“Believe it or not, as a high school teenager, [heroine] was easier for us to get than alcohol,” he said. “It’s cheaper than anything out there.”
That’s because alcohol is legal and restricted and heroin is prohibited and unrestricted.
But I guess it’s only newsworthy when rich white kids get hooked.
Here’s the story in the New York Times.
The BBC has a good video reportage on the latest gun battles between the drug mob and police. This time in the port city of Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacán.
The complete disrespect the drug people have for law enforcement is shocking. They engage in gun battles with heavily armed police and expect to win. Sometimes they do.
Ryan Grim reportsin the Huffington Post that only 3 of 763 “sneak and peek” requests involved terrorism cases. A sneak and peak is when the government searches your home or office without telling you. It was supposed to keep us safe from terrorists.
But most sneak and peaks, not surprisingly, were for drugs. Also worrisome, only three requests were denied.
Raționalitate asks a very good question: How much marijuana is consumed in the US?
Of course, thanks to drug prohibition, we really have no idea.
Some 100 million Americans would admit to having smoked marijuana, but that is most certainly a low estimate.
The New York Timescites a congressional report stating that Mexico seized around 9.3 million pounds of marijuana in 2007.
Raționalitate then, out of necessity, plays a bit fast and loose with the numbers, but the end result boils down to this: let’s assume that marijuana seizedin Mexico represents 1/4 of total U.S. consumption.
IfUS consumption is 37.2 million pounds or 2.38 billion quarter ounces. Raționalitate says a quarter is enough to get one person high about 15-40 times, depending on quality and tolerance (does that ring true?). Let’s go with 20.
That’s 144 highs for every American man, woman, and child. Duuude… That’s just gotta be too high. Right?
So perhaps the Mexican figures are bogus.
So what other figures are out there? In 2004 the 1.1 million kilograms of marijuana were seized at the border. And in 2005 there were 4,046,599 plant seizures in the US. And let’s also assume that you get 2 ounces of smokeable marijuana per plant. (oh, web research, how easy and unreliable you make data!).
So we got 157 million quarter ounces at the border seized and about 32 million quarter ounces of plants destroyed. And let’s say that these seizures represent, I don’t know, 20% of total consumption? Do we have any idea? It could be 25%. It could be 2%. More likely to be the latter. But let’s say 20%, because it makes the figures more conservative. That means there are about 1 billionquarter ounces of marijuana consumed in America each year. That’s 3 quarters or 60 highs for every American per year.
Duuuude, that’s still a lot of weed!
Four officers shot, one very seriously. In a “no-knock” drug raid in New Jersey.
Wayne Parry of the A.P. reports:
Lakewood Patrolman Jonathan Wilson was shot in the face during the raid, and was in critical but stable condition at a local hospital. Authorities said they were cautiously optimistic he would survive despite being grievously wounded.
…
As soon as they got inside, a suspect identified as Gonzalez opened fire on them from atop a staircase, striking the four officers, authorities said.
Gonzalez was also shot. Many times.
Cops stealing from a drug house. Too bad the FBI was watching. Now one is going to the Federal Penn for a couple decades. Such cases are inevitable with the war on drugs. All drug cops are not corrupt. But almost all corrupt cops deal with drugs. It’s just too easy to rationalize stealing dirty money.
26 pending major-felony cases have been dropped as a result.
Jon Murray has the story from Indianapolis.
In the Washington Post, Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, MD, writes about his experience:
I remember thinking, as I kneeled at gunpoint with my hands bound on my living room floor, that there had been a terrible, terrible mistake.
…
In the words of Prince George’s County Sheriff Michael Jackson, whose deputies carried out the assault, “the guys did what they were supposed to do” — acknowledging, almost as an afterthought, that terrorizing innocent citizens in Prince George’s is standard fare. The only difference this time seems to be that the victim was a clean-cut white mayor with community support, resources and a story to tell the media.What confounds me is the unmitigated refusal of county leaders to challenge law enforcement and to demand better — as if civil rights are somehow rendered secondary by the war on drugs.
…
As an imperfect elected official myself, I can understand a mistake — even a terrible one. But a pattern and practice of police abuse treated with utter indifference rips at the fabric of our social compact and virtually guarantees more of the same.
You know what they say: a liberal is a conservative who’s been raided (actually I just made that one up).
In 2008, New York’s Department of Correction’s budget was $978 million ($939 million of which is paid for city tax dollars). “In Fiscal 2007, the Department handled over 100,000 admissions, managed an average daily population of 13,987 and transported 326,735 individuals to court.” The average length of stay is 47 days.
That’s $70,000 per inmate per year. Or $190 per person per night. I think it’s safe to say that Rikers Island is the world’s most expensive jail.
You could say that Rikers gives you and a friend a double room for $383 night. But you don’t get to pick your friend. Meanwhile I can get a double room tonight at the Holiday Inn on 57th Street in Manhattan for $268. But the Holiday Inn doesn’t have the coveted LaGuardia view.
You can see the DOC budget here.
LEAP says:
A group of police and judges who want to legalize drugs pointed to new FBI numbers released today as evidence that the “war on drugs” is a failure that can never be won. The data, from the FBI’s “Crime in the United States” report, shows that in 2008 there were 1,702,537 arrests for drug law violations, or one drug arrest every 18 seconds.
“In our current economic climate, we simply cannot afford to keep arresting more than three people every minute in the failed ‘war on drugs,’” said Jack Cole, a retired undercover narcotics detective who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). “Plus, if we legalized and taxed drug sales, we could actually create new revenue in addition to the money we’d save from ending the cruel policy of arresting users.”
Last December, LEAP commissioned a report by a Harvard University economist which found that legalizing and regulating drugs would inject $77 billion a year into the struggling U.S. economy.
Today’s FBI report, which can be found at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/arrests/index.html, shows that 82.3 percent of all drug arrests in 2008 were for possession only, and 44.3 percent of drug arrests were for possession of marijuana.
Pointing to the collateral consequences that often follow drug arrests, LEAP’s Cole continued, “You can get get over an addiction, but you will never get over a conviction.”
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) is a 13,000-member organization representing cops, judges, prosecutors, prison wardens and others who now want to legalize and regulate all drugs after witnessing horrors and injustices fighting on the front lines of the “war on drugs.”
Read a few perspectives in the New York Time