War on Drugs

[philunderwood]

www.qando.net/?cat=1

Prohibition still doesn’t work

June 2nd, 2011 | Author: Bruce McQuain

One of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The “war on drugs” is a classic example of insanity at a world-wide level. We learned in the early 20th century that prohibition doesn’t work. Our experience with alcohol should have at least given us the basis for rejecting another such prohibition when it came to drugs. However we have charged ahead and for decades waged what can only be termed a horribly expensive, liberty stealing campaign against drug use that has empowered criminal organizations and allowed them to become powerful enough to challenge some governments.

As should be clear to anyone, the “War on Drugs” is an epic failure. If you don’t believe it, imagine numbers like this for any legitimate business and then factor in the ongoing campaign to deny the flow of the product:

It cites UN estimates that opiate use increased 35% worldwide from 1998 to 2008, cocaine by 27%, and cannabis by 8.5%.

In the face of the full might of the government of the US and many other governments in the world, this illegal enterprise has managed to supply demand that in some cases has increased 35% world wide. And it has cost us billions in “enforcement”, filled our jails and essentially had no effect whatsoever on the net side of things.

What did we learn from our own prohibition era? Apparently nothing. The market that exists today for drugs is eerily similar to that which existed for alcohol during the era of prohibition. It is a “black” market that exists because the demand exists, and government is single-handedly responsible for its existence.

Simple economics spells out how this works. There is an unfulfilled demand and whether or not you agree with the demand, the market will do all in its power to fill it. Government declaring something “illegal” may dampen demand – at least for a while – but the market will still do its best to fill the demand as long as there’s a profit to be made. All government does is change the nature of the market in question. It can be legal (which means regulated, controlled and taxed) or illegal (which usually means unregulated, untaxed and usually dominated by criminals and gangs), but it is not going to go away just because a government declares something “illegal”.

For whatever reason, after observing the results of the existing (and mostly unchanged) drug policies over decades, our political leaders still can’t seem to figure out the fact that they’re not going to “win” this battle. However, they can change the market dynamic tremendously simply by backing off of their desire to control what we consume and understanding that the best way to address such a market is through acceptance, regulation and taxation (yeah, I know, you never thought you’d hear a libertarian say that, but let’s be clear – that’s what we did with alcohol and it has worked).

The argument that people will go hog wild if drugs are legalized I find to be as nonsensical as when the argument was used about alcohol during the prohibition era. Those that are going to use drugs are most likely using them now. Additionally, part of the allure of drugs is their illegality. Yes, those with addictive personalities are probably going to get hooked on something – but given the inability of governments to stop drugs to this point, they’re likely already hooked on something anyway. The point is having this all out in the open and legal removes tremendous costs from “enforcement” and the revenue generated by regulated drug sales could be put toward treatment regimes. It also puts the criminals out of business and ends the drug related violence.

To this point, the War on Drugs has been an epic failure. All it has done is criminalize a behavior, create a market for now powerful criminals, and wasted our tax dollars on trying to control behavior.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy report calls for the legalisation of some drugs and an end to the criminalisation of drug users.

I agree. Of course, according to the story, the US and Mexican governments disagree. Therefore the war on the border will continue, the funding of criminal (and terror) organizations will continue, and the militarization of the police and the resultant violation of the rights of citizens will also continue. Jails will continue to fill even while drug sales continue to grow.

Our current drug policies are insane. The numbers prove it. It is time to stop the knee-jerk reaction to the term “drugs” and drastically reassess our approach to their control and use. We’ve been through this before. It is time we reviewed that era and applied its lessons.

~McQ

[philunderwood]

www.miller-mccune.com/culture/war-on-drugs-remains-at-stalemate-after-40-years-32782/

War on Drugs Remains at Stalemate After 40 Years

Pretty much everyone agrees the war on drugs is a failure. So why don’t we try a different approach?

By Emily Badger

It's pretty much unanimous: The war on drugs has failed since it was declared by President Nixon 40 years ago. It is time now to start seriously considering new approaches? (Thinkstock.com)Related Stories

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The headlines, commission reports and op-eds have been singing in chorus this month around the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s declaration of a national war on drugs.

“Panel Calls War on Drugs a Failure,” reads the Wall Street Journal headline on a new high-profile report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

“Law Enforcement Study: War on Drugs is a Failure,” announced the release of another analysis from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

Next came “U.S. Mayors Call U.S. ‘War on Drugs’ a Failure.”

And just to underscore the bipartisan nature of all this condemnation, former President Jimmy Carter (“Call off the Global Drug War”) and libertarian magazine Reason (“Declare Defeat and Go Home”) have taken up the cry as well.

Their collective assessment isn’t new (see past reports reaching similar conclusions from: the Cato Institute last year, Brookings in 2008, RAND in 2005 and the ACLU in 2000 — to cover just the past decade). By many metrics — drugs used, dollars spent, communities impacted, violence averted — the war on drugs, with its heavy emphasis on incarcerating even low-level couriers and nonviolent tokers, has been deemed ineffective relative to America’s sweeping investment in it.

But now that we’re marking four decades with the strategy (a rhetorical milestone more than an actual one), perhaps it’s time to ask a different question: Not why has the “war on drugs” failed, but why have policymakers stuck with it for so long in the face of so much evidence of failure?

“If you stop 10 people on the street and say ‘Do you think we’re winning the war on drugs,’ nine of them would say no,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project. “Part of it is a question of what other kinds of approaches can we suggest? How do we suggest different options other than large-scale incarceration?”

Mauer blames inertia for Washington’s inability to think differently, along with the deep entrenchment that’s come with pushing law enforcement to log ever more drug arrests. He notes that we’ve prioritized prohibition over treatment and defined the problem as a matter of “criminal justice” instead of “public health.”

Mauer’s analysis suggests we’re in a particularly tricky spot decades in, because the longer the war on drugs drags on, the harder it becomes to adjust deeply ingrained practices.

THE IDEA LOBBY
Miller-McCune's Washington correspondent Emily Badger follows the ideas informing, explaining and influencing government, from the local think tank circuit to academic research that shapes D.C. policy from afar.


He bemoans “a mix of institutionalized policies and resource allocation and general commitment that’s difficult to turn around, even though consciousness is shifting and there’s more evidence about doing things differently. The drug war has just been ratcheted up so dramatically that it’s difficult to change direction.”

Jimmy Carter, writing in The New York Times, ticked off some of the familiar data behind that boom. In 1980, when he left office, America was incarcerating 500,000 people. Now, it’s more than 2.3 million, giving the U.S. the highest rate of incarceration in the world (and a dramatically disproportionate share of all the world’s prison population).

The greatest flaw in our policy, says Carnegie Mellon professor Jonathan Caulkins, is that so many of those people are non-violent users or low-level drug runners whose long prison sentences were triggered not by any harm they’ve caused their communities but by how many ounces they were caught carrying.

“The better criticism to my mind is not prohibition versus legalization,” said Caulkins, who previously co-directed RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center, “but why do we do the prohibition the way that we do?”

We would do better, he suggests, to target not the number of users in existence, but the consequences of drug use that do the most damage to communities, such as violence and HIV transmission. He points out that the drug dealer who carries a weapon, sells outside treatment centers and employs children as lookouts — in other words, one “who creates unusually large problems per kilogram sold” — contributes to that collateral damage much more than the run-of-the-mill seller.

Users who are addicted to drugs, Caulkins adds, also aren’t likely to be dissuaded by the drug war’s long mandatory sentences.

“Long sentences are terrible at deterring people particularly from using drugs when they’re dependent,” he said. “Cravings and compulsions make it just unable for people to process the consequences of a low probability of a long sentence.”Dependent drug users who don’t pose a violent threat might be better addressed through treatment programs (or through “coerced abstinence,” a strategy of constant testing and brief incarceration Caulkins believes could be particularly effective). But the current drug war skews most of its resources toward prohibition. That 2005 RAND report Caulkins helped write cited one presidential budget for the drug war: 53 percent of the requested money was earmarked for enforcement, with only 29 percent for treatment and 18 percent for prevention.

Caulkins says the government isn’t organized to recalibrate that balance between toughness and treatment. For one thing, we don’t have a single authority in charge of both. Obama’s “drug czar,” for example, has a bully pulpit but no purse strings.

And then there’s the tricky issue of morality, which is another obstacle to adjusting our current course. Decisions about drug policy are colored by the public’s moral reactions in a way that decisions about, say, agriculture subsidies are not.

This reality particularly frustrates economists like Jeffrey Miron, who’ve tracked the billions of dollars America has spent on the drug war because, for no particularly rational reason, society has decided drugs are immoral, but alcohol is not.

“People accept that it’s immoral because it’s illegal, then turn around and say, well, because it’s immoral, therefore it should be illegal,” said Miron, director of undergraduate studies in the Harvard economics department and a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. He produced the study last fall suggesting America wastes $88 billion a year waging the war on drugs.

Miron’s reasons for opposing the current policy differ from Mauer’s, whose organization is also concerned with how the war on drugs has disproportionately impacted minority communities. That diversity of criticism — whether on free market, social justice or public health grounds — would seem to give the collective case against the strategy all the more momentum.

Miron, though, isn’t optimistic, even though the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s declaration and the new report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy — which included former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan and past presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Columbia — have brought the issue back into the news.

“There have been commission reports going back 50, 100 years,” Miron said. “There’s always been a new commission report, there’s always a new well-known person who comes out for this. But it turns out these people always do this well after they’re retired, well after they need to get re-elected. They never do it when they’re still the president of Mexico.”

[philunderwood]

Prohibition

By John Stossel

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Unlike Bill Clinton, President Obama admits he inhaled!. "Frequently," he said. "That was the point."

People laugh when politicians talk about their drug use. The audience laughed during a 2003 CNN Democratic presidential primary debate when John Kerry, John Edwards and Howard Dean admitted smoking weed.

Yet those same politicians oversee a cruel system that now stages SWAT raids on people's homes more than 100 times a day. People die in these raids — some weren't even the intended targets of the police.

Neill Franklin once led such raids. The 33-year Maryland police veteran, now executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, locked up hundreds of people for drugs and felt good about it.

"We really thought that these drugs made people evil," he told me.

But 10 years ago Franklin decided that drugs — even hard drugs — do much less harm to Americans than does the drug war.

"Drugs can be — and are in many cases — problematic. But the policies that we have in place to prohibit their use are 10 times more problematic."

The raids helped change his mind. "We end up with kids being shot ... search warrants being served on the wrong home, innocent people on the other side of the door thinking that they are protecting their home."

And the level of drug use remains about the same.

Still, most Americans support the drug war. Paul Chabot, White House drug adviser to Presidents George W. Bush and Clinton, told me: "We should be kicking down more doors. ... They're kicking the door of somebody who's a violent person."

Violent? People who get high are rarely violent. The violence occurs because when something's illegal, it is sold only on the black market. And that causes crime. Drug dealers can't just call the cops if someone tries to steal their supply. So they form gangs and arm themselves to the teeth.

"We have the violence of these gangs competing for market share, and people get hurt," said Franklin.

Especially kids. Drug gangs constantly look for new recruits.

"Some of these gangs have better recruitment programs than Fortune 500 companies. They know what to say to kids."

People think that if drugs were legal, there would be more recruiting of kids. Franklin says the opposite is true.

"Prohibition causes that. We don't have kids on the corner (saying), 'Pssst, I got a fifth of Jack Daniel's.'"

Kids rarely peddle liquor, and there's little violence around liquor sales because alcohol is legal. There was lots of violence before 1933, but that was because Prohibition forbade liquor sales. Prohibition gave us Al Capone.

"Organized crime existed well before Prohibition," Chabot replied.

That's true. But much less of it. The murder rate rose when alcohol was banned. It dropped when Prohibition was repealed.

"If we were to do away with our drug laws ... we know drug usage numbers will skyrocket," Chabot said.

But we don't know that.

It's logical to assume that, were it not for drug prohibition, drug abuse would be rampant. But 10 years ago, Portugal decriminalized every drug — crack, heroin, you name it. The number of abusers actually declined.

Joao Goulao, Portugal's top drug official, said that before decriminalization "we had a huge problem with drug use ... around 100,000 people hooked on heroin."

Then they started treating drug use more like a parking ticket. People caught with drugs get a slap on the wrist, sometimes a fine.

Independent studies have found the number of people in Portugal who say they regularly do drugs stayed about the same. And the best news, said Goulao: "Addiction itself decreased a lot."

At first, police were skeptical of the law, but Joao Figueira, chief inspector of Lisbon's drug unit, told me that decriminalization changed lots of minds.

"The level of conflicts on the street are reduced. Drug-related robberies are reduced. And now the police are not the enemies of the consumers!"

And teen drug use is down.

All good news. But in American and in most of the world, the drug war continues, thousands are murdered and in ghettos the police are enemies of the people.

Governments should wake up and learn something from the Portuguese.

[philunderwood]

www.newschannel5.com/story/18241221/man-loses-22000-in-new-policing-for-profit-case


Man Loses $22,000 In New 'Policing For Profit' Case


Posted: May 09, 2012 9:52 AM EDT

Affidavit from $22,000 seizure in Monterey

By Phil Williams
Chief Investigative Reporter

MONTEREY, Tenn. -- "If somebody told me this happened to them, I absolutely would not believe this could happen in America."

That was the reaction of a New Jersey man who found out just how risky it can be to carry cash through Tennessee.

For more than a year, NewsChannel 5 Investigates has been shining a light on a practice that some call "policing for profit."
See previous stories:
"NC5 Investigates: Policing For Profit"

In this latest case, a Monterey police officer took $22,000 off the driver -- even though he had committed no crime.

"You live in the United States, you think you have rights -- and apparently you don't," said George Reby.

As a professional insurance adjuster, Reby spends a lot of time traveling from state to state. But it was on a trip to a conference in Nashville last January that he got a real education in Tennessee justice.

"I never had any clue that they thought they could take my money legally," Reby added. "I didn't do anything wrong."

Reby was driving down Interstate 40, heading west through Putnam County, when he was stopped for speeding.

A Monterey police officer wanted to know if he was carrying any large amounts of cash.

"I said, 'Around $20,000,'" he recalled. "Then, at the point, he said, 'Do you mind if I search your vehicle?' I said, 'No, I don't mind.' I certainly didn't feel I was doing anything wrong. It was my money."

That's when Officer Larry Bates confiscated the cash based on his suspicion that it was drug money.

"Why didn't you arrest him?" we asked Bates.

"Because he hadn't committed a criminal law," the officer answered.

Bates said the amount of money and the way it was packed gave him reason to be suspicious.

"The safest place to put your money if it's legitimate is in a bank account," he explained. "He stated he had two. I would put it in a bank account. It draws interest and it's safer."

"But it's not illegal to carry cash," we noted.

"No, it's not illegal to carry cash," Bates said. "Again, it's what the cash is being used for to facilitate or what it is being utilized for."

NewsChannel 5 Investigates noted, "But you had no proof that money was being used for drug trafficking, correct? No proof?"

"And he couldn't prove it was legitimate," Bates insisted.

Bates is part of a system that, NewsChannel 5 Investigates has discovered, gives Tennessee police agencies the incentive to take cash off of out-of-state drivers. If they don't come back to fight for their money, the agency gets to keep it all.

"This is a taking without due process," said Union City attorney John Miles.

A former Texas prosecutor and chairman of the Obion County Tea Party, Miles has seen similar cases in his area.

He said that, while police are required to get a judge to sign off on a seizure within five days, state law says that hearing "shall be ex parte" -- meaning only the officer's side can be heard.

That's why George Reby was never told that there was a hearing on his case.

"It wouldn't have mattered because the judge would have said, 'This says it shall be ex parte. Sit down and shut up. I'm not to hear from you -- by statute," Miles added.

George Reby said that he told Monterey officers that "I had active bids on EBay, that I was trying to buy a vehicle. They just didn't want to hear it."

In fact, Reby had proof on his computer.

But the Monterey officer drew up a damning affidavit, citing his own training that "common people do not carry this much U.S. currency."
Read Officer Bates' affidavit

"On the street, a thousand-dollar bundle could approximately buy two ounces of cocaine," Bates told NewsChannel 5 Investigates.

"Or the money could have been used to buy a car," we observed.

"It's possible," he admitted.

NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked Bates if Reby had told him that he was trying to buy a car?

"He did," the officer acknowledged.

"But you did not include that in your report," we noted.

"If it's not in there, I didn't put it in there."

So why did he leave that out?

"I don't know," the officer said.

Bates also told the judge the money was hidden inside "a tool bag underneath trash to [deter] law enforcement from locating it."

"That's inaccurate," Reby said. "I pulled out the bag and gave it to him."

And even though there was no proof that Reby was involved in anything illegal, Bates' affidavit portrays him as a man with a criminal history that included an arrest for possession of cocaine.

That was 20-some years ago," the New Jersey man insisted.

"Were you convicted?" we wanted to know.

"No, I wasn't convicted," he answered.

But Officer Bates says that arrest -- which he acknowledged was old -- was still part of the calculation to take Reby's money.

"Am I going to use it? Yes, I'm going to use it because he's been charged with it in the past -- regardless of whether it's 10 or 15 years ago," he said.

Attorney John Miles said he's frustrated with attitudes toward Tennessee's civil forfeiture laws, which make such practices legal.

"We are entitled not to be deprived of our property without due process of law, both under the Tennessee Constitution and the federal Constitution -- and nobody cares," Miles said.

"Nobody cares."

This year, state lawmakers debated a bill to create a special committee to investigate these "policing for profit" issues. That bill died in the last days of the legislative session.

After Reby filed an appeal, and after NewsChannel 5 began investigating, the state agreed to return his money -- if he'd sign a statement waiving his constitutional rights and promising not to sue.

They also made him come all the way from New Jersey, back to Monterey to pick up a check.

He got the check, but no apology.

"If they lied about everything in the report, why would they apologize?" Reby said.

And, with that, he was ready to put Tennessee in his rearview mirror.

"I really don't want to come back here," he said.

As for the appeals process, Reby was able to provide us and the state with letters from his employers, showing that he had a legitimate source of income.

It took him four months to get his money back, but it usually takes a lot longer for most people.

And that, Miles said, works to the benefit of the police.

He had two clients where police agreed to drop the cases in exchange for a cut of the money -- $1,000 in one case, $2,000 in another. In both cases, that was less than what they might have paid in attorney fees.

Miles called that "extortion."

[philunderwood]

qando.net/

Civil asset forfeiture: a legal scam

Published May 21, 2012 | By Bruce McQuain

As I’ve mentioned before, this is one that burns me up about as much as anything that government/law enforcement does. Again, I want to make it clear – this nonsense exists because of the drug war.

First an explanation:


Civil asset forfeiture is based on the premise that a piece of property — a car, a pile of cash, a house — can be guilty of a crime. Laws vary from state to state, but generally, law enforcement officials can seize property if they can show any connection between the property and illegal activity. It is then up to the owner of the property to prove in court that he owns it or earned it legitimately. It doesn’t require a property owner to actually be convicted of a crime. In fact, most people who lose property to civil asset forfeiture are never charged.

The laws were created to go after the ill-gotten gains of big-time dealers, but critics say they’ve since become a way for police departments to generate revenue — often by targeting lower-level offenders.

In fact, in the case I’m about to relate, law enforcement has put together as much a “sure thing” as can be imagined. Read this and be disgusted:


When the Brown County, Wis., Drug Task Force arrested her son Joel last February, Beverly Greer started piecing together his bail.

She used part of her disability payment and her tax return. Joel Greer’s wife also chipped in, as did his brother and two sisters. On Feb. 29, a judge set Greer’s bail at $7,500, and his mother called the Brown County jail to see where and how she could get him out. "The police specifically told us to bring cash," Greer says. "Not a cashier’s check or a credit card. They said cash."

So Greer and her family visited a series of ATMs, and on March 1, she brought the money to the jail, thinking she’d be taking Joel Greer home. But she left without her money, or her son.

Instead jail officials called in the same Drug Task Force that arrested Greer. A drug-sniffing dog inspected the Greers’ cash, and about a half-hour later, Beverly Greer said, a police officer told her the dog had alerted to the presence of narcotics on the bills — and that the police department would be confiscating the bail money.

"I told them the money had just come from the bank," Beverly Greer says. "We had just taken it out. If the money had drugs on it, then they should go seize all the money at the bank, too. I just don’t understand how they could do that."

The Greers had been subjected to civil asset forfeiture, a policy that lets police confiscate money and property even if they can only loosely connect them to drug activity. The cash, or revenue from the property seized, often goes back to the coffers of the police department that confiscated it. It’s a policy critics say is often abused, but experts told The HuffPost that the way the law is applied to bail money in Brown County is exceptionally unfair.

Indeed it was. Why? Because the county demanded cash, and, as Snopes tells us, about 80% of the cash in the US has traces of drugs on them (specifically cocaine):


In one 1985 study done by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration on the money machines in a U.S. Federal Reserve district bank, random samples of $50 and $100 bills revealed that a third to a half of all currency tested bore traces of cocaine. Moreover, the machines themselves were often found to test positive, meaning that subsequent batches of cash fed through them would also pick up cocaine residue. Expert evidence given before a federal appeals court in 1995 showed that three out of four bills randomly examined in the Los Angeles area bore traces of the drug. In a 1997 study conducted at Argonne National laboratory, nearly four out of five bills in Chicago suburbs were found to bear discernible traces of cocaine. In another study, more than 135 bills from seven U.S. cities were tested and all but four were contaminated with traces of cocaine. These bills had been collected from restaurants, stores and banks in cities from Milwaukee to Dallas.

A single bill used to snort cocaine or otherwise mingled with the drug can contaminate an entire cash drawer. When counting and sorting machines (which fan the bills, and thus the cocaine) are factored in, it’s no wonder that so much of the currency now in circulation wouldn’t pass any purity tests.

Of course, you can bet Brown County law enforcement is completely aware of this little factoid, thus the cash requirement for bail and, for them, the profitable inevitable outcome.

That’s why I call it what it truly is – a scam to cheat people out of their money perpetrated by the very people whose job it is to protect you from scam artists. You have law enforcement knowingly setting up a situation in which they’re sure they’ll be able to take bail money under this civil asset forfeiture travesty because it will test positive for drugs.

In this case, it didn’t turn out so well for the thieves at the sheriff’s office:


It took four months for Beverly Greer to get her family’s money back, and then only after attorney Andy Williams agreed to take their case. "The family produced the ATM receipts proving that had recently withdrawn the money," Williams says. "Beverly Greer had documentation for her disability check and her tax return. Even then, the police tried to keep their money."

In this case there’s a fairly simple way to stop this sort of blatant thievery. More options for payment (cashier’s check) other than cash.

However, it is civil asset forfeiture that needs to go the way of the Dodo bird:


In 2010, the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian law firm, rated the forfeiture laws in all 50 states, assigning higher grades to states with fairer policies. The firm gave Wisconsin a "C." When there’s less than $2,000 at stake, law enforcement agencies in the state get to keep 70 percent of what they take. If more than $2,000 is taken, departments can keep half.

But in all states, police agencies can contact the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), making the case federal, and under federal law, local police departments can keep up to 80 percent of forfeiture proceeds, with the rest going to the Department of Justice. The institute reports that between 2000 and 2008, police agencies in Wisconsin took in $50 million from this "equitable sharing" program with the federal government.

When provided such an incentive, what is the usual reaction? As demonstrated by this particular case where they took bail money, it has nothing to do with the pursuit of “big-time dealers” does it? Instead, they’re just after low hanging fruit, which in this case also happened to be low-income people who had to scrape and borrow just to raise the bail.

That’s “law enforcement”?

That’s scamming the public for profit. And it is an inexcusable breach of trust between law enforcement and the public.

If anyone should be in jail, it is those who’ve perpetrated this travesty and those who use it to cheat the public.

~McQ

[Ritty77]

Read this and be disgusted:

More like f**king outraged! I just read another article somewhere where an elderly couple had their little motel seized because there were drug arrests of guests.

[twinder]

They should simply legalize drugs and tax them and treat it like alcohol or cigarettes.

I heard a saying once... "show me a cop, and I'll show you a well paid criminal." Can't remember where but it definitely fits some of them.

Especially a few around here that I know.

[Ritty77]

Candidate: I'll smoke a joint on Hill

www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76574.html

From the article:

"Caffrey, who is single and lives alone in an apartment in Garberville, Humboldt County, says marijuana helps him deal with attention deficit disorder and complex posttraumatic stress disorder — which resulted, he says, from a list of traumas including his sister’s suicide and having been homeless for five years."

I don't know which is worse: This guy's pathetic, laughable reasons for getting a prescription or his having to go through all this crap just to smoke an occasional doobie.

[philunderwood]

The drug war recedes?

By Rich Lowry

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Chris Christie is not a wimp, a hippie or a countercultural icon. He's not known for taking time out from budget negotiations to smoke dope, or for his sympathy for drug dealers.

Yet he is a soft-liner on the war on drugs. That the combative New Jersey governor and Republican rock star -- just tapped to keynote the GOP convention in Tampa, Fla. -- vocally dissents from drug-war orthodoxy is another sign that the tectonic plates of the drug debate are shifting. Perhaps our appetite for spending billions and incarcerating millions, in the service of pieties immune to rational analysis, is not limitless after all.

In a speech at the Brookings Institution, Christie called the war on drugs "well intentioned," but "a failure." He just signed a law to mandate treatment rather than jail time for nonviolent drug offenders. The Democratic rising star in New Jersey, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, recently condemned the drug war in strikingly similar terms as "big overgrown government at its worst." In Jersey, the drug war is getting it from both barrels and both parties.

Exhaustion is finally setting in with the enormous human and fiscal costs of attempting to eradicate the ineradicable. People have always used intoxicants, and always will, in ways ancient and new. The Good Book tells that no sooner had Noah planted a vineyard than "he drank of the wine, and was drunken." After all the countless resources expended trying to keep illegal drugs from entering the United States, The New York Times reported the other day, abuse of indigenous prescription drugs is the nation's biggest drug problem. In 2008, it accounted for the lion's share of overdose deaths.

The definition of a victory in the drug war is usually when a drug declines in popularity of its own accord. A new drug tends to go through a natural epidemic cycle. New users pick it up and spread the word about the good times. Then, it loses its allure as its ravages become plain in the wrecked lives of the hooked. The metrics say we are "winning" the fight against cocaine. Today, there are only 1.5 million users a month, a drop from nearly 6 million in the heyday of the 1980s. But cocaine's price hasn't changed much; its prestige has. "When cocaine stopped being the drug of investment bankers and started becoming the drug of $5 whores, it became less fashionable," says UCLA professor Mark Kleiman, co-author of "Drugs and Drug Policy."

The war on drugs overseas, a U.S. foreign-policy priority for decades, has only shifted around trafficking routes. Mark Schneider of the International Crisis Group notes how -- in the "mercury effect" -- pressure against the cartels in Colombia squeezed the action into Mexico, where it is now being displaced again, to Central America and the Caribbean. No wonder that at the Summit of the Americas in April, Latin American leaders expressed disenchantment with the entire enterprise.

No one crafting American laws from scratch purely on a basis of public health would make marijuana illegal while alcohol -- much more damaging to society -- is legal. Slowly, the prohibition on marijuana is giving way. Medical marijuana is legal in 17 states and the District of Columbia. Colorado, Oregon and Washington state will consider ballot measures to legalize the drug in November. The current regime makes criminals of millions of casual users, but legalization -- even in one state, according to experts Beau Kilmer and Jonathan Caulkins -- could collapse the price nationally and lead to more widespread use.

Every alternative has its pitfalls. The mandatory treatment now being implemented in New Jersey, although better than a jail sentence, is often less effective than advertised. But we are exiting the era when a focus on the harmful effects of illegal drugs excludes all consideration of the harmful effects of their hard-fisted prohibition. The debate is becoming less susceptible to cheap rhetorical bullying. If Chris Christie, arguably the toughest Republican in the country, is open to new approaches, there's hope for everyone else.

[philunderwood]

www.qando.net/?tag=dea

DEA sting gone wrong violated Texas truck owner’s rights

Published July 31, 2012 | By Bruce McQuain

Need a story to get you all fired up this morning? Looking for something to make you see red?

The DEA provides it (from the Houston Chronicle via NRO):


The phone rang before sunrise. It woke Craig Patty, owner of a tiny North Texas trucking company, to vexing news about Truck 793 — a big red semi supposedly getting repairs in Houston.

“Your driver was shot in your truck,” said the caller, a business colleague. “Your truck was loaded with marijuana. He was shot eight times while sitting in the cab. Do you know anything about your driver hauling marijuana?”

“What did you say?” Patty recalled asking. “Could you please repeat that?”

The truck, it turned out, had been everywhere but in the repair shop.

Commandeered by one of his drivers, who was secretly working with federal agents, the truck had been hauling marijuana from the border as part of an undercover operation. And without Patty’s knowledge, the Drug Enforcement Administration was paying his driver, Lawrence Chapa, to use the truck to bust traffickers.

The concept of private property? Completely ignored. Permission? We don’t need no stinkin’ permission. We’re the federal government. We’re the DEA.


But eight months later, Patty still can’t get recompense from the U.S. government’s decision to use his truck and employee without his permission.

His company, which hauls sand as part of hydraulic fracturing operations for oil and gas companies, was pushed to the brink of failure after the attack because the truck was knocked out of commission, he said.

Patty had only one other truck in operation.

In documents shared with the Houston Chronicle, he is demanding that the DEA pay $133,532 in repairs and lost wages over the bullet-sprayed truck, and $1.3 million more for the damage to himself and his family, who fear retaliation by a drug cartel over the bungled narcotics sting.

Out of control? That’s a vast understatement. This is like Fast and Furious Jr. Who thought this up? Who approved it? Why didn’t they seek the permission and cooperation of the owner of the business and property? Where in the world do they get off commandeering private property and endangering the life and livelihood of a citizen without seeking his okay to use his property?

The operation was a fiasco:


At least 17 hours before that early morning phone call, Chapa was shot dead in front of more than a dozen law enforcement officers – all of them taken by surprise by hijackers trying to steal the red Kenworth T600 truck and its load of pot.

In the confusion of the attack in northwest Harris County, compounded by officers in the operation not all knowing each other, a Houston policeman shot and wounded a Harris County sheriff’s deputy.

17 hours before the owner of the truck was notified and that notification didn’t come from either the police or the DEA. The only thing the DEA didn’t commandeer for this operation was a clown car. Said Patty:


"I was not part of this," he said. "I had absolutely no knowledge of any of it until after it happened."

For its part, the DEA has not admitted that it was using Chapa as a spy because its official policy is not to comment on whether someone was an informant.

Lisa Johnson, a spokeswoman for the DEA Houston Division, confirmed that Patty’s demand had been received and noted that it would be investigated by the agency. But the Chronicle established Chapa was an informant based on interviews with multiple law-enforcement officials who spoke on the condition they not be named, and later by courtroom comments of prosecutors.

So now the DEA will drag its feet, pretend like it is investigating this, refuse to admit anything, and, as is fairly standard and routine behavior for government agencies violating the rights of the citizens these days, obfuscate, evade and attempt to block every move to shine a light on this operation.

This is outrageous. And, if the facts presented by the Chronicle are true, whoever put this together and executed it deserves to be put on trial and put in jail. That’s right, jail. We want someone held accountable for this travesty for a change.

As for Patty, pay the man, DEA. You screwed up big time, you were wrong to commandeer his property and put his life in danger. You had no right to do any of that and you owe him the chance to get his life and that of his family back in order.

~McQ