Drug WarRant

Via Radley Balko comes this excellent asset forfeiture cash stealing investigation by News 5 in Nashville.

Again, this isn’t a surprise to us, but as evidenced by the anchors at the end of this segment, most of the population is not aware that this kind of thing goes on in this country.

Update: More from the News 5 investigation:

Questionable Traffic Stops Caught On Camera

In this one, the News 5 helicopter team tracked a police car that pulled over two Hispanic men with Texas plates supposedly for weaving on the road, yet the News 5 helicopter video showed that the car wasn’t weaving at all. The news investigation team covers the line between persuading someone to consent to a search and tricking them. Very good piece.

Video Shows Officer Offering Truckers Freedom For Cash

Cops searched the truck and couldn’t find anything, but felt that something was there, so they threatened the truck drivers with prosecution unless they gave up the cash, despite the fact that there was nothing they could charge the drivers with.

News 5 reporter: “If I have not committed a crime, is it proper for a police officer to make me think that I have?”

District Attorney General Kim Helper: [pause] I believe… that officer can use a variety of techniques…

There are more videos and stories connected to this investigation, including extended interviews and traffic stop videos.

With the black market value of illegal drugs, there’s no way that drug warriors have a chance to stop the drugs. Trying to overcome the laws of supply and demand is harder than defying gravity.

Even without the violence and corruption that insures the power of the black market, the ingenuity and determination of those who make their living from the black market goes far beyond what our drug warriors can stop.

VIDEO: The Daring Zip-Line Coca Harvesters Of Bolivia

Inside Mexico’s Drug Tunnels – Photo Essays – TIME

Ecuador Seizes Drug-Running Super Submarine

And these are the people who usually accuse us of wanting to get ‘high’…

Well, the impending predicted rapture (6 pm on May 21) has been quite entertaining. Alas, it will end soon. Based on the jokes I’ve heard, very few people if they even believed it (which they don’t), would actually want to spend a significant amount of time with the people who do believe it.

The word is that it’ll come by time zone, which means it’ll hit Kiritimati, Christmas Island in just a few minutes.

What are your favorite rapture jokes?

Here’s one (thanks, Radley) from Six Feet Under (possibly NSFW).

This week, the World Medical Association and the International Federation of Health and Human Rights Organisations have called for compulsory drug detention centers to be closed.

Sarah Evans at Open Society Foundations has the story: Shut Down Abusive Drug Detention Centers

As many as an estimated 400,000 people worldwide are currently held in drug detention centers— sometimes for years at a time— on suspicion of using drugs or because of a positive urine test. Most get no medical evaluation, and no treatment—for drug addiction, TB, or HIV. Though these centers are called “rehabilitation,” “treatment,” or education centers, what goes on inside is not based on research or accepted medical principles so much as the desire to discipline and punish.

Patients’ human rights are frequently violated, said the WMA and the International Federation of Health and Human Rights Organizations (IFHHRO). Drug users are beaten, starved, and forced to labor—often in the service of private companies. The number of such “treatment” centers has continued to grow in recent years. […]

Dr. Adriaan van Es, IFHHRO’s director[:] “As in other forms of medical care, drug dependency treatment should be voluntary and should respect and validate the autonomy of the individual,” he said.

The drug detention centers are really prisons by another name, and most operate outside either the medical or criminal justice system. National police, military forces, and other public security authorities run most drug detention camps. Detainees suspected of drug use can be held without trial, an appearance before a judge, or right of appeal. While some people do enter such facilities by choice, most do not, and those who attempt to leave are often beaten by the “teachers” who staff the centers.

This issue is being addressed as part of the campaign to Stop Torture in Health Care

We may think we’re above all this in the U.S., but we’re not.

Our forced treatment may not be as abusive, but it is still forced treatment, and when it means loss of liberty or loss of parenting, it’s not that different from torture.

It’s amazing how little we, as a society, discuss the ongoing horrors of the drug war in other countries. Perhaps it’s because it would force us to look at ourselves as well.

… because you need one.

Change to Pot Law?

One state senator is behind two controversial pieces of legislation involving pot and school buses.

That caught my attention… Actually, this is just a very confusingly written article. Turns out the pot and school buses are completely separate items.

You pay $100,000 bill for addicts’ sex and disease control

VICTORIAN taxpayers have footed the bill for more than 2 million condoms – most of them flavoured – for drug users in the past 2 1/2 years, tender documents reveal.

Taxpayers have also been slugged for almost 700,000 sachets of lubricant, as part of an add-on to a needle exchange program.
The free prophylactic program means Victorian taxpayers supply more than 2000 condoms a day to drug users, at a cost of more than $100,000 a year.

A bargain.

Willie Nelson endorses Gary Johnson for President

Legendary country music singer and pot head Willie Nelson and his Teapot Party have endorsed the pro-legalization presidential bid of Republican candidate Gary Johnson, the Johnson campaign announced in a press release Tuesday. The endorsement came after Nelson and Johnson met last week and marks the Teapot Party’s first foray into presidential politics.

Marijuana is Here to Stay – Lester Grinspoon

It is also clear that the realities of human need are incompatible with the demand for a legally enforceable distinction between medicine and all other uses of cannabis. Marihuana simply does not conform to the conceptual boundaries established by twentieth-century institutions. It is truly a sui generis substance; is there another non-toxic drug which is capable of heightening many pleasures, has a large and growing number of medical uses and has the potential to enhance some individual capacities? The only workable way of realizing the full potential of this remarkable substance, including its full medical potential, is to free it from the present dual set of regulations – those that control prescription drugs in general and the special criminal laws that control psychoactive substances. These mutually reinforcing laws establish a set of social categories that strangle its uniquely multifaceted potential.

San Francisco

For the second time in a week, San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi accused police of stealing from drug suspects after releasing video footage Tuesday that shows two officers walk into a residential hotel empty-handed and leave with bags that were not booked into evidence.

This is the same city (and possibly the same hotel) where cops have been caught on video entering without permission and then claiming to have been given permission to search, leading to the dismissal of nearly 100 cases.

What makes the cop’s story even fishier in this case is that the cops supposedly found meth in the apartment, yet the charges were dropped when the cop who was caught on video with the bag didn’t show up in court despite a subpoena.

The resident says there was a laptop and video camera missing.

The police union has it all figured out, however.

The latest accusation brought an angry response from the head of the police officers’ union, who said there was probably an innocent explanation and called Adachi a “media whore” who is staining the careers of good cops for political gain. […]

The union president, former narcotics inspector Gary Delagnes, said he had supervised or worked alongside Guerrero and other officers facing accusations. Guerrero, he said, was “my best undercover (officer) out there for 10 years. … There’s never been a single allegation that he has taken a dime.”

Delagnes said he had spoken to Guerrero and that the officer didn’t recall the backpack. However, Delagnes said, narcotics officers sometimes collect evidence in bags found at a scene and then throw away the bags.

“I’m guilty of it myself,” he said. “Rather than book the $1 backpack, we throw it away.”

He continued, “Why would you steal a $50 camera when you’re probably seeing $100,000 a month in cash? These are top-level cops, and they’re trying to allege they went over the wall for coffee, tequila and an iPod? It’s ludicrous.”

Hmmm… Is it really a good idea to point out that the cop could be stealing a whole lot more than a laptop and camera?

The inaugural issue of the new International Journal on Human Rights and Drug Policy is now available in full online.

The first issue starts off with an incredible editorial: ‘Deliver us from evil’? – The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 50 years on

In recent years there has been growing attention to the human rights implications of the international narcotics control regime among non-governmental organisations and UN human rights monitors. Human rights violations documented in the name of drug control in countries across the world include: the execution of hundreds of people annually for drug offences; the arbitrary detention of hundreds of thousands of people who use (or are accused of using) illicit drugs; the infliction of torture, or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, in the name of ‘drug treatment’; the extrajudicial killings of people suspected of being drug users or drug traffickers; and the denial of potentially life saving health services for people who use drugs.

While all of this work is significant, with some notable exception this emerging body of commentary has tended to focus on the documentation specific human rights violations linked to drug enforcement laws, policies and practices, rather than interrogating the drug conventions themselves, and the practices that emerge from their domestic implementation, from the perspective of international human rights law. Yet bringing such a human rights law perspective to the international drug control regime is a crucial exercise, both to promote consideration of international drug control law in the context of overall State obligations under the body of public international law as a whole, but also to further promote human rights-compliant implementation of the international drug conventions at the national level.

Powerful stuff for an opening editorial. Lets you know where they’re going with this journal.

The editorial continues with a fascinating discussion of the wording within the Single Convention’s preamble, that starts out with noble goals of ensuring ‘adequate provisions’ of medicines, but then…

However, whatever the intended appeal to a greater humanitarian mission expressed in the Single Convention’s opening lines, such sentiments are immediately undermined, if not contradicted, by those that follow, which describe ‘addiction to narcotic drugs’ as a form of ‘evil’.

Recognizing that addiction to narcotic drugs constitutes a serious evil for the individual and is fraught with social and economic danger to mankind,

Conscious of their duty to prevent and combat this evil,

Considering that effective measures against abuse of narcotic drugs require coordinated and universal action,

In the context of international treaty law, this wording is notable in that the Single Convention is the only United Nations treaty characterising the activity it seeks to regulate, control or prohibit as being ‘evil’. […]

Indeed, the unique nature of the use of the language of ‘evil’ in the Single Convention is particularly glaring when considered alongside that used in other treaties addressing issues that the international community considers abhorrent.

For example, neither slavery, apartheid nor torture are described as being ‘evil’ in the relevant international conventions that prohibit them. Nuclear war is not described as being ‘evil’ in the treaty that seeks to limit the proliferation of atomic weapons, despite the recognition in the preamble that ‘devastation that would be visited upon all mankind’ by such a conflict. The closest one finds to the language contained in the preamble to the Single Convention to describe drugs is that found in international instruments in the context of genocide.

The editorial goes on to describe how that word has since then proliferated to describe individuals (as opposed to states), and how that contributes to the international excesses in the war on drugs.

The presence of such ‘tendentious and highly inflammatory absolutist talk’, to use Gearty’s phrase, within discourse of both UN bodies and domestic courts is not only worrying, it contributes to an environment in which human rights violations in the name of drug control flourish around the world. Indeed, it can be argued that this rhetoric of ‘evil’ goes so far as to provide ideological justification for, and defense of, such abuses. As noted by Robin Room, it is this language of drugs as ‘evil’ that ‘serves as a justification of the…Convention regime of control and coercion’.

Very good stuff. Points out so clearly the urgent need to get rid of the Single Convention.

I haven’t read the entire issue, but based on the opening editorial, I’m very impressed.

The latest from the Supremes

(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled against a Kentucky man who was arrested after police burst into his apartment without a search warrant because they smelled marijuana and feared he was trying to get rid of incriminating evidence.

Voting 8-1, the justices reversed a Kentucky Supreme Court ruling that threw out the evidence gathered when officers entered Hollis King’s apartment.

The court said there was no violation of King’s constitutional rights because the police acted reasonably. Only Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.

Officers knocked on King’s door in Lexington and thought they heard noises that indicated whoever was inside was trying to get rid of incriminating evidence.

Justice Samuel Alito said in his opinion for the court that people have no obligation to respond to the knock or, if they do open the door, allow the police to come in. In those cases, officers who wanted to gain entry would have to persuade a judge to issue a search warrant.

But Alito said, “Occupants who choose not to stand on their constitutional rights but instead elect to attempt to destroy evidence have only themselves to blame.”

In her dissent, Ginsburg said her colleagues were giving police an easy way to routinely avoid getting warrants in drug cases. “Police officers may now knock, listen, then break the door down, never mind that they had ample time to obtain a warrant,” she said.

Now even the noises of getting up to answer the knock on the door could be interpreted by police as an attempt to destroy evidence, allowing them to enter without a warrant (making Alito’s pathetic excuses irrelevant).

I wonder how many Marines have had to face down 71 bullets at once aimed personally at them in mere seconds?

William Norman Grigg does a potent job of telling the story of the death of Jose Guerena by SWAT

‘Why Did Police Kill My Dad?’

This is nice to see…

At Health News Digest: Would Legalizing Pot be Good for the Environment?

(The answer is “yes”)

It’s a short article, but it hits the high points.

Fact is, not only would legalizing pot be good for the environment, but legalizing all drugs would be good for the environment.