This is huge. While I would like all drugs to be regulated, for now I’ll settle for a real debate on the merits of legalizing marijuana.
To me it’s a amazing that simply debatingsuch an issue has been taboo. At least until now. Why? Because prohibitionists are going to lose this debate.
I’ll give Schwarzenegger props for this one.
The storyin the New York Times.
Joba Cahmberlain’s mother, Jacqueline Standley, was arrested in Lincoln, Nebraska. Read Tony Newman’s take on the situation:
America likes to promote itself as the “home of the free” but, unfortunately, we have the embarrassing honor of being known as the incarceration nation. … We lock up more people on drug charges than Western Europe locks up for EVERYTHING and they have 100 million more people than we do. … The way our country deals with drug abuse is the driving force to our incarceration problem. … By declaring a “war on drugs” we have declared a war on ourselves.
I can’t help but wonder how the mother of any person making millions [correction (see comment below): hundreds of thousands] of dollars needs to be selling drugs. I mean, take drugs? Sure. But sell? Like for money? Shouldn’t Joba be giving her an allowance, even if it does go for drugs?
My mom reads this blog. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have a drug problem. But Mama, if you need money, I’ll be happy to give you some. No questions asked.
The Obama administration said it favors shorter jail sentences for crimes involving crack cocaine.
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Under current law, a person caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine gets the mandatory minimum sentence of five years, while it takes only five grams of crack cocaine to trigger the same sentence.
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“Our stance on this is we shouldn’t be lowering the penalties on crack. We’ve always talked about bringing the powder-cocaine penalties up,” said Gene Voegtlin of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which includes 20,000 police chiefs and executives.
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“We believe the remedy would be to increase the penalties for powder cocaine so all criminals are treated equally,” said James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents about 325,000 uniformed officers.
The whole story by Gary Fields in the Wall Street Journal.
I don’t want to overstate this point, but I would like to place it on the table: I don’t think there’s much difference between powdery crack cocaine and clumpy powder cocaine. And lab tests don’t distinguish between the two because they’re both cocaine.
I pity the man who gets caught in the ghetto with 5 grams of powder cocaine in a crack vile or two.
There’s a one-day conference on Safe Injection Facilities (a legal place where addicts can shoot up) at John Jay College on May 22, 2009.
The conference organizer is looking for somebody to provide a law enforcement perspective. Any police out there interested in talking about what police officers think about such programs? Email Rick Curtis. It will be fun, interesting, and good place to network with academics and public health people. They need a good law-enforcement perspective so that it’s not all just preaching the choir.
In the New York Times.
Instead of fighting a war we can’t win, we could buy the drugs. Burn it if we want. Sell it if we’re smart. It would be cheaper and better than sending soldiers into harm’s way. Perhaps just $300,000,000 a year. That’s what they say the Taliban makes in drug profits (though I suspect it’s higher). But instead, we’ll fail to end the drug trade and push more farmers into poverty and the hands of the Taliban.
I wishit weren’t always the Narcs. And now, because I’m older and wiser (and somewhat shamed by comments to other posts), I’ll add that it isn’t allnarcs. Most narcotic officers do their job and do it well. But corruption always has a vice link. Always.
Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker write in the Philadelphia Daily News:
RED FLAGS were everywhere. Something wasn’t right.
Search-warrant applications read like form letters. A confidential informant made drug buys across the city, sometimes just minutes apart, defying the laws of physics….
Yet police brass apparently failed to notice.
Again and again, supervisors in the Philadelphia Police Narcotics Field Unit signed off on cookie-cutter applications for search warrants, which are now the subject of an expanding FBI and police Internal Affairs Bureau investigation.
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[After allegidly being robbed by police officers during a drug raid] The 5-foot-1, 110-pound Lu, who had no criminal record, was hauled off to jail for selling little ziplock bags.
Read the whole story here.
Evidently, raiding and closing ghetto Korean corner stores for selling small ziplock bags is now standard operating procedure. All part of the war on drugs.
“The store is closed for six months or so, but on that corner, or one, two blocks away, drugs are sold and guys are armed,” said Patrick Carr, a Rutgers University sociology professor. “They say quality of life – whose quality of life are we talking about?
“With the store closed, who will sell diapers, milk and bread?”
Laker and Ruderman have written a series of articles on Tainted Justice.
Legalizing drugs would be the quickest way to keep police clean. More bureaucratic layers of red tape is not the answer.
I don’t know if I should be proud or ashamed I love ViceMagazine. It’s anti-consumer attitude is completely and unashamedly support by consumer culture and slutty American Apparel ads.
I don’t know how to describe Vice so I won’t. Let’s just say it’s eclectic and, among other things, sometimes provides a wonderfully unsanitized view of the world. Yes, there is some female nudity in pretty much every issue, but the only thing it has in common with Playboy is that I’ll say I read it for the articles.
And, oh yeah, Vice is supposed to be free. But then you have to go to the right stores, none of which, evidently, are in my neighborhood. So I’m one of those losers that actually subscribes to Vice.
The current issue–loosely based on tech–features homemade explosive devices (from the Anarchist Cookbook), pictures on making Scottish Haggish from live deer to cooked meat, a photo-documentary on guest workers in Dubai, and lots more.
When I started reading Vice I just liked the hipster attitude (and the occasionally topless hipster girl). But then I came along this article and I realized the magazine was for real. Yeah, that’s the prison in the Philippines where the guy makes all the inmates do massive dance numbers (and seems to have a harem of women prisoners on the side).
Where is all this going? Two good stories of note. The first is what I would call honest drug education about synthetic opiates. I can say no because other people said yes. It’s effective not despite, but because it admits that heroin’s high is as pleasant as “swimming through a sea of warm blankets fresh from the euphoria dryer.”
The second story is about shipping drugs from South America in purposefully designed torpedoes.
We all know that submersibles are now used to transport drugs. But how many magazines interview the guy who “spearheaded the project”? I’ll be damned if I didn’t learn a thing or two (though I already know the war on drugs won’t be won).
To give you some idea of the money involved (and why it’s scary to think that criminals and terrorists profit from drug prohibition), in 2000 a kilo of coke cost this guy $2,100. He sold it in Mexico for $8,000 (and more in the U.S.). At three tons per torpedo, that’s a profit of more than $17,000,000 per shipment.
At the time the street value for cocaine in the U.S. was $161 per gram or $161,000 per kilo. If you want to price it that way (as does law enforcement because it sounds cooler for the evening news), each shipment had a street value of $483,000,000. What wouldn’t you do for $483 million. Now that’san economic stimulus.
Eight-term Iowa Republican Congressman Tom Latham is asked about LEAP, a group of former law enforcement agents who support drug legalization. He responds, “They’re probably a bunch of old potheads.”
Don’t like the message? Disparage the messenger. That’s what they call an ad hominem attack. Maybe he should get to know us.
Of well, you know what they say: any publicity is good publicity.
They say it’s a success. Here’s a report from the Cato Institute.
I haven’t listened yet, but I assume it’s good. From NPR.