexes the mother how one could be so focused and the other so lacking in motivation.

The young man suffers from depression.

Is this a story about marijuana abuse or something else entirely? Seems to me that there were a number of issues here and that marijuana may have just been a symptom reliever.

So what’s the conclusion from the author of the article?

And, in a nutshell, that is why state-control of marijuana will probably never happen. Because an ordinary citizen, a garden-variety parent, does not want to be party to the creation of a nation of young pot-heads. Period.

Really? Is that what we learn from this story?

Is prohibition why the older brother didn’t abuse marijuana? How did prohibition help the younger brother? It seems to me that all his problems happened under prohibition. So why is that an argument against legalization?

He dealt marijuana and hung out with that crowd. Would that have happened if marijuana was legal?

Wouldn’t legal marijuana have an age restriction?

It baffles me that people continue to look at the drug problems under prohibition and list them as reasons why legalization would be bad. There’s no evidence that legalization would exacerbate these prohibition-related problems and plenty of evidence that we’d have a better chance of helping people who abuse drugs without the sledge hammer of prohibition.

Every time one of these parents comes forward we need to ask why they support having criminals control the drug market.

How does that help their children?

Have a wonderful day and spend a little time enjoying some turkey instead of dealing with them.

…

This is an opportunity, however – you have a group ready to be converted to drug policy reform.

• When the subject turns to health care, you can say “I think the government should give heroin away for free!” Great conversation starter.
• Or head over to the kids table and ask them whether the drug dealers at school check for age I.D. when selling them marijuana.
• When the adults are stuffed after the huge dinner, are sitting in the easy chairs and have eyelids drooping from all the tryptophan in their system, ask them what makes them any better than lazy potheads.
• Offer to give grace before the meal and then give thanks that none of your family have been decapitated by drug lords in Mexico or shot by drug gangs, that none of you are serving time in prison, and that you’re not black, so you’re less likely to be a target. (If you are black, then give thanks that they haven’t found you yet.)
• Offer to pour the wine, and as you do so, ask each person first “Hey, you want some drugs?”
• When everyone’s watching TV, take bets on how many drug commercials will be shown.

[Important note: the above suggestions may not work with all Thanksgiving gatherings. Use discretion.]

Or… you could simply find a time in conversation to say… “This year, I’ve been studying drug policy and have learned a lot about what’s going wrong with our current policies. Is anyone else interested in this subject?”

Cop Says Marijuana Legalization Could Cause Window Washers to Fall From Large Buildings and Land on People

… because you pretty much filled the last one.

Thanks for all the help on model trains. We think we’ve got it worked out. We’ll be going with n-scale due to the extremely limited space.

And by the way, I spent the last two days at my Dad’s working on getting broadband and wireless ordered for him. It’ll be installed soon, so the next time I visit, I won’t have to be so long out of touch!

Are you familiar with CNTPO? I wasn’t either. Maybe by its full name: The Defense Department’s Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office. Nope? Me neither.

Pentagon’s War on Drugs Goes Mercenary

An obscure Pentagon office designed to curb the flow of illegal drugs has quietly evolved into a one-stop shop for private security contractors around the world, soliciting deals worth over $3 billion.

This is the kind of thing we constantly face — pots of money and power all over the place that depend on the drug war (as well as the war on terror and other such never-ending wars).

The office, known as CNTPO, is all but unknown, even to professional Pentagon watchers. It interprets its counternarcotics mandate very, very broadly, leaning heavily on its implied counterterrorism portfolio. And it’s responsible for one of the largest chunks of money provided to mercenaries in the entire federal government.

Mercs. Drug War. Terrorism. Funding. What a combination.

For the vast majority of people who’ve never heard of CNTPO, the organization answers to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Low-Intensity Conflict Directorate, within the Counternarcotics and Global Threats portfolio. It’s tucked away so deep, bureaucratically speaking, that it doesn’t actually have an office at the Pentagon.

The organization, run by a civilian named Mike Strand, has been around since 1995. In 2007, it made a big push into contracting, hiring the Blackwater subsidiary U.S. Training Center as well as defense giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and ARINC for “a wide range of Defense counternarcotics activities,” according to a statement provided to Danger Room by the agency. That award, which has doled out $4.3 billion so far, is the precursor to the current bid. […]

In its new contract, the office explicitly stakes out a broad definition of its mandate: “to disrupt, deter, and defeat the threat to national security posed by illicit trafficking in all its manifestations: drugs, small arms and explosives, precursor chemicals, people, and illicitly-gained and laundered money.” It declares its practices “beyond traditional DoD acquisition and contracting scopes.”

Visiting relatives this week and my first stop will have no WiFi and very little G3. Posting will be light for a few days.

Talk amongst yourselves (not that I need to tell some of you that).

….

Bleg for any model train enthusiasts out there…

Looking for help in getting a starter electric train set for someone who really likes trains, is retired, has very limited space, and has a very limited income. He has done a lot of scroll saw work (can handle small detail very well and has patience), but is pretty much done with that and looking to possibly switch hobbies. (And anyone reading this who knows who I’m talking about, keep quiet – this is a secret.)

Should I look at an N-guage set because it’ll take up less space and he’d be able to do more complex set-ups on a standard table? Should I go H0 because it’s more common and easier to get stuff for it? Something else? Recommendations on a starter set or brand?

One of the entrenched problems of the drug war is there are so many pots of money and power that can be tapped that too many people have a shot of getting some for themselves.

Senator Jim Webb is greatly admired by those of us in the drug policy reform community for his tireless work trying to institute a blue-ribbon commission “to look at every aspect of our criminal justice system with an eye toward reshaping the criminal justice system from top to bottom.”

While the commission was recently shot down in the Senate on 10th Amendment concerns(!), Webb has never wavered in his commitment to criminal justice reform.

As he’s noted: “Irregularities and inequities in America’s criminal justice system challenge our notions of fundamental fairness.”

A great guy to have in the Senate, right?

And yet…

Webb seeks to include all SW Va. counties in federal drug designation

The inclusion of those three localities followed a February request by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., to have all 13 Southwest Virginia counties included in the designation.

In a letter addressed to Office of National Drug Control Policy Director Gil Kerlikowske, Webb requested that the review of the remaining counties be expedited to ensure fairness.

“In order to ensure basic fairness in the application of federal resources, I ask that you expedite the inclusion of the remaining 10 Southwest Virginia counties into the Appalachia HIDTA,” Webb wrote in the Oct. 31 letter. “The continuation of Appalachia HIDTA into all 13 Southwest Virginia communities will allow the Appalachia HIDTA to assist the local communities unduly burdened by this regional epidemic, in order to effectively locate and eradicate these systemic drug networks.”

Now what’s the advantage of being designated a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA)? Federal funding.

And how is that funding most commonly used? Creating a multi-agency drug task force.

And from whence do many of the “irregularities and inequities in America’s criminal justice system” that “challenge our notions of fundamental fairness” stem? You guessed it. Drug task forces.

Not only do multi-agency drug task forces lead to systemic abuse, they aren’t particularly good use of funds, as indicated in an audit of the program.

While many task forces are effective, they are too often assembled indiscriminately. Some task forces in the five sites reviewed were put together to address circumstances where an absence of coordination among enforcement agencies was clearly identified as an obstacle to effective enforcement. But such task forces appeared to be the exception more than the norm. More often, it seemed, task forces were created on the assumption that having personnel from different agencies work together would necessarily improve enforcement. Given that individual agencies have distinct operational approaches, procedures, organizational cultures, and esprit de corps, this is not always the case.

Moreover, even task forces that are successful at promoting law enforcement coordination may not always represent the best use of HIDTA resources. At least some of the coordination that occurs under the auspices of HIDTA task forces would take place without HIDTA funding and designation. HZDTA did not invent the idea of coordination among law enforcement agencies, nor is HIDTA the exclusive patron of such efforts.

But to Senator Jim Webb, it’s another source of funding for his constituents that is very popular with law enforcement.

Everyone wants a piece.

Copenhagen votes to legalise marijuana

Marijuana could soon be legalised in Copenhagen, after the city voted overwhelmingly in favour of a scheme that would see the drug sold through a network of state-run shops and cafes.

The scheme, if approved by the Danish parliament at the start of next year, could make the city the first to fully legalise, rather than simply tolerate, marijuana consumption. […]

“We are thinking of perhaps 30 to 40 public sales houses, where the people aren’t interested in selling you more, they’re interested in you,” said Mikkel Warming, the Mayor in charge of Social Affairs at Copenhagen City Council. “Who is it better for youngsters to buy marijuana from? A drug pusher, who wants them to use more, who wants them to buy hard drugs, or a civil servant?”

I’ve had a life-long dream of going into space. I was at the launch of Apollo 13 and voraciously read science fiction since I was a young boy.

I always thought the shuttle program missed a golden opportunity to help fund itself by having a lottery to win a space on each shuttle. I would have bought lottery tickets. Lots of them.

Now Reason notes that NASA is accepting applications…

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has a need for Astronaut Candidates to support the International Space Station (ISS) Program and future deep space exploration activities.

KEY REQUIREMENTS

Position subject to pre-employment background investigation
This is drug-testing designated position
Frequent travel may be required
Selectee must pass a pre-employment medical examination

Key requirements?

There goes my dream. I won’t apply for a position that requires drug testing on principle. (Not that I’m young enough to be an astronaut anyway, or would have a chance of being in physical shape to do it.)

The odd part to me is that I would assume that the medical examination for an astronaut would be so comprehensive as to know what you had for lunch last week and would certainly know whether you had taken any drugs. It’s the listing of drug testing as a key job requirement that puts it on my do-not-apply list.