How Legal Cannabis Sales Help the Poor

The District of Columbia voted to legalize possession and non-commercial sharing of cannabis in last week's election. That's good, but the more important part of the law is the authorization of the DC City Council to vote to legalize (and regulate) the sale of marijuana if it so chooses.

This further action is necessary for the people in DC who suffer most from the effects of the drug war: poor minorities.

In my latest at Rare, I explain how marijuana for sale is better for the poor than marijuana for free.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

My Response to Franklin Foer of The New Republic

TNR editor Franklin Foer took to his virtual pages today to argue for more federal involvement to protect our civil liberties. In the abstract, I agree with him: I think the federal government is a necessary check against wanton abuse by states and locals against their own people. (We kinda fought a war that settled that.)

However, when it comes to details, he's about as far afield of correct as you can get:

But back to the actual issue at hand, Foer cites civil asset forfeiture as the strongest evidence of need for federal intervention. Oh, if this were only the case.

As this Institute for Justice’s 2010 paper on the subject makes clear, the rise civil asset forfeiture is a direct result of federal involvement in local policing. In what are known as “equitable sharing” agreements, federal law enforcement split forfeiture proceeds with state and local law authorities, supposedly in relation to the amount of work the agencies put into the investigation. While the amount of money is discretionary by statute, all reports indicate that the default split is the maximum allowed: 80 percent to local agencies, 20 percent to the federal government.

You can read the whole thing here.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Beyond the Drug War: How Libertarians' Aversion to 'Black Issues' Impedes Their Own Relevance

I have a new piece up at Rare today. In it, I lay out the case that color-conscious criminal justice reform is needed, and libertarians persistent refusal to take these problems head-on undercuts their message of individual liberty.

Take the reaction to the Ferguson protests: only one third of white people surveyed by Pew thought tear gassing and pointing guns at peaceful black protesters (and journalists) was “too far.” Even subtracting the third who answered “I don’t know,” half of those who expressed any opinion thought the police’s actions against the primarily black crowd—captured on countless cameras, phones, and video recorders—were within the range of acceptable behavior.

In a world in which this well-documented, recorded, over-the-top enforcement is tolerated or condoned by a majority of Americans, relying on cameras to rein-in police behavior in minority enclaves or against minorities individually is probably quite naïve.

Other big picture policy shifts like eliminating sex-work prohibitions, broad sentencing reform, and reducing the Pentagon programs that militarize and hyper-weaponize local police would also benefit millions of Americans. However, there’s no reason libertarians should not add an equal protection component to their criminal justice reform wish list and encourage law enforcement agencies to improve community relations with minorities.

You can read the whole thing here.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

This is Your Government on Drugs

My latest piece on the ONDCP is up at Washington Post's PostEverything. A snippet:

For decades, the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and its allies have used government resources to marginalize, stigmatize, and demonize drug users.

There were the nonsensical ads like “this is your brain on drugs” and inexplicable demonstrations like torching cars and valued possessions. The ONDCP, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, the Ad Council, and Above the Influence portrayed small time dealers as snakes and users as rats.

They also showed drug use as a gateway to prostitution and, in the wake of 9/11, explicitly linked casual drug users to supporting terrorism and cop killing. The United States has spent millions stigmatizing drug use, sale and abuse — all before one even begins to calculate the costs to arrest, try, and incarcerate offenders for the past 40 years. This, of course, comes in addition to the stigma that comes with incarceration and criminal records.

The Obama administration says it wants to de-stigmatize drug addiction. But no matter how hard it tries, it’s virtually impossible to de-stigmatize behavior that is still a crime.

Read the whole thing here.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Drug Free School Zones, Sex Crime Registries, and Other Dumb Laws

Me, at the Washington Post:

The stupid laws and rules promulgated over decades of “tough on crime” rhetoric will take years to reform and correct. Throwing the book at offenders with well-meant but misguided lawmaking has wreaked havoc on correctional budgets while breaking up families and damaging local economies in the process. Policymakers who are now reevaluating laws and extending review to thousands of inmates subjected to blind punishment would do even better than the reforms above to let judges decide who is punished and how severely in the first place.

Read the whole thing here.

NB--I should be writing there, and elsewhere, more often. Hit me up if you have a good idea you want me to write about.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

David Brooks's Flaccid Defense of Drug Prohibition

Most talking heads who are willing to go on record against drug legalization are deeply invested in preserving it--either to maintain their antiquated view of 'law and order,' or because they hold the singular belief that drugs are evil and invariably rot the human soul. Neither of these can possibly justify the punitive structure of our drug laws, let alone the United States' criminal justice leviathan, but such arguments, while misguided, at least approach the issue from principle.

Today, however, the New York Times's David Brooks finds a third way--a stunningly flaccid defense of the status quo. In my years of arguing against drug prohibition, I cannot recall a less-inspired, more ineffectual, and heartless piece of writing against my position. To say this column was phoned in insults the effort it takes to pick up a phone, find stored contact information, and press send.

Missing among the 803 words used to defend impotently mutter his position were: "criminal," "arrest," "incarceration," "jail," "prison," "misdemeanor," or "felony." (Note also that the piece is utterly devoid of conviction in any sense of the word.) To completely ignore the criminal implications of our current laws is even more dishonest than the mealy mouthed nonsense that usually comes from the ONDCP. The state of American criminal justice has even forced them, the federal government's anti-drug mouthpiece, to acknowledge that criminalization has had devastating unintended consequences and that, as a result, their tactics must change (if only rhetorically). Brooks, apparently, could not muster even that much honesty.

For shame.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

It's Going to Take More than a Memo to Fix the Drug War

Today, the DOJ released a memorandum (PDF, hereafter "Cole memo") sent to all US Attorneys' offices to "update [the DOJ's previous] guidance" on federal policy as it relates to liberalized state marijuana laws. A lot of drug reformers are hailing this memo as a great step forward for the government. I'm less convinced.

As I've written elsewhere, we've seen DOJ memos on this topic before. Indeed, the opening lines of the Cole memo directly reference the 2009 Ogden memo and its 2011 clarification. The latter,  also written by Cole, effectively gutted the spirit of the Ogden memo's message to de-prioritize state-law compliant medical marijuana distributors: "The Ogden Memorandum was never intended to shield such activities from federal enforcement action and prosecution, even where those activities purport to comply with state law."

Looking at the language of today's memo, there is no concrete change in policy by the DOJ. Yes, it is encouraging  that the Attorney General wants to de-emphasize regulated marijuana distribution as a prosecutorial priority, from a politically symbolic standpoint. But U.S. Attorneys don't primarily operate within the realm of politics--they prosecute people for the federal government. They have the widest discretion imaginable and literally countless federal laws with criminal and civil sanctions from which to choose to prosecute any person in their jurisdiction. Those prosecutions cost money to investigate and they have finite resources with which to work--though much larger than the resources of the would-be defendants facing federal prosecution.

Some Thoughts on the Broad Spectrum of Racism

I've never shied away from my particular resentment of Southern racism. Cloaked in tradition and gentility, years of barbarity and terrorism are blithely ignored as the Southern gentlemen and their darling belles get misty when they hear 'Dixie.' It's enough to make me reach for blood pressure medication. But that doesn't mean that it's the only kind of racism, or the most important.

Racism isn't geographically isolated, nor is it confined to a particular political or ideological affiliations. Boston, for example, famously resisted bused integration in the 1970s, resulting in this Pultizer prize winning photograph:

Today, Boston remains one of the most segregated cities in the United States. Don't let the 'enlightened Northeastern liberal' reputation fool you. (see also Twitter reaction to the Bruins' elimination from last year's Stanley Cup Playoffs on the goal by a black man) Racism, in its individual and collective forms, is still ubiquitous.

Progressives tend to focus on racism in systems, often referred to as "institutional racism." Conservatives and libertarians tend to be skeptical of allegations of entrenched racism, seeming to believe that racism can only exist on an individual level, and that to the extent it exists in the United States, it's not pernicious enough to require laws to combat it because "Jim Crow is over."

Neither political side quite seems to get it.

About Rand Paul's Howard Speech

Today I watched Sen. Rand Paul give a speech before Howard students on the relationship between blacks and the GOP. Much of my twitter feed watched the speech, but if without context you'd think they were watching completely different speeches by the tone of the reactions. The libertarians were more or less enjoying the speech, the Left seemed to be yelling in unison "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?" I find myself squarely in between these camps on this issue, but am closer to the Left in the speech's efficacy.

From the outset, Paul bombed with two opening jokes about how people had warned him about going to Howard, perhaps the most storied HBCU, because of its mostly black, presumably Democratic student body. While not really offensive, the jokes were inappropriate. The audience didn't need to be reminded about the Otherness with which Republicans view blacks and Democrats generally. (Say nothing of universities.) But out-of-place reminders seemed to be the order of the day for the junior senator from Kentucky.

Paul spent much of his speech retracing Civil Rights history and the role of the Republican party in it--conveniently glossing over anything since 1964. He was seemingly unaware that a university dedicated to black uplift would be peopled with individuals whose understanding of The Struggle is not only equal to but, in many cases, surely surpasses his own. While it may come as a shock to some people, black people are well aware of what the Republican party used to be. Paul compounded this problem by saying that it was the Democrats who were the slavery party and the party of Jim Crow.

Well, that's true enough, but the false equivalence of the Democratic parties of 1863, 1963, and 2013 is an insult to everyone's collective intelligence and he should be ashamed of himself for conflating them. Whether or not you buy Kevin Williamson's contrarian view of the modern Republican party, it is just wholly absurd to think the parties of Alexander Stephens and Richard Russell would ever nominate a black man as its titular leader. Think what you will of today's DNC, the word "Democrat" just doesn't mean what it used to and saying it does is contemptibly ridiculous.
 
 Paul's comments betrayed a low intellectual expectation and historical awareness of his audience. Given the venue, this is particularly insulting, and I would bet that cost him any credibility he may have earned by just showing up.

Unfortunately lost in all this, Paul finally began to talk about serious policy issues we face in this century toward the end of his remarks. He brought up two issues, specifically, that could begin to bridge the credibility deficit between the GOP and black voters: mandatory minimum sentences and the Drug War. On these issues, Paul is a solid senator and he's been getting better. But so much of his time and effort was dedicated to telling an audience that they've misunderstood the GOP and it hasn't changed from its Civil Rights heyday.

It is as if the leader of the new vanguard of the GOP decided to approach black America and say: "Come back! It's you, not us! But we forgive you for the misunderstanding."

Relatedly, I was baffled when he hailed the Reagan era as a sterling example of Republican vision to that audience. Whatever his economic policies did for the country, Reagan's escalation of the War on Drugs turned America's inner cities into the killing fields of that war. The mandatory minimum sentences Paul opposes today were ramped up in the Reagan era in response to the "crack epidemic," eventually culminating in the 100:1 sentencing disparity for crack to powder cocaine, only recently lowered to 18:1. Black people disproportionately suffered from that escalation and those laws, with bi-partisan consensus, no less. This is what he should have been driving home: that government, however well-meaning, can ruin lives and devastate communities through unintended consequences.

This is his view of government and, on these issues, young Democrats should work with the GOP to correct some of these horrible wrongs.

That's the history he should have begun, started, and ended with. Paul missed a great opportunity today. Let's hope the next time he tries something like this, and I sincerely hope he does, he comes with a higher estimation of the audience he's speaking to. Maybe then, if he focuses on today's issues and why his approach can benefit all people, and particularly the folks in his audience, he might leave the room with a little more respect than he came in with.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Some Thoughts on Fear and Gun Control

NB: my opinions alone, yadda yadda yadda.

As the New York Times noted this morning, most gun deaths in the United States are actually suicides—by a 2 to 1 margin. Thus, only about a third of Americans who die from guns are doing so by the will of another. Using 2012 data (courtesy of MoJo), there were 9,960 gun homicides in 2012, and roughly rounding the U.S. population using 2010 census data (~308,745,000), there were about 3.2 gun homicides per 100,000 people in America. That is, removing all risk factors, an American's chance of being shot to death in the last year was approximately .0032%. There is indeed a problem of gun violence in this country, but murder and other violent crime rates have been declining steadily over the past two decades. It's getting better, and we can find ways to make these numbers even smaller, but it's unlikely many of the newly proposed gun control measures will be effective in doing it. So why are they being pushed?

Earlier this week, a man was fatally struck by a train at DC's Gallery Place/Chinatown Metro Station during morning rush hour. I was running a little late that morning and that incident made me a lot later. At the time, we had no idea whether the person who was struck jumped, slipped, or was pushed, but everyone thinks getting hit by a train is tragic and awful. Yet, when the announcement came over my train's public address speaker, no one freaked out or even reacted at all, other than a couple eye rolls of frustration that their commute just got lengthened. No “Oh, that's a shame!” or “Oh my god, that's terrible!” Just a train of normal commuters reading their Kindles and filling out sudokus and crosswords like any other Tuesday train delay. A man's (presumed) death did not emotionally register with anyone on the train that I could tell.

While I was sitting there, I thought about the nonchalance with which the entire train took the person's probable death. I could be wrong, but I think that if he had gone to the platform at Chinatown at the exact same time for the exact same purpose, but pulled out a gun and immediately shot himself in the head, the reaction on the train at my station in Virginia would have been much different. Why?

Guns scare people. 

Despite the fact we stand on platforms waiting for zooming trains or get in automobiles unquestionably capable of killing us just as dead every day as part of our get-to-work ritual, people fear guns more even when used by someone on themselves alone. Sure, in theory, someone could pick up the gun after the man shot himself and harm others, but I would imagine most of the people on the platform would be too shocked to think “Oh, here's my chance to go on a rampage/rob a group of people at gunpoint!,” as if lack of opportunity is what prevents most people from doing it. Yes, guns are designed to be lethal whereas trains and cars serve other functions, but in this situation, the use of a gun would produce a much more shocking effect on the public—rather than just the witnesses on the platform and the poor train operator—despite being functionally indistinguishable to anyone but the emergency responders.

For comparison, 32,885 people were killed in fatal automobile incidents in 2010.* Roughly, then, any given American is more than three times as likely to die in a car accident than be shot to death if you ignore risk factors on both sides. That is, if you're not involved in the drug trade or in an abusive relationship, your odds of dying as a result of gun violence is even lower than the numbers above suggest.

There are numerous tragic exceptions, of course, but while firearms make violence easier, they are not the causes of violence. Policymakers should be addressing the causes of violence if the public safety were actually their primary goal. Instead, most of the gun debate operates on this emotional level detached from the actual harm to the general public because the people want to feel safe, despite the considerable safety most Americans already have.

This isn't to say we must preserve the status quo or that any new controls are an affront to the Constitution, because they may not be, but policies that are pushed by irrational fear of guns are unlikely to hinder gun violence because the root causes of most gun violence remain. Meanwhile, domestic violence and the Drug War rage on, and only so few in the gun debate are actually addressing them. 

bellum medicamenti delenda est 

*PS: Of course I understand that automobile deaths have decreased as cars have gotten safer and various other factors. But you're not going to make lethal weapons that much "safer" and simultaneously preserve their effectiveness. The point is not that cars are bad, but that the fears surrounding gun control are not generally borne out by statistics.

"Breaking the Taboo" Premieres Today

When you get time, please watch "Breaking the Taboo," a great new documentary on the murderous and costly Drug War. It's narrated by Morgan Freeman and features appearances by, inter alia, former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, entertainment mogul Richard Branson, and former leaders from Latin America and Europe.



It is a compelling film and I urge you to share it with friends and relatives who may not understand the failure and catastrophic costs borne by millions of people in our country and abroad.
 

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Why the Feds Are Unlikely to Respect Washington and Colorado

The recent ballot initiatives that allow recreational cannabis use in Colorado and Washington have been welcomed by many folks as a sweeping change in American drug policy. To the extent that the initiatives represent a shift in popular conception of cannabis use, I join the general enthusiasm expressed by libertarians and a several on the Left. However, the Obama Administration has shown no substantive will to rein in the federal Drug War and until it does, these measures can only be viewed as partial victories in those two states. Moreover, many supportive commentators seem overly optimistic of what is likely to happen, perhaps based on misplaced assumptions of how the Drug War is fought.

Quoting Mark Kleiman, co-author of Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know, MoJo's Kevin Drum writes:

[Kleiman:]The federal government could shut down both of those experiments, if it were determined to do so....But it would make it impossible to learn anything useful from the Colorado and Washington experiments.

So why shouldn’t the federal government cut Colorado and Washington some slack? As long as those states prevent marijuana grown under their laws from crossing state lines and thereby subverting marijuana prohibition in the rest of the states, the Justice Department could step back and let the consequences of the new policies play themselves out. They might succeed, or they might fail. In either case, the rest of us could learn from their experience.

I doubt that either state can effectively prevent locally-grown marijuana from crossing state lines, but hell, they can't prevent it now either. So I'm with Mark: there's no need to announce any public change of policy, but Obama should tell DEA to lie low for a while and see how Colorado and Washington do. A controlled experiment like this is the best way of finding out the effect of full legalization of marijuana. Does it lead to higher consumption? Is it a gateway drug? Will it reduce consumption of alcohol? (emphasis mine)

There are three main problems with this excerpt. 

 

First, Professor Kleiman's question rests on the assumption that the federal government has any desire to see how the “experiments” play out. As I've noted before, the DEA effectively prohibits experimental research on cannabis in a controlled environment by anyone but the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a government agency. Cannabis, as explained in Kleiman's book, is the only illicit drug that is off-limits to non-governmental researchers that are open to positive value in cannabis use. There is no reason to believe that while the DEA won't allow literal experiments by scientists in a lab, they would be amenable to whole states being substituted as figurative laboratories. As a drug researcher, he knows this, but this sort of 'why not?' obscures the hurdles the government  institutes to hamper the “science” the ONDCP is so fond of citing to support their policies.

Second, Drum assumes that cannabis would need to cross state lines to violate the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution to enter the federal jurisdiction—a perfectly reasonable belief. Unfortunately, this is not how the Supreme Court has ruled...twice. In Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the New Deal Court ruled that a farmer who set aside wheat for his own family's use could be regulated—read, “prohibited”—by the federal government of the Interstate Commerce Clause. More recently, in Gonzales v. Raich (2004), the Court ruled—with Republican-appointed Justices O'Connor, Rehnquist and Thomas dissenting—that cannabis grown by a terminally ill individual in accordance with state law for one's own medical use violated that very same Interstate Commerce Clause because by not participating in a (prohibited) interstate market, you affect demand. Not coincidentally, this tortured reading of the clause was cited in just nearly (if not) every single brief supporting the government in the Health Care Cases (2012). In short, much of the Left's economic and legal agenda rides on the federal government asserting power, via the Commerce Clause, into any aspect of our economic and personal lives. That Obama's Administration would find a new respect for federalism for cannabis is laughable...literally.

Third, and perhaps most important, it's not only the DEA that needs to stand-down. The U.S. Attorneys in every federal jurisdiction in the country have very wide latitude on whom they prosecute and for what offense. As you may recall, early in the Obama Administration, Attorney General Holder said publicly, backed-up by what is known as the “Ogden Memo,” that the DOJ would no longer consider raiding medical cannabis facilities that complied with state law a priority. Since then, the DOJ has increased raids on those same facilities, sometimes with the help of municipal authorities who don't agree with state law. If a public directive is so willfully ignored, there's little to suggest private encouragement would meet a different fate, particularly in the Eastern District of Washington.

Matt Yglesias, in a post that has a much more realistic view of the new regime, still errs a bit:

“The DEA obviously can't police low-level retailing, so if states and localities say it's legal it'll be a lot simpler in practice to get some pot.”

On the facts of the matter, Matt is correct. There will be no DEA patrols going through neighborhoods looking for cannabis. That said, it has been and continues to be very easy to “get some pot” all across America. Most cannabis users (and dealers, for that matter) simply aren't caught. The Drug War isn't a failure because you can still get some drugs under some circumstances—the failure lies, in part, in the fact drugs are still virtually ubiquitous despite draconian enforcement efforts. Further, the feds are not above using relatively low-level stings to get convictions—they know most offenders are going to plea out. Indeed, they don't even need to charge anyone at all to intimidate a low-level user ignorant of federal law into cooperation. Then, all they need is an inside-lead to a small group of people who have a common connection to drugs—say a commune or even a co-op—and prosecutors may attach the word “conspiracy” to add the cannabis together to reach federally chargable amounts. If any of those people have otherwise legal and unrelated guns on the premises, the charges really start to mount up. A small dispensary or a self-sustaining bunch of hippies can become a target of an ambitious U.S. Attorney—and it's all over. Though hypothetical, it's not at all unreasonable to think this sort of thing will happen—the track record against medical cannabis facilities proves that. I'm sure the DOJ has its stable of confidential informants ready and willing to work under new rules.

So I join Yglesias and Drum with a cautious optimism that this will make life better for cannabis users in Colorado and Washington. But we should not fail to mention that this will not deter federal law enforcement from prosecuting state-legal activity. That enforcement, though less harassing to the general public than state and municipal policing, will continue to ruin lives through incarceration and depriving the sick of relief. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the Administration that continues to deprive cancer and AIDS patients regular access to their medicine suddenly changing its tune now that Dave-O can load up his stash before a Phish show. If anything, I would expect heightened federal action against participants in the new regimes not long after they are put in place.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug Czar Speeches

I have a lot of ideological issues with the Center for American Progress, but I didn't expect even they--an activist think tank founded by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta--would give an open-armed welcome to Gil Kerlikowske, the sitting Drug Czar, to tout the "new" drug control policy of the Obama Administration. I know they want the Administration to win in November, but self-identified progressives carrying water for the most destructive government force this side of the Pentagon should be an ideological and institutional embarrassment.

But they did, and I sat through it.

As pointed out by respected drug law reform champion Ethan Nadelmann,the "new" White House strategy the talk was meant to promote is a change in rhetoric but not much else. I've decided to take quotes from his prepared remarks to explain why the ONDCP rhetoric is fundamentally dishonest and to bring out what was left unsaid or misrepresented.

The following (in bold) are all quotes from Chief Kerlikowske's presentation yesterday at CAP.


"Very vocal, organized, well-funded advocates"

From jump street, the one-time police reformer and now head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy was clear that any talk of legalization would not be entertained. He wasted no time straw-manning the arguments of drug reformers, saying that advocates believe legalization is a "silver bullet" that would make the nation's drug problems disappear--which no one serious says or believes. But he reiterated that removing the criminal penalty from behavior--behavior that the ONDCP, CAP, and other reformers would like to have qualified as a "public health problem" indicative of an individual's "disease"--is "extreme." Furthermore, the Czar added, legalization (lumped in with "enforcement-only" strategies) is 'not humane, compassionate,or realistic.'

At that point, I knew this was going to be a long morning.

So, given that the federal behemoth--that includes the federal prison system, FBI, State Department, DHS, DEA, ICE, the U.S. Military, and the DOJ's ambitious and relatively unfettered U.S. Attorneys--is engaged almost exclusively in "enforcement only" activities, the head of the ONDCP is complaining about "extreme" "organized and well-funded advocates" who host occasional policy forums and write blog posts, op-eds, and policy papers about rethinking the government's current strategy.The way he tells it, you'd think the government was fighting a large, cold-blooded and ruthless force as strong as the drug cartels--who, of course, have all the incentive to maintain drug prohibition--instead of a few dedicated people whose strongest weapons are truth and the compassion he claims we lack.

"Most importantly, [legalization arguments] are not grounded in science."

Kerlikowske bragged, "In fact, NIDA--the National Institute on Drug Abuse--is the source of 85% of the world's research on drug abuse and we could not be more proud of that."

Who is this "we?" Science is the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Science, as practiced in all other disciplines, includes testing data and falsifiable results so that it may be peer reviewed by other scientists to support or detract from the findings in an objective manner. Science, in short, is a group effort and one agency doing most of the work is nothing at all to brag about--indeed, it should be a call for greater scrutiny.

There are those who would like to study drug effects of, say, marijuana--but the government refuses to allow the study (New York Times):

Lyle E. Craker, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Massachusetts, has been trying to get permission from federal authorities for nearly nine years to grow a supply of the plant that he could study and provide to researchers for clinical trials.

But the Drug Enforcement Administration — more concerned about abuse than potential benefits — has refused, even after the agency’s own administrative law judge ruled in 2007 that Dr. Craker’s application should be approved, and even after Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in March ended the Bush administration’s policy of raiding dispensers of medical marijuana that comply with state laws.

“All I want to be able to do is grow it so that it can be tested,” Dr. Craker said in comments echoed by other researchers.

Marijuana is the only major drug for which the federal government controls the only legal research supply and for which the government requires a special scientific review.

“The more it becomes clear to people that the federal government is blocking these studies, the more people are willing to defect by using politics instead of science to legalize medicinal uses at the state level,” said Rick Doblin, executive director of a nonprofit group dedicated to researching psychedelics for medical uses.

I don't write this to impugn NIDA or its motives, but--at least in regard to cannabis--that the government NIDA reports to for funding is the same government that uses its research to maintain its policies and the same government that denies the right of research to others cannot be construed as objective science by any reasonable standard.

"Just last year, the Department of Justice released data that health, workplace, and criminal justice cost of drug abuse to American society totaled over $193 billion...Contributing to the immense cost are the millions of drug offenders under supervision in the criminal justice system"

Yes, Chief Kerlikowske, keeping human beings in cages is expensive. Law enforcement is expensive. Lost wages from job termination resulting from drug charges is expensive. Supporting people who can't get jobs after non-violent drug convictions is expensive. All of these are direct results of drug prohibition. This is not to diminish the other costs borne by other parties, but 'look how much money we're spending on this' is not a cohesive argument when your detractors say you should be spending the time, effort, and money elsewhere.


"To break the cycle of drug use and crime, we have worked to divert non-violent drug offenders into treatment, instead of jail, through drug courts....Whenever someone tells me that government doesn't listen or that taxpayer dollars are being wasted in [drug abuse work], I just ask them to attend a drug court graduation. If you're not moved and you're not motivated by that graduation, you have a pretty cold heart."

Drug courts look good on paper, but in practice, their effectiveness ranges from "okay" to "terrible." Depending on the state and jurisdiction, drug courts may require plea agreements, whose violation triggers automatic and often severe jail time, and usually it is not appealable. Many violations are the result of failed drug tests--one of the outward symptoms of the "disease" Kerlikowske and co. say drug addiction is.* It is hard to imagine designing a program that would be more effective at setting addicts up for failure.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers did a two-year nationwide study interviewing people from all aspects of drug courts to measure their effectiveness and adverse consequences. They found that while many people have benefited from drug courts--and that is certainly a good thing--the programs have been susceptible to other problems, such as "cherry picking" defendants to boost success numbers. (Though ONDCP rarely, if ever, acknowledges it, most people who use illicit drugs are non-problematic users.) Putting people who don't really need treatment into treatment inflates success statistics while people with severe problems are left out because they may fail on their first try, harming success rates and increasing the risk of criminal penalty for failing. (For more on the many problems with drug courts, you can download the PDF of the report here and read their follow-up here.)

That the man who oversees the national operation to keep people in cages is appealing to pity in order to defend inadequate solutions to a broken system would be comical if not so damned tragic.

"Drug use is a public health issue"

Both in his statement and in the ONDCP strategy, the Drug Czar has mentioned his desire to eliminate the stigma of drug and alcohol abuse and addiction. But this is impossible, especially when it is still a crime to use illicit drugs in the first place. Criminality brings stigma, which, ironically, is the best argument for making drug use illegal.

But experience has taught us that the criminal penalties for drug use and distribution are grossly disproportionate to the offense itself, and thus we need to scrap it. That said, I think that society should discourage drug use--especially of harder drugs like heroin and methamphetamine. "This can happen to you" is effective, when not overblown to the point of fiction. But the way drugs are thought of in America--lumped all together like smoking a joint is roughly the same thing as shooting heroin--is irresponsible because there is no distinction between more responsible/safer drug use and reckless/more dangerous use. Such conflation and enduring lies like 'gateway' drugs--that smoking a joint will lead to being a heroin junkie--undermines the value that truthful drug education provides.



"Our [highlighted] policies include support for programs like screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment. That works to medicalize [sic] our approach to the drug problem by helping health institutions recognize the signs and symptoms of drug addiction early."

"Drug screening" is a polite way to say "pee in a cup." I don't have a problem with employers drug testing their employees if they think it's important, but the government really has no business incentivizing the practice. As I said before, most drug users aren't actually problem users--and never become problem users--yet they could get caught up and risk losing their employment for something they do in their spare time. Even if the federal government were to give employment protection to "current use" drug abusers under Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA already protects from being fired for inactive addiction), this is invasive, expensive, and unnecessary for the vast majority of Americans, users and non-users alike.

The point of making drug addiction a public health issue is to get people into treatment more readily--that the door is open when they are ready to quit--without fear of criminal sanction for mistakes/relapses or possession. It is not, as apparently has been embraced by the White House and ONDCP, carte blanche to subsidize the addiction treatment industry. Furthermore, making employees' unrelated and off-site recreational behaviors a matter for HR won't help the goal of destigmatizing drug abuse--indeed, it will probably exacerbate it as recreational users will be unfairly labeled as addicts.

"We support the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign and the Drug Free Community Support Program."

This is your tax dollars on drugs, any questions?

The Drug Czar finished his prepared remarks on "securing the Southern border," working with other countries to stem the flow of drugs into (and cash out of) the United States, and other aspects to the international scope of America's Drug War--with absolutely no mention of Portugal, or what's actually going on in Mexico, or how Los Zetas, a Mexican cartel, has become the primary criminal force in Guatemala. The worldwide failure of American drug policy is worth an entire post by itself, so I won't get into it further here.

As someone who is invested in fighting against the Drug War, it was a really difficult 20 minutes to sit through. I highly recommend Mike Riggs' summary of the event  over at reason. I really couldn't have done better than he did on the Q&A, so instead of cribbing what he said here, just read it there.

What's perhaps most disturbing, is that this speech was short and doesn't get into the details and depths of what the federal government's strategy has done and is doing. And, of course, the federal outline barely touches on what state and local authorities are doing--where the majority of drug arrests actually occur.

The Drug War, despite Kerlikowske's and Tanden's protestations, is still going full force. That the government is spending more money on treatment does little good, on the whole, so long as cops are still breaking down doors, shooting dogs, and throwing kids in a hole for 5 days. And, Chief Kerlikowske, we're gonna keep calling it a war until you stop treating it like one.

It's the humane thing to do.

bellum mediamenti delenda est


*I'm not qualified to say what is and is not a disease. My position on legalization does not change if I grant or deny that claim. The point, of course, is that if it is a disease, these triggers punish the disease, which is contrary to the aims the ONDCP claims.

Quote of the Day

Glenn Greenwald, discussing Obama hedging on his promise about federal medical cannabis raids:

The same person who directed the DOJ to shield torturers and illegal government eavesdroppers from criminal investigation, and who voted to retroactively immunize the nation’s largest telecom giants when they got caught enabling criminal spying on Americans, and whose DOJ has failed to indict a single Wall Street executive in connection with the 2008 financial crisis or mortgage fraud scandal, suddenly discovers the imperatives of The Rule of Law when it comes to those, in accordance with state law, providing medical marijuana to sick people with a prescription.

HT: Huffington Post

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Geraldo and the Hoodie

So most of the Internet knows that Geraldo Rivera tweeted this garbage about Trayvon Martin:

Trayvon killed by a jerk w a gun but black & Latino parents have to drill into kids heads: a hoodie is like a sign: shoot or stop & frisk me
— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) March 22, 2012

His hoodie killed Trayvon Martin as surely as George Zimmerman.
— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) March 23, 2012

Rivera has since tried to walk it back, basically saying his point was about the awful truth it is to be a minority and dealing with people in (supposed) authority. The problem here is that the "jerk with a gun" is solely responsible for shooting and killing Trayvon Martin. If Trayvon's hoodie had anything to do with what happened, it was Zimmerman's fear and prejudice about hoodies, not Trayvon's fashion sense. Shifting the responsibility to Trayvon or his inanimate attire is absolutely unacceptable. The entirety of responsibility for changing any act or behavior rests on Zimmerman and anyone else who fears brothers in hoodies.

Touré published a list of advice to give black youths about how to grow up in the face of racism. It's generally decent advice, but it's just that: advice. A black kid could follow every rule he listed and still die at the hands of someone like Zimmerman.  There is no "safe" way to be black in America and any post hoc analysis of the victim's non-aggravating and perfectly innocent behavior is so off-base it's insulting.

There is no comprehensive list of things to do to avoid being harassed while black. Individual black people from any walk of life who drive any type of car and wear any type of clothes are suspicious to somebody in authority:

Nice car? Drug dealer. 
Hoopty? Ex- or future convict looking for trouble. 
Walking/driving too fast? Getting away from someplace he shouldn't have been. 
Walking/driving too slow? Casing robbery/intoxicated.  
Minding own business/driving the exact speed limit? Looks scared. Probably carrying drugs.
ad infinitum

You might as well tell a black person to become invisible if you're trying to tell them to avoid suspicion for all the good it will do them.

One of the main problems here is that it is still acceptable in our society to treat people like criminals with no reasonable evidence to suggest guilt of anything. The Drug War exacerbates this, given the violence associated with the illicit trade and the relative ease with which users and dealers may conceal drugs and weapons on their person. Further, that enforcement is concentrated in poor, minority neighborhoods--leading, inter alia, to increased violence because of the increased transaction costs of dealing--disproportionate arrests of poor minorities appear to be justified because of this self-sustaining cycle. This cycle also perpetuates and reinforces stereotypes of violent young black men because of the type of people the prohibitionist system produces on the margins. It's absolutely maddening.

And it has absolutely nothing to do with a goddam hoodie.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

The Rhetorical Power of "Drugs"

Unless you follow sports or sports news pretty closely, you probably have never heard of Sam Hurd. Until a couple months ago, he was just a wide receiver and special teams player for the NFL's Chicago Bears. He recently signed a contract for $5.1 million, not anywhere near a star's salary, but enough cheddar that people are predictably surprised that a "rich" man would get caught trafficking a large amount of cocaine.

I don't know enough about the case or Hurd to explain what he was doing. I could get into the one-sided nature of NFL contracts (if you get cut from the team, you don't get paid, no matter what the paper says), the short professional tenure of most NFL players ( ~4 years), or what it says to be a typical special teams player not named Devin Hester (you're a back-up when a star goes down), but I don't think "why?" is really important either. Furthermore, I generally don't trust media reports this early into the public phase of the process. It's a one-sided PR battle waged by the prosecution until the lawyers hash it out at trial, so talking about this or that "fact" is just speculation. What I do want to focus on is the predictable shock and outrage that a 'successful' man is doing something so risky and potentially life ruining as cocaine trafficking.

Here is an image of what a lot of people think when they hear "drug dealer":

Black. Cornrows. Neck Tattoo. "Bling." Vaguely menacing to those people who get scared of people who look something like this. Pictures like this pay for the Drug War.

The problem is, while this is what our prison population looks like, it's not fully indicative of who is selling, buying, and using drugs. The guy in the picture could be Father of the Year for all I know, but if you Google image search "drug dealer," he comes up.

The United States illicit drug market is the largest in the world--surpassing the drug market for the entire European continent--worth multiple billions of dollars. Tens of millions of Americans are illicit drug users. Think about that for a moment: tens of millions. The drugs have to get to all of them somehow, and it's not always delivered by someone who looks like our friend here.

"Drug dealers" are just people who exchange drugs for property, money, or services. That's it.

Not every person who sells drugs is a "drug dealer," per se--a lot of times it's a user who gets extra for his friends. Like chipping in on a beer run, it doesn't make sense for multiple users to all go separately to a seller, so one guy can pick up a bunch--as drugs, like most goods, are cheaper when you buy in bulk--and distribute it to his friends. Other times, someone "knows a guy"--you could say, a drug dealer--who brings in extra cash by selling drugs to regular or semi-regular users. The guy is not on the street hustling or gang banging--he works at a job and makes extra money on the side by selling to friends, co-workers and other people he knows aren't police. If you have a secure supplier and a small customer base, this can last quite sometime with low risk because most people who use drugs don't actually get caught. The risk comes when someone does get caught and rats out his dealer to avoid or decrease jail time. Such is the life of the low-level dealer.

The other risk, which it appears Mr. Hurd discovered, comes when you're trying to expand your customer base. Your quantities are larger so transportation becomes more difficult, and you're much more likely to draw the attention of law enforcement.

The police are rather fond of big fish, you see.  It seems to be their only distraction from the Sisyphean drudgery of the drug war day after day. For a brief moment, they try to convey that they've done something useful, despite having no lasting effect on the supply or demand for drugs. Even in the rare event law enforcement is successful in dramatically reducing one type of drug from making it from supplier to consumer, the latter's desire to get high remains and new drugs come to the fore or less popular drugs reemerge through alternate channels.

But back to my point: the scary "drug dealers" are just people engaged in a market. In massive distribution networks, like the Mexican cartels, there are kingpins and mercenaries and mules and American distributors and-so-on down the line as the drugs are diffused into the American black market economy. In more local operations, there are a farmers who grow marijuana in fields, woods, homes, or warehouses and smaller supply networks. Eventually, the drugs get to "that guy" and then to the consumer. People at various levels essentially are engaged in the same enterprise, but face vastly different pressures and constraints related primarily to the level of prohibition enforcement, but also the cost of overhead ( the level of bribes and kickbacks required to do business on top of growth and distribution) and local competition. Access to major drug channels in northern Mexico that stretch into the southern U.S., for example, can be expected to produce a high volume of drug-related violence due to the profits tied to those routes. Yet, in San Francisco, there are state-sanctioned distribution shops and users all over the place--yet there aren't constant shootouts at Haight and Ashbury or decapitated bodies in Berkeley despite the ubiquitous drug trade. The tolerance of law enforcement, whether by law or priority, lowers operating costs of drug sales. If you and your neighbor can both make a little money selling drugs, but neither of you is likely get super rich from doing it, motivation for violence is virtually zero. One doesn't become a violent monster just because he makes some dough selling his old college buddies some weed once a week.

This overreaction isn't at all limited to "drug dealers." The Daily Show put out a great bit this week about a newish but (thankfully) enjoined law in Florida that requires all welfare recipients to take a drug test. This video shows how poor people--simply by someone asserting that they do drugs at a higher rate than more affluent folks--are subject to invasive 4th Amendment violations just because they are poor (and probably perceived to be racial minority, but that's another post) are thus assumed to be "drug users."

                       

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Poor Pee-Ple
www.thedailyshow.com
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Regardless, because it's "drugs," all sense and decency go out the window despite the fact that the poor actually spend less on drugs than non-poor folks and alcohol--a perfectly legal addictive intoxicant that one or two people have been known to use as escape mechanism--isn't regularly tested for. Surely, we don't wanna be subsidizing bar tabs any more than we want to pay for weed -- but this raises uncomfortable questions about what taxpayers can really demand of the people to whom their money is given and where that line stops. I would like few things more on this planet than a more constructive alternative to government-provided welfare--but until that becomes a reality, I don't believe setting arbitrary and abusive bars on that assistance helps anyone. Indeed, by kicking a drug user off of welfare, they further marginalize a poor person who may very well have a drug problem. He or she still needs to survive, and without a legitimate source of income, a life of crime--be it as a dealer or actual crimes against people and property to support their problematic habit--is likely to make the community more dangerous than it would have been supporting this person's habit. And, of course, you can't very well support this policy from a fiscal stance if the result is more people in prison being supported for food, shelter, and medical care. You don't have to believe in drug legalization to recognize the probable downside to this policy.

If you say "drugs," then all the normal limits of what we expect of people and what is proper for government to do change--whether we're talking about dealers, users, or even suspected users. The general consensus is that drugs are bad, and thus anything to stem their influence--whether the solutions are shown to be the least bit efficacious or not--are accepted with almost no hesitation. Similarly, anyone engaged in the trade is assumed to be a horrible person--a violently cruel drug dealer or a drug-using bloodsucking leech on society. This is both foolhardy from a budgetary perspective and unspeakably cruel from a humanitarian perspective. The result is the Drug War that diverts resources from violent crimes to pursue vice crimes whose greatest tie to violence is the prohibition itself. Everyone is presumed to be guilty and without excuse for their alleged behavior, which must be condemned in no uncertain terms and with the harshest of punishments. All this makes  United States the undisputed leader in incarceration on the planet, imprisoning one percent of our entire adult population with more than three percent on probation or parole. "Drugs" as rhetorical boogeyman allows the American public to support an ever-expanding incarceration state and tolerate the Drug War that feeds it.  Given the outcomes of the policy, it's hard not to think "drugs" has become a euphemism for a more inflammatory word that has traditionally scared the status quo.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

An Anger-Fueled Ruse

So, apparently Attorney General Eric Holder is back up on the Hill doing his usual CYA Dog and Pony show about Operation: Fast and Furious, the gun-walking (remember when it was gun running?) operation that led to U.S. DOJ officials losing track of the guns it sold to drug lords without apprehending anyone. I know I've discussed this before, but I get irritated every time I see Holder try to B.S. his way out of this by bringing up gun control.

The guns are a distraction: a massive, calculated, politically motivated distraction away from the actual problem--the Drug War. The Republicans are using F & F to embarrass Holder and, predictably, Holder is getting defensive and trying to turn the blame on the Republicans for creating the environment where guns may flow freely across the border. I've seen this show before.

Never mind that people don't tend to kill each other willy-nilly with a body count in the tens of thousands just because they have guns. Never mind that a lack of prohibition on guns is being scapegoated to cover up a failed prohibition that has gone on for a half century. Never mind that the drug prohibition has made drug trafficking so lucrative that kingpins can buy whatever they want: they have submarines now.

WE NEED BETTER SUBMARINE REGULATION!

So, as I write this, you have grown men and women engaging in heated, angry, blame-filled hearings, arguing over something completely tangential and plainly irrelevant to the actual cause of the violence and murder. This is your government on drugs.

Any questions?


bellum medicamenti delenda est

In Latinam Veritas

Here's another great video from my former colleagues at Reason. The law enforcement guys are just too much.



One of the cops, professing an adolescent affinity for libertarianism, said 'As a younger man I used to say 'carpe diem'...Now, as a parent, I'm 'carpe kids.'

Indeed, cops are carpe'ing kids all over the place.

For those unfamiliar with the idiom or Latin, "carpe" means "seize."


bellum medicamenti delenda est (et carpe custodem fatuum )

"Made in the U.S.A." Is Not the Problem

I was watching the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing today on the oversight of the Department of Justice. The sole witness was Attorney General Eric Holder, who would be called upon to answer for "Operation Fast and Furious," a failed DOJ/ Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) program that was meant to snare cartels in gun trafficking. I tweeted the first part of the hearing, but I wanted to discuss an op-ed by two state attorneys general that Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) had put in the Congressional Record (courtesy of Emptywheel's @bmaz):

Congress and the media have understandably focused on the missteps of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the “Fast and Furious” sting operation that allowed suspected “straw buyers” to purchase weapons and transport them to Mexico in order to build cases against drug cartels.

However, the covert operation was terminated abruptly after its possible connection to the tragic death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was revealed. Unfortunately, most of the recent criticism about the operation seems to be serving as a means to attack Attorney General Eric Holder and destroy the ATF, rather than to hold those behind Fast and Furious accountable.

The focus should be on the real public safety problem underlying this controversy: keeping arms from the Mexican drug cartels and protecting the security of the United States. However, many of the roadblocks faced by ATF and the Department of Justice are not being built by international criminals, but by Congress. (Emphasis mine)

The piece goes on to explain the prolific violence in Mexico and that 95% of the guns recovered from Mexican drug violence 'can be traced to the United States.' This sounds troubling, but it's really smoke and mirrors.

As I've detailed in the past, drug violence in Mexico is indeed rampant and unspeakably brutal. People are kidnapped, murdered, often tortured, strung up from overpasses, disemboweled, and/or beheaded. Does it really matter whether the murderers bought their ropes and machetes from stores in Tuscon or Tijuana?

It's the murderers, stupid.

If we could magically keep American guns out of the hands of the cartels, people would start being gunned down with a greater percentage of AK-47s sold in other countries than AR-10s made and sold in America, but they would still be gunned down. The cartels have planes, boats, and more than enough money to get whatever they want through their expansive networks. Making it marginally more difficult to acquire weapons may be good policy insofar as we want better, more sensible gun laws in this country, but it's hardly the "real public safety problem" facing our law enforcement agencies and the public at large.

The cartels make astronomical profits from selling the drugs banned by the United States' global prohibition policy. That money gets them access to the entire planet and all its terrible weapons that make their line of work so bloody. Ramped up interdiction efforts just make drug dealing more dangerous, but also more lucrative, and thus more enticing. So, when you think about it, the real public safety problem is the one that enables and incentivizes the cartels to commit heinous crimes in the first place: the Drug War itself.

Arguing about where the cartels bought their guns is like arguing the make of the bus that just hit you: it's trivial, at best, and probably a sign you have brain damage.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

UPDATE: This isn't meant to be a dismissal of the ineptitude that plagued Operation Fast and Furious. This was a post about the underlying problems, not the highly questionable tactics employed in that operation.

The Government's Addiction

Charlie Savage reports that the DEA is ramping up its militarization efforts around Latin America:

The D.E.A. now has five commando-style squads it has been quietly deploying for the past several years to Western Hemisphere nations — including Haiti, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Belize — that are battling drug cartels, according to documents and interviews with law enforcement officials.

The program — called FAST, for Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team — was created during the George W. Bush administration to investigate Taliban-linked drug traffickers in Afghanistan. Beginning in 2008 and continuing under President Obama, it has expanded far beyond the war zone.


“You have got to have special skills and equipment to be able to operate effectively and safely in environments like this,” said Michael A. Braun, a former head of operations for the drug agency who helped design the program. “The D.E.A. is working shoulder-to-shoulder in harm’s way with host-nation counterparts.”

 The DEA has hit-teams now. What could possibly go wrong?

“It could lead to a nationalist backlash in the countries involved,” [University of Miami professor Bruce Bagley] said. “If an American is killed, the administration and the D.E.A. could get mired in Congressional oversight hearings. Taking out kingpins could fragment the organization and lead to more violence. And it won’t permanently stop trafficking unless a country also has capable institutions, which often don’t exist in Central America.”(emphasis mine)

In short, the Obama administration's answer to the Drug War is to get more violent and put more agents in harm's way, the benefit of which will be...more violence. It's not like this hasn't been tried before:

The FAST program is similar to a D.E.A. operation in the late 1980s and early 1990s in which drug enforcement agents received military training and entered into partnerships with local forces in places like Peru and Bolivia, targeting smuggling airstrips and jungle labs.


The Reagan-era initiative, though, drew criticism from agency supervisors who disliked the disruption of supplying agents for temporary rotations, and questioned whether its benefits outweighed the risks and cost. The Clinton administration was moving to shut down the operation when five agents died in a plane crash in Peru in 1994, sealing its fate.

Best case scenario: country A sees a wave of US-backed military raids and violence. This country restores its "capable institutions" and  after countless firefights with law enforcement and one another, leaving scores of innocents dead, the resident drug operation finds more fertile ground to operate in country B, which lacks similar capable institutions. America still gets its drugs and the bloody fight continues in a new country. This predictable and oft-repeated result is called the "balloon effect."

Like a gambler at a casino who just doesn't know when to quit, the United States continues to double-down on its hopeless efforts to use violence to solve its 'drug problem.' Any objective observer of the situation can clearly see its futility and the consequences of pursuing this course of action. Yet the gambler continues, thinking this time it's gonna work. Any short term gains are completely illusory, but they are used to justify even more of the same.

It's time we start thinking about an intervention.

bellum medicamenti delenda est