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Drug WarRant
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Saturday, October 2, 2004 |
Supreme Court Season is Coming!
The ACLU has a guide to this year's Supreme Court term. Here's their description of a few cases related to drug policy.
The issue in United States v. Booker (04-104) and United States v. Fanfan (04-105), is whether the federal sentencing guidelines are similarly [as in Blakely v. Washington] invalid because the guideline score that is used to determine a defendant's sentence often rests on facts that are never presented to the jury -- such as the actual quantity of drugs involved in a particular transaction. Instead, those critical findings are made by a judge based on a preponderance of the evidence at a post-conviction hearing where reasonable doubt is no longer the standard.
Thousands of federal sentences could be affected by the Supreme Court's decisions in Booker and Fanfan. ...
Too often, as we know, the consequences of incarceration do not end with incarceration. Many states disenfranchise former felons. This issue achieved national prominence when approximately 600,000 people were prevented from voting in Florida in the 2000 election because of felony convictions. Felon disenfranchisement laws, however, exist throughout the country. According to a recent study, one out of four black men in Providence, Rhode Island will be barred from voting in this year's election. Two cases now pending before the Court on petitions for certiorari -- one from the Second Circuit (Muntaqim v. Coombe, 04-175), and one from the Ninth Circuit (Locke v. Farrakhan, 03-1597) -- ask the Court to decide whether the racially disproportionate impact of felon disenfranchisement violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Race is not an explicit issue in Illinois v. Caballes (03-923), but it is an issue nonetheless. The formal question presented is whether the Fourth Amendment requires individualized suspicion before the police employ a canine unit to sniff for drugs during a routine traffic stop. While most people feel anxious during any police encounter, the presence of a police dog fundamentally changes the nature of the seizure, as the ACLU points out in its amicus brief, making it both more intimidating and a more serious intrusion on privacy. Even beyond those generalized concerns, there is good reason to fear that minority drivers will more often be subject to this invasive practice in the absence of individualized suspicion given everything we have learned in recent years about the prevalence of racial profiling by law enforcement.
Another aspect of the misguided "war on drugs" will be before the Court in Ashcroft v. Raich (03-1454), where the federal government is defending its right to prosecute two critically ill patients in California who cultivated marijuana for their own personal use after it was recommended by their doctors in accordance with California law. The Ninth Circuit held that this exercise of federal power violates the Commerce Clause, and this case undoubtedly raises important questions of Commerce Clause jurisprudence. There is, nonetheless, something profoundly disturbing about the government's effort to treat the case as merely about commerce, thereby obscuring the important liberty interest involved when patients who often have no other option seek to use marijuana to obtain relief from unbearable pain.
I'm going to be following all of these with great interest, but especially Ashcroft v. Raich, which will be argued November 29, 2004 at 10:00 am.
1:54:24 PM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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More on Jonathan Magbie, Drug War Victim
In a follow-up to my post yesterday, comes today's editorial in the Washington Post: An Inmate's Death.
Jonathan Magbie, a 27-year-old quadriplegic who had been unable to breathe on his own since he was 4, was sent to a Corrections Department facility for 10 days for marijuana possession. Four days later he was dead. The short period between sentencing and his death is a story of what can happen when an impersonal system treats inmates as if they are nobodies with no one to turn to.
...
Then the buck-passing began. After arriving at the D.C. jail, Mr. Magbie was evaluated as needing "acute medical attention" and nearly nine hours later was shipped to Greater Southeast Community Hospital, which has handled inmate hospitalizations since the closure of D.C. General Hospital. Greater Southeast, however, discharged Mr. Magbie the next day and sent him to the Correctional Treatment Facility (CTF), another Corrections Department unit near the jail. A physician at the CTF concluded that Mr. Magbie belonged at the hospital and asked that he be taken back, but Greater Southeast refused. The physician then asked Judge Retchin to order the hospital to take Mr. Magbie, but the judge said she didn't have the power. And there at CTF Mr. Magbie stayed.
After his mother, Mary Scott, and his lawyer haggled with the medical staff for two days, she was finally permitted to bring his ventilator to the building. By the time Ms. Scott got there, her son had been taken back to Greater Southeast. He died that night.
Yesterday, we asked the chief judge's office if the matter of Jonathan Magbie was closed or under review. The case is closed, we were told ...
Why is his case closed?
For more on this, please read Baylen's passionate post at D'Alliance: Judge and Executioner
Also, more at Media Crapola and TalkLeft (where a strange and passionate discussion took place in the comments led off by an idiot that somehow thought Magbie deserved it).
11:40:35 AM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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Friday, October 1, 2004 |
Quadriplegic man smokes pot, goes to jail, dies.
"I'm not saying that he shouldn't have been punished, because he did smoke the marijuana," his mother, Mary Scott, said yesterday, a day after burying her son. "I just don't think it should have cost him his life."
That's the story in today's Washington Post.
Jonathan Magbie, a 27-year-old Mitchellville man, was sent to jail in the District last week for 10 days for marijuana possession.
He never made it home.
Paralyzed as a child and unable to even breathe on his own, Magbie died last Friday after being shuttled between the D.C. jail complex and Greater Southeast Community Hospital.
At the center of the many questions surrounding his death is whether D.C. Superior Court and the D.C. Department of Corrections did enough to ensure adequate care for the quadriplegic inmate.
An investigation is underway, but that is little solace to his family, which marched on the courthouse this week with signs accusing the judge of killing Magbie.
The pre-sentencing report had recommended probation.
[thanks to Paul]
7:09:56 AM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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Thursday, September 30, 2004 |
Check out Decrimwatch
New to the drug policy blogs... decrimwatch
Keeping an eye on cannabis decrimiminalization news, particularly in Chicago
8:24:24 PM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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What did you do in the War, Daddy?
I chased criminal plants. I tore up fields of hemp. ... I started a war to repress the people of Bolivia and Columbia ... I contributed to the loss of Bill of Rights for all Americans ... I turned some neighborhoods into shooting gallerys where armed bands fought over marketing rights in various territories. ... I worked hard to get children to inform on their parents. ... And while making war on 5 to 10% of all Americans I ignored any warnings of terrorist threats and concentrated on the civil war against users of the wrong kinds of drugs. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. ...
M. Simon of Rockford, Illinois first had this piece published on December 15, 2001. But as he says: "It's still true."
Read it.
He also adds:
This weeks saying:
What is the difference between drug prohibition and alcohol prohibition?
Seventy four years so far.
Ask a politician:
Do you support drug prohibition because it finances criminals at home or because it finances terrorists abroad?
8:11:45 PM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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Debates
I'll start watching debates when they're ready to talk seriously about drug policy. Odds are, that won't happen.
Let me know if I'm wrong.
I'll be coming out with my endorsement and analysis of the Presidential race sometime in October so watch for it. I'll also be working on more state voting guides.
8:01:18 PM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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Wednesday, September 29, 2004 |
Reefer Madness in the Houston Press
Thanks to Scott (of course), comes this amazing piece in the Houston Press. It's a five (web) page article on medical marijuana by Michael Serazio called Reefer Madness.
I'm just going to quote extensively from it (although this is still just a brief taste of the article).
Along with the tape from the Montel show, this is required reading for people considering the pros and cons of legalizing medical marijuana.
When he emerged from 13 straight months in the hospital and rehab, Jones choked back a steady diet of assorted pills: Demerol, Vistaril, Valium, Halcion and Lioresal, among others. He describes the feeling in his back "like somebody's got an ice pick and they just keep jabbing it in and out of that same damn spot, constantly." The pills, he found, didn't work well enough.
"I was at the point that I was taking 280 milligrams of baclofen," or generic Lioresal. "And the maximum dosage on that is 80 milligrams a day," he says. "Just to try to control spasticity. I'd be sitting in my wheelchair. I would get a spasm out of nowhere. Next thing I knew, I was trying to block my head from hitting the ground. It just threw me right out of my chair. Threw me over backwards."
He says that in the early '90s his doctor recommended, unofficially, trying marijuana for the pain. Nowadays, Jones needs only a strong aspirin, a Benadryl for his sinuses and most critically -- he points to the table -- cannabis. ...
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Dr. Alan Robison, who chaired the pharmacology department at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston before retiring, conducted some of the earliest research on marijuana's toxicity level.
"That was the first and only drug I ever studied in my career that was so nontoxic that no matter how much of it you gave to a mouse or a rat, you couldn't kill the damn thing," says Robison, the founder of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas. "As an industrial chemical, it's a real loser, because you can't even kill a cockroach with it." ...
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The self-described "straight-edge" teen had seen cocaine wreck her mother's life and initially shied away from medicating with cannabis. When her cancer returned, though, in the midst of a painful chemotherapy run, she gave it a shot. It worked, at least for her depression and nausea.
"Without smoking pot, I don't eat. At all." She pauses. "Just, I don't eat at all." She later adds, "The marijuana works with the pain. It actually, like, relaxes -- like, when you're in pain for so long, your body gets so on edge and you get so tense and it just makes the pain worse. And usually it results, when you're in that kind of pain, you have to go to the ER and get IV pain medication." ...
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A 2001 Pew Research Center study found the public supports prescription marijuana by a more than three-to-one ratio, and a Time/CNN survey one year later had it at 80 percent. But despite the fact that marijuana's medical use enjoys widespread and consistent public support, it's a source of a paralysis on the part of elected officials -- perhaps the strangest paradox in politics. Both conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr.'s writings and the NORML Web site, odd bedfellows in the fight to legalize, lament this pervasive fear of looking "soft on drugs."
"You know why it's not legal," says Paul. "It's because people are afraid to vote that way. You know, people get hysterical" -- he fakes a shrieky voice -- "Oh, I can't do that. I agree with you, but the people'll think I'm pro-drugs... The whole thing is just carried away. So Congress is way behind what the people are thinking. If this were a really, really bad position, I couldn't be in office, because it's been used against me continuously." The point is salient not only to Paul, but it speaks to a second, perhaps stranger paradox: Despite the issue's volatility, no one can think of a single case of someone significant losing their seat because of a stance on medical marijuana.
"Ron Paul should've been gone 20 years ago if that were the case," says Alan Bock, author of Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana. "I think partly what this is, most people, early in their political careers, some consultant told them: 'Don't touch that. Your career's over.' And they've never rethought it. Even if they've had fairly serious questions about it."
None of this is particularly new to those who follow drug policy reform closely -- you've heard me talk about the problem with politicians being afraid of being considered "soft" on drugs again and again -- but it's powerful to see this kind of article in the press.
9:29:46 PM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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Tuesday, September 28, 2004 |
Record Cocaine Seizure
Via Vice Squad comes news that the US Coast Guard has seized 56,000 pounds in two recent interdictions.
Total amount of cocaine seized by the DEA since 1986: over 1,000 tons.
The degree to which that has reduced availability: approximately 0.
9:00:53 AM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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Monday, September 27, 2004 |
Eat some hemp. It's good for you.
DEA's Failed Battle To Ban Hemp Food is Over
San Francisco -- Three years after the Bush administration tried to ban food products made with hemp, the government surrendered that front in the war on drugs, attorneys for the hemp industry said Monday.
The Justice Department, these attorneys say, will not challenge a federal appeals court ruling that overturned the ban - a victory for more than 200 companies that make such things as energy bars, waffles, milk-free cheese and veggie burgers with the plant that contains only trace amounts of THC, the key ingredient in marijuana.
Monday night was the deadline for the government to challenge a federal appellate court's February decision to the Supreme Court that the United States cannot ban the domestic sale of hemp foods. ...
The trade group Vote Hemp said it would begin lobbying Congress to allow industrial hemp production in the United States, said Alexis Baden-Mayer, the group's government affairs director.
[Thanks, Scott]
7:55:17 PM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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Is Chicago proposal elevating the debate?
I expressed some misgivings regarding the proposal in Chicago to switch to fines for marijuana possession. It's in the Tribune again today (an interesting article) and reader Brian suggests:
Consider the number of new articles about what a waste of resources it is to prosecute pot charges let alone trying to enforce them. I wonder if they are trying to create some forced recognition of the issue as it exists today. I agree with you that tickets are not perfect, but it is a step in the right direction. I think the biggest issue here is that the topic is being debated at all and the fact that the it is in front of all people.
Excellent point.
9:53:36 AM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, and Kansas are now complete, bringing the total to 15 states. I've still got a ways to go to get them all done before the election, but I'm plugging away.
The interesting story this time is the Libertarians in Arizona and Kansas. Without the Libertarian Party in those states, I'd have been hard pressed to come up with very many endorsements (in Kansas in fact, for the first time so far in these state guides, one party swept the endorsements).
Here are some additional statements from Libertarians in those states:
John B. Crockett (Arizona 1st) "All drugs should be Freely available to all Adults without a prescription."
Powell E. Gammill (Arizona 2nd) "People have a right to do whatever to themselves, those who forcefully oppose this are the criminals"
Mark J. Yannone (Arizona 3rd) "The federal government is not authorized to regulate drug use."
Craig B. Stritar (Arizona 6th) "The War on Drugs is unconstitutional and therefore illegal."
Jack W. Warner (Kansas 1st) "The purchase, sale, or possession of drugs is a personal freedom issue and there should be no laws of prohibition"
Joseph K. Bellis (Kansas 3rd) "Once again the federal government has no constitutional mandate to carry on a war on drugs. Regulation of drug use is the responsibility of the individual states."
I also enjoyed this write-in candidate in Arkansas:
Vernon 'Gene' E Mason (Arkansas Senate Write-in) "There are more than 25,000 products to be manufactured from the hemp plant. The hemp industry could employ every single Arkansan."
Here are all the state guides so far:
1:14:18 AM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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Freedom March shut down
Alabama Marijuana Party's Loretta Nall spoke on Saturday on the steps of the Alabama State Capital as part of a Freedom March, to focus attention on Alabama's Habitual Offender law, harsh drug laws and prison overcrowding.
A small, but enthusiastic crowd apparently reacted very well to the speeches, at least until the cops came and shut the event down over controversy over the permit.
Read all about it here. Go to page 3 for pictures from the event.
Update: Video of the march available at POT-TV.
1:05:30 AM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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