Drug WarRant

I hadn’t really taken much notice of this Rick Perry guy. I mean I’d read about him, but I hadn’t actually seen him in action… until now.

Hoo boy.

This is both a dim bulb and a true believer! In this video, he’s convinced that abstinence-only education works, despite all evidence, because to believe otherwise would threaten his world view. Therefore any “facts” that show otherwise are simply… unimportant.

And, in case you missed it, Jon Stewart does an absolutely brilliant take on the media pretending Ron Paul doesn’t exist…

Video removed… but available here

I don’t know why, but Gil Kerliowske seems to have a lot of problem getting words and concepts mixed up. I keep having to fix them.

And now, more than ever, it’s important to recognize that drug use [the drug war] harms every sector of this country. From keeping individual families together, creating a healthy and strong workforce, reducing the economic strain on the criminal justice system, and fostering a safe environment in local communities, tackling America’s substance abuse issues [drug war problem] is vital for winning the future.

There.

The question I’d ask…

President Obama, every time someone asks you about marijuana policy you smirk and chuckle a little. What’s so funny?

Is it the 800,000 Americans arrested each year for doing what you did when you were young?

Or is it the people suffering from cancer and pain who are looking for much-needed relief?

Or perhaps the families who have been terrorized and whose dogs were shot by SWAT teams looking for an ounce of pot?

Or the taxpayers who pay for it all, or the Mexicans who are dying?

Let us in on the joke, Mr. President, so we can laugh, too.

15 of Today’s Biggest Advocates Against the Drug War and Police Brutality

Ethan Nadelmann
George Soros
Norm Stamper
Neill Franklin
Howard Wooldridge
Stephen Downing
Joseph D. McNamara
Leigh Maddox
Walter Cronkite
Gary Johnson
Carl Dix
De Lacy Davis
Copwatch
The Black Panther Party
Cory Doctorow

I’m not sure I get it.

“A lot of states are making decisions about medical marijuana. As a controlled substance, the issue is then that is it being prescribed by a doctor as opposed to… you know, well, I’ll leave it at that.“

Thank you, Mr. President. That’s the kind of bold leadership we’ve been seeking.

Video

Radley Balko’s title shows just how bizarre this is…

Sage, chocolate chip cookies, deodorant, billiards chalk, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap, patchouli, spearmint, eucalyptus, breath mints . . . . . . and now, motor oil.

In April, Janet Goodin of Warroad, Minn., was crossing into Canada for an evening of bingo with her daughters when an officer with the Canadian Border Service conducted a routine search of her van. The officer found an old bottle of motor oil, did a field test and told her that it contained heroin. […]

The motor oil was sent to a Canadian federal laboratory, which eventually determined there was no heroin in it. After 12 days behind bars, Goodin was released.

Given how often these field tests false-positive on such a wide range of substances, it is absolutely unconscionable to jail people based solely on field tests.

How do they give 12 days back to this woman?

There are two main reasons to support prohibition.

1. You are corrupt. You support it because you make money off it, or it gives you power or status, despite the damage it causes to society and people.
2. You actually believe that prohibition is necessary to protect society and people.

This post isn’t for the people in #1. They shall have their own reward, and be first against the wall when the revolution comes suffer the fate of The Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

This is about the second category: people who think prohibition is protecting society and the people, and that legalization (in any form or scheme) would result in some amount of increased damage.

Here’s the problem with their view:

The whole thing rides on a balancing act between:

1. An uncertain and unknowable increased amount of problem usage of a particular drug due to legalization of any sort…. and
2. All the known damage caused by our present prohibition scheme (violence, black market profits, enormous criminal justice costs and backlog, corruption in government and law enforcement, lack of trust in police, attacks on liberty, increased dangers of drug use, lack of regulation, damage to individuals and families, etc.)

In order to make this argument, the supporters of prohibition have to claim that (a) would be of greater damage to society than (b). That’s a pretty strong claim. Especially when they have NO data to support it.

It all boils down to claims made based on “common sense” or what appears to actually be their gut instinct or bias.

Common sense tells you that legal cocaine would be used and abused as much as alcohol.

Well, no. It doesn’t. Nor does any of the data that we do have.

Of course, when we point to Portugal, or Amsterdam, we’re told that that’s not a true picture of legalization, since those countries haven’t actually fully legalized any drugs.

Exactly. Nobody has. Nobody has been allowed to do so. So there is no data to show what would actually happen in the case of legalization. At least we can point to actual data from halfway measures to bolster our case. All the prohibitionist can do is point to “common sense” that has been pulled from some nether region.

If anyone truly believes that they want what’s best for society, the path is clear. Vague claims of uncertain futures are simply not enough.

Give us our laboratory.

“To stay experimentation in things social and economic is a grave responsibility. Denial of the right to experiment may be fraught with serious consequences to the Nation. It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” – Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis

If you, in your support for prohibition, truly believe that you’re right, then you shouldn’t fear the laboratory, whether it’s the laboratory of a single state, or a single country.

We have given you a world-wide exclusive laboratory for decades to try prohibition. Unless you can give better proof of its efficacy, and data regarding alternatives, then you cannot in good conscience deny a laboratory for legalization.

If you do, then it seems certain that you are in category 1, not category 2.

The corrupt have plenty of good reasons to fight against a laboratory. Imagine the thought processes behind the fact that the DEA has, for decades provided full government-grown quality-controlled and tracked marijuana to a handful of patients through the Compassionate IND program, and yet, they never showed a single bit of interest in studying those patients.

The corrupt aren’t interested in science, or the data from a laboratory. All they’re interested in is preserving their structure, regardless of the cost to society.

Give us a laboratory. Start small – pass the Barney Frank/Ron Paul bill to end the federal ban on marijuana. It won’t legalize marijuana (it’s still illegal in the states), but it will allow some courageous state to step up and try it. And then we can learn.

I maintain that if you don’t support the laboratory, you are corrupt. Convince me that I’m wrong.

What if other scientific fields were handled the way we handle prohibition vs. legalization?

For almost 2,000 years, bloodletting was a medical practice performed to balance the humors in the body, and to thereby cure or prevent disease. In most cases, it was harmful to patients (although the “doctors” of the time didn’t think so), and it almost completely unused today.

Imagine bloodletting as the main medical practice today and some scientists tried to appeal for alternatives…

Scientist: We’re concerned that a lot of patients are dying and that bloodletting isn’t doing much to help them; may even be hurting them.

Barber/Doctor: Nonsense! Bloodletting is curing many people, but can’t save them all. Just imagine how many more would have died if we didn’t do bloodletting, or if we tried your “medical” techniques.

Scientist: Well, we don’t know, do we, since you won’t let us try any other medical techniques. Just let us have a laboratory, so we can see if alternatives to bloodletting can work.

Barber/Doctor: You must be high on cheese mold. Here, let me bleed you and get rid of some of those bad humors you have.

Back up to Chicago again. In addition to Flashback Weekend Chicago Horror Convention on behalf of New Millennium Theatre Company

How Tanning Changes the Brain

People who frequently use tanning beds experience changes in brain activity during their tanning sessions that mimic the patterns of drug addiction, new research shows.

Scientists have suspected for some time that frequent exposure to ultraviolet radiation has the potential to become addictive, but the new research is the first to actually peer inside the brains of people as they lay in tanning beds.

No surprise. The real surprise is that people get bent out of shape because of getting “high” with drugs, when they do it all the time with things like chocolate, exercise, religious experiences, sex, and vacations.

Two views on drug policy

Mark Kleiman writes:

The BBC interviews me, and Joe Arpaio. At most one of us is making sense. See if you can figure out which one. […]

BBC “The World Today”

Um, well, I often disagree with Mark, and I haven’t even viewed this clip, but if I’ve got to make a choice between Mark and Joe Arpaio making sense, it’s a no-brainer – I’ll go with Kleiman.

Swatting – new form of prank.

SWAT teams have become so widespread that people across the country (and even Canada.) are calling in false reports designed to elicit a SWAT raid–a practice known as “swatting.” Naturally, this is causing some distress among the SWAT teams who have been punked in such a manner, as UPI reports:

In Wyckoff, N.J., 40 members of a Bergen County Police Department SWAT team responded July 23 to a call from a man who said he had killed four people and taken several others hostage. After throwing tear gas through windows, the SWAT team members found only a cat.

While such pranks are dangerous, they’re probably also a natural response to the mass-produced SWAT raiding that goes on today, and should be a wake-up call to police agencies to do a little more research before busting down a door.

Might cut down on a whole bunch of these wrong-address raids as well (Of course, that would mean that they’d have to stop using SWAT 4 times a day and maybe just reserve it for situations that actually call for the use of militarized force).

The UNODC discusses some rather significant money laundering…

More than one trillion dollars: this is the staggering amount of money probably laundered annually in recent years, says Pierre Lapaque, chief of the section dealing with organized crime and money-laundering at UNODC. In 1998, the International Monetary Fund estimated this figure to be the equivalent of between two and five per cent of global GDP, and UNODC considers that such a range remains plausible today, says Lapaque.

That’s a lot. Where’s it from?

“We cannot separate drug money from crime money – it’s all dirty money,” explains Lapaque. “It’s a huge flow but we cannot make precise estimates. Let me put it this way: you have to identify the stream of illicit money before it joins the rivers of global financial flows. That’s the crux of the problem in making estimates.”

Hmmm…. I bet you I could come up with a way to separate drug money from crime money…

There have been some problems with the site in the past few days. I thought the server was intermittently down, but the tech guys at DreamHost say that the site had been getting quite a few memory spikes (this was Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning).

The overall 5 minute memory use averages are quite low compared to my maximum, so there should be no problem, but apparently very quick, even millisecond, spikes were causing the server to shut down temporarily, thus freezing the site.

At their suggestion, I’ve implemented some additional caching to the site that should make pages load faster, but that shouldn’t have caused spiking. I think the problem is over for now, but I’m still not sure what caused it.

Please let me know if you continue to have issues.

Thanks.