Drug WarRant

If the government shuts down, will the DEA continue to raid medical marijuana operations?

My understanding is that the DEA will continue to operate as a “critical public safety” component in case of a shutdown, which is completely baffling.

If you really care about public safety, you should shut down the DEA even if you don’t shut down the government.

I’ll be a guest on Cultural Baggage with Dean Becker this Sunday, April 10 at 7 pm central time (the second half of the program). It airs live on Pacifica Radio and online at www.kpft.org and then is syndicated on a bunch of other stations throughout the week.

Should be fun! I’m looking forward to it.

District Attorney Throws Out 57 Cases After Henry Hotel Scandal, Cops Pissed

This is the scandal where videotape evidence showed that police officers entered rooms without a warrant or consent, and then lied about it on the stand.

The whole scandal has pissed off some cops, says one a veteran cop who attended the police academy with two of the accused officers. He talked to SF Weekly candidly in exchange for anonymity.

“As far as dudes being sloppy in attempting to arrest someone, I don’t see how that meets the standard of such accused corruption…Those guys, they work really hard and care about their jobs, it’s a big blow to morale to see them so immediately vilified,” he said.

“If these guys are cutting corners and not going about things the right legal way, that sucks and maybe they should be reprimanded. But police work and plainclothes work is not black and white — you have to be creative to be effective,” he tells us.

Yeah, that Fourth Amendment limits our creativity. Now the KGB – those were some really creative guys.

The officer also put into perspective why we shouldn’t be so concerned about the violation of citizens’ rights and lying on the stand…

“It’s a bummer to see all those cases dismissed. It was kind of depressing. I guarantee there’s other police departments in America where far worse things happen and nobody bats an eye.”

Is that the standard we’re aiming for? Hey, at least we’re not as corrupt as some of the other cops.

The sad thing is that this is pretty common. Cops who truly believe that violating the law and citizens’ rights when it comes to the drug war is no worse, really, than overstaying a parking meter.

Update: Just a reminder that we’re talking about some cops. If you’ve met any of the fine folks in LEAP, you would be very careful about making generalizations about all cops.

Jonathan Caulkins, Jonathan Kulick and Mark Kleiman have written Think Again: The Afghan Drug Trade – a good piece in Foreign Policy about “Why cracking down on Afghanistan’s opium business won’t help stop the Taliban — or the United States’ own drug problems.”

The article shows these guys at their best – when they are debunking some of the lazy arguments put forth by those trying to justify the excesses of the drug war. It works even better than usual because they’re not trying to throw in some kind of false equivalency to attack reformers.

Here’s a delightful example, where they point out a truth that few want to note: traffickers and law enforcement have the same goal.

As Thomas C. Schelling pointed out in the 1960s, law enforcement and organized criminal enterprises are on the same side when it comes to the price of illicit commodities: They both want them to be higher.

Yes, entirely eliminating Afghan drug production would eliminate Afghan drug revenues. It would also be impossible. And though reducing production is possible, reducing it will also drive up Afghan export prices more than proportionally, increasing overall drug revenues.

Monopolists facing inelastic demand don’t worry about production reductions — they love them. Less production means higher revenues; this is why OPEC meets to discuss how to constrain oil production, not expand it. Counternarcotics strategy solves this coordination problem for the drug traffickers, reducing exports and increasing industry revenues

Where they bog down, of course, is, after pointing out the failures of the prohibition mind-set, they have very little that they can really offer as a long-term solution, since a regime involving legalization is not allowed as a serious option for discussion in their world.

If solutions must be quick or decisive, then counternarcotics in Afghanistan is no solution. But that does not mean that nothing can or should be done. Small steps are better than no steps, and even in a land in such desperate circumstances, giving up makes for bad public relations.

There are practical options. The United States could fund drug treatment in Afghanistan, a country with a horrendous heroin problem, to reduce demand and earn support from the Afghan public. It could encourage consumer countries (including Iran and Russia) to step up drug treatment; that will shrink the revenues of Afghan traffickers. Focusing alternative-development efforts on more stable parts of the country, as a reward for taking steps toward normalcy, could further erode the threat of the Taliban gaining influence there. And removing Afghan officials corrupted by the drug trade from seats of power — if it were possible — would bolster confidence in the government.

It would be foolish to expect too much from these approaches. But the limitations of feasible drug-control activities in Afghanistan do not justify continuing to pursue policies that do more harm than good. Because the natural tendency of counternarcotics efforts is to help America’s enemies, the country should pursue them as little as possible. This is a case where less really is more.

They’re right. Less prohibition is more. But the wimpy choice between more prohibition and slightly less prohibition is not the only one.

Which leads to another part of the article that I found interesting and which I think merits further discussion:

Naturally, traffickers who are arrested or killed are worse off, but those who remain are in much better shape — they capture a larger slice of a bigger pie.

In an ideal world, law enforcement would selectively target the nastiest of the nasty dealers, putting them at a competitive disadvantage and shifting market share toward traffickers who are merely bad in a common-criminal sense. The DEA and military understand this and try to selectively disrupt the traffickers who are linked most closely to the insurgency.

The DEA and military may or may not understand this concept, but they sure don’t implement it well.

There is a sure-fire way to dramatically reduce the violence merely through enforcement policy implementation without actually legalizing drugs, although prohibitionists don’t like it.

It’s the carrot and the stick.

All you have to do is officially (or through the grapevine) make it clear that enforcement efforts will be focused only on those traffickers who use violence (the stick). You also have to have the carrot: make it clear that trafficking organizations that don’t use violence will be left alone, including not prosecuting (or limited prosecution for) those who get caught up in accidental nets.

The long term result is that the violent traffickers will be taken down, and the non-violent ones will flourish. There will be more of them, so they’ll lose some market share, but that’s made up for by reduced costs related to violence.

In the ultimate version of it, it’s actually a form of legalization, just unregulated legalization. It does, however fulfill one aspect of regulated legalization — eliminating one or more harmful side-effects of prohibition.

In Mexico, they’re starting to talk more and more about a mild variation of the carrot and the stick: Should Mexico Call for a Cease-Fire with Drug Cartels? (Time Magazine).

The journalist and poet Javier Sicilia led a march to commemorate the death of his son and his son’s friends, who all appear to be innocent victims caught up in the violence. In the media spotlight, Sicilia said what has been on the mind of many weeping parents. The war on drugs is not working, he said, and the government has to make a truce with the cartels. “Drug trafficking goes on. The United States doesn’t care and is not helping us at all,” Sicilia told reporters. “The mafias are here. We should make a pact.”

The statement sparked a sizzling public debate, which many Mexicans have been conducting in private for years: Should the government reach out to criminal gangs to calm the bloodshed? […]

Sicilia explained that by “pact” he meant that gangsters should be urged to avoid hurting the public and respect the prisoners they take. […]

There is also a debate as to whether the government should allow cartels to dominate specific trafficking routes, thus avoiding the bloody turf wars. This notion is so commonly discussed, it has its own terminology: “repartir plazas,” roughly meaning “to award turfs.” [the carrot]

There are local variations on the carrot and the stick as well. A town can make it clear that adults will not be bothered regarding pot sales or possession (the carrot), but that they’ll come down hard and focus on any seller that targets high school students or younger (the stick). This was the policy in the town where I attended college and it worked perfectly. The college students were left alone unofficially, and there were never any problems. However, one time, one of them decided to sell to High School kids and the entire police force descended on the campus and nailed him, leaving everyone else alone. The message was clear and was then followed to the letter.

Drug enforcement agencies today don’t have a clue as to the power of the carrot and the stick. They think they do, but their approach could best be described as the stick and the really big stick, along with the surprise stick that hits you alongside the head when you least expect it.

Without the carrot, the technique doesn’t work to reduce bad behavior. At all.

Legalization is the only option that really works for the long term. It is the proper way to deal with the violent and destructive drug war.

Prohibition, however, won’t end overnight.

There could be an administration, or a town, or a Latin American country, that realizes the truth — that the drug war is destroying the lives of their people. And yet they know that they don’t have the power by themselves to end the global drug war.

They may find that the carrot and the stick, while imperfect, is vastly superior to what we have today.

Obama’s staff has scheduled a Facebook Town Hall on April 20.

Certainly his staff has to know the significance of 4/20. They also know that every opportunity for public questions has resulted in drug war reform being the top question. And if that’s true elsewhere, it’s even more likely to be true on Facebook.

The media is smart enough to make the 4/20 connection.

So is Obama’s staff just stupid? Or do they really want to talk about pot?

Every now and then you get an… interesting set of issues from a candidate that’s decided to run for public office. Alan Saldanha’s announcement caught my attention.

I think the government should stop supplying free alcohol to people who actively engage in clubbing seals in a way that would make Genghis Khan’s hordes blush with embarrassment. I wonder if any man would do what they do if he were sober.

All you need is $18 million to support northern communities who are displaced if we stopped killing baby seals, and that can easily come from tax dollars from the legal sale of cannabis. Personally, I don’t fancy cannabis one bit. It makes me feel pukey. Cannabis is a $7 billion illegal sale in Canada. That is three times what Canada makes from wheat grain. I support cannabis sale on permits issued under stringent regulation. I suggest it cannot be smoked in cities, but five to 10 kilometres away on farms and people will be only able to ride transit to get there.

I agree that we shouldn’t give free alcohol to people to club baby seals. And I agree that cannabis should be legalized. I want to know more about this transit system that will transport people from the city to farms where they will smoke pot. Is this some kind of a Weedstock with busses to take you there?

Gary Johnson Knows He’ll be Labeled the “Pot Candidate”

Presidential hopeful Gary Johnson knows his support for legalizing marijuana will be used against him by opponents of his quest for the GOP presidential nomination. The libertarian-leaning former Governor of New Mexico will announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination on April 21st in New Hampshire.

Before delivering the keynote speech at the High Times Cannabis Cup in Denver, Colorado, Johnson told Fox News he is prepared to be attacked on the pot issue.

“I just want you to know I caught a lot of flack on this as governor, and I more than survived,” Johnson said. “I’ve debated this issue more than any politician on the planet. And this is an issue that under the light of day does really well.”

Johnson really has it together. He doesn’t have any other potential fringe baggage that can be exploited (no gold standard, no racist newsletters, etc., etc.), so the only thing they’ll really be able to come after him on is pot. And he’s ready and willing to take that head on.

Let’s hope that he can stay in the race long enough to generate some good discussions.

In a fine editorial, Narco News’ Al Giordano suggests that the people of Mexico have the power to start a revolution.

On Wednesday afternoon, thousands of Mexican citizens will take to the streets to demand “an end to the violence” wrought by the so-called “war on drugs.”

There might not be thousands, but tens of thousands… or more. […]

And I am left with just one question: If the people of the United States once rose up and demanded, and won, the end of a senseless, stupid, violent, corrupt, criminal prohibition against a “drug” that is, today and for the last 68 years, peacefully regulated and consumed and sold without violence between its sellers, without corrupting police, judges, politicians and presidents, without censoring newspapers and assassinating journalists and community organizers and defenders of human rights… If the gringos could repeal such a violent policy that caused such harm against them… then why not Mexico?

See you in the streets on Wednesday at 5 p.m. We will be there to report it. What you decide to do is up to you. But if there is one thing I have learned in fourteen (really, 24, counting my first voyage) years since arriving in Mexico, it is this: The Mexican people have more power than you know. And one day you are going to use it. If Wednesday is not that day, it will be another day, maybe sooner than anyone thinks. But it also occurs to me that, like with Egypt on January 25, it is not so impossible that Wednesday could be the start of something big…

Drug War Chronicle

The bill had the support of the entire Seattle legislative delegation, as well as the Seattle Times editorial board. But that wasn’t enough to move it out of committee.

The legislature’s failure to act clears the way for an effort to take the issue directly to the voters. Sensible Washington is already gathering signatures for a legalization initiative to go before the voters in November.

Let’s hope that they can get the signatures collected. Here’s the Sensible Washington site.

At TalkLeft, Jeralyn has a fascinating post: Trial Starts Monday in “DEA African Adventures” Case

It discusses the extremely bizarre legal maneuverings that seem to all the DEA to enforce American laws using taxpayer money, anywhere in the universe.

I’ve been writing for over a year about what I call the DEA’s African Vacations. Shorter version: DEA agents go to Africa, set up an elaborate sting, whereby cocaine from South America is flown to Ghana or elsewhere in Africa, so that it can be transported to Europe, its final destination. Even though the cocaine isn’t headed to the U.S., the feds in the U.S. indict the participants, have them arrested/kidnapped in Africa and fly them to the U.S. to stand trial on charges ranging from conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization and conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism, to conspiracy to distribute or import drugs.

If the Government is successful in the prosecutions, we will bear not only the cost of the overseas investigation, the cost of prosecution (and in many cases, the cost of defending those charged), and the cost of pre-trial detention, but also the cost of incarceration of those convicted for the next 10 or 20 years.

When you think about it, it’s a really bizarre notion. I wonder why we don’t send our federal agents to bars in France to arrest French citizens under 21 years old for drinking.