Drug WarRant

Glenn Greenwald is one of the most important writers in America today, and if you don’t follow him regularly, you’re missing out. Although politically he’s often considered on the “Left,” the civil liberties issues he covers are, like the drug war, not so much “Right” vs. “Left” as they are right vs. wrong. He believes in liberty and justice for all and will take on anyone who perverts that standard, regardless of the letter following their name.

He had a post a few days ago discussing The two-tiered justice system – “the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system.”

It’s quite compelling, and in a companion video, filmed by the ACLU of Massachusetts, he takes you down the path that has created this two-tiered system, from the pardon of Richard Nixon all the way to the telecom immunity, the lack of torture investigations, and the lack of prosecutions in the financial crisis…

And when you juxtipose that full scale immunity with the fact that America has the world’s largest and most oppressive penal state, where ordinary Americans are subjected to the harshest punishment for the pettiest and most trivial of crimes — that don’t really trigger imprisonment anywhere else — and the incredibly harsh conditions of those prisons, what we really have is exactly what the founders said was the most threatening to freedom, which is, not equal treatment under the law, but a completely distinct and separate justice system based on one’s status and power.

We cannot forget that the drug war is specifically tied to that two-tiered justice system. We cannot be a truly free nation if people who commit torture are given a free pass while those who grow cannabis are sent away for decades.

Having a tough time finding time to post right now, operating on a severe lack of sleep.

Having a good time, though. I’m faculty advisor for a college student group called Theatre of Ted. They do underground open-mic-style theatre every Saturday night at midnight along with other events. One annual thing they do is sponsor a Four-Square Marathon for Student Scholarships. Four-square? The grade school playground game? Yes, but the students here have their own style and rules.

The way the marathon works is that they keep at least one court going night and day, while getting people to pledge $1 or $.50 per hour based on how long it’ll go, as well as getting direct donations. They started Wednesday at 5 pm and have gone 38 hours so far at the time of this posting. They’re hoping to break last year’s record of 64 hours, which would mean continuing until sometime Saturday morning.

I’m there through all the nighttime hours to keep an eye on things, as well as cooking grilled cheese sandwiches and breakfast sandwiches for them on the griddle.

I’m also a member of one of the fundraising teams (team #8) and if you think it would be a fun thing to help out some outstanding students raise money to create their own scholarship fund, here’s your chance. You can donate directly online with credit card (add 8 cents to the donation so my team gets credit).

Discuss what you like.

… from NarcoNews TV

Now, don’t get too excited… it was one judge in Ontario, Canada. And he’s given the government 3 months to fix the problem.

But still…

Ontario judge declares criminalization of pot unconstitutional

Ontario is one step closer to the legalization of marijuana after the Ontario Superior Court struck down two key parts of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act that prohibit the possession and production of pot.

The court declared the rules that govern medical marijuana access and the prohibitions laid out in Sections 4 and 7 of the act “constitutionally invalid and of no force and effect” on Monday, effectively paving the way for legalization.

If the government does not respond within 90 days with a successful delay or re-regulation of marijuana, the drug will be legal to possess and produce in Ontario, where the decision is binding.

This all stems from medical marijuana. The judge ruled that since the government has not come up with a good way for people to obtain medical marijuana, nor provided the necessary guidance to help doctors utilizing the federal medical marijuana program, it’s forcing people to crime, and that was the rather unusual basis behind the ruling.

Star: In an April 11 ruling, Justice Donald Taliano found that doctors across the country have “massively boycotted” the medical marijuana program and largely refuse to sign off on forms giving sick people access to necessary medication.

As a result, legitimately sick people cannot access medical marijuana through appropriate means and must resort to illegal actions.

Doctors’ “overwhelming refusal to participate in the medicinal marijuana program completely undermines the effectiveness of the program,” the judge wrote in his ruling.

“The effect of this blind delegation is that seriously ill people who need marijuana to treat their symptoms are branded criminals simply because they are unable to overcome the barriers to legal access put in place by the legislative scheme.”

Taliano declared the program to be invalid, as well as the criminal laws prohibiting possession and production of cannabis.

So essentially the judge is saying that unless the government fixes its atrocious federal medical marijuana program, he’ll make marijuana legal for everyone to insure that sick people will be able to get it without having to go to criminals. Fascinating.

The notion of federal laws against marijuana used to be considered unconstitutional in this country, too.

We’ve been having fun here with the ongoing “Kids Say the Darndest Things” series, and probably will continue to do so as long as student journalists embarrass themselves and the future of the profession.

Here’s an example that actually proves the point of that ridicule by demonstrating what student journalism can and should be.

Macy Linton is a 19-year-old freshman at LSU and wrote this OpEd in the LSU Reveille: Southern Discourse: Mexican, US drug legalization necessary to end war

It’s a well-thought-out, well-written opinion piece about the drug war in Mexico and Vicente Fox’s call for legalization.

It’s not perfect by any means. Her mention of “34,000 people dead from drug-related incidents” is very badly phrased since they’re drug-war-related incidents and not drug-related (but unfortunately that same imprecision is used by many professional columnists). It’s also unfortunate that she repeated as truth Vicente Fox’s one blunder in his recent speaking — saying that Portugal showed a 25% decrease in drug use in the ten years since decriminalization (in fact, Portugal showed dramatic gains, including reduction in absolute terms of use by certain age cohorts – including the critical 15-19 cohort – and only mild increases less than the EU averages in other age groups, plus a huge reduction in drug-related deaths, etc., but a 25% reduction in overall drug use wasn’t part of this clear success).

Keep at it Macy. Good luck with your international studies. We need more like you.

A fun protest… with a point.

A continuation of our popular series.

Today’s entry is an editorial from the “Crimson Report Staff” at Arvada High School (CO). They do get a little extra lenience for still being in High School, where they apparently haven’t had instruction in English or critical thinking. After several paragraphs that appear to be lifted almost directly from government publications (you’ll see shortly why they couldn’t have written it themselves), the staff (which apparently likes to refer to itself in the first person singular), came up with this doozy of a conclusion.

Marijuana is illegal for a reason. I think people who smoke marijuana do not know of the effects besides the “high” they get after smoking. I think people need to know what they are dong to their body’s before they start smoking and trying to get it legalized. If they do know, what does to them and they still smoke it. I’m fine with that, let them harm their body’s but don’t try to legalize it so uneducated people can do it to themselves.

Wow.

I guess this is proof that uneducated people do it to themselves.

Congratulations to the Crimson Report Staff — for that outstanding example of uneducated writing and thinking.

Feel free to discuss the Cultural Baggage show or anything else you wish.

This is depressing as hell…

Mexican drug cartels targeting and killing children

According to U.S. and Mexican experts, competing criminal groups appear to be killing children to terrorize the population or prove to rivals that their savagery is boundless, as they fight over local drug markets and billion-dollar trafficking routes to voracious consumers in the United States.

“It worries us very much, this growth in the attacks on little children. They use them as a vehicle to send a message,” said Juan Martin Perez, director of the Child Rights Network in Mexico. “Decapitations and hanging bodies from bridges send a message. Killing children is an extension of this trend.”

The children’s rights group estimates that 994 people younger than 18 were killed in drug-related violence between late 2006 and late 2010, based on media accounts, which are incomplete because newspapers are often too intimidated to report drug-related crimes. […]

In February, assassins went hunting for a Ciudad Juarez man, but the intended target wasn’t home, so they killed his three daughters instead, ages 12, 14 and 15.

In March, a young woman was bound and gagged, shot and left in a car in Acapulco. Her 4-year-old daughter lay slumped beside her, killed with a single bullet to her chest. She was the fifth child killed in drug violence in the resort city in one bloody week.

“They kill children on purpose,” said Marcela Turati, author of “Crossfire,” a new book on the killings of civilians in Mexico’s drug war. “In Juarez, they told a 7-year-old boy to run, and shot his father. Then they shot the little boy.”

This is sick.

Those who do this should be hunted down like dogs. And make no mistake about it, the blame for killing children falls squarely on those who do the killing and order the killing.

Yet we are not, by any means, blameless. This is a knowable, predictable, and inevitable consequence of the ratcheting up of our drug war.

Take a look at Effect of drug law enforcement on drug market violence: A systematic review – in the International Journal of Drug Policy

The conclusion, while walking a cautious line, is still crystal clear.

Based on the available English language scientific evidence, the results of this systematic review suggest that an increase in drug law enforcement interventions to disrupt drug markets is unlikely to reduce drug market violence. Instead, from an evidence-based public policy perspective and based on several decades of available data, the existing scientific evidence suggests drug law enforcement contributes to gun violence and high homicide rates and that increasingly sophisticated methods of disrupting organizations involved in drug distribution could paradoxically increase violence.

That’s right. The harder we push with the drug war, the more survival benefit there is to those criminals who are ruthless, and are willing to terrorize, bribe and kill wantonly to keep their power (remember we’re not using the carrot and stick which would do the opposite).

This is elementary. Calderone’s war, pushed by the U.S. is unable to actually accomplish anything positive (due to the laws of economics), but is without a doubt resulting in lots of dead children.

This is obvious. Surely this can be a wake-up call to change failed policy.

After all, what kind of sick, soulless creature could possibly look at this and see something positive? Seriously.

…

Oh. Wait.

U.S. and Mexican officials say the grotesque violence is a symptom the cartels have been wounded by police and soldiers. “It may seem contradictory, but the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs,” said Michele Leonhart, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Success.

For that 7-year-old boy.

Ah, hell.

The mainstream media is catching on to the fact that our sacred border isn’t secure even when we have our own employees guarding it.

Mexican cartels corrupting more US border officials?

In the Mexican drug war, U.S. authorities are finding a disturbing trend: an increase in American law enforcement officials corrupted by wealthy Mexican criminals who pay them to look the other way as illegal drugs and immigrants flow north into the United States.

“It is the single most debilitating factor in successful law enforcement on the border, and we do a horrible job of weeding that corruption out,” says retired DEA supervisor Anthony Coulson.

In the last five years, nearly 80 U.S. Border Patrol agents and Customs and Border Protection officers have been arrested along the Mexican border, and according to federal authorities, hundreds more officials are under investigation.

Of course, the notion that you even could weed that corruption out significantly is ridiculous.

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

Part of the problem is also due to the fact that during the Bush administration there was a big political push to massively increase the number of border agents.

Scott at Grits for Breakfast could have told you that would be a stupid idea. In fact, he did. Back in 2006, he noted:

Seriously – if you were a cartel leader, wouldn’t you be manufacturing phony ID papers and sending in your lieutenants to apply for these slots as quick as you could? And do you think the Bush Homeland Security department will handle vetting 10,000 new agents any more competently than, say, the response to Hurricane Katrina?

Maybe I’m just being cyncial, or maybe I’ve just seen it happen too many times, but I predict we’ll see increased corruption problems among border officials in coming years as a result of this illogically rapid, politically motivated border security buildup.

Wow. Now that’s a pretty darn good “I told you so”!