Drug WarRant

At the Drug Czar’s “blog”: ONDCP and Canada Renew Partnership in Substance Abuse Work

Last month Director Kerlikowske visited Ottawa, Canada to share the Obama Administration’s efforts to restore balance to drug control efforts and discuss drug issues affecting both sides of the border.

Ah yes, “balance.” That’s the code word that the drug czar likes to use to excuse why, if he’s already ended the drug war, and they know that supply side policy doesn’t work, they still use so much enforcement. It’s really a “balanced” approach of [and then they mumble] mostly law enforcement. It’s sort of like calling it a balanced approach to a diet when you have a diet coke after eating an entire Death by Chocolate.

On his first trip to the Canada in his official capacity…

Interesting wording there. Perhaps a staffer in the office doesn’t realize that Canada is a sovereign nation (actually, perhaps the entire office doesn’t realize that) and going “to Canada” isn’t going “to the Canada” — it’s not like going “to the mall.”

He also discussed how these measures, combined with smarter use of law enforcement, could help reduce the southbound flow of drugs, especially methamphetamine and ecstasy, from Canada into the U.S. and stream of guns into Canada from the U.S.

Yep, there’s the real agenda. Supply-side, pure and simple.

He also met with the Honorable Peter Kent, Minister of State of Foreign Affairs; the Honorable Rob Nicholson, M.P. for Niagara Falls, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada; the Honorable Vic Toews, M.P for Provencher and Minister of Public Safety; and Member of Parliament the Honorable John Weston to discuss cross-border issues on drugged driving…

Really? He is so determined to beat this dead horse. He apparently sees his claim to fame (other than ending the drug war, of course) to be the creation of an international epidemic of drugged driving out of thing air all by himself. I wonder what those “cross-border issues on drugged driving” are? Do we have a lot of people who are driving high and failing to stop at checkpoints? Is drugged driving something that is catching and they might have to seal the border to keep it from spreading?

During meetings with Mr. William J.S Elliott, Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and with members of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police Drug Abuse Committee, Director Kerlikowske discussed current drug-related challenges and explored opportunities for cross-border collaboration across a range of law enforcement of issues.

More “balance.” And more bad grammar.

Hope you had fun on your trip to the Canada, Director Kerlikowske. Did they enjoy your lies as much as we do?

The day Westminster gave up on science by Ian Dunt

Last week’s police reform and social responsibility bill contains a clause scrapping the requirement for the home secretary to appoint at least six scientists to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). So that’s that then. They’ve admitted it. The drugs war has nothing to do with reality. It is now to be based entirely on fairy tales.

Of course, it’s always been based on fairy tales. It’s just that the UK is ready to admit it. The U.S. still pretends that there’s some science involved in their policies, but that’s never really been the case, either.

“A number of people expressed concern about what the cost may be to the county,” said Mendocino County Board Chairwoman Carre Brown, also 1st District supervisor. “We have no money to put into this.”

Nor does cash-strapped Mendocino County seem to be alone in its inability to contribute much to the estimated $1.5 million price tag of a combined law enforcement effort to reclaim the Mendocino National Forest for hikers and outdoors enthusiasts, according to Brown.

That’s an estimate offered at the symposium of what it would cost to launch a large, six-county law enforcement operation next year, according to Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman.

Must be tough. Figuring out the huge cost of getting marijuana grows out of the national forest… Oh wait. Wasn’t there a Proposition recently that would have done that automatically and raised tax money to boot? Gee, I wonder what happened with that? They don’t even mention it.

Not all college newspaper contributors are clueless about the truth. Thank goodness for SSDP.

Gutierrez went on to say, however, that he now realizes there is not even time for the institution building to take hold in the remaining years of the Calderon administration. “We have 18 months,” he said, “and if we do not produce a tangible success that is recognizable to the Mexican people, it will be difficult to sustain the confrontation into the next administration.”

He lamented the pervasive, debilitating fear that is so much a part of contemporary Mexican society, where even people in the Yucatan, with “European levels of security” are afraid because of the instability in a few distant cities.

In the U.S., they want us to be unreasonably fearful in order to increase authoritarian government power. In Mexico, they want the people to feel unreasonably safe in order to… what?

A New Zealand glamor model who was charged with possessing half a million dollars’ worth of methamphetamine said test results show the substance was harmless fake snow.

Bought at a $2 store.

Hey, if it’s white and powdery, it must be worth a half million.

The AP points out that their story confirms what critics of drug war have said for years: The government is quick to boast about large arrests and seizures, but its efforts result in little, in any, slowdown in the drug trade.

And not only has it failed to interrupt the drug trade – it has made it much more violent. While Mexico’s and the United States’ “surge” in fighting the cartels over the last four years has not impacted drug availability or slowed down the trade, it has led to close to 30,000 prohibition related deaths in Mexico. It’s not the marijuana or coca plants themselves or the use of these drugs that causes this bloodbath. The brutality is a byproduct of drug prohibition, which makes drugs as valuable as gold and creates a profit motive that people are willing to kill for.

In a sane world, people would be outraged by this.

Vast expenditures resulting in no beneficial results, but causing tens of thousands of deaths. Hmmm… better invest some more money in that enterprise.

This is an open thread.

It’s important in a country like ours to have a mechanism to counter a grave injustice should one occur. In that light, the founders properly saw fit to vest the President of the United States with the power of the pardon.

Of course, we all know about the injustice that can occur in the drug war, with up to life sentences given to many low-level drug offenders.

President Obama has deliberated for two years, reviewing the requests for pardons and has finally identified the worst injustices and is ready to wield his pardon power (Via TalkLeft), including a whopping four drug cases “who were given sentences that the president deemed excessive.” Such as the heartrending case of Roxane Kay Hettinger.

Roxane Kay Hettinger, Powder Springs, Ga., sentenced in 1986 to 30 days in jail and three years of probation for conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

Thank goodness the President was there to rescue this poor woman who spent 30 days in jail 24 years ago.

Or how about this tragedy?

Timothy James Gallagher of Navasota, Texas, sentenced in 1982 to three years of probation for conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute cocaine.

I doubt that even a pardon can erase the horrible memories of three years not spent in prison 28 years ago.

Thank goodness that those are the worst of the injustices that have occurred in the drug war. I don’t know if I could take it otherwise.

A very insightful article by Juan Gabriel Tokatlian in the Guardian (UK): The only winner in the ‘war on drugs’: The real effect of militarising drugs policy in Latin America has been to cement the hegemony of the US Southern Command

As always with the war on drugs, it’s so important to look at the money, and look at the power. Know who benefits in both those areas, and you know the real players pushing for prohibition.

One of the most interesting and challenging paradoxes of debate on the “war on drugs” is how little examination there has been of its major warrior: the military. In Latin America, that means the US Southern Command (SouthCom). […]

At first, there was a certain reluctance on the part of the military to being sucked into an unconventional, politically-driven fight against the illegal drug trade. But they were eventually won over to participation in anti-narcotics efforts – thanks, in part, to growing anti-drug budgets approved by Congress. […]

After 9/11 and the rise of the so-called “new threats” (the supposed amalgamation of international terrorism, organised crime, drug trafficking and weapons of mass destruction), Washington ceased to observe a distinction between internal security and external defence. SouthCom experienced a “great leap forward”: its role was already extensive, but now it developed into a more autonomous protagonist in the “war on drugs”. Plan Colombia, first, and the Mérida Initiative, more recently, were emblematic of the core rationality of a coercive anti-drug strategy – a strategy that, by definition, placed the military centre-stage in a prohibitionist crusade in the Americas. […]

What we are witnessing practically everywhere in the Americas is a coercive prohibition campaign that brings neither a partial nor a total solution to the drug question. Unless its premises are challenged, a permanent sense of a “clear and present danger” with regard to narcotics will be fostered both in the United States and in Latin America – which, in a circular way, will only serve to justify the existing repressive policies. The role of the US Southern Command in the Latin American front of the “war on drugs” is key to the prohibitionist paradigm.

Powerful stuff. And right on target.

This is, in part, why I feel it’s unlikely that we’ll get anything really useful from the State Department memos from WikiLeaks (although I’m willing to be surprised) — the only real conflicting opinion that’s likely to be found is over who gets the lion’s share of the power and funding from continuing the drug war.

Oh, and don’t forget: Drug Czar Kerlikowske ended the drug war last May.

There’s been a lot of controversy over the new TSA body scanners at airports that can “see” through clothing. Since it’s unlikely that they would even catch the kind of terrorist device that they are being installed at great expense to prevent, what’s the use of them?

Now we know.

Via Toke of the Town.

Legendary rapper Kurtis Blow, 51, was busted Thursday morning at Los Angeles International Airport after a TSA body scanner detected “an anomaly” in his pants, which turned out to be a bag of marijuana.

TSA — keeping California safe from rappers with marijuana.

ACLU sues Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills and Livonia over medical marijuana rules

The ACLU is suing Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, and Livonia because, the ACLU says, the three cities have effectively banned medical marijuana, despite a state law approved by voters that legalizes the drug for medicinal purposes.

It continues to amaze me that some people are still so scared of medical marijuana that they’re willing to buck state law and try to outlaw it locally. What is it that they really fear? (They can’t all be making money from prohibition, can they?) Is it some misguided morality thing? A lifetime of ingrained propaganda?

Last time on Kids Say the Darndest Things, we had Shane Smith of TCU. Today, it’s Frannie Boyle at Vanderbilt University with Legalized marijuana? You must be high.

Some really astonishing items in this piece.

Legalization would cause use of marijuana to go up, and as a result, health care costs associated with the drug would rise as well.

And what health care costs are those?

In areas of the world where the drug is decriminalized, there are still high rates of violence and crime as a result of trafficking.

How is that an argument against legalization?

Also, the RAND Corporation did a study that says 60 percent of people arrested in the U.S., England and Australia test positive for marijuana use.

Another absolutely meaningless statistic.

Weed would never boost the economy. The cost of marijuana would drop considerably if it were legalized, giving most distributers a major incentive to stay on the black market or to start dealing other drugs.

Wait. What?

Also, the FDA hasn’t approved marijuana, even for medicinal purposes. This means that marijuana could come from unknown, dangerous sources.

Actually, it’s criminalization that means that marijuana would come from unknown sources. Legalization would solve that.

A common argument is that problems associated with weed can also be associated with alcohol, a legal substance. This may be true, but marijuana users are much more likely to become addicted to the drug than alcohol users.

Coffee spit number 1.

Unlike alcohol, marijuana has no known health benefits.

Coffee spit number 2.

Marijuana is usually consumed to the point of intoxication. Alcohol usually isn’t.

Ironically, that was the erroneous argument put forth by Art Linkletter in his discussions with Nixon, and Art Linkletter started “Kids Sat the Darndest Things” on his television show.

Alcohol can be harmful, yes, but our government tried to make it illegal during the Prohibition and found that crimes and deaths went up as a result. Alcohol has been a part of this world since before Christ, and it is too ingrained in this culture to take away.

Um. How is this an argument against legalization?

Weed, on the other hand, has never been fully ingrained in American culture, and it never will be. College is fun and all, but the real world will meet us with drug tests and rewards for good character, productivity and efficiency — the antithesis of what marijuana is. Music artists and movies stars make smoking weed sound like it’s a mainstream thing, but it is simply the minority’s addiction to escape.

Ah. Drinking is part of good character, productivity and efficiency; marijuana is not.

Almost as scary as Frannie Boyle’s ignorance about marijuana is her conception of what the “real world” is supposed to be.

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?

Drug Czar

Director Kerlikowske called attention to new information reporting the alarmingly high percentage of fatalities on America’s roadways involving drivers with drugs in their system. He called on communities to act immediately to prevent drug use before it starts in light of these new findings. […]

In an ONDCP News Release, Director Kerlikowske stated that “drugged driving is a much bigger public health threat than most Americans realize and unfortunately, it may be getting worse.

So what’s the significant impact that this increase in the presence of drugs of unknown breakdown in the bloodstream of tested drivers has had on society?

U.S. Traffic Deaths Drop to Historic Low

U.S. traffic fatalities are at a record low despite drivers traveling farther than they did in 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study of traffic injuries and fatalities in 2009 found that 33,808 people were killed in vehicular accidents, which is a decline of 9.7 percent from 2008’s figures. In fact, you’d have to go all the way back to 1950 to find a year when fewer people were killed.

Keep in mind that there were only 44.7 million cars on U.S. roads in 1950 and a population of 150 million compared to today’s 255.9 million cars and a population of 310 million, according to the DOT. Which means that the probability of being involved in an auto fatality is dramatically lower than it was nearly 60 years ago.

Drugged Driving. Obviously it has more impact than we thought.

I’m strongly in favor of the efforts of WikiLeaks to help create some transparency in our Government.

Unlike the authoritarians that seem to dominate much of our media, many of whom appear to want to kill or imprison the leakers and yet have no desire to hold government officials accountable for their crimes, I see WikiLeaks as a balancing force.

Sure, the ability of government to conduct delicate affairs in secret sounds attractive until you have a situation where practically everything is classified and the government routinely lies to its own citizens.

So I’m, as usual, in agreement with Glenn Greenwald:

Nonetheless, our government and political culture is so far toward the extreme pole of excessive, improper secrecy that that is clearly the far more significant threat. And few organizations besides WikiLeaks are doing anything to subvert that regime of secrecy, and none is close to its efficacy. It’s staggering to watch anyone walk around acting as though the real threat is from excessive disclosures when the impenetrable, always-growing Wall of Secrecy is what has enabled virtually every abuse and transgression of the U.S. government over the last two decades at least.

In sum, I seriously question the judgment of anyone who — in the face of the orgies of secrecy the U.S. Government enjoys and, more so, the abuses they have accomplished by operating behind it — decides that the real threat is WikiLeaks for subverting that ability. That’s why I said yesterday: one’s reaction to WikiLeaks is largely shaped by whether or not one, on balance, supports what the U.S. has been covertly doing in the world by virtue of operating in the dark. I concur wholeheartedly with Digby’s superb commentary on this point yesterday:

My personal feeling is that any allegedly democratic government that is so hubristic that it will lie blatantly to the entire world in order to invade a country it has long wanted to invade probably needs a self-correcting mechanism. There are times when it’s necessary that the powerful be shown that there are checks on its behavior, particularly when the systems normally designed to do that are breaking down. Now is one of those times. . . . .As for the substance of the revelations, I don’t know what the results will be. But in the world of diplomacy, embarrassment is meaningful and I’m not sure that it’s a bad thing for all these people to be embarrassed right now. Puncturing a certain kind of self-importance — especially national self-importance — may be the most worthwhile thing they do. A little humility is long overdue.

I am quite interested to see what we will discover in the coming days regarding the drug war.

Of all the information contained in the WikiLeaks files about Mexico, 80 percent refers to the issue of drug trafficking and communications made from the Embassy during the governments of Ernesto Zedillo, Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon.

All told, there are 8,300 documents in the current WikiLeaks dump (not yet released) with the tag “narcotics.”

I’m sure most of them will be embassy communications discussing how to fight the drug war “better” and there will be minimal new revelations. There could be an embarrassment or two regarding just what we did provide in Plan Mexico.

What I’d really like to see is a WikiLeaks dump of DEA administrative files and internal ONDCP memos. That would be a treasure trove. Any whistle-blowers out there?

It really is pretty pathetic to continue to hear such this nonsense.

This latest moron is Adam Yamaguchi in a promo at Huffington Post for Current TV’s Vanguard.

My team decided to do this story after we’d come across a pretty startling piece of information – that Mexican drug trafficking organizations derive most of their operating profit not from heroine, cocaine or meth, but from marijuana. In fact, according to Tommy Lanier, Marijuana Initiative director at the Office of National Drug Control Policy, marijuana funds the organizations’ capacity to traffic heroin, cocaine, meth, humans, arms, and all their other criminal enterprises.

So while you may not think a little bong hit has the same impact as a hit of coke, it’s time Americans admit a recreational habit could have larger ramifications.

It might be hard to inhale, but it’s hard to ignore the connection.

First of all, is this some new revelation from the ONDCP? Or is Adam Yamaguchi that far behind the times? After all, it was the ONDCP under Walters that came out with notion that the cartels were primarily dependent on marijuana for their income. Then when we started using that as an argument for legalization, they worked exceptionally hard to walk that back and attribute it to crazy Walters pulling it out of his ass. They even got RAND and the other academics to downplay the marijuana connection in the lead up to the Prop 19 vote. So now that the vote’s over, it’s the cartels’ primary source of income again?

Second…

It takes some kind of first class idiot to believe that you can defund the cartels by suggesting that people voluntarily stop smoking pot. It’s like saying that you could eliminate all sexually transmitted diseases if people just gave up sex. True, but only happening in your fantasies.

Thus, trying to assign blame to the person taking a bong hit is delusional. Especially when you’d have to be deaf, dumb, blind, and braille illiterate (tough traits for a so-called correspondent and producer to hold) to have missed the fact that legalization would solve all those problems, and unlike abstinence, is actually possible.

Unlike Adam, the people taking those bong hits know the truth.

Adam Yamaguchi — moron of the week.