There’s a Q & A with former baseball player Darryl Strawberry in the New York Times today. He could’ve been a contender. Actually, for more than a few years he was, playing half a glorious career before crashing and burning on cocaine. Q: You have your own history of illegal drug use, complete with cocaine binges and time in jail.…
Tag: war on drugs
Steve Bierfeldt’s Box Full of Cash
In town for a conference, a director of Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty is detained by TSA at the St. Louis airport because when asked to explain why he’s carrying $4,700 in cash (it was proceeds from book and ticket sales at the conference), he asks the agents to tell him what law requires him to do so. He managed…
Will Wilkinson Smokes Pot and Likes It
Will Wilkinson interviewed me a while back on Bloggingheads TV. The Atlantic Monthly’s Andrew Sullivan has been documenting on his blog the stories of typical, productive Americans—kids’ football coaches, secretaries of the PTA—who smoke marijuana because they like to smoke marijuana, but who understandably fear emerging fully from the “cannabis closet.” This is a profoundly necessary idea. If we’re to…
Coming home to roost
Seems like the drug war is now chipping away at the freedom and privacy of police officers. In L.A., gang and narcotic officers will have to turn over detailed personal financial information. The story.
Dangerous Drug Raids?
Not for police. Here’s the story from Drug War Chronicle. I’m quoted in it.
Everybody’s doing it
So it looks like Ashley Biden, Joe’s daughter, has been filmed snorting coke. So what? Our last three presidents snorted coke! It’s a pretty impressive membership list: Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton [correction: Er, maybe not. See comments below]. Didn’t seem to ruin their lives.
Shot in Drug Raid
Copp was unarmed when a deputy shot him in the chest at his off-campus apartment more than two weeks ago. West Michigan Enforcement Team officers entered the residence on a search warrant. Copp’s attorney has said “a few tablespoonfuls” of marijuana were found in the apartment. Police have not released any details on what was found in the residence. The…
Why We Must Fix Our Prisons
Senator Jim Webb wrote a piece for ParadeMagazine: With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different–and vastly counterproductive. Obviously, the answer is the latter. … Justice statistics also show that 47.5%…
Judge Gray on Drugs
Steve Lopez of the LA Times write about fellow LEAP member, Judge Jim Gray: All right, tell me this doesn’t sound a little strange: I’m sitting in Costa Mesa with a silver-haired gent who once ran for Congress as a Republican and used to lock up drug dealers as a federal prosecutor, a man who served as an Orange County…
Rockefeller Drug Laws
It’s official. I don’t like them. See it says so right here: Professor Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who teaches law enforcement classes at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the Rockefeller laws “don’t make sense from a legal level or a moral level. They treat every problem as if prison was the answer.” “Nobody leaves…