Drug WarRant

Former Presidents of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Switzerland, Prime Minister of Greece, Kofi Annan, George Shultz and Paul Volcker Call for Paradigm Shift in Global Drug Policy

The Global Commission on Drug Policy will host a live press conference and teleconference on Thursday, June 2 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City to launch a new report that describes the drug war as a failure and calls for a paradigm shift in global drug policy.

The Commission is the most distinguished group of high-level leaders who have ever called for such far-reaching changes in the way society deals with illicit drugs – such as decriminalization and urging countries to experiment with legal regulation. The Executive Director of the global advocacy organization AVAAZ, with its nine million members worldwide, will present a public petition in support of the Global Commission’s recommendations that will be given to the United Nations Secretary General.

This is very big stuff, if for no other reason than the fact that a group this distinguished can generate significant press coverage and get huge mainstream cred.

If you haven’t signed the petition yet, you can still do so before the press event on Thursday.

There’s a legitimate tendency to be a little pissed about the fact that it seems to take leaving office to see the light (or to have the guts to say so), but our ire does no good aimed at those who are now doing their part. It’s more appropriately targeted at those in office now.

That’s exactly what Mary Ann Seighart does in this excellent OpEd in The Independent: A ‘war’ we should fight no longer.

Before he was President, Obama called the war on drugs an “utter failure” and said we should think about decriminalising cannabis. Before he was Prime Minister, Cameron said Britain’s drug policy was an “abject failure” and called for a debate on legalisation of all drugs. Now that they’re in power, though, both men have had an utter and abject failure of nerve. They agree with the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker, who once said, in this context: “We know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”

They are not just craven but wrong. For, inexorably, the momentum is building for a more rational way of dealing with drugs. And it’s not only because baby-boomers and their successor generations now make up three-quarters of voters. The big hitters are onside too. This week, the Global Commission on Drug Policy will publish a report in New York calling for a “paradigm shift” in the way we deal with drugs. It will advocate not just decriminalisation, but also experiments with legalisation and regulation. Its cast list of backers is stellar. […]

There must be a better way, and Obama and Cameron know it. If they’re serious about representing a new generation, they should stop bragging about their youth and start doing something about it. Those of us who also came of age in the 1980s don’t want to wait till they’re ex-leaders serving on a drugs policy commission.

On the other hand, you have this extremely ignorant screed attempting to preempt the Global Drug Policy announcement:

Should former presidents, prime ministers, economists and the business community decide drugs policy? NO! from the World Federation Against Drugs:

This is what happens when the legalisation movement teams up with strong financial interests pushing the agenda via normalisation, harm reduction, in order to finally reach their goal – legalisation of drugs. Pushing for a health approach is just part of the plan, the idea being that nobody is expected to be against a health approach or harm reduction.

There is every reason to be critical of this so-called “health approach”. To facilitate access to drugs has nothing to do with a “health approach” or harm reduction. It is rather harm production.

Furthermore one might ask – What do former presidents, prime ministers, economists and members of the business community really know about drug addiction?

Well, morons, it’s not about drug addiction, it’s about drug war and drug prohibition policy, and former presidents, prime ministers, economists and members of the business community actually might know something about policy.

And “financial interests for legalisation”? Really? You might want to talk to your board members Robert DuPont and Calvina Fay about their financial interests in prohibition. Those are a couple of folks who know about “harm production.” They’ve been responsible for a whole lot of that in this world.

A rather moving segment featuring Neil Franklin, Executive Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, at a panel discussion at Riverside Church in New York. He is visibly disturbed by what the drug war has done to the people, and by his part in it before understanding its destruction. A very heartfelt mea culpa.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center has released a major new report (that appears to have been prepared at significant expense) titled: The Economic Impact of Illicit Drug Use on American Society 2011

The National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) prepares an annual National Drug Threat Assessment (NDTA) that provides federal policymakers and senior officials with a comprehensive appraisal of the danger that trafficking and use of illicit drugs pose to the security of our nation. To expand the scope of its NDTA, and to provide the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and other federal officials with a broad and deep understanding of the full burden that illicit drug use places on our
country, NDIC has prepared this assessment— The Economic Impact of Illicit Drug Use on American Society. The assessment is conducted within a Cost of Illness (COI) framework that has guided work of this kind for several decades. As such, it monetizes the consequences of illicit drug use, thereby allowing its impact to be gauged relative to other social problems.

In 2007, the cost of illicit drug use totaled more than $193 billion.

$193 billion. In one year? Wow.

How is illicit drug use costing us so much? Let’s look at what they’re including…

• Crime includes three components: criminal justice system costs ($56,373,254,000), crime victim costs ($1,455,555,000), and other crime costs ($3,547,885,000). These subtotal $61,376,694,000.
• Health includes five components: specialty treatment costs ($3,723,338,000), hospital and emergency department costs for nonhomicide cases ($5,684,248,000), hospital and emergency department costs for homicide cases ($12,938,000), insurance administration costs ($544,000), and other health costs ($1,995,164,000). These subtotal $11,416,232,000.
• Productivity includes seven components: labor participation costs ($49,237,777,000), specialty treatment costs for services provided at the state level ($2,828,207,000), specialty treatment costs for services provided at the federal level ($44,830,000), hospitalization costs ($287,260,000), incarceration costs ($48,121,949,000), premature mortality costs (nonhomicide: $16,005,008,000), and premature mortality costs (homicide: $3,778,973,000). These subtotal $120,304,004,000.

Now, you have to read the actual report to understand what they mean by some of those terms above, but are you already starting to get the picture?

The vast majority of those costs are directly attributable to prohibition, not illicit drug use.

Criminal justice costs of $56 billion, for example, include the police, courts, and prisons that enforce drug laws.

And the absolute largest portion of the total costs by far is “lost productivity.” Here’s my favorite: $48 billion attributable to lost productivity due to prison. That’s right, they’re considering it a cost to society that people are not being productive because they’ve been arrested for drug offenses and are in jail. And they attribute this cost to illicit drug use. They even invented a really bizarre-sounding term: drug-induced incarceration.

Now I’ve heard of drug-induced hallucinations before, but drug-induced incarceration? I don’t think so. It takes a law and a judge to induce an incarceration.

Most of the other so-called costs of illicit drug use are equally suspect. Take a look at the lost labor productivity from drug users who aren’t incarcerated. They’ve essentially looked at the income of those who use illicit drugs and compared it to those who don’t and called the difference “lost productivity.” That ignores all sorts of social and class implications related to the status of illicit drugs and also whether drug use drives unemployment or the reverse is true.

Take a look at treatment costs and you’ll find they not only count the cost of treatment, but the cost of lost productivity for those in treatment, and yet treatment may be not a result of illicit drug addiction, but of court mandate.

Or health costs. How much of the health costs mentioned are because illicit drugs are unregulated, leading to overdoses and other health problems? And death. They also counted the lost productivity of every person in history who died because of illicit drugs and would have been alive to work in 2007 otherwise. This means they counted all the people who died from heroin laced with all sorts of adulterants – a direct result of unregulated drugs.

The more you look at the report and analyze it, the more you see it as a damning report on the cost of the drug war to society. And yet it’s actually presented as a justification for the drug war.

The base line they use for the report is a drug-free America.

It is important to note that this analysis occurs within the context of a “what if” scenario in which illicit drug use no longer exists.

So essentially, they are comparing a mythical non-illicit-drug-use state with today’s illicit-drug-use state. Except that that’s not really true. They are completely ignoring prohibition. In a non-illicit-drug-use state, there would be no prohibition. Prohibition is not something that just exists because drug use exists. It is an active and significant factor that’s been added to the equation. To ignore a factor of such magnitude renders the entire report meaningless.

Imagine that the government had bizarrely decreed that corn was only allowed to be planted in rocky desert areas. Now imagine that a government report studied the attempts to grow corn and concluded, without any reference to the decree, that corn was not a viable crop for the United States. How stupid would those analysts look? And yet, this is the same kind of stupidity used in this National Drug Intelligence Center report.

It gets worse.

After listing a bunch of costs that are truly attributable to the drug war and not to illicit drug use, the analysts actually conclude that this report justifies the drug war and the drug policies that the federal government are pursuing.

…it is relatively easy to draw inferences from the findings presented above.

It is important that illicit drugs be made as difficult and costly to obtain as possible. This points to the value of law enforcement efforts. […]

The findings thus validate the basic premises of the National Drug Control Strategy. Strong law enforcement efforts that reduce cultivation, production, and distribution of illicit drugs both limit consumer access and enhance
public safety…

Incredible. I’ve seen a lot of junk science in my time, but I’d be hard pressed to come up with a more blatant example of just making up a conclusion that had nothing to do with (and in fact was contradicted by) the data presented.

Ethan Nadelmann

Tim Pawlenty

Guatemala says it is winning the drug war, following decapitation of prosecutor

The title of this article says it all. Another in the series of “people are dying so we’re successful” drug war justifications.

Three Medical Marijuana Bills Filed in Congress

The trio of bills is a clear signal to the Obama administration that disenchantment with its approach to medical marijuana is growing in Congress. While the Obama Justice Department declared in its famous 2009 memo that it would not go after medical marijuana operations in compliance with state laws in states where it is legal, federal prosecutors and the DEA have continued to arrest and prosecute medical marijuana providers.

No easy fix for California’s prison crisis

“We have to stop the insanity of sending nonviolent drug offenders and low-level theft offenders to prison for life,”

Russia hopes to halve number of drug addicts by 2014

The introduction of punitive measures and mandatory treatment would allow Russian authorities to reduce the number of drug addicts in the country by half in three years, Russia’s anti-narcotics chief, Viktor Ivanov, said.

Right. ‘Cause that’s worked so well.

3 in MCSO accused of cartel ties

Three Maricopa County sheriff’s employees, including a deputy in the human-smuggling unit, were arrested Tuesday by authorities who say they were involved in a drug- and human-trafficking ring and used Sheriff’s Office intelligence to guide smugglers through the Valley.

If this is true, it’s somewhat mind blowing. Imagine helping the cartels while working for someone as scary as Sheriff Joe Arpaio!

No government in the world can compete with the black market in financial compensation for police officers. – Guitherisms

Extend life-saving Patriot Act items

James Sensenbrenner, Jr., one of the worst of the worst in Congress, defends the Patriot Act extensions:

Additionally, no civil liberties have ever been violated.

Just wow.

Doing Life for Marijuana: A Case Study in Waste – excellent OpEd by ACLU’s Alison Holcomb

So, Louisiana taxpayers are going to spend a lot of money to warehouse a nonviolent marijuana seller for the rest of his life. Does anyone seriously think it will be harder to buy marijuana in Louisiana?

Could not pass up sharing this release in its entirety with you…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – May 25, 2011

One Hitters Burned Again By Timid Czardinals

Office of National Drug Control Policy Backs Out of Softball Game with Drug Policy Reformers

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Once again, the softball team representing the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has backed out of playing a Congressional Softball League game against the One Hitters, a team consisting of members of several drug policy reform organizations and others who support ending the “war on drugs.” A game between the two teams had been scheduled for May 25, but the ONCDP Czardinals pulled out shortly after scheduling the game, with ONDCP public liaison coordinator Quinn Staudt citing an “accidental double-booking.”

This is not the first time the Czardinals have refused to play the One Hitters. In 6 years, the team found one reason or another to avoid taking the field against this team of individuals dedicated to reforming the out-of-date and ineffectual policies promoted by the ONDCP.

This behavior is being mimicked on the national stage by the ONDCP as well. While drug czar Gil Kerlikowske has stated that he will no longer use the rhetoric of a “war on drugs” and President Obama said that he wants to move to treat drug abuse as a health problem rather than a criminal justice problem, little has been seen in the way of action in that direction. The President has also said that he does not support the legalization of any drug, even marijuana, despite the inarguable damage marijuana prohibition does to society, individual users, medical patients that benefit from marijuana treatments, governmental budgets, and respect for the rule of law.

“It is really disappointing that the ONDCP not only refuses to have an honest debate with drug policy reformers about the absolute failure of drug prohibition, but also keeps ducking out of softball games with us,” said One Hitters team captain Jacob Berg. “We think it would be a great opportunity to advance the discussion between drug law reformers and the people ostensibly in charge of drug policy in this country. I wonder if they are afraid to have that conversation. The drug czar said ‘legalization’ isn’t in his vocabulary, but it’s just a friendly softball game!”

The One Hitters hope the Czardinals will put aside ideological differences and accept their invitation to play a softball game this summer on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

Here’s a petition to sign at AVAAZ

To Ban Ki-moon and all Heads of State:
We call on you to end the war on drugs and the prohibition regime, and move towards a system based on decriminalisation, regulation, public health and education. This 50 year old policy has failed, fuels violent organised crime, devastates lives and is costing billions. It is time for a humane and effective approach.

I’m not a big one on petitions, usually, but this sounds interesting, particularly since the petition is connected to the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which is apparently releasing a major report soon. The petition is aimed to support that report.

This, by the way, is a pretty amazing commission, looking to completely change the global approach to drug policy, based on evidence.

The commission also has a powerhouse membership, including a number of former heads of state who have come out for legalization.

I’ve signed the petition and suggest that you do the same.

It’s kind of sad that if you want to really see how Americans have lost their liberty, you are more likely to read about it in another country’s newspaper.

A patriotic duty: repeal the Patriot Act by Jennifer Abel in the Guardian (UK)

The first thing you need to understand about the Patriot Act is this: Osama Bin Laden’s destruction of the World Trade Centre wasn’t the reason the act was passed; it was merely the excuse. The real reason dates back to the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan demonstrated his principled commitment to personal liberty and small government by turning the “war on drugs” up to 11.

Of course, the constitution as it’s written makes drug laws difficult to enforce. Police learn about most crimes – real crimes – when the victims report them to the police. But there’s no victim to complain when a willing buyer purchases a product from a willing seller, so drug cops looking to make arrests and justify their existence had to resort to privacy violations and fishing expeditions instead.

Then came the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the most horrific in my country’s history. But it was also the answer to every drug warrior’s prayers: they finally got the unconstitutional powers they craved, and under a spiffy patriotic acronym to boot.

Jennifer Abel notes that even with the end of Bin Laden and the lack of international support for al-Quida, the Patriot Act isn’t likely to go away, “because the Patriot Act was never about Bin Laden in the first place.”

Exactly.

But come on now, there were all sorts of politicians grudgingly accepting the Patriot Act as a short term requirement that objected to the sheer magnitude of the rights infringement. Surely now that Bin Laden is dead, they’ll at least discuss it, right?

Glenn Greenwald last night:

Tonight, a cloture vote was taken in the Senate on the four-year extension and it passed by a vote of 74-8. The law that was once the symbolic shorthand for evil Bush/Cheney post-9/11 radicalism just received a vote in favor of its four-year, reform-free extension by a vote of 74-8. […]

But what’s most notable isn’t the vote itself, but the comments made afterward. Sen. Paul announced that he was considering using delaying tactics to hold up passage of the bill in order to extract some reforms (including ones he is co-sponsoring with the Democrats’ Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Leahy, who — despite voicing “concerns” about the bill — voted for cloture). Paul’s announcement of his delaying intentions provoked this fear-mongering, Terrorism-exploiting, bullying threat from the Democrats’ Senate Intelligence Committee Chair, Dianne Feinstein:

“I think it would be a huge mistake,” Feinstein told reporters. “If somebody wants to take on their shoulders not having provisions in place which are necessary to protect the United States at this time, that’s a big, big weight to bear.”

In other words: Paul and the other dissenting Senators better give up their objections and submit to quick Patriot Act passage or else they’ll have blood on their hands from the Terrorist attack they will cause. That, of course, was the classic Bush/Cheney tactic for years to pressure Democrats into supporting every civil-liberties-destroying measure the Bush White House demanded (including, of course, the original Patriot Act itself), and now we have the Democrats — ensconced in power — using it just as brazenly and shamelessly

And these folks take an oath to defend the Constitution.

Update: Powerful slam on the Democrats (and so-called “liberal” blogosphere) by Kevin Gosztola at Firedoglake: Deafening Liberal Silence as the Senate Moves to Extend the Patriot Act

Why are there so few Democrats taking issue with the idea that government should be able to violate the Fourth Amendment to fight terrorism when that is not the case? Why is there so little push back from liberals or progressives to put an end to the extraordinary assault on civil liberties that the Bush Administration escalated and the Obama Administration has done little to bring to an end? […]

Liberals began the Obama presidency committed to making Obama do it—whatever they thought needed to be fixed now that President Bush was gone. They had some kind of a vision. Now, they tinker around the edges and ask for minuscule reform that will not upset the balance (or gross imbalance) of power in the country. They ask for changes that have no monetary impact on the corporatist elements of the United States, which make money off of subverting democracy to fight the “war on terror.” When their voices are most needed, they say nothing and do nothing.

Liberals contend that people must cut Obama some slack. Meanwhile, the imperial presidency expands.

Over at Points: The Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society, guest blogger Allen Hopper of the ACLU discusses the issue of the way the federal government is conducting their anti-state medical marijuana offensive and how that could result in a court case.

This is the issue we were discussing in 10th Amendment Case recently, and I think that perhaps Allen does a better job than I of explaining why this potential lawsuit is valid, despite established Supreme Court case law giving the feds the authority to outlaw cannabis.

So, what are these threatening new letters really about? In a letter to Attorney General Holder last week, the ACLU suggested that the federal government is improperly attempting to influence the states’ legislative processes. The ACLU points out that several of these letters landed on state officials’ desks just as new state laws regulating medical marijuana were about to be enacted. The Governor of Washington, for instance, vetoed a popular medical marijuana bill after receiving a letter from U.S. Attorneys threatening to prosecute state officials who license and regulate dispensaries. If the ACLU is right about the real purpose behind these U.S. Attorney letters, the feds may be opening a can of worms they’ll wish they hadn’t. A federal lawsuit put on hold in 2009 after the DOJ issued the Ogden Memo could be reopened, with court-ordered discovery into federal enforcement practices.

It isn’t at all about whether marijuana is illegal at the federal level, but rather whether the federal government is improperly enforcing the law selectively in order to interfere with the state’s legislature. That’s a legitimate 10th Amendment issue.

This lawsuit would be a continuation of one filed some time ago by the ACLU (later temporarily put on hold due to the Holder memo), and which the courts have already refused government’s motion to dismiss.

At issue was whether the government had selectively enforced federal marijuana laws in California, purposefully targeting those organizations operating in full compliance with state laws and most closely collaborating with local governments; the lawsuit asserted that such raids were an attempt to undermine state medical marijuana laws and force the state to re-criminalize medical marijuana.

It’s the selective enforcement that opens the door to this legitimate legal challenge. That doesn’t mean that it’ll win if pursued, but it is completely separate from the Raich decision.

In other lawsuit news, Groups Sue Feds Over Marijuana Rescheduling Petition Delay

As many of you know, one of the big tricks the federal government uses to maintain its death-hold grip on outlawing marijuana is to have systems in place for making change and then using delaying tactics and internal revolving door appeal systems to keep the challenge in limbo for years. Usually the courts are hesitant to get involved as long as there is a “process” going on.

Inevitably, however, there is a limit that even the courts will accept.

A coalition of medical marijuana and drug reform groups filed suit in federal court in Washington, DC, Monday in a bid to force the government to act on a rescheduling petition that has languished at the DEA for nearly nine years. The lawsuit asks that the government respond to the petition within 60 days.

The petition argues that marijuana has accepted medical use and should thus be removed from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia currently allow for the medicinal use of marijuana, and an ever-increasing mountain of evidence has shown marijuana to be effective in treating a number of diseases and conditions.

The groups filing the lawsuit include the Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis (CRC), Americans for Safe Access (ASA), Patients Out of Time, NORML, and California NORML. Also included are medical marijuana patients William Britt, Kathy Jordan, Michael Krawitz, and Rick Steeb.

The first rescheduling petition in 1972 was stalled for 22 years.