Monday, March 12, 2007

Cruel and Disgusting Maia Szalavitz does a great job of keeping the Richard Paey travesty in view (something lacking in the mainstream media). The latest news is that the Florida Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal (a story that appears to only have been covered so far in the Bradenton Herald and Tampa Bay's 10). Maia puts it all in perspective in her article Cruel and Disgusting: Pain Patient Appeal Denied. She does a great job of reminding us just how unjust this 25 year sentence is: The Florida Court of Appeals had upheld his conviction-- despite the lack of evidence of trafficking and despite the fact that most of weight of the substances he was convicted of possessing (higher weights lead to longer sentences) was made up of Tylenol, not narcotics. The majority suggested that Paey seek clemency from the governor, claiming that his plea for mercy "does not fall on deaf ears, but it falls on the wrong ears." In a jeremiad of a dissent, Judge James Seals called the sentence "illogical, absurd, unjust and unconstitutional," noting that Paey "could conceivably go to prison for a longer stretch for peacefully but unlawfully purchasing 100 oxycodone pills from a pharmacist than had he robbed the pharmacist at knife point, stolen fifty oxycodone pills which he intended to sell to children waiting outside, and then stabbed the pharmacist." But the Florida Supreme Court disagreed, letting the sentence stand, without comment. It released its cowardly decision in the media quiet of a Friday night. As Siobhan Reynolds, founder of the Pain Relief Network points out, "Where Florida stands now is that individuals have no recourse to the courts when the executive and legislative branches behave tyranically." Under the Constitution, the role of the judiciary is supposed to be to check the powers of the other branches-- not simply to defer to them. Paey must now look to the U.S. Supreme Court or Governor Crist. 7:29:05 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

Ron Paul Officially Announces for President Again, I don't think he has any kind of real chance of winning the Presidency, but there's a real possibility that his candidacy will force some important discussions. Even the article mentioning his announcement notes that: "He also supports medicinal marijuana and has argued for a repeal of America's drug war laws." He's already raised over a half million dollars on the internet for his candidacy. 7:19:37 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

Souder is beaten up in his own backyard NORML's Paul Armentano really nails Mark Souder in the Fort Wayne, Indiana News Sentinel. Go read. 10:16:19 AM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

Bush in Colombia The President tried to paint a positive picture about the drug war we've funded in Colombia although security (despite 20,000 troops) wouldn't let him stay in Bogota for more than seven hours. Peter Baker writes for the Washington Post: As Air Force One swooped over the Andes Mountains toward Bogota, Colombia, for the first time in a quarter-century, President Bush and his aides sat in the front compartments with a message about improved security after decades of civil war and narcotrafficking. But the optimistic message didn't make it to a rear compartment for Secret Service agents for the first U.S. president to visit Bogota since 1982. "Colombia presents the MOST SIGNIFICANT THREAT ENVIRONMENT of this five-country trip!" the monitor in the compartment warned starkly. The terrorist threat, it went on, was "HIGH." And, in general, the trip is not generating the kind of press that the President would like. Check out the language in this piece by Liliana Segura in The Nation and at CBS: The Bush Administration has been largely mute about the mounting parapolitica scandal. But with the advent of a Democratic-led Congress and the State Department requesting a new round of funding for Latin America, the upheaval in Colombia may become impossible to ignore. For the first time since the passage of Plan Colombia -- the Clinton-era drug-eradication package that under Bush became a $4.7 billion boon for the Colombian military and American corporations outfitting the drug war -- Democrats head key committees that under Republican control have funneled U.S. dollars to Bogotá. Politically, Plan Colombia has benefited from the seamless merging of "war on drugs" rhetoric with that of the "war on terror." "When it comes to Colombia," Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern says, "the Bush Administration says two things: One, we're fighting terrorists, and two, we're protecting our kids from drugs. Facts don't matter. And anyone who disagrees is 'soft on terror.'" "Facts don't matter." If that doesn't encapsulate the position of the drug warriors! (For example, check out this nonsense by Roger Noriega at AEI) The San Francisco Gate really goes after it: "The coca eradication program has not achieved what we were promised," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees U.S. foreign-assistance programs. "The amount of cocaine reaching here is no less than it was five years ago." According to the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, U.S. retail cocaine prices fell from above $200 to below $140 per gram and purity rose from 60 percent to above 70 percent between July 2003 and October 2006. Such statistics suggest that the drug's availability improved at a time when spraying nearly tripled in Colombia, which provides more than 90 percent of cocaine entering the United States, according to the State Department's 2006 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. Coca cultivation has increased, despite Plan Colombia's initial goal of cutting the country's coca crop in half. The most recent data released by the State Department show that more land was cultivated with coca in 2005 -- 144,000 acres -- than when the effort began in 2000. To be sure, drug czar John Walters has credited Plan Colombia with helping President Alvaro Uribe push back cocaine-financed guerrilla groups that have been fighting the state for more than four decades. (That point by Walters, of course is rendered much less viable with the recent scandal in the Uribe government.) I've read dozens of articles about this visit, and it's rewarding to see that the press is, at the very minimum, recognizing the failure of Plan Colombia. This is a good step, and it means that there will be some very serious discussions in Congress when it discusses the budget. For now, the discussions will be about what approach toward prohibition is better. One day, maybe the press will have the courage to actually recognize that there could be an alternative. 10:06:32 AM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

Walters fails Turing Test John isn't even coherent in this Q and A in the Dallas Morning News: Q: It's interesting that you emphasize a public health approach, because there's a perception in the academic community that studies drug policy that there's too much emphasis on interdiction and not enough on treatment. A: The academic community that works on drug policy is almost uniformly second rate. They're fighting battles over dogma that doesn't really exist anymore, that's in the past. What does that mean? Other than the "second-rate" crack against the academic drug policy community, which is the equivalent of an "F" student accusing a "C" student of being dumb. Care to answer the actual question, John? Or should we move on to another... Q: What about drugs coming out of South America, mostly heroin and cocaine? Figures from your office show a decrease in supply and purity, but other studies contradict that. Illegal drugs remain cheap and widely available. A: I certainly recognize that there are particular places in the United States that won't see the same performance as the aggregate. That's true of education performance and crime and consumer prices. We're a big country, and there are variations. But we have seen declines, through a combination of eradication of both poppy and coca, and record seizures. Regional differences? So... there are certain places within the United States where South American drug interdiction is working, and others where it is not? Isn't that kind of like saying that we're winning the Iraq war in Nebraska, but losing it in Kansas? Sometimes it seems like Walters has stopped trying. He used to at least attempt to make his lies sound plausible. [Thanks, Jay] 12:26:58 AM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []