Drug WarRant

I’m not big on going to meetings. I’d often prefer to skip them and get some work done. Here’s one I’d like to attend.

U.S. President Barack Obama will meet his Mexican counterpart Felipe Calderon next week at the White House, with talks expected to focus on Mexico’s ongoing drug war efforts, the White House said on Wednesday.

“The president is deeply committed to the strong partnership that the United States has with Mexico. I think that is the reason for the meeting,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said in response to a query about the upcoming meeting.

“We admire the commitment and sacrifices of the Mexican people as they confront the criminal organizations that have brought so much violence to Mexico, specifically on those issues which I know have been in the news,” he said.

Since taking office in December 2006, Calderon has boosted efforts to fight drug traffickers by mobilizing troops and police. Official figures show some 32,000 people have died since in the drug war.

I figure I’d just sit back for the first half of the meeting, letting them flail about ineffectively, grasping at the same tired straws that have failed them again and again. And then I’d take over and solve it for them.

I’ve got a fairly busy week next week, but I think I could get away for a day, if they’d like to pencil me in on the calendar.

The science has been clear on this for quite some time: needle exchange programs save lives, reduce the spread of HIV, and don’t cause any increase in drug use. It’s a real no-brainer, and it’s been bizarre that it’s taken the U.S. government so long to get on board, but they finally are.

White House moves to fund needle exchanges as drug treatment

The Obama administration has designated intravenous needle exchanges as a drug treatment program, allowing federal money set aside to treat addictions to be used to distribute syringes to narcotics users. […]

The new position, determined by the surgeon general, is that the states can receive federal funding for programs that hand out the syringes as a treatment. […]

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Regina M. Benjamin told The Washington Examiner that needle exchange programs can serve as a gateway to treatment for drug addiction, HIV and other diseases.

“This determination, based on years of scientific research, will permit states and territories to use Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant funds for what had formerly been termed ‘needle exchange,’ ” Benjamin said.

Well that’s pretty clear. And uncontroversial. After all, who would object to a program that saves lives, doesn’t increase drug use and helps move hard core addicts to treatment?

Oh.

“It doesn’t pass any serious test of rationality,” said John P. Walters, the former drug czar under President George W. Bush. “It’s like the surgeon general deciding that handing out lighters is a good way to help people to stop smoking. It’s at least that absurd, and the consequences are even greater given the risks involved in IV drug use.”

The risks involved in IV drug use are precisely why this program is so important. And if cigarette lighters on the street were infected with the ebola virus, then yes, it would make sense health-wise to hand out lighters to smokers.

But Dr. Scott Teitelbaum, director of the University of Florida-run Florida Recovery Center, said, “Putting a needle in your arm is not recovery.” Teitelbaum said he opposed taking money from legitimate treatment programs to pay for needle exchange.

Translation: “I resent that you might take federal money away from me to fund something that actually works.”

Dr. Robert L. DuPont, president of the Institute for Behavior and Health in Rockville, said it’s possible that addicts will seek treatment after getting clean syringes, but there are more cost-effective ways of getting drug users to seek treatment.

“If someone proposed giving free drinks to treat alcoholism, they’d be laughed out of the building,” DuPont said. “But in the drug world, that’s considered good science.”

A more effective way is to spend the money to go into the shelters and communities hit hard by addictions and bring the addicts into treatment, said DuPont and other drug treatment experts.

Yeah, we can follow the Thailand example. Rounding up addicts into forced treatment? Really? That’s your solution? Are there perhaps some good reasons why that isn’t being done now? Like, oh, I don’t know, the U.S. Constitution?

Critics say the new policy is a step toward European-style treatment where the government provides the drugs and a clean room to inject them.

Oh, you mean the European programs where they’ve demonstrated an 88% reduction in crime, improved health, and a dramatic raising of the average age of addicts (because of addicts living longer and fewer young initiates)?

Yeah, we sure wouldn’t want anything like that to interfere with the jollies of our sadomoralists.

Drug addicts in Thailand will be treated next week

The Ministry of Interior has picked next week to get all drug addicts across Thailand clean. Deputy Permanent Secretary for Interior Mr Surapong Pongtadsirikul has disclosed that there are approximately 30,000 drug addicts who have not been treated so far since the 3rd phase of the drugs eradication program has begun.

During 20-27 February, 2011, drug abusers in Bangkok will be brought to the rehabilitation centers to get clean. There will be those who are encouraged to receive treatment on their freewill and those who will be forced against their will. A rehabilitation camp will be open for addicts elsewhere in Thailand where a rehab center is scarce.

This, remember, is a country with a history of abusing and killing its citizens in its internal drug wars.

The International Harm Reduction Association and other NGO’s have responded:

A coalition of international and Thai health and human rights organisations have voiced their fears that the Thai government’s planned round up of people it suspects are using drugs will trample on human rights and potentially rekindle widespread abuses of vulnerable people.

The organisations responded to an official announcement that the Ministry of the Interior intends to force thousands of people suspected of using drugs into detention centres and keep their names on official registries for future monitoring.

In a letter to the Thai government, the organisations wrote, “These plans for mass detention and forced treatment raise considerable human rights concerns, especially given Thailand’s history of nationwide punitive and ineffective anti-drug campaigns…there is no way for the Government to implement a campaign to forcibly ‘treat’ tens of thousands of people who use drugs without widespread human rights abuses taking place.”

So, where is Yury Fedotov and the UNODC? Why aren’t they jumping in to stop this abuse? Do human rights not matter?

And where is the U.S. State Department? They’ve got no problem jumping in to object to Bolivia’s innocuous amendment about coca. Where’s their objection to this?

How dare you harm that young child…

… by attempting to deny him the medicine that can help save his life.

We have two pieces of evidence to offer, at two ends of the scale, from morons who can’t seem to grasp that legalization is actually a way to end the problems of the drug war, and so they reach deep inside themselves (apparently from the backside) to find a “solution.”

Exhibit 1: A Freshman at SMU. “Michael Dearman is a first year majoring in the pursuit of truth and the overthrow of systems”

Clearly he hasn’t found it yet.

We, American drug market fuel international war on drugs

It is generally common knowledge that there is a drug war going on in Mexico.

Cartels run rampant through the entire country, making unfath-omable sums of money from the drug trade. None of these drug cartels would exist if there was not a market for the illicit substances they sell.

We are their market. You see, America has a drug problem. No matter where you go, whether it is on the SMU campus or to the poorest neighborhoods in the United States, there will be drugs. […]

In particular, marijuana use is extremely high. By the time students graduate from high school 42 percent will have tried marijuana, says the National Institute on Drug Abuse. This is where the cartels come in. Marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines enter from the southern border and make their way to your home. […]

It is easy to ignore these deaths when we refuse to make the connection between our habits and the livelihood of others. What if a human face is put on the issue? Then it is much harder to ignore the facts. There are plenty of SMU students that are Mexican nationals with families in Mexico who are day in and day out affected by the drug war. […]

Every time someone offers you a hit, pulls out a bong or asks you to buy from them, there should be a constant reminder of the blood it took to put those drugs in your hands. Smoking marijuana is more than just a habit that is debated in Congress or in the student forum, it changes the lives of people, real people, with real lives.

And every time you take a drink, you have the blood on your hands from those alcohol cartels…. Oh, wait. Never mind.

Exhibit 2: A merchant of death by the name of Li Yuehu — an alum of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nations should take no prisoners in the war on drugs

No, he’s not advocating reducing our prison population by legalizing. He’s actually suggesting that we should kill them instead.

Proximity to powerful Mexican and other drug cartels has been a constant headache for the US for decades. But countries like Singapore and China are also close to the infamous Golden Triangle and Golden Crescent. Yet the situation there seems different. […]

But perhaps another factor is that capital punishment awaits drug traffickers in China. And Singapore greets visitors with a friendly message on their entry card that says “Warning, death for drug traffickers under Singapore Law” in nice bold red ink.

Indeed, Southeast Asia has some of the harshest laws on drug crimes. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are the other countries in the region that enforce to various degrees the death penalty for drug trafficking. […]

I am no law expert by any stretch, but the way the laws are written seems predicated on the concept of a life for a life. Lets ponder that for a moment.

When we spare the lives of those who peddle and smuggle illegal drugs again and again, are we indirectly extinguishing the lives of others? […]

In every war, there are casualties. For anyone who is foolish enough to defend this way of life, there is an unspoken appreciation of the potential to pay the ultimate price. Perhaps society should not stand in their way.

One wonders why Li Yuehu chooses to live in San Francisco, instead of one of those wonderful countries whose murdering governments he admires so much.

TalkLeft has one of those way-too-common stories demonstrating painfully that the harm of prohibition is far greater than any harm from drugs: OK Woman Gets 10 Years for Selling $31 of Marijuana. It’s the kind of story that makes you angry — at the snitch, at the prosecutors, at the system, and mostly at the law.

Peter Moskos saw this:

A police “accreditation manager” (whatever that means) is revising his “social networking policy” so that potential applicants, as part of their background investigation, must sign an affidavit listing any social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn) they belong to and give their passwords to these sites so the department can snoop.

Is this becoming standard? Do we approve? I’m pretty sure I don’t approve.

I don’t either. I understand the need for police departments to investigate the background of applicants to make sure they haven’t been involved in criminal enterprises, but this smacks of screening for “unacceptable” viewpoints (such as “liking” LEAP, for example). And given the power the police seem to have (through lobbying and various questionable techniques) to influence legislation, even the appearance of the attempt to create a “standardized” political viewpoint in law enforcement is a pretty scary thing.

According to the U.S. State Department, the drug warriors are expected to seize 103% of all cocaine produced in the world this year.

Narcoleaks, a new website produced by Italian journalists and the drug trafficking researcher Sandro Donati, keeps track of cocaine seizure reports and compares them to official estimates of worldwide production. The most recent projection based on Donati’s calculations indicates that seizures, which totaled 47.1 metric tons from January 1 through yesterday, will hit 664 to 714 metric tons by the end of the year. According to the U.S. State Department’s production estimate, that means governments will succeed in confiscating all of Earth’s cocaine, plus another 19 metric tons or so (based on the middle of the projected range), possibly produced on Mars.

As you may be aware already, Special Agent Jaime Zapata, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent was killed in Mexico. It’s a tragedy, of course, and it was murder, which is reprehensible, and I would like very much for those who committed the murder to be brought to justice.

On the other hand, it’s important to remember that over 30,000 others have been killed in this drug war in Mexico, and important to avoid making wrong conclusions and bad policy based on the tragedy of a death.

In 1985, Drug Enforcement Administration agent Kiki Camarena was kidnapped and killed by drug traffickers. That was also a tragedy. It was turned into an annual celebration of the drug war (and a fictional “Drug Free Youth” called Red Ribbon Week, promoted heavily by the DEA.

The tragedy of one man’s death, instead of making us reevaluate the policies that led to it, led to cheering on those same destructive policies.

We face the danger again with the death of Jaime Zapata. Already, some are quickly finding the wrong lessons, and beating the drums of ratcheting up the very drug war that fueled this violence…

Security Advocates Call for Greater Offensive Against Mexico Cartels After Murder of ICE Agent

Advocates for stronger border security on Wednesday called for stepping up the U.S. offensive to stop murderous drug cartels terrorizing Mexico after an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent was killed a day earlier.

“This tragic event is a game changer. The United States will not tolerate acts of violence against its citizens or law enforcement and I believe we must respond forcefully. This should be a long overdue wake-up call for the Obama administration that there is a war on our nation’s doorstep,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas.

U.S. Govt. Hopes Agents Death Leads to Changes

some are predicting the brutal ambush of two ICE agents in Mexico, will change the way U.S. law enforcement operates in Mexico, possibly allowing agents to carry weapons across the border. And those familiar with the drug war say changes will be vital, because it looks like the cartels won’t be falling anytime soon. […]

Mayor Raul Salinas says he strongly supports attorney general Eric Holder’s suggestion to ask Mexico’s government to consider allowing U.S. agents serving in dangerous territory to carry weapons.

ICE Agent Zapata’s Murder Deepens U.S. Involvement in Mexico’s Drug War

Surely, the death of an American official on Mexican soil raises the stakes in the ongoing U.S.–Mexican battle against Mexico’s cartels and criminal organizations. […]

Yet there is fresh concern that help for Mexico will fall victim to the budgetary ax as the Obama Administration moves to cut key security and anti-drug assistance in order to protect domestic pork. [That’s from the Heritage Foundation, which is just fine with securitization pork!]

Fortunately, there are occasional voices of sanity…

Portales, New Mexico, News-Tribune

Let’s hope that reassessment actually takes place. Many questions need to be answered regarding the level of violence in Mexico, and the U.S. involvement that many refuse to recognize. […]

Sadly, people focus on the violence and ignore the cause. Too many Americans refuse to recognize the link between U.S. demand and those in Mexico who are fighting over the supply.

What will it take to convince people that interdiction is a lost cause? Billions of dollars and thousands of lives have been lost, with little effect on the drug trade. Spending even a fraction of that amount on treatment, to lessen the demand, could be a much more effective investment.

Most importantly, what will it take for people to recognize that the drug war itself is a major contributor to all this carnage? We tried the same experiment with alcohol in the 1920s, and saw the same results. Remember Capone, Dillinger and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre? Today’s crime in the streets of Mexico merely echo of what happened in Chicago and other U.S. cities 90 years ago.

Within 15 years of banning alcohol, officials recognized that prohibition itself contributes to the violence by raising the price of the product and ceding control to those who, by definition, are willing to break the law. It didn’t work with alcohol, it isn’t working with other drugs.

What will it take for officials to see the futility of their policies, and replace them with something more sensible?

If we want to provide a legacy to remember Special Agent Jaime Zapata, then let’s do so with policy that will really change the dynamic in this war.

This is probably the strongest, most well-written newspaper editorial that I’ve ever seen for the legalization of marijuana.

The Washington Legislature should legalize marijuana in the Seattle Times.

MARIJUANA should be legalized, regulated and taxed. The push to repeal federal prohibition should come from the states, and it should begin with the state of Washington.

In 1998, Washington was one of the earliest to vote for medical marijuana. It was a leap of faith, and the right decision. […]

It is time for the next step. It is a leap, yes — but not such a big one, now.

Still, it is not an easy decision. We have known children who changed from brilliant students to slackers by smoking marijuana at a young age. We have also known of many users who have gone on to have responsible and successful lives. One of them is president of the United States.

Like alcohol, most people can handle marijuana. Some can’t.

There is a deep urge among parents to say: “No. Don’t allow it. We don’t want it.” We understand the feeling. We have felt it ourselves. Certainly the life of a parent would be easier if everyone had no choice but to be straight and sober all the time. But an intoxicant-free world is not the one we have, nor is it the one most adults want.

Marijuana is available now. If your child doesn’t smoke it, maybe it is because your parenting works. But prohibition has not worked.

It might work in North Korea. But in America, prohibition is the pursuit of the impossible. It does impose huge costs.

The article goes on to detail those costs in ways rarely seen in the media, and then:

Some drugs have such horrible effects on the human body that the costs of prohibition may be worth it. Not marijuana. This state’s experience with medical marijuana and Seattle’s tolerance policy suggest that with cannabis, legalization will work — and surprisingly well.

Not only will it work, but it is coming. You can feel it.

Wow. Great stuff.

And this is just two days after Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes wrote an OpEd in that paper: Washington state should lead on marijuana legalization

MARIJUANA prohibition is more than a practical failure; it has been a misuse of both taxpayer dollars and the government’s authority over the people.

As the steward of reduced prosecutorial dollars, I am the first Seattle city attorney to stop prosecuting marijuana-possession cases and to call for the legalization, taxation and regulation of marijuana for adult recreational use.

We have long since agreed as a society that substances should not be prohibited by the government simply because they can be harmful if misused or consumed in excess. Alcohol, food and cars can all be extremely dangerous under certain circumstances, and cigarettes are almost always harmful in the long term. All these things kill many people every year.

But we don’t try to ban any of them — because we can’t, and we don’t need to. Instead, we regulate their manufacture and use, we tax them, and we encourage those who choose to use them to do so in as safe a manner as possible.

Remember, this is a city attorney speaking. Aren’t they supposed to be all gung-ho about prosecuting anyone who breaks the law and trying to pass more laws so you’ve got more tools to prosecute them? Here’s a city attorney who thinks on a broader scale.

My focus as city attorney is to ensure that we have ways to regulate the production and distribution of any potentially harmful substance so that we limit the potential risk and harm. Outright prohibition is an ineffective means of doing this.

Instead, I support tightening laws against driving while stoned, preventing the sale of marijuana to minors, and ensuring that anything other than small-scale noncommercial marijuana production takes place in regulated agricultural facilities — and not residential basements.

He even takes a pro-law enforcement position:

Ending marijuana prohibition is pro-law enforcement because it would enhance the legitimacy of our laws and law enforcement. As Albert Einstein said of Prohibition in 1921, “Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.”

Marijuana prohibition cannot be and has not been consistently enforced, and keeping it on the books diminishes the people’s respect for law enforcement. […]

Ending marijuana prohibition and focusing on rational regulation and taxation is a pro-public safety, pro-public health, pro-limited government policy. I urge the state Legislature to move down this road.

This is great stuff. Congratulations Seattle.

I’ve got a friend living in Seattle who has gotten more interested in drug policy reform partly in recent years, and he’s been quite excited by recent developments in his area, and these two articles in particular.

I think it is true that we are getting closer and closer to that critical mass level — the point at which public opinion overwhelmingly shifts to our side, not just in answering a poll favorably, but in demanding change. When that happens, the politician have no choice but to follow.

It may not happen as fast as we’d like (it certainly won’t), but I believe it’s inevitable, for two main reasons:

1. The more people learn about prohibition, the more they’re likely to shake off their propaganda blinds and support reform. That means as long as we’re out there educating more people, the support will always grow and never shrink.
2. Once brought on board to reform, the more people learn, the more angry and motivated and insistent they get (just check out the angst in the comments here now and then for a taste of that). This means that there will continue to be a larger subgroup of support that is not just in favor of reform, but considers drug policy reform a matter of critical importance (as opposed to the “oh, yeah, I favor legalization, but the time isn’t right and we have bigger things to do right now.”)

So bring it on, Seattle. Take another shot that will be heard round the country. Whether you succeed or not this time, you’re bringing us another step closer.

Danny at Transform Drug Policy Foundation blog has a fascinating and illuminating post on “securitisation.” Note: he does give the post a “policy nerd warning,” but despite the academic language, the thrust is easy to follow and so completely explains the world-wide expansion of the drug war and its exemption from the need to prove its value or efficacy (the same principles can be used to explain at a more local level the way the drug war has progressed in the U.S.)

Securitisation is described as “the move that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics” (Buzan et al. 1998: 23). By declaring something a security issue, the speaker entitles himself to enforce and legitimise unusual and extreme measures to fight this threat. Referenced from here.

Rita Taureck of the University of Birmingham describes securitisation:

“The main argument of securitisation theory is that security is a speech act, that alone by uttering ‘security’ something is being done. “It is by labelling something a security issue that it becomes one.”(Wæver 2004a,) A securitising actor, by stating that a particular referent object is threatened in its existence, claims a right to extraordinary measures to ensure the referent objects survival. The issue is then moved out of the sphere of normal politics into the realm of emergency politics, where it can be dealt with swiftly and without the normal (democratic) rules and regulations of policy making. For the content of security this means that it has no longer any given meaning but that it can be anything a securitising actor says it is. Security – understood in this way – is a social construction, with the meaning of security dependent on what is done with it.” […]

The inherent nature of a securitisation is anti-democratic, in so far as it is “the move that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics”. That is why evidence is anathema and why the political rhetoric around drug policy is so irrational and populist in tone. Once an issue has been securitised, a system of propaganda must be maintained to hold it within that framework.

Which leads me to one last point. When a securitisation has been in place for as long as the one relating to the non-medical use of drugs, progressive reform in itself becomes a ‘threat’ – a ‘threat’ to a long standing mission and some very well resourced agencies, charged with fighting the drug war. Now we see that what is actually under threat is an inflexible world order. A world order, whose long standing international relations, and indeed, national domestic social policies are predicated on fighting a futile war on drugs, are fundamentally threatened by a reform process that undoes its foundations.

I think you’ll find the whole piece quite interesting.

The House is currently debating H.R. 1, which would fund the government for the rest of the current fiscal year. As part of this debate, Representatives Jared Polis (D-CO) and Ron Paul (R-TX) are introducing an amendment to eliminate funding for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, commonly known as the Drug Czar’s office.

Apparently this is going on right now.

You can send a letter to your Rep: