Drug WarRant

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.

There’s an important new book out by Damon Barrett called “Children of the Drug War,” available at Amazon, but also available to read for free online (it’s that important).

This collection of original essays looks at the impact of the war on drugs on children, young people and their families.

I knew right away in the introduction that the book was taking us in the right direction.

To begin with there is a basic need to take stock—to count the costs. This necessitates a closer look at what really matters in terms of outcomes. Indeed, it is the way in which “success” has been measured in drug control that has led to some of the strongest criticism. The number of people who use drugs, the amount of kilos of drugs seized, prosecutions secured, and hectares of illicit crops eradicated are some of the key indicators in this regard. But while these indicators can be useful, they are, for the most part, indicators of means, not ends. This is not often recognized, and in the prominence given to such measurements, drug control has, over time, become self-referential and self-perpetuating; a positive feedback loop in which the fight against drugs is an end in itself.

Counting the costs to children is about breaking that loop as the process of investigating the harms of the war on drugs can help to delineate between means and ends and provide an insight into the question of meaningful outcomes. Children’s and families’ involvement in drug production and trade, for example, is a mix of coercive forces, often driven or even necessitated by poverty and social neglect. These drivers are all but ignored and even exacerbated by current drug policies that focus on eradication and interdiction, as some of the chapters in this book show.

I haven’t read the whole thing yet – just got the link to it today and wanted to share it with you as soon as possible. Here’s Javier, from Colombia:

The planes often sprayed our community. People would get very sad when they saw the fumigation planes. You see the planes coming—four or five of them—from far away with a black cloud of spray behind them. They say they are trying to kill the coca, but they kill everything. I wish the people flying those fumigation planes would realize all the damage they do. I wish they’d at least look at where they’re going to spray, rather than just spraying anywhere and everywhere. The fumigation planes sprayed our coca and food crops. All of our crops died. Sometimes even farm animals died as well. After the fumigation, we’d go days without eating. Once the fumigation spray hit my little brother and me. We were outside and didn’t make it into the house before the planes flew by. I got sick and had to be taken to the hospital. I got a terrible rash that itched a lot and burned in the sun. The doctor told us the chemical spray was toxic and was very dangerous. I was sick for a long time and my brother was sick even longer.

We were fumigated five times. I don’t think they will ever stop fumigating. They’ll keep fumigating because there’s still coca. They say they won’t stop fumigating until all the coca is dead. […]

I know if I go back there, I’ll see lots of people get killed. I saw two people killed right in front of me; Rebecca and her brother. They lived close by us. The guerrillas had been looking for Rebecca and caught her while she was with her brother. I was standing close by and saw the whole thing. They made them get down on their knees. They shot them many times in the head with machine guns, picked up their dead bodies, put them in chairs, put bags over their heads, and left.

Children of the Drug War. Counting the Costs.

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Reading this brought to mind the struggle I had with the latest addition to my CafePress store. As I was designing this car magnet, the phrase just popped into my head, and seemed right.

I just got a note from my Mom, who is 89. She reads Drug WarRant every now and then to keep up with what I’m doing. She said:

Did you create this: “The Drug War Doesn’t Care About the Life of your Child. Legalize and Regulate for Safety.”? That’s an excellent message which will require some thought…

Couldn’t ask for a better recommendation.

Children of the Drug War. Counting the Costs.

Here are the key statistics from the latest Angus Reid Public Opinion Poll.

• 55% support the legalization of marijuana, with greatest support from:
• Democrats: 63%
• Independents: 61%
• Men: 57%
• Aged 35-54: 57%
• 67% think the “War on Drugs” has been a failure… however
• Only 10% support legalizing ecstasy
• 9% powder cocaine
• 8% heroin
• 7% meth
• 7% crack cocaine
• 64% think America has a serious drug abuse problem that affects the whole country

There are some important points we can gather from this:

1. Democrats (the voters) support marijuana legalization, even though Democrats (the politicians) do not. The challenge here is to get it to rise to more than support, but a crucial voting issue.
2. We’ve done a great job of demonstrating the failures of the drug war to the citizens, but we still have a long way to go to convince them that legalization of all drugs isn’t surrender, but a solution.
3. If close to 2/3 of Americans think that we have a serious drug abuse problem, then we, as reformers, need to do a better job of showing how reform can address that problem.

Drug Czar ‘Too Busy” to Meet With Fellow Cops – by Norm Stamper

Norm sends a letter to Gil Kerlikowske:

Subject: You Can Run But You Can’t Hide

We didn’t just drop by on June 14, Gil. We had sent emails and made phone calls asking for a meeting. Our requests went unanswered. So we decided to show up in person, and hope for an audience.

Instead, you sent your aide downstairs to head us off in the lobby. The man graciously accepted the report, promised to deliver it to you, and to convey our request that you get back to us with your reactions.

Just curious, have you read it? […]

But we weren’t there to ask for money, Gil. And we do understand that you haven’t the authority to change laws.

Our expectation was that you’d at least be willing to have a grownup conversation about our drug laws. […]

We’ve come by our anti-drug war views honestly, through scholarship, research and real-world experience. Our point of view is increasingly in alignment with that of citizen-taxpayers across the country.

We’re not going away, Gil. Talk to us.

Day Laborers Tricked Into Harvesting Pot; Get Prison Time at Toke of the Town

Federal prosecutors are wrapping up a weak case against 11 men charged with cultivating thousands of marijuana plants in Ohio. The state’s former top cop claimed it’s an example of cartel-sponsored drug production, but defense attorneys point out that many of the defendants were day laborers who were tricked into harvesting the illegal crop. […]

For instance, Leonel Mondragon-Garcia got a call on his cellphone offering “a day’s work” with no details, according to his attorney, Margaret Quinn. He was driven to a rural wooded area north of the Muskingum River and learned he was expected to help harvest a field of marijuana.

Just about the time he figured out he was trapped of the day, police raided the grow camp, arresting Mondragon-Garcia and 10 others, according to Quinn.

The 29-year-old spent several months in jail before pleading guilty to conspiracy to “knowingly and intentionally manufacture” more than 1,000 marijuana plants. He was given 12 months and one day in prison, after which he’ll be deported to Mexico.

Must make the DEA and the federal prosecutors feel good knowing they’re able to stick it to someone like that.

War and Memory by John Sinclair

A nice, but sad piece, about concert venues, the drug war, and asset forfeiture abuse.

Sometimes, while looking through newsreader headlines for articles that might be of interest, you find some rather unusual things, like this one:

Drug Charge: Woman In Nude Ear Squat Case Goes Free

I read the article. I still have no idea.

Poor federal government with its limited resources to communicate policy. They’re absolutely powerless when confronted by the daunting media machine of marijuana legalizers.

That appears to be the point of Keith Humphreys’ bizarre government-as-victim post about the DOJ’s medical marijuana policies.

Could it be that the administration has been hypocritical about marijuana policy, intentionally vague about enforcement, completely anti-science, and trying to have it both ways (appearing to be pro-science progressives while really being anti-science shills of the pharmaceutical and law enforcement lobbies)?

Naw. Must be the fault of the legalizers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBOXUjHhrVM&feature=player_profilepage

…

Also, see Gary Johnson’s OpEd in The Washington Times: JOHNSON: Hitting the cartels where it hurts

Imagine you are a drug lord in Mexico, making unfathomable profits sending your illegal product to the United States. What is the headline you fear the most? “U.S. to build bigger fence”? “U.S. to send troops to the border”? “U.S. to deploy tanks in El Paso”? No. None of those would give you much pause. They would simply raise the level of difficulty and perhaps cause you to escalate the violence that already has turned the border region into a war zone. But would they stop you or ultimately hurt your bottom line? Probably not.

But what if that drug lord opened his newspaper and read this: “U.S. to legalize and regulate marijuana”? That would ruin his day, and ruin it in a way that could not be fixed with more and bigger guns, higher prices or more murder.

You may disagree with his political approach of talking about ending the whole drug war but focusing only on marijuana policy, but you can’t deny that he’s doing an outstanding job of focusing on the anti-drug-war message in his campaign.

Update: You know how practically every mainstream article about marijuana or drug policy has that ubiquitous and anachronistic graphic of the fingers holding a large lit doobie?

Well, I was fascinated by the graphic that was used instead in the Washington Times OpEd. Much more interesting and relevant.

It’s “Legalization” by Alexander Hunter for The Washington Times.

It appears to be a graphic showing that under criminalization, there is an inevitable link between marijuana and huge black-market profits, which then leads to blood and violence. And the scissors and dotted line indicates legalization severing that connection.

An outstanding editorial from the Chicago Tribune puts some much-needed sanity in the government-fueled hysteria over “drugged driving.”

Someone who drinks to excess and gets behind the wheel of a car can be prosecuted and punished for driving under the influence. Everyone would agree that’s as it should be. But what if the law included DUI to cover anyone driving sober who has had a drink in the last week?

That would make little sense, since the past drinking would have no effect on the motorist’s fitness to drive. But under Illinois law, something very similar is the norm for drivers who have used illegal drugs. […]

But it’s still possible to detect impairment through field sobriety. Potheads may reek of weed. A driver caught on videotape mumbling incoherently would have a hard time arguing the dope in his urine had no effect. In these cases, an officer can request a blood or urine sample — with refusal leading to license suspension.

When felony charges are involved, the law ought to require a showing that the drug in question contributed to the crash. Motorists involved in fatal accidents who have drugs in their bodies should at least have the chance to rebut the presumption that they were impaired.

Driving under the influence is a crime that deserves strict enforcement and stern punishment. Driving long after being under the influence is not the same thing, and it shouldn’t be treated as though it were.

Let’s hope that we see more of this kind of sanity. It’s time for the drug czar’s ugly and fact-free push for per se drugged driving laws to get ridiculed and to stop getting a free pass from the press.