Drug WarRant

Powerful essay in Spiegel by Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations:

Lift the Ban! Kofi Annan on Why It’s Time To Legalize Drugs

Prohibition has had little impact on the supply of or demand for drugs. When law enforcement succeeds in one area, drug production simply moves to another region or country, drug trafficking moves to another route and drug users switch to a different drug. Nor has prohibition significantly reduced use. Studies have consistently failed to establish the existence of a link between the harshness of a country’s drug laws and its levels of drug use. The widespread criminalization and punishment of people who use drugs, the over-crowded prisons, mean that the war on drugs is, to a significant degree, a war on drug users — a war on people. […]

First, we must decriminalize personal drug use. […]

Second, we need to accept that a drug-free world is an illusion.

I’m very curious to see what will happen when the U.N. General Assembly has a special session on drugs in April. It’s getting harder for them to pretend that the failures of prohibition don’t exist.

Over the years here, we’ve talked a lot about economics and the drug war, and how obvious it is that the drug war cheerleaders are clueless (sometimes intentionally) about the basics of economics.

NPR did a piece about Tom Wainwright, who followed the drug war for The Economist. ‘Narconomics’: How The Drug Cartels Operate Like Wal-Mart And McDonald’s

During the three years he spent in Mexico and Central and South America, Wainwright discovered that the cartels that control the region’s drug trade use business models that are surprisingly similar to those of big-box stores and franchises. For instance, they have exclusive relationships with their “suppliers” (the farmers who grow the coca plants) that allow the cartels to keep the price of cocaine stable even when crop production is disrupted.

“The theory is that the cartels in the area have what economists call a ‘monopsony,’ [which is] like a monopoly on buying in the area,” Wainwright says. “This rang a bell with me because it’s something that people very often say about Wal-Mart.”

Wainwright describes his new book, Narconomics, as a business manual for drug lords — and also a blueprint for how to defeat them. When it comes to battling the cartels, Wainwright says governments might do better to focus on controlled legalization rather than complete eradication of the product.

“The choice that I think we face isn’t really a choice between a world without drugs and a world with drugs,” he says. “I think the choice we face really is between a world where drugs are controlled by governments and prescribed by pharmacists and doctors, and a world where they’re dealt by the mafia, and given that choice, I think the former sounds more appealing.”

Nothing new to us, but good to be reminded of now and again.

Tom Wainwright has another article in the Wall Street Journal that came out a couple of days ago — How Economists Would Wage the War on Drugs — but it’s behind a paywall.

For those who haven’t noticed, there has been a bit of a blow-up regarding a dispute between the FBI and Apple Computers.

The FBI is trying to break into the iPhone of a suspected terrorist, but they can’t brute force the password because the software on that particular version of iPhone only allows 10 wrong tries before the phone becomes worthless with a delay between tries. They want to compel Apple to write a new updated version of the IOS to install on that phone that would essentially allow the FBI to make unlimited tries at speed (i.e., by hooking up another computer) and eventually brute force the password in order to get in. A judge has agreed, and Apple is resisting the order.

Here is the letter from Tim Cook of Apple explaining their position. As he points out, the issue is that once Apple does this, what’s to prevent the exploit from being compromised and used in nefarious ways?

Additionally, what would prevent law enforcement from seeing this as a new tool to use over and over again?

We know that would happen.

Remember the Patriot Act? One of the provisions was normalizing the “sneak and peek” provision to protect us from terrorists (this allows them to break into your home surreptitiously and not inform you even after the fact, so you can’t challenge the warrant because you don’t know it happened – they can also take things by pretending it’s a burglary). Again, we were told this was critical to protect us from terrorists. So what happened? According to the most recent figures in 2013, that year there were 11,129 “sneak and peek” warrant requests, and only 51 of those were for terrorism-related investigations.

Can you guess what the majority of requests were for? Of course — drug investigations. Even misdemeanors.

Regardless of how evil the person is that the FBI is investigating, in a free society we cannot use that as justification for giving unlimited power to investigating entities.

Now, of course, as with any technology issue, there are a lot of complicating factors to this case, but the overall facts are pretty clear. The FBI wants to compel a software company to not just give access to information that they already have, but to help them break the security of their software, with the “promise” that they’ll only do it once. And I don’t accept that.

I’ve been interested to see where the Presidential candidates come down on this issue. A number of different media sources have been tracking candidate responses. Here’s one. Here’s another.

Trump immediately sided 100% with the FBI. Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich have basically said that they understood the concerns but still sided with the FBI. Neither Clinton or Sanders took a firm position either way.

“Obviously Apple and the other tech companies are concerned about this,” Ms. Clinton said. “But as smart as we are, there’s got to be some way on a very specific basis we could try to help get information around crimes and terrorism.

Clinton’s opponent also did not choose between Apple and the FBI. “I’m on both,” Mr. Sanders said, when asked which side he favored. “But count me in as somebody who is a very strong civil libertarian, who believes that we can fight terrorism without undermining our constitutional rights and our privacy rights.”

Libertarian Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson: “#Apple is RIGHT. Handing the govt a potential passkey to millions of phones would be lunacy.”

I was just informed that my hosting service moved the virtual server for Drug WarRant.com to a new location. There was a temporary outage, but it seems to be back. Please let me know if you experience any new problems with the site. Thanks.

Maia Szalavitz takes on an important area that needs significant reform: the treatment industry.

The Rehab Industry Needs to Clean Up Its Act. Here’s How.

There are so many areas of this industry that are broken or just plain corrupt. Part of this is due to historical non-evidence-based stigmatizing approaches toward addiction, some due to the lack of science in the federal government’s laws and regulations, and some due to the attempts to cash in on a potentially lucrative captive market by unscrupulous players.

“What we simply need is a nice bulldozer, so that we could level the entire industry and start from scratch,” says Dr. Mark Willenbring […] “Another approach is that you could use dynamite,” he deadpans. […]

And in no other area of medicine do insurers pay for hours of group “therapy,” films and lectures that consist overwhelmingly of indoctrination into the teachings of a self-help group, available for free in church basements. […]

In any other area of medicine, if patients were not informed about a treatment that cuts mortality by at least half—while being given one that has no effect on it—it would be considered malpractice. […] But in the addictions field—largely because the dominant abstinence-only model historically hasn’t recognized medication-assisted treatment (MAT) as an acceptable form of recovery—this happens almost every time someone with an opioid addiction enters an abstinence-only 28-day rehab, a detox or an abstinence-based outpatient program. […] Given this, stigmatizing maintenance or telling patients that it is “not really recovery,” is basically killing people. […]

In the past year, the addiction treatment industry—never trouble-free in the best of times—has been wracked by scandal. […]

But the treatment industry has for too long relied on referrals from the criminal justice system to stay solvent. […] Several problems result. For one, since their biggest customer is often the criminal justice system, many programs shape themselves to its dictates. “The field has been so distorted by its dependence on the criminal justice system, which is really the client,” […]

Unfortunately, nearly all long-term residential treatment centers in America— i.e., “therapeutic community” programs that last three months or longer—were originally modeled on a destructive cult called Synanon. […] While many have moved away from the most extreme tactics, a widespread belief that all people with addiction are lying “whenever their lips are moving” and a sense that negative experience is necessary to get people to realize that they need to change remains common. […]

Research has long shown that in most cases, outpatient treatment is as effective as inpatient care for alcoholism and other addictions. […]

We also need national standards for counselor education, for best practices in all types of treatment and for informed consent regarding options like medication. All counselors need to be educated about all aspects of addiction, not just their own recovery […]

These are some great critiques, and something that more people need to acknowledge. There is a tendency, by some, to simply talk about treatment being better than enforcement without noting that prohibition has seriously tainted the treatment field. Simply spending more on treatment without paying attention to what you’re getting is not reform.

Of course, the concept of Jury Nullification (choosing to find a defendant not-guilty because of your disagreement with the law) is a time-honored Constitutional power of the jury. After all, the jury of peers is the highest judge of the law in our system, and cannot be held to account as to their reason for making a finding.

However, the judiciary has been openly antagonistic toward the concept, even to the point of excluding jurors who believed in the concept, instructing juries that they’re not allowed to think that way, and even attempting to jail activities who are merely trying to inform the population of their rights as jurors.

So this is significant:

Justice Sotomayor Says ‘There Is a Place, I Think, for Jury Nullification’

This week Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had some kind words for jury nullification, which empowers jurors to judge the law as well as the facts of a case and may involve disregarding the law when the law is unjust. During a discussion about juries at NYU Law School on Monday, Sotomayor, who used to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, was asked about a 1997 decision in which that court “categorically reject[ed]” nullification. “As we govern in the system, and watching it, I’m not so sure that’s right,” she said, according to Law360. “There is a place, I think, for jury nullification—finding the balance in that and the role judges should play.”

A small, but important step.

And, of course, jury nullification has been used to free some people brought to trial on drug charges. It has the potential, as more of the public becomes disenchanted with the drug war, to become even more heavily utilized, even to the point of making it difficult for prosecutors to bring certain kinds of charges forward.

For years, those of us in drug policy reform have pointed out that, while the government talks about prevention and treatment, the federal government budget has always been weighted toward enforcement and interdiction. It’s been really telling that, while they know that supply side spending is ineffective, they’ve still been doing the most there, in part because so many entrenched interests are involved.

Finally, for the first time, the proposed budget is different.

FACT SHEET: Administration’s Drug Control Budget Represents Balanced Approach to Public Health and Public Safety

The President’s Budget, submitted to the U.S. Congress today, represents the first time in the history of the Office of National Drug Control Policy that federal funding to reduce the demand for drugs is funded at similar levels as funds to reduce the supply of drugs.

So let me take a moment to congratulate the administration on finally spending less on attacking supply than on demand reduction and treatment. Good for you.

Now that I’ve done that…

They’re still proposing over 15 billion dollars on supply reduction efforts, which is an obscene amount of money to be pouring down that toilet. And out of the 15+ billion being spent on treatment and demand reduction, most of that is wasted as well, given the fact that the federal government is horribly behind in accepting scientific fact, and has its priorities based on political interests rather than good policy.

Via Making Noise in the South, A Super Serving of Shame and Stigma for Super Bowl 50

The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse (NCADA) is hitting us again at the Super Bowl. This time with “All American Girl” – an ad that’s supposed to show that you should care about heroin abuse because it affects pretty white girls, too.

But, of course, the ad then doesn’t show what you do when someone is having a problem with heroin – it lets them just wander off in the distance. No, this is just another one of those frying-pan scared-straight attempts at prevention that have been shown historically to not work.

And a shit-ton of money is being poured down the drain for this nicely scored, beautifully shot Super Bowl ad, when they should be helping Dan Morrhaim get some real reform passed in Maryland that will actually make a difference.

Here’s the ad:

There is so much good information available to us about drugs and drug policy if we’re willing to actually, you know, listen to it. But science and reality have been pretty much excluded from the public policy conversations when it comes to drugs, except for that “science” that supports the drug war regime.

The absurdity of this was brought home again to me with this article…

A Maryland Lawmaker Offers A Radical New Solution To The Heroin Crisis

That certainly sounded interesting. A radical new solution? Tell me more.

On Friday, he’ll announce the introduction of a sweeping set of bills that would upend the approach to the opioid epidemic, Morhaim, a Democrat, told HuffPost.

The approach is a radical one likely to scare off nearly all politicians and probably a majority of voters. So let’s back into his bills slowly.

Wow. So radical and new that even the article has to broach the idea cautiously. I can’t wait to find out… seven paragraphs later…

OK, ready to hear the idea?

The first option is to treat the addiction so that the person is no longer using heroin. For that, a variety of treatments need to be offered, depending on the user and the circumstances. The second option is to treat the social problem by giving the most difficult-to-treat addicts free heroin — or something very close to it — in a safe, controlled environment.

Really?

OK, don’t get me wrong. This is very good. And I applaud the lawmaker for bringing this forward.

But new? Radical? Not to anyone who has been paying attention. We’ve been talking about these ideas at Drug WarRant for many years. These are ideas that have been tried, tested, and proved – the science is there. They’ve just been excluded from political consideration.

It’s sad that in today’s world… in a major world power with amazing intellectual resources, we’re stuck in the drug policy equivalent of medieval barber surgeons, and that anyone who actually proposes scientifically proven reform is considered some kind of scary radical.

Annual Arrests for Marijuana in NYC Drop From Nearly 51,000 in 2011 to Under 17,000 in 2015

According to data just released by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, New York City marijuana arrests in 2015 dropped to under 17,000 for the first time since 1996. The 16,590 arrests for low-level marijuana possession in 2015 is a 42% decline from the 26,386 in 2014 and a 67% drop from the nearly 51,000 arrests in 2011.

This is welcome news and a clear sign of some changes in leadership. New York City is one of those places where showing marijuana in public was an arrestable offense, and so cops would stop-and-frisk and tell people to empty their pockets. Once it was out of their pockets, they’d get arrested for having it out in public.

A 67% drop in four years is pretty incredible. Part of it comes from the announcement in 2014 by Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner Bill Bratton to stop arresting for simple possession of less than 25 grams.

Of course, 16,590 arrests is still way too high.