Drug WarRant

Update:

Taking swift action, a federal district court judge last night granted an ACLU request and temporarily halted an unconstitutional policy at a public college in Missouri requiring all incoming students to submit to mandatory drug tests. Judge Nanette K. Laughrey ordered officials at Linn State Technical College in Jefferson City, Mo., to stop analyzing urine specimens that have already been collected and to instruct the drug testing company not to release any results it may have already compiled.

The ACLU is on fire.

Got Urine? ACLU Sues College Over Mandatory Drug Testing

Today the ACLU filed suit in federal court to stop Linn State Technical College, a public college in Missouri, from drug testing all of their incoming students with no suspicion of wrongdoing. Six brave students have stood up to administrators to demand that their Fourth Amendment rights not be violated, and that this senseless intrusion must end. […]

Our complaint demands that Linn State rescind their unconstitutional drug testing policy, refrain from testing anymore students, halt any analysis of the urine samples already collected, and return the $50 they charged all students.

But this case goes beyond Linn State. We filed our complaint in federal court not to just stop Linn State, but to stop any other college that thinks they can drug test their student body. It is illegal and they cannot.

Coming right on the heels of taking on the Florida welfare drug testing law, the ACLU is really stepping up to the plate here. These lawsuits are essential.

…

In other drug testing news, Hawaii Teachers Defeat Random Drug Testing

In an agreement reached Monday, the state agreed to end its insistence on random drug and alcohol testing for teachers.

Negotiators for Gov. Abercrombie agreed to the settlement “to avoid further expense and risk of litigation,” according to KITV-4 in Honolulu.

“For the past four years, the HSTA the ACLU have been challenging the random drug testing,” said HSTA President Wil Okabe, who added the issue had become one of teachers’ rights and the constitutionality of random suspicionless drug tests.

Link

Police and FBI agents arrested a drug suspect in Alameda on Wednesday, but not before mistakenly trying to raid a home across the street belonging to a network TV reporter and her political consultant husband.

Harm Reduction International has released a new report: The Death Penalty for Drug Offences: Global Overview 2011

One of the key findings of the report is:

There are likely to be more than a thousand people executed every year for a drug offence and in many environments the majority or even totality are non-nationals of the executing state.

The countries that do the most executing particularly like to execute people who come from other countries (don’t assume that being an American will protect you).

Harm Reduction International points out the state of international law regarding execution, particularly for drug offenses:

The lawful application of capital punishment is significantly restricted under international law. Article 6(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that the penalty of death may only be applied to the ‘most serious crimes’. Over the past twenty-five years UN human rights bodies have interpreted Article 6(2) in a manner that limits the number and type of offences for which execution is allowable under international human rights law. While many retentionist governments argue that drug offences fall under the umbrella of ‘most serious crimes’, this is not the perspective of the UN Human Rights Committee or the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, both of which have stated that drug offences do not constitute ‘most serious crimes’ and that executions for such offences are therefore in violation of international human rights law. This is supported by international State practice given the small minority of countries retaining capital punishment for drugs. In recent years there has also been increasing support for the belief that capital punishment in any form violates the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment, as enshrined in numerous UN and regional human rights treaties, and customary international law.

I’d like to see the UNODC focus more on this area. When UNODC head Yury Fedetov recently visited Iran and praised them effusively for their drug seizures, saying:

“Iran is our important partner in the war on drugs,” he said, adding, it is a “good and reliable” partner for the international community as well.

“We will make efforts to increase international support for Iran,” he added.

Where was the admonishment for their execution of drug offenders in violation of UN law? According to reports (including from Iran government sources) as detailed in the HRI document, Iran executed at least 590 last year for drug offenses and has executed over 10,000 for drug offenses since 1979.

I’ve heard that Kevin Sabet is planning on leaving the Drug Czar’s office next week to take a job in the private sector. He’s been a prime behind-the-scenes player in the ONDCP and is likely to have had a strong hand in the extremely late National Drug Control Strategy.

Kevin’s a bright young opportunist, and has done quite a job of building a career for himself using the drug war as a resume builder. He’s also good at creating catchy sound bites without needing any evidence…

And legalization remains (rightfully) the stuff of dreams (nightmares, really, when you take into account the heavy social costs that would result from a free, commercial market for illegal drugs).

I haven’t heard yet where he’ll be working. What are your guesses?

… but what it can do is get out of the way and let the states experiment if they choose.

But the entire federal government with its President and all his federal agencies and armed forces, along with the entire House of Representatives and Senate, even if they all worked together for the first time in history to use all the power at their command… they could not legalize marijuana.

And yet, I continue to hear people call HR 2306 (Barney Frank’s bill: the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2011) a bill that would legalize marijuana. Even people in Congress. (After the jump I’ve included the rather convoluted letter I got from my Representative Adam Kinzinger.)

So people like my Representative say they’re opposed to HR 2306 because they oppose legalization. But that’s not true, since HR 2306 cannot, by itself, legalize marijuana.

What these people actually oppose is the ability of free citizens in other places to use their Constitutional power to have their state government reflect their interests.
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It is not hard to see how critics of the war on drugs got the impression that Barack Obama was sympathetic to their cause.

Jacob Sullum does a fine job of analyzing Barack Obama’s record so far regarding drug policy, both candidate Obama and President Obama.

Barack Obama turns out to be just another drug warrior.

Kerlikowske’s earnest insistence that you can end the war on drugs if you stop calling it that gives you a sense of the chasm between rhetoric and reality in Obama’s drug policies, which by and large have been remarkably similar to his predecessor’s.

The jury is no longer out. The verdict is clear.

“I initially had high hopes,” says Marsha Rosenbaum, “but now believe Obama has abdicated drug policy to the DEA.”

It would be going too far to say that Obama has been faking it all these years, that he does not really care about the injustices perpetrated in the name of protecting Americans from the drugs they want. But he clearly does not care enough to change the course of the life-wrecking, havoc-wreaking war on drugs.

Sullum ends with a powerful punch:

A misdemeanor marijuana conviction could have been a life-changing event for Obama, interrupting his education, impairing his job prospects, and derailing his political career before it began. It would not have been fair, but it would have spared us the sorry spectacle of a president who champions a policy he once called “an utter failure” and who literally laughs at supporters whose objections to that doomed, disastrous crusade he once claimed to share.

This one’s from last week, but I couldn’t resist passing it on…

A Las Cruces woman has been charged $1,122 by a local hospital for a forcible body cavity search ordered by the Metro Narcotics Agency that did not turn up any illegal substances.

That has to be one of the most surreal sentences ever written.

The Drug Czar has a new website. It appears to be an effort to coordinate all the White House websites, and even all the White House blogs. It looks pretty, but unfortunately is based on the same old propaganda.

If anyone can figure out the new RSS feed for the Drug Czar’s “blog,” let me know. I can’t seem to find it.

A Decade After 9/11, Police Departments Are Increasingly Militarized – Radley Balko with a must-read piece in the Huffington Post.

The problem with this mingling of domestic policing with military operations is that the two institutions have starkly different missions. The military’s job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. Cops are charged with keeping the peace, and with protecting the constitutional rights of American citizens and residents. It’s dangerous to conflate the two. As former Reagan administration official Lawrence Korb once put it, “Soldiers are trained to vaporize, not Mirandize.” That distinction is why the U.S. passed the Posse Comitatus Act more than 130 years ago, a law that explicitly forbids the use of military troops in domestic policing.

Over the last several decades Congress and administrations from both parties have continued to carve holes in that law, or at least find ways around it, mostly in the name of the drug war. And while the policies noted above established new ways to involve the military in domestic policing, the much more widespread and problematic trend has been to make our domestic police departments more like the military.

Viewpoint: Why Tough-Love Rehab Won’t Die by Maia Szalavitz at Time.

On Wednesday, TIME.com reported on the phenomenon of “blood cashews,” nuts produced for export in Vietnamese drug-rehabilitation programs where addicts are forced to perform “labor therapy,” such as sewing clothes, making bricks or, most commonly, shelling cashews.

Last Sunday, the New York Times described Russia’s harsh new treatment camps, where addicts are locked up for as long as a month in “quarantine rooms” to endure withdrawal.

And last week a lawsuit was refiled against a Utah-based school for teens with drug or behavioral problems, with 350 former students alleging that the school engaged in abusive disciplinary tactics like locking students in outdoor dog cages overnight.
Yet, to date, there has been no evidence that the use of forced labor, public humiliation or generally brutal confrontation has ever been effective in rehabilitating people with drug problems — or any other kind of problem, for that matter. What’s more, when tough-love approaches are compared directly with kinder treatment alternatives for addiction, the studies find that compassionate strategies win by a large margin.

So why does the whip-’em-into-shape approach continue to get re-invented around the world?

Interview with Dr. Alex Wodak

We start recognizing that drug users are our brothers and sisters, our daughters and sons, our mothers and fathers, whether we know they are using or not. For that reason in the Netherlands the term they often use for drug users is ‘Dutch citizens who use drugs’ which is a pertinent reminder of the fact that they are still Dutch citizens. This term is used in policy statements. The Dutch are pragmatists and realize that it is always better to regulate the practice that the majority may not like but cannot stamp out. Whether it be gambling, prostitution etc. – if you can’t eradicate it then let it happen but with regulation.

[…]

A study was done comparing South Australia, which had just decriminalized cannabis, to Western Australia, where there were draconian penalties. The WA group were much more likely to have lost a job, accommodation or relationship. They were alienated and very angry. The SA group was much less likely to be in this position. The WA police were horrified and a WA Labor government then altered their policy. The current Barnett government has just gone back to Draconian penalties, even though cannabis use has been in decline.

It is also important to remember that money spent on prosecuting cannabis offenders is money that’s not available for prosecuting rapists, murders and perpetrators of violent crime. My view is that the police have an important role to play and I’d much rather they were solving violent crimes than doing a job in which they can never succeed, regarding illegal drugs.

In a free society it is critical to make sure that law enforcement is properly situated within the organizational structure and that it has strong and transparent systems of control.

In order to combat crime, we cede extraordinary powers to law enforcement which, if abused, could lead to the destruction of our society. That makes it essential that systems exist to insure law enforcement entities are responsive to the people they serve.

Asset forfeiture (particularly as it has expanded under the drug war) undermines the essential structure of a free society by weakening the fiscal authority of the employers (the people).

We’ve already seen how this happens with police agencies shifting their allegiance to the federal government in order to bypass state law and get a big chunk of federal forfeiture dollars that they can control.

Americans for Forfeiture Reform point out how bizarre this has come: What’s wrong with thes story?

Precinct 3 Commissioner John Roth […] asked Sheriff Larry Fowler to use some of his forfeiture funds — from the seizure of cash and property — to rescue the fiscal year 2011-12 general fund, where commissioners seek $2 million in cuts.

“You know we’re in a tough spot,” he said as he confronted the sheriff. “I’m asking you to see how much money could go into the [general fund] budget. How much do you need to keep in reserves?”

[Sheriff] Fowler had told the court he wanted to use the funds — which he estimated at about $350,000 — to augment the low salaries of dispatchers and clerical personnel over the next two years.

“Basically, I have the money to do this,” he said

Wow.

As Americans for Forfeiture Reform note:

The fact that this council has to negotiate with armed men over how public money is spent makes a mockery of America’s founding principles.