Friday, December 22, 2006

Some weekend reading and open thread There have been all sorts of interesting things going on and flying around the blogosphere. Here's a few to keep you busy. Let's start with something light at Unconfirmed Sources: Mexican Troops Killed Fighting Hybrid Marijuana Plant [Thanks, Jay]. Over at Catallarchy we have Drug War, same old same old -- a man is arrested because both he and his son have allergies and when he bought some Claritin-D to send with his son to church camp, he exceeded the maximum allowed purchase by law. Ex-cop plans 'Never Get Busted Again' video [Thanks rachelrachel] A one-time Texas drug agent described by his former boss as perhaps the best narcotics officer in the country plans to market a how-to video on concealing drugs and fooling police. This made the drug warriors very upset. "...for him to go to the dark side and do this is infuriating." John Markley has written a very good OpEd at LewRockwell: What They Think of Us -- In it, he talks about how drug laws and others are really based on the fact that politicians don't think very highly of the people -- that we can't be trusted to do the right thing. In short, the American people are subjected to a nearly continuous stream of insults and calumny from their own elected officials, as well as from many pundits and intellectuals. Fascinating article, although in my mind it was made slightly weaker by his attempt to include social security in the mix (I think the dynamics of that discussion are different enough to throw people off the case he's making.) A man put up a billboard opposing snitching and it outraged the local community and mayor. They asked him why he would promote such an offensive notion as not cooperating with the police Gonzales said the message really means to stop snitching wrongly. He says the catch phrase is being interpreted wrongly. "There's a lot of people incarcerated for people snitching, so people can reduce their time." Gonzales' son is in federal prison for 15 years. He says his son was wrongly convicted on a drug charge after an informant falsely snitched in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. Ben Fulton has a well-written OpEd in the Salt Lake City Weekly: Speed Limit. I don't agree with him fully on his conclusions about meth, but he does a very nice job of demonstrating the absurdity of the federal government's war on marijuana, and puts the priorities in the right place -- recovery services rather than prohibition Speaking of Meth, Maia Szalavitz had a good article (doesn't she always) at the Huffington Post: Barack Obama's Meth Menace Unfortunately, in terms of drug policy, despite his candid and refreshing discussion of his own use, he apparently remains part of our on-going national nightmare. Libby at Last One Speaks notes that Tyrone Brown (the man who was sentenced to life in prison for smoking a joint while on probation), may be getting a reprieve. Keith Dean, the Dallas judge who issued the unusually harsh sentence, has written a formal letter to the Texas parole board asking them to free Brown. Dean, who was voted out of office just days after "20/20" ran the story, wrote that he supported the district attorney's recommendation of release and agreed that "Mr. Brown has been rehabilitated and no longer poses a risk to others or himself." Via TalkLeft, Bush issued 16 pardons. And some of them were drug offenses. But. Is it just me, or is the list of those pardons missing some of the more outrageous miscarriages of justice out there? I mean, really: Thomas R. Reece of Cumming, Ga., violating the Internal Revenue Code pertaining to alcohol. Sentenced May 2, 1969, to one year of imprisonment. We have people rotting in jail, and dying in jail, right now. The Drug War Chronicles brings us the best of times, and the worst of times. 7:19:04 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

Monitoring the monitoring For some reason, I just can't get too excited about the release of the new Monitoring the Future data. The Drug Czar is all agog at the "dramatic declines in teen drug use" except, of course, for the increase in teens using other drugs. DARE Generation Diary has an amusing chart showing a correlation between the Drug Czar's media budget and teen drug use... as the Drug Czar's budget decreases, so does teen drug use. Hey, it's as legitimate as most of the correlation attempts that the Drug Czar uses in justifying the drug war. Eric Sterling notes that the story of increased prescription drug use should include better warnings about drug interactions with common dangerous drugs like acetaminophen (which, unlike illegal drugs like marijuana, has serious risk of fatality in certain interactions). Alex at the Drug Law Blog points out that increased prohibition is likely to drive teens to the more risky prescription drug experimentation. A variety of interesting points and articles, but ultimately Monitoring the Future seems a lot to me like governmental masturbation -- to images of fantasy numbers that they desperately imagine actually love their... policies. Here's the reality. First, some teens will experiment with things that are not good for them (or would be better for them if they waited until later in life). No matter what you do. People who believe in a drug-free America need to be placed in padded protective custody where they can't hurt anybody and where they can have extended conversations with the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte about the dragons lurking at the edge of the world. When I was in High School, two ridiculously stupid classmates died from huffing kerosene. This was well before the creation of the Darwin Awards but even then I unconsciously grocked their truth. And yet I, a minister's son and a goody-two-shoes, was also tempted by friends in a cemetery (don't ask) into trying an illegal (for me) drug called "beer." Now I don't know if the kerosene huffing would have been avoided if something safe like marijuana had been available to them. But I do know that drug laws/policies/advertising did nothing to prevent me or my thankfully-removed-from-the-gene-pool classmates from experimenting. So, minor fluctuations in "teen drug use" as a gauge of drug policy are pretty much meaningless to me. And the classifications of drugs in Monitoring the Future are unhelpful. Here's three things I'd like to see to get a real picture of teens and drug problems (and only one could be accomplished within the current structure of Monitoring the Future data). A comparison of trends in relation to the actual dangers of specific drugs. This is the one thing that could be done now to some extent with MtF data. Create a realistic and truthful ranking of drugs (both illegal and "legal") in terms of their actual health and safety threats and find out whether trends of teen use are gravitating to the more dangerous or to the safer drugs. This could be useful information for policy analysis (of course, this will never happen because of the political resistance to calling any illicit drugs "safer"). Ending the conflation of "use" with "abuse." Someone who uses a drug casually without ill effects (other than legal effects) is much different than someone who completely disappears into a world of drug abuse, and general "use" statistics tells you nothing about the extent of real problems. We need real, concrete distinctions between use and abuse (and not the deliberate misdirection of "treatment admissions" that the Czar likes to use). Provide a real laboratory. Again, this is something that the government will do everything it can to prevent because it doesn't want useful data -- only its masturbatory fantasies. What I mean by a real laboratory is letting states or countries follow their own citizens' wishes and legalize a drug. See what happens. It won't be the end of the world. And it might give us a chance to do some meaningful comparisons of data over time and see what real policy changes might do. But no, every year, the Drug Czar anxiously awaits his advance copy of MtF and retreats into the back room where he can thumb through the figures over and over again until an picture forms in his mind that makes him feel good. But it doesn't do a damned thing for the teens. 1:48:08 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

Applauding a prosecuting attorney It doesn't happen that often here, unfortunately, but I'm actually noting that a prosecuting attorney is doing the right thing. A cancellation of a proposed demonstation and locker search using drug dogs at Luther L. Wright High School has school officials fuming. Citing a "no-tolerance" drug policy, Ironwood Schools administrators and board members want the district's schools drug free. At Monday night's school board meeting, members expressed anger when they heard the Dec. 1 demonstration had been canceled without any "apparent explanation" by Gogebic County Prosecuting Attorney Richard Adams. These school officials wanted blanket suspicionless dog searches of all lockers in the schools. "I told them: 'No, you don't do a blanket search. It does not set a good message to the students,'" Adams said. "The courts are already on line questioning the use of dogs in the schools at all." "Blanket searches are not allowed." [...] Adams said Michigan State Police officials also told him they would not allow their dogs to be used in the demonstration. [...] Adams did specify he would approve the use of dogs if ( Kolesar ) "has reasonable suspicion and targets the lockers that the suspicion leads directly to." But that doesn't satisfy the rabid ravings of a psychotic school administrator. "Those dogs could help us, if there are any drugs in our building," Kolesar said. "It's a matter of zero-tolerance. We don't ever want students to even think about drugs being in the school." [emphasis added] Would it be easier to find the drugs in your schools if you let dogs search everywhere? Yes. Would it be easier to prevent drugs in your schools if you made all the students strip and walk around naked after having full cavity searches? Yes. Could we catch more drug users if police could search every car and every person and every home without a warrant? Yes. But we don't live in that country. 11:51:07 AM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []