Drug WarRant

One of the things I find that absolutely stuns people when I give talks about drug policy reform is the totally corrupt system of civil asset forfeiture in this country, that allows the seizure of assets (from cash to cars to homes) without charging the owner with a crime and with the proceeds kept by the law enforcement agency seizing the property.

We need to continue to educate people about this corrupt practice that not only makes a mockery out of our justice system, but provides a profit incentive for law enforcement to lobby in favor of continued drug war.

Here are a couple recent articles on the subject.

From October in American Thinker (thanks, Richard): Asset Forfeiture and Perverse Incentives

Several reforms are badly need to reduce the problem. First, salaries and bonuses of public servants should be disconnected from asset seizures. This measure would remove some of the brazen incentivize for prosecutors and police to engage in questionable tactics.

Second, people facing asset seizures should be given additional legal rights. Those facing forfeiture should have the right to state legal representation. Property seizure should be an option only when the owner is convicted of a crime. Law-abiding property owners shouldn’t have to look over their shoulders, in fear that opportunistic prosecutors or police departments have them in their sights.

Yesterday in the New York Times: Police Use Department Wish List When Deciding Which Assets to Seize

“At the grass-roots level — cities, counties — they continue to be interested, perhaps increasingly so, in supplementing their budgets by engaging in the type of seizures that we’ve seen in Philadelphia and elsewhere,” said Lee McGrath, a lawyer for the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that has mounted a legal and public relations assault on civil forfeiture.

Much of the nuts-and-bolts how-to of civil forfeiture is passed on in continuing education seminars for local prosecutors and law enforcement officials, some of which have been captured on video. The Institute for Justice, which brought the videos to the attention of The Times, says they show how cynical the practice has become and how profit motives can outweigh public safety.

In the sessions, officials share tips on maximizing profits, defeating the objections of so-called “innocent owners” who were not present when the suspected offense occurred, and keeping the proceeds in the hands of law enforcement and out of general fund budgets.

Marijuana Overdoses Kill 46 In Oregon During First Week Of Legalization

Only four days after Measure 91 passed, Oregon is reconsidering it’s decision to legalize recreational marijuana.

According to a report in the The Oregonion, 46 people were killed across the state since weed became legal earlier this week. Reports from MSNBC indicate there has also been 23 deaths in Alaska, and a a staggering 89 in Washington DC.

Several more marijuana victims are clinging onto life in local emergency rooms and are not expected to survive.

“It’s complete chaos here, I’ve never seen anything like it” says Dr. Steve Perkins, chief of surgery at Riverbend Hospital in Springfield. “I’ve put six college students in body bags since before noon, and more are arriving every minute. One young man came in extremely hungry and even started gnawing on his arm, until he collapsed in the emergency room.”

Well, I guess we learned our lesson the hard way.

…

[Just in case any random people wander by here who don’t know me, yes, I’m aware the article is satire. It’s a nice mocking of all the chicken little prohibitionists.]

Jacob Sullum really nails it in this piece: Fear of Cannabis Commerce Didn’t, Won’t, and Shouldn’t Stop Legalization, where he takes on both Kevin Sabet and his “Big Marijuana” mantra, and Mark Kleiman’s kinder, gentler non-profit-based prohibition lite.

Sabet warns that such businesses will make money by producing and distributing marijuana, meaning they will have a financial incentive to sell as much as they can. That is all completely true, but it is scary only if you view consumers as the slaves rather than the masters of people trying to sell them stuff. Most Americans do not see the businesses that supply them with useful and enjoyable goods and services as the enemy [emphasis added]

This bolded part is one of the things that really annoys me about how we make laws, which are often predicated on the idea that we have to protect lesser beings than ourselves from the horror of having to make smart choices, since they are incapable of doing so.

It’s an extraordinarily offensive and elitist approach.

Unlike Kevin Sabet, Kleiman thinks (or at least hopes) that we can have legalization without commercialization. There is another name for this form of legalization: prohibition.

Tuesday was definitely a great day for drug policy reform. With cannabis outperforming most of the candidates, it may even start to sink in with more politicians that opposing drug policy reform is bad politics and not worth the “contributions” from prohibition interest groups.

Conventional wisdom was that reform was unlikely to be successful at a mid-term election (and that was true relatively recently). That’s because the historical population that supported reform also tended to be less politically engaged (young people, etc.) and turnout is lower at the mid-terms.

Yet it’s clear that reform has gone mainstream.

With that shift, it was interesting to see the new dynamic of the voter on marijuana ballots, and this useful page of exit polls from CNN provides some illumination.

Oregon Ballot Measure Results (click on Exit Polls)

So where were the votes for marijuana in Oregon?

Overall, men and women were roughly the same. Young people were slightly more likely to vote for the measure. Educated people were more likely to vote Yes. Urban did better than rural. Poor people were slightly more likely to vote for the measure than rich people, but the differences were minor.

So I started to look at where the numbers get radical…

• Only 20% of those who self-identified as Republican voted Yes, compared to 77% of Democrats.
• Only 20% of those who are enthusiastic/satisfied with GOP leadership voted Yes, and only 35% of those who are angry at the Obama Administration voted Yes (as opposed to those merely dissatisfied with Obama, who voted Yes at 51%)
• 33% of those who attend religious services weekly voted yes, compared to 57% of those who attend occasionally and 72% of those who attend never
• 26% of those who think that same-sex marriages should not be legal voted Yes, compared to 75% of those who think it should be legal

Now, what’s true in Oregon may not be true elsewhere, but this does remind us that there is still a strong core of social-religious conservatives who see marijuana/drugs as a key element in their culture war. These aren’t the Rand Paul Republicans, but they do make up a good portion of the Republican constituency.

In Florida, for medical marijuana, and in Alaska for legalization, many of the same factors showed up, but they were a little less extreme.

This is the day – get out and vote.

Post election stories, results, discussions here.

Here’s a pretty good preview of today’s marijuana votes:

If Legal Cannabis Wins in the US Midterms, It’s No Thanks to the Democratic Party

Update (10:30 a.m. Central): Guam has voted to legalize medical marijuana. (56 of 58 precincts are now in, with Yes leading 56% – 44%.)

According to Tom Angell of Marijuana Majority:

“The marijuana majority is a truly global phenomenon. People all across the world are ready to move beyond failed prohibition laws, especially when seriously ill patients are criminalized just for following their doctors’ recommendations. With these election results, U.S. territories stretching from Guam — where America’s day begins near the International Date Line — to Hawaii and Alaska have sensible laws that let patients use marijuana without fear of arrest. And this is just the beginning of a very big day. It’s likely that we’ll see other important marijuana reforms enacted today as election results come in from races across the U.S.”

Update: (9 p.m. Central):

@KevinSabet:

SAM IS CALLING FLORIDA. The No Campaign has won and Floridians rejected changing their Constitution. @learnaboutsam http://t.co/PaeNjCpJBM

Nice graphic, Kev. And, of course, it’s correct, except for the fact that the majority actually voted YES. It’s just that they needed 60% to win.

Update (9:30 p.m. Central): Victory in Washington, DC

Via Drug Policy Alliance:

According to NPR and USA Today, voters in the District of Columbia have approved Initiative 71, a ballot initiative that legalizes possession of up to two ounces of marijuana for adults over the age of 21 and allows individuals to grow up to six marijuana plants in their home. D.C. laws prevented the ballot initiative from addressing the taxation and sale of marijuana, but the D.C. Council is currently considering a bill that would tax, regulate and strictly control the sale of marijuana to adults.

“This was the first legalization campaign in which the racial disproportionality of marijuana enforcement played a major role,” said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance. “Initiative 71 sets the stage for the D.C. Council to create a new model for legalizing marijuana – one that places racial justice front and center.”

Update (10:30 p.m. Central):

It looks like Oregon is a win, according to Fox 12 in Portland.

Tom Angell:

“With Oregon and D.C. coming on board, it’s clear that Colorado and Washington voting to legalize in 2012 was no anomaly. The trend is clear: Marijuana prohibition is coming to an end. As 2016 approaches, we can expect to see many more ambitious national politicians finally trying to win support from the cannabis constituency instead of ignoring and criminalizing us.”

Update (Wednesday morning):

Via Law Enforcement Against Prohibition:

ANCHORAGE–Alaska’s Measure 2, an initiative to allow adults 21 and over to possess up to one ounce of marijuana and up to six plants, passed tonight in a close race. This measure will establish, license and regulate retail stores, cultivation facilities, product manufacturers and testing facilities so consumers will always know that what they’re getting is safe, will allow police to focus on violent crime and will ensure that profits benefit the government, not drug cartels. Driving under the influence and public consumption will remain illegal and employers may restrict their employees’ use and localities can ban marijuana establishments though not private possession or cultivation.

“This is a historic day for public safety and for civil rights,” said Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper (Ret.). “Clearly, the people demand change, and their leaders would be wise to follow.”

More updates (via Drug Policy Alliance):

Today, California voters took a significant step toward ending mass incarceration and the war on drugs by approving Proposition 47. On the heels of reforming the state’s “three strikes” law in the 2012 election, Californians overwhelmingly voted to change six low-level, nonviolent offenses – including simple drug possession – from felonies to misdemeanors.

New Jersey voters have approved Public Question No. 1 to reform New Jersey’s bail system. This will reduce the number of people behind bars for low-level drug law violations and ushers in broader bail reform because it is linked to comprehensive legislation, already signed by the governor, that overhauls the state’s broken bail system.

Overall, a very good day for drug policy reform.

This coming Saturday, November 8, I will be one of the speakers at the Students for Liberty Regional Conference in Chicago, at Loyola University. I’ll be discussing the drug war’s assault on liberty.

2014 SFL Chicago Regional Conference

Hope to see any Chicago-area Rant readers (be sure to introduce yourself).

You may have heard recently that the UK government had a study come out (after they tried to suppress it) that basically showed that enforcement has no significant effect on drug use — that the drug war is not only destructive, but ineffective.

Tougher Drug Laws Don’t Work, Finds “Supressed’ UK Government Study

The report – the government’s first evidence-based study into drugs policy – was not released without incident however, as Liberal Democrat drugs minister Norman Baker accused his Conservative coalition partners of “suppressing” it.

“The reality is that this report has been sitting around for several months,” Baker told the Guardian. “I’ve been trying to get it out and I’m afraid that I believe that my coalition colleagues who commissioned the report jointly don’t like the independent conclusions it’s reached.”

Here’s another article discuing it in the Western Morning News: Fear and loathing in the War on Drugs

I’ve often spoken of prohibition as being like using a sledge hammer. This article had another nice analogy:

The War on Drugs is a bit like using a chainsaw to get rid of facial hair.

Thanks to Allan for pointing out this interesting article that serves as an important reminder: Strange reason to legalize marijuana

Apparently an underlying assumption of legal pot opponents is that human consciousness is some sort of pristine, pure pool of unsullied awareness which shouldn’t be contaminated by chemical substances like THC, the major psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.

Here’s another science news flash: the brain produces conscious awareness, and it is filled with over 100 chemical neurotransmitters.

They make us happy, horny, hungry, and so much more. Including, high.

I’m writing these words buzzed on a chemical my brain adores: caffeine. Is this wrong? Should caffeine be illegal because it alters my consciousness, increasing alertness and improving my mood?

Of course not. It’s beautiful, really, how humans can bring parts of the world into their brains, then those substances enable them to view the world differently.

We are the world. The world is us. There is no immaterial self standing apart from materiality.

Nice.

Radley Balko also gives us an update that serves as another important reminder of something we’ve discussed here in the past…

Surprise! Controversial Patriot Act power now overwhelmingly used in drug investigations

So since the Patriot Act passed, the number of of sneak-and-peeks each year has grown from about 16 per year to over 11,000 in 2013. Meanwhile, not only have the number of sneak-and-peek investigations unrelated to terrorism increased on a massive scale, the percentage of sneak-and-peeks that have anything to do with terrorism continues to drop. In other words, sneak-and-peek is increasingly ubiquitous while the justification for granting the government this power in the first place — terrorism — is not only irrelevant to the tactic’s increasing pervasiveness, it gets more irrelevant every year.

Recently, it seems like the Washington Post is trying to become the U.S. version of the Daily Mail, given its editorial section antipathy to marijuana.

This time, they give the platform to Roger Roffman, with whom I have had some disagreements in the past. He writes: Marijuana’s addictive risk shouldn’t be ignored.

In it, he talks about his own awareness that the way he was using marijuana was interfering with other things he wanted to do. Of course, he blames this on some evil property of marijuana itself rather than on his own decision-making and prioritization. It’s like blaming football addiction for your lack of cutting the lawn on Sunday. No, you just didn’t want to get your ass off the sofa.

Roffman wants education and treatment to be a necessary condition of marijuana legalization.

Hey, I’ve got no problem with making education and treatment available to those individuals like Roffman who have difficulty managing their lives, regardless of the activity with which they’re obsessed.

But to hold marijuana legalization hostage seems petty and irresponsible.

This idea came up again this week, as I saw a number of people link to this article: Boycott Cocaine by Miles Hunt at Unharm, as a response to the devastating violence of the criminal drug market.

Morally we must boycott cocaine just as you’d boycott meat from any farmer that killed their livestock in a horribly gruesome way, or any company that refused to pay wages.

The solution to this problem is through abstinence as individuals until Governments deal with this problem properly by regulation

First, I will say that this is far superior to the absurd notions from some prohibitionists that getting everyone to abstain is a viable answer instead of legalization/regulation. That’s an argument that we’ve consistently debunked here at the Rant.

This is simply saying that prohibition is bad, it needs to be eliminated, but in the meantime we should encourage people to change their consumption habits to reduce the amount of money feeding criminal violence.

Sounds good. But it won’t work.

First of all, it’s important to understand how and when boycotts work. If you read the studies (check out the work of Brayden King), you quickly come to realize that boycotts almost never affect the bottom line. They work when the company being boycotted doesn’t want to be connected with the bad publicity related to the boycott (ie, use of slave labor, environmental damage, etc.).

But violent criminal drug organizations don’t care a bit about the bad publicity, so no boycott is going to affect them in that way.

Second, in those rare situations where a boycott works, there is usually a consumer choice (shop at a different company, buy local, etc.). This isn’t available in the cocaine market.

Third, there are natural changes in markets all the time. Over the past decades, there have been huge shifts – the explosion of cocaine use in the U.S. and then a dramatic reduction over years, with a shift in increased use elsewhere in the world. As long as the black market is in control, it adjusts to those variances seamlessly. Any affect from a boycott would be a tiny blip in comparison.

Finally, there is a danger that a boycott will make people think that they are doing something to help when they’re making no difference at all, perhaps reducing the effort put into true drug policy reform.

Look, if you feel better by avoiding use of cocaine until you can purchase it without the taint of criminal violence, by all means do so. That’s a perfectly fine moral choice.

But don’t think that participating in a cocaine boycott is going to save lives, or reduce the need for your efforts to end prohibition.