Drug WarRant

While the U.S. continues to keep, promote, and export repressive marijuana policies, other countries, often quietly, are finding ways to mitigate the stupidity of the laws the international treaties force them to follow.

Spain is another one.

Cannabis clubs plug a gap in Spanish drugs laws

The Private Cannabis Club, with its palmate green leaves stencilled on the walls and the club’s name etched on to smoked windowpanes, is at the vanguard of a new movement of pro-cannabis campaigners in Spain. The members spotted a gap in Spain’s drugs laws which, they say, makes the activities of private clubs like these entirely legal. […]

“We’ve been open for two months and we already have 125 members,” said the association’s president, Pedro Álvaro Zamora. Those members pay €120 a year to belong and Zamora and his companions follow rules that seem similar to those of exclusive Mayfair clubs. A sign by the doorbell warns that only members are admitted and a committee vets new applicants, blackballing some. Alicia Méndez, a club official, said: “Potential members are interviewed and we do not accept everyone. Our members have to be responsible people, have the right profile.”

Zamora said: “This is not Amsterdam, this is not a coffee shop. This is our association’s club house and it is a private place. It is not open for everyone.”

Spain does not have a law banning consumption in private and members claim it is safer to use the club than go out to parks and smoke in public.

Authorities are pretty much allowing these to continue (sometimes even returning confiscated cannabis to the clubs) without making a big fuss about it.

Again, not a perfect solution, but better than nothing.

The Conservative Political Action Conference is a big deal each year, and this year’s is already generating some controversy. Turns out that they’re not ready to accept teh gays.

Two of the nation’s premier moral issues organizations, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, are refusing to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference in February because a homosexual activist group, GOProud, has been invited.

Well, maybe they need to embrace another issue. The New York Post’s Abby Wisse Schachter has a suggestion: Note to CPAC: Have a pot session

Pat Robertson and Vice President Joe Biden have provided conservatives an opportunity to start a conversation about marijuana legalization. Robertson came out earlier this week favoring if not wholesale legalization of pot, then a reexamination of the current broken system of punishment and prison for possession. […]

On the other side of the aisle, Biden was asked to respond to Robertson’s remarks and reverted to language that has been in use for decades. Biden called pot a “gateway drug” and said he doesn’t agree that legalization is the way to go. […]

Biden’s answer to the question was old hat indicating that Democrats aren’t ready to evolve on the issue. Republicans should beat them to the punch and there’s no better labratory for new ideas than the annual CPAC gathering. Conservative leaders and politicians will gather with thousands of the faithful, in Washington in February where much of the focus will be on 2012 and the rise of presidential contenders. It would serve the purposes of the conservative movement and those who want to run for president to start a conversation about legalization.

Excellent suggestion.

… yet still disturbing.

Cristina Silva of the AP has an article: In Nev., booze, bets, brothels OK, not selling pot even as nearby states allow it

The question:

How is a state that has long lured visitors with promises of unconstrained debauchery stricter with pot than its more wholesome neighbors of Colorado, Arizona and California?

Apparently that’s a misunderstanding of the character of Nevada. And the political leaders and historians will set you… straight.

Sure, they say, the state has libertarian leanings and is generally willing to prosper from activities that most states have declared repugnant.

For many, however, pot is for hippies.

And Nevada, borne in the rugged days of the Wild West, is no place for hippies.

“The attitude was real men drank, whored and gambled — these are the vices of frontier men and women,” said Guy Rocha, Nevada’s former archivist.

“When it comes to drugs, Nevada has looked at it as, ‘that’s what those wild people in California do, or New York or Oregon,'” he said.

Sad. But refreshing honesty.

To adapt The West Wing’s Ainslee Hayes’ quote to a different issue …

Your marijuana control policy doesn’t have anything to do with public safety… It’s about, you don’t like people who do like marijuana. You don’t like the people.

Yes, Virginia, caveman-testosterone-fueled public policy does exist.

The Daily Herald (Chicago suburbs) editorial board shows just how ignorant it is: A suburban war on drugs is vital to stem the tide

We must wage a war on drug abuse. That should be the resolve of law enforcement, our communities, our schools and ourselves. […]

Death by heroin was up 130 percent in Lake County, 150 percent in three years in McHenry County and it doubled in two years in Will County. […]

A vital takeaway from the St. Charles forum was the role marijuana use and drinking plays in leading teens into even harder drugs. One expert said more teens are in treatment for marijuana dependency than all other drugs combined.

One teen told the crowd that “from the moment I tried smoking pot and drinking, something clicked in my body and I knew that I liked being altered.” That led to cocaine, acid and mushrooms. It led to her being expelled and it led to criminal activity like forging checks.

That treatment statistic lie just won’t die. (By “lie,” I mean an intentional effort to deceive, which it is.)

This isn’t the first time for the Daily Herald to get on the bandwagon of conflating marijuana use with heroin deaths (and the other just as nonsensical bandwagon of thinking that a war is actually useful in reducing heroin deaths).

Last year, they helped promote this bizarre campaign of a grieving and destructive mother.

Mother of suburban teen who died warns others

(I’ve seen this billboard. It really threw me to see the pot leaf on a billboard. And it made less sense once I read it.)

“If this doesn’t get their attention, I don’t know what will,” the Lincolnshire mother says, as she wipes a tear off her cheek and a friend wraps an arm around her shoulder. “If we have to be in people’s faces, we will.”

Now, there are actually some good things being suggested:

Parents pushed for the new law that takes effect Jan. 1 making it legal for anyone who has the proper training to carry Narcan, a prescription drug already used by medical workers that reverses the effects of a heroin overdose. […]

Parents also are having informal discussions whether to push for a law that would grant immunity to anyone who calls 911 to report a drug overdose.

Excellent ideas. But some of the rest is just clueless…

Heroin’s growing popularity in the suburbs can be attributed to a few things, experts say. First, it’s easy to get. Police officers say there’s a steady stream of nice cars filled with suburban kids rolling into the West side of Chicago, where they buy the drugs on the street corner. Heroin’s also cheap – a $10 “dime bag” can contain up to 12 doses, said Bruce Talbot, a retired Woodridge police sergeant who now leads drug training programs at schools and police departments.

Hmmm… that seems to me to be the result of a drug war, not the reason to call for one.

A generation ago, heroin was largely thought of as a scary, inner-city drug. Today, it’s trendy to some high school students who don’t recognize how highly addictive and dangerous it is.

“They think it’s like marijuana or something,” said Bruce Johnson, director of NICASA, a substance-abuse center based in Round Lake. “They don’t think there’s going to be this horrific change in their life because of this.”

Maybe if you hadn’t lied to them about marijuana…

Stephen Smith, a unit coordinator for Rosecrance’s men’s residential program in Rockford, says most rehab centers have waiting lists.

“It’s heartbreaking,” he said. “Funding is disappearing.”

The stigma associated with heroin also prevents parents from seeking help, fearing they’ll be judged if anyone finds out.

Well, maybe there would be spaces in rehab centers if they weren’t filled with marijuana “addicts.” And maybe the stigma wouldn’t be such a problem if we weren’t waging a war!

The leaked cables, which various journalism organizations such as WikiLeaks and the New York Times have been publishing, have been interesting historically, but have produced very little in terms of startling or radically new information that had previously been hidden.

The New York Times covers Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency

WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.

In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be hard to tell the politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings are themselves mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run roughshod over struggling governments.

Yes, some details may be new, but anyone who has been paying close attention to drug policy and the way our government deals with drug policy is already aware of the shady international position of the DEA and the blatant fact that drug policy agencies are being used for many other political purposes, including spying.

In fact, the real danger of the leaked cables is the likely assumption by some that these cables are somehow showing the worst of what is happening out there.

These are State Department communiques — far from the kind of place where anyone would discuss the real underbelly of DEA operations. For that you’d need to see some files buried deep inside 600 Army Navy Drive in Arlington, Virginia.

What we’re seeing now reported by the New York Times is the visible part of the iceberg.

Still, it’s good to see this, at least, aired publicly.

The Portugal experiment in drug policy has been a critical and important laboratory demonstrating two huge points in the drug policy debate:

1. tough enforcement (with all its destruction) isn’t somehow magically preventing an even larger drug problem than we have today (this is the completely unsupported argument that prohibitionists use to oppose trying anything other than strict prohibition)
2. smarter approaches to drug policy can actually work to reduce harm, save lives, save money, and more.

The story was broken in a huge way by Glenn Greenwald, in his outstanding white paper for the Cato Institute: Drug Decriminalization in Portugal:
Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies (downloadable for free) in April, 2009. The report, while given a lot of play on the internet, was fairly thoroughly ignored in most of the mainstream media.

This week that changed, with a large piece by Barry Hatton and Martha Mendoza with the Associated Press: Portugal’s drug policy pays off; US eyes lessons. It’s a pretty good piece, with accompanying video, about the Portugal experiment, plus other innovative approaches around the world, including the Switzerland heroin maintenance program, the harm maintenance programs in Canada, and drug courts in the U.S. Inexcusably, however (yet typically for mainstream media), they fail to even mention Greenwald’s white paper.

Regardless, it’s good to see this getting some good coverage.

One of the things the piece mentioned was that Drug Czar Kerlikowske went to Portugal in September to see it for himself. They also mentioned that Kerlikowske was publicly trying to distance himself from the “drug war” language.

Well, this was just a little too close to an endorsement of something other than prohibition for the czar, so we quickly found this correction from the AP in the Washington Post:

In a Dec. 26 story, The Associated Press reported that the United States is studying drug reforms in Portugal, and that White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske visited Portugal to learn about its experience with decriminalizing drugs. The story should have made clear that Kerlikowske does not think Portugal’s approach is right for the United States.

Running away from good lessons. We don’t even dare talk about it unless someone gets the idea that something other than strict prohibition can be a possibility.

It’s also interesting that if we point out an outright provable lie that the drug czar has gotten the press to print, there’s no interest in printing a correction, but let the Drug Czar think that something in an article might lead people to believe that he’d be open-minded and a correction is posted within hours.

Quotable from Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings: No matter how bad it seems, it’s worse

It seems that no matter how cynical you are on the drug war, if you search hard enough you can find some piece of evil that still exceeds your worst projections.

So much money. So many profiteers.

Bill Conroy at The Narcosphere covers the story of the $100 Million Drug-War Garrison Approved for U.S.-Mexican Border

A small county board in southern California has just ushered in the era of the paramilitarization of the U.S. border by approving plans for a private, $100 million, 1,000-acre military and law enforcement training camp spearheaded by a former Navy Seal sniper who also has done work for the U.S. intelligence community.

The Imperial County Board of Supervisors earlier this week approved the project, to be developed near the small rural border town of Ocotillo, Calif., by a company called Wind Zero Group Inc. The supervisors, at a meeting held Tuesday, Dec. 21, voted 4-1 in favor of allowing the border garrison project to proceed toward construction, despite stiff community opposition, according to news reports.

$100 million facility. That’s a lot of money to spend on a training facility unless they expect to get a whole lot of government contracts for training… and other activities.

Conroy points out the interesting connection with RAND.

among the backers of the Wind Zero project is former Navy Captain and RAND Senior Management Systems Analyst John Birkler, who serves as a director of Wind Zero, according to SEC filings.

RAND bills itself as a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, but, in reality, it has a long history of close ties to the military and private-sector warfare complex.

RAND media spokesman Warren Robak told Narco News previously that “John Birkler and his involvement with Wind Zero is a private matter — it has nothing to do with RAND.”

But Birkler has at least one thing in common with Wind Zero beyond the Navy background he shares with the company’s founder, the former Navy SEAL sniper, U.S. intelligence agency operative and author Brandon Webb. Birkler, Webb and Wind Zero have expertise in the emerging arena of drone warfare.
At RAND, Birkler, among other responsibilities, oversees research for the U.S. Navy as well as the U.S. Special Operations Command — under which is the Navy SEAL program. And, according to Rand’s Web site, among Birkler’s specific areas of expertise is “unmanned aerial vehicles.”

Doesn’t pass the smell test. RAND does lots of government work, has a Senior Manager who specializes in drones and is a backer of a big border project to provide drug war training facilities for an organization that has experience working with drones, and it’s just “a private matter.”

Wind Zero is, at best, a Blackwater/Xe wanna-be, connected with RAND, and poised to conduct private drug war operations within the United States as a taxpayer-funded mercenary operation.

Feel safer now?

More training facilities to escalate the drug war even further. And we know how well that can work out… Event the Los Zetas, probably the most dangerous group of drug trafficking criminals out there, apparently received training at the School of the Americas at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where they would have trained in rapid deployment, aerial assaults, marksmanship, ambushes, small-group tactics, intelligence collection, counter-surveillance techniques, prisoner rescues and sophisticated communications.

Apparently what we need is more private military training facilities on the border.

… because you need one.

I’ll be back posting tonight or tomorrow – a number of things of interest happening out there.

I’m on the road right now, headed to my Dad’s for Christmas. I’ll be there for a few days without any wifi, so, while I’ll be able to read comments and emails on my iPhone, it’s unlikely that I’ll be posting much.

Then home for a bit before heading out to Iowa to begin a road trip with my Mom, January 1-8. My Mom is 88 and was really hoping sometime to see her brother who is 94 and living in Sun City, Arizona. Neither can travel on their own so I’m going to drive her out to see him.

I’m hoping to also enjoy a little sight-seeing along the way with her, and maybe check out the Phoenix area a bit, while she’s visiting with her brother.

I’d love to have any of your suggestions regarding planned routes, tips of things to see or do, etc.

Mom lives in the Des Moines, Iowa area and it’s possible that we’ll need to take the southern route toward Arizona, which would likely include US-54 cutting through the corners of Kansas/Oklahoma/Texas, I-40 through New Mexico and eastern Arizona, and I-17 north of Phoenix.

If weather forecasts are favorable, we may try using the northern route on one of the trips: I-80 through Nebraska, I-70 through Colorado, US-191 through Utah.

It seems to me that the northern route may have more interesting scenery (with the exception of Nebraska) including areas of Utah and northern Arizona that I haven’t seen since I was a boy, although I’m sure there are some good things to see going through New Mexico into Arizona (Petrified Forest?, etc.) We won’t have a lot of time to stop and explore, but we’ll be looking for quick stops, passing scenery and maybe even a short detour or two.

Is there anything we shouldn’t miss?

What are your holiday plans?

This is an open thread.