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Tag: war on drugs

  • Daaaryyl!

    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.

    A: I wasn’t a criminal. That’s what saddened me. Not being a criminal and going to jail because you have a substance-abuse problem is really sad. It’s sad that the system doesn’t see that as the real issue.

  • 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 to surreptitiously record his conversations with TSA officers on a cell phone. The audio is infuriating.

    That’s from Radley Balko’s The Agitator. Radley is a bit too anti-cop for my tastes, but he’s on the mark more often than not. And his Cato work on police raids is a classic.

    Now I don’t fault the cops for asking questions. I would do the same. But I would be a bit quicker to realize that cash isn’t a crime, see the Ron Paul campaign link, and understand the man isn’t going to answer questions and let him go.

    Finally, a smarter officer (different agency?) realizes it’s campaign money, sees the red flag, and tries to set the original officers straight:

    “Campaign Contributions…. You guys stopped him because the metal box.” He doesn’t phrase that as a question.

    “Well that and the large amount of money that was in there.” Ix-nay on the ash-cay, chief! Cash isn’t a crime, even if it mightgive you reasonable suspicion for a stop. But after that, you got nothing.

    The complete audio is here. I like how Bierfeldt doesn’t say he “knows his rights!” Instead he says he doesn’t know his rights.

    It all goes back to the war on drugs. And every time the government asks you to give up rights in the name of fighting terrorism, it will be used in the war on drugs. We don’t give “implied consent” to be searched at airports because we’re worried about people carrying cash. We give up our rights so we’re not blown up by a terrorist!

    It doesn’t take a agitating libertarian to worry about a government that stops a person walking through an airport with cash.

    Back in 2004, an astute former police officer wrote in the Washington Post:

    What starts as a necessary security measure will quickly become standard law enforcement procedure even for crimes that are nonviolent and not related to terror.
    …
    In order to stop and search any suspect, not just a terrorism suspect, law enforcement need only wait for a person to enter an implied consent area such as a subway or a shopping mall…. The true object of the search — most likely drug possession, but any contraband will do — is unrelated to terrorism.

    The difference between civilian employees searching for bombs in airports and government agents conducting random searches for suspicious objects is the difference between preserving a free society and creating a police state.
    …
    The solution — the balancing of public safety with constitutional liberties — is surprisingly simple…. Limit the doctrine of plain view…. If the government must search without probable cause, let it search, but only for illegal weapons or bombs…. Any unrelated suspicious or illegal objects found must be ignored.

    Read the whole article here.

  • Will Wilkinson Smokes Pot and Likes It

    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 begin to roll back our stupid and deadly drug war, the stigma of responsible drug use has got to end, and marijuana is the best place to start. The super-savvy Barack Obama managed to turn a buck by coming out of the cannabis (and cocaine) closet in a bestselling memoir. That’s progress. But his admission came with the politicians’ caveat of regret. We’ll make real progress when solid, upstanding folk come out of the cannabis closet, heads held high.

    So here we go. My name is Will Wilkinson. I smoke marijuana, and I like it.

    Read all of Wilkinson’s piece in The Week.

  • 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 story by Megan Schmidt in the Holland Sentinel.

  • 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% of all the drug arrests in our country in 2007 were for marijuana offenses…. And although experts have found little statistical difference among racial groups regarding actual drug use, African-Americans–who make up about 12% of the total U.S. population–accounted for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison.

    Read the whole article here.

  • 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 judge for 25 years. And what are we talking about? He’s begging me to tell you we need to legalize drugs in America.

    “Please quote me,” says Jim Gray, insisting the war on drugs is hopeless. “What we are doing has failed.”

    The whole story is here.

  • 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 prison better than they were when they went in,” he said. “Those laws had no deterrent effect. Frankly, I’m amazed that it took so long to get rid of them.”

    Read the whole story by Richard Liebson and Rebecca Baker in the Lower Hudson Valley (that’s suburban NYC)Journal News.