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Drug WarRant
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Saturday, March 17, 2007 |
Vermont ruling on car searches at odds with Supreme Court
The Vermont Supreme Court yesterday ruled 3-2 that police need a search warrant to search a car unless there are circumstances such as "when an officer's safety is threatened, or evidence might be destroyed, or a suspect might flee."
Reading that, you might think, "Well duh! That's clear from the Fourth Amendment."
Except that this is contrary to federal precedent, which allows officers much more latitude in searching cars without a warrant, particularly when the driver has been arrested (as had happened in this case).
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The ruling, which represented a rare departure from frequent unanimity, said the state constitution provides Vermonters with greater protections from unreasonable searches and seizures than does the federal Bill of Rights.
(Actually, the federal Bill of Rights provides greater protections from unreasonable searches and seizures than does the federal government.)
Of course, this ruling has little direct impact outside Vermont, but it may provide an example of "See, it's possible to conduct police work without trampling on rights."
Chittenden County State's Attorney T.J. Donovan is the kind of man we need all over the country serving the citizens in that role. Read his reaction to the ruling:
"Vermont has a proud history of protecting one's privacy interest, and this is a profound example of Vermont's uniqueness," he said. "We'll respect the law."
Wow.
[Thanks to Cannabliss in comments]
12:37:00 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Quote of the day
I mail myself a copy of the Constitution every morning just on the hope that [the government] will open it and see what it says.
11:55:40 AM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Friday, March 16, 2007 |
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Thursday, March 15, 2007 |
The worst scum on the earth
I'm sorry, I probably shouldn't let my feelings get away like that. And I should have been smart enough to not listen to this radio program featuring ONDCP's "Dr." David Murray and gambler/sado-moralist/former drug czar William Bennett.
So Bill Bennett asks about medical marijuana, and this is what David Murray, a federal employee paid by my tax dollars, has to say:
This is really hurting us, and it's hurting the people because it's a fraud. There is no medical value to smoked, raw, weed marijuana -- the Food and Drug Administration, scientific bodies have weighed in on this. This is not an open, or a contested issue -- it's clear. It is risky. It is dangerous to the people who use it, and it is not therapeutically valuable. It's not a medicine, so the fraud is to keep offering it as a medicine. And in state initiatives supported by very powerful legalization lobbies with millions of dollars behind it, they've sometimes pulled the wool over voters in state initiatives in places like California, and now even New Mexico.
This isn't worth debunking. This is a guy throwing handfuls of his own feces around the room. When that happens, there's no point sticking around. You just hope that an attendant will be around soon to put him back in his cell.
So I turned it off. If any of the rest of you want to listen to the rest and see what the callers had to say, let me know what happened.
I've got some other thoughts going through my head right now...
Link
Raich, 41, began sobbing when she was told of the decision and said she would continue using the drug.
"I'm sure not going to let them kill me," she said. "Oh my God."
Link
On June 14, Natalie Fisher went to Peter McWilliams' home, where she worked as housekeeper to the wheelchair-bound victim of AIDS and cancer. In the bathroom on the second floor, she found his life-less body. He had choked to death on his own vomit. ...
I thought about the judge who had denied him his day in court and had ordered him to forgo the medication that kept him alive. I suppose he's happy, I said to myself, now that he's murdered Peter.
I'm one of those libertarians who generally tries to look at government policies more as folly than as evil. But sometimes, the evil that government does transcends simple folly. Sometimes I have to be reminded that there is a real human cost of government.
There is a real cost to what the David Murrays of this world do to our country, our citizens, our soul.
11:38:22 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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What's next? Tables are turned.
Two years ago I reported about a particularly heinous police action in Flint, Michigan. Innocent partygoers at Club What's Next were strip searched and arrested for "frequenting a drug establishment" simply because someone else at the club possessed illegal drugs.
Fortunately, on October 13, a judge threw out the cases. And now today...
Detroit -- The American Civil Liberties of Michigan filed a class action lawsuit in Federal District Court today against the City of Flint, the Flint Police Department and Genesee County Sheriff Department on behalf of 40 innocent young men and women who were strip and/or cavity searched and wrongfully arrested during a 2005 raid of a licensed Flint nightclub.
"These young people simply did what thousands like them do all over the country [^] they went to a licensed and legal club to listen to music, dance and socialize," said Kary Moss, Executive Director of the ACLU of Michigan. "A judge has already agreed with us that the arrests were unlawful and we now seek to hold Flint and Genesee County accountable for their reckless disregard for the patrons' rights and to ensure that these practices are abolished."
Communities have to be made to pay. If that's the only way to stop the un-American, un-Constitutional, and unacceptable abuses of drug war power, then so be it. Let every community that turns its police force over to an oversight-free multi-jurisdictional task force pay. Every community that turns a blind eye to abuse because they've been told it's "for the children" -- let them pay.
And to Corey and all the others who have endured both the indignity of the event and the two years that followed, thanks for being willing to stand up for the rights of all of us.
7:37:53 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Billy Bob Thornton joins Halle Berry in Tulia project
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The film's visibility just raised a couple more notches. Think he'll play Coleman?
7:08:49 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Wednesday, March 14, 2007 |
Good news (Rosenthal) and Bad news (Raich)
 First the good: Via TalkLeft -- Link:
A federal judge threw out criminal charges today against an Oakland man accused of growing medical marijuana, ruling that authorities had vindictively prosecuted him because of remarks he made after he successfully appealed an earlier conviction.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco dismissed charges of tax evasion and money laundering against Ed Rosenthal, an author and activist who has been dubbed the "Guru of Ganja."
Breyer declared that the government had improperly refiled the tax-evasion and money-laundering case last fall after Rosenthal successfully appealed his 2003 conviction for marijuana cultivation.
"The reasonable observer will interpret the government's conduct as demonstrating that if defendants successfully appeal, the government will ensure that they face more severe charges and more prison time the next time around," Breyer said.
"The government's deeds -- and words -- create the perception that it added the new charges to make Rosenthal look like a common criminal and thus dissipate the criticism heaped on the government after the first trial," Breyer said.
This is great news and full vindication.
Then the bad: Via The Drug Law Blog
A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that a California woman whose doctor says marijuana is the only medicine keeping her alive is not immune from federal prosecution on drug charges.
This one isn't a big surprise to me. Once the Supreme Court ruled against Raich in the main case, I held out little hope for the follow-up case. As Alex says, we need to turn to Congress to pass the Hinchey-Rohrabacher Amendment this year.
More:
Raich, 41, began sobbing when she was told of the decision and said she would continue using the drug.
"I'm sure not going to let them kill me," she said. "Oh my God."
7:23:57 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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HBO's addiction
HBO opens up a big new project tomorrow night: Addiction, a 14-part documentary produced by HBO in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
Now HBO has done some excellent work in the past, and I'm guessing that they have put some real effort into this piece, but, quite frankly, I'm not looking forward to it.
Grant Smith at D'Alliance has a review of the first segment and seemed to find it a mixed bag --
Despite this and other down sides to this film, HBO's "Addiction" does manage to advocate on behalf of people who struggle with drug dependency. There are a number of sequences in the film that help to humanize drug users. Moreover, the film shines a bright spotlight on the managed care industry and its strong reluctance to provide benefit coverage for drug treatment, replacement therapies and counseling. All in all, it's worth checking out "Addiction" and using it as a vehicle to talk about the wisdom of diverting drug offenders into low-barrier, individually tailored drug treatment.
Join Together is upbeat about it:
An upcoming HBO series on addiction is being viewed as a unique opportunity to educate the public about a disease that affects more than 22 million Americans -- and many more family members -- but is widely misunderstood.
... and enthuses about the series of Townhall meetings in conjunction with the documentary (the one nearest me would have required me to be approved by A Safe Haven to attend).
Siobhan Reynolds and the Pain Relief Network, on the other hand, are not at all thrilled (and I respect their opinion greatly).
The Federal Government is gearing up for what appears to be their next big crackdown on pain treating physicians. The last time we saw this much propaganda in the press, several dozen physicians were then rounded up on Federal charges of drug distribution. Panic ensued and pain care for the seriously ill has been all but shut down.
This approach of "stampeding" the population was pioneered by the Nixon Administration -- an event brilliantly portrayed by Edward Jay Epstein in Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America -- a book on the creation of the DEA as an extra-constitutional police force at the service of the Executive Branch.
HBO is falling into line with their new series, "Addiction," which focuses on opioid dependence as though it were a disease. Most striking is the inclusion of pharmaceutical advertisements within HBO's announcement of "Addiction."
Our nation's most esteemed physicians are also lending their credibility to this public relations effort, wringing their hands at the upcoming forum on opioid addiction. Ten million Americans were struggling to live with out-of control pain prior to the Bush Administration's attack on pain treating doctors. (Read More)
Those who found care during the flowering of the pain movement have since been abandoned by a terrified and complicit medical profession.
This kind of scientific back-peddling in the face of oppressive state authority hasn't been seen since the psychiatrists in the Soviet Union allowed themselves to be used in government efforts to repress political dissent. Here, patients are being systematically destroyed by the government, many become "drug war" convicts, all the while, academic pain physicians float above the carnage.
I'll be interested to see what you all think of the HBO documentary. I'm guessing it'll be somewhere between horrid (drug war porn "stampeding" the population into a heightened fear of an addition epidemic) and mediocre (tear-jerking profiles combined with hard-hitting "exposes" regarding the lack of coerced treatment opportunities). But I don't expect anything groundbreaking regarding real solutions, nor do I expect much mention of prohibition as the source of most problems.
[Thanks, Allan]
1:39:54 AM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Tuesday, March 13, 2007 |
Reforming Cocaine Sentencing Guidelines
Good news. Some members of Congress have finally stopped being scared wimps long enough to actually acknowledge that the sentencing disparities between the two forms of cocaine are unfair and unjust.
In the Senate, Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama is drawing bipartisan support for his proposal to ease crack sentences.
"I believe that as a matter of law enforcement and good public policy that crack cocaine sentences are too heavy and can't be justified," Sessions says. "People don't want us to be soft on crime, but I think we ought to make the law more rational."
So far, so good. So what's the plan?
Sessions' bill would lessen the sentencing disparity by increasing punishments for powder cocaine and decreasing them for crack. Crimes involving crack would still draw stiffer sentences, but the difference would not be as dramatic.
Hmmm, maybe I should take back the part about them no longer being scared wimps. The only way to reduce an unjustly harsh penalty is by increasing another harmful harsh penalty? Give me a break.
Of course even this extremely wimpy reform attempt has drawn fire:
"We believe the current federal sentencing policy and guidelines for crack cocaine offenses are reasonable," Justice spokesman Dean Boyd says.
Higher penalties for crack offenses reflect its greater harm, he says, adding that crack traffickers are more likely to use weapons and have more significant criminal histories than powder cocaine dealers.
For a good analysis of the situation, check out Seeking Justice in the Drug War by Marc Mauer and Kara Gotsch at Tom Paine. The article concludes:
An alternative to Sessions' bill was introduced in January by Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y. His legislation would equalize the penalties for powder and crack cocaine by raising the quantity of crack that triggers a five-year mandatory sentence to 500 grams. This approach would eliminate the unjustified disparity in sentences for crack and powder and reduce the number of low-level drug offenders sentenced to harsh mandatory minimum sentences. Such a proposal deserves serious consideration by Congress.
With champions for criminal justice reform like Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., heading the judiciary committees in Congress, the opportunity to redress the misguided crack sentencing policy is upon us. Hearings before both committees are long overdue in this arena and would provide the necessary evidence to dispel the misinformation and hysteria that clouded the public debate on crack cocaine in the past. These myths have done a disservice to developing responsible drug policy, while exacerbating the tragic racial disparities that plague our prison system. Now is the time for congressional attention and action.
11:07:37 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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Sunday, March 11, 2007 |
Granny's Recipes
It's Sunday morning. Take a moment to enjoy the delightful story of Granny Patricia Tabram...
There's a heavenly kind of abundance about Patricia Tabram's kitchen that should earn her a place in the Grandmothers' Hall of Fame. Chocolate cakes and cooking oils jostle for position on several chaotic work surfaces.
Bacon ( smoked and unsmoked ), plum pudding, heaps of cream cheese ( for use in both cheesecake and omelettes ) and kilogram slabs of Dairy Milk are packed into an chock-full fridge.
And there, half obscured - though certainly not hidden - to the left of the cooker, between the sea salt and the Bisto, is the magic ingredient that has just sealed her reputation as one of the nation's better-known pensioners.
The finely ground marijuana is kept in an old Bramwells pickle jar by the sink, and it looks almost interchangeable with the nearby jars of mixed herbs when Mrs Tabram reaches for it during a morning's initiation in the art of cooking with cannabis.
Read the rest
12:43:48 AM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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