State of the world on drug decriminalization

Personal possession of any drug decriminalized: Spain, Portugal, Italy, Czech Republic, Baltic states, some German states and Swiss cantons, Mexico.

Partial decriminalization/minimal criminal prosecution: England, Denmark, Slovakia, Latvia, Croatia, Poland, Austria, Germany, France, Netherlands (see chart in the Economist story linked below--it's interesting that the Netherlands has the highest percentage of prison outcomes on this list)

Unconstitutional to prosecute people for drug possession (any drug) per Supreme Court ruling: Argentina, Colombia

Marijuana decriminalized: 14 U.S. states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon)

States with some localities that have decriminalized marijuana: Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Washington, Wisconsin

Considering marijuana legalization: California, Massachusetts, possibly Oregon

Considering decriminalization (any drug): Brazil, Ecuador

Source: The Economist, "Virtually legal," November 14, 2009; state decriminalization details from Wikipedia.

Mexico decriminalizes personal possession of drugs

After at least two prior attempts in 2006 and 2008, Mexico has decriminalized the personal possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD, and methamphetamine in order to unclog the courts and focus only on heavy trafficking. This will be an interesting experiment in decriminalization that will no doubt also provoke drug tourism to Mexico.

It appears that the new law is similar to the 2006 proposal, which was less radical than it may have originally appeared--it allowed local police as well as federal police to pursue drug crimes (a strengthening of the prosecution of drug crime) and allowed diversion to treatment for possession of small amounts of drugs rather than criminal prosecution. The new law doesn't allow criminal prosecution for personal possession, and mandates treatment diversion on a third offense. So it's not legalization, it's decriminalization.

Anthony Watts abuses DMCA to suppress criticism

Anthony Watts, a radio meteorologist who has collected evidence of badly sited weather stations to argue that climate change data is incorrect, was the subject of Peter Sinclair's latest Climate Change Crock of the Week video. Rather than attempt to refute the criticism (which would be difficult--both "good" and "bad" weather stations show the same long-term temperature trends), Watts resorted to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to get Sinclair's video taken offline. Watts doesn't hold copyright on television footage he appears in on Glenn Beck's show, which has been used in fair use excerpts, anyway.

But the video is back, and you can see it for yourself here.



(Via Pharyngula.)

UPDATE: As Rich Trott points out, Watts has replied here. He says that the basis of his copyright complaint is that the video shows the cover of and photographs and graphs from his book, but doesn't say why he thinks the video exceeds fair use. He says that the NCDC's response to his data (a) used out-of-date data and (b) used a process guaranteed to have two similar graphs, by taking a weighted average of the good and bad station reports even in the line reported as just the good stations.

This is not exactly correct--there is a correction for urban heating that does use nearby station data, but even if you do not perform the urban heating adjustment step, you STILL get two graphs with essentially the same trend. (This was indirectly linked to in my previous post on this subject, through my link to the Daily Doubt blog of frequent commenter Hume's Ghost.)

UPDATE (August 10, 2009): Climate Progress points out the inanity of Watts' defense of his DMCA abuse, observing that he's suggesting copyright infringement on the basis of a few graphs and images shown from his book, which is given away for free in PDF form on the Internet. So not only was Sinclair well within fair use based on the amount and substantiality of material used, there's no chance that Sinclair's video could possibly have had any adverse effect on the commercial market for Watts' book, since there isn't one.

O'Reilly on Amsterdam

Via Pharyngula, a video rebuttal to a recent Bill O'Reilly show claim that Amsterdam's drug policies are a failure that has led it to be a "cesspool of corruption, crime, everything is out of control, it's anarchy," according to guest Monica Crowley, Ph.D. (In a bit of irony, her doctorate is in "international relations." She's a Fox News foreign affairs and policy analyst who was a personal foreign policy assistant to Richard Nixon from 1990-1994--I didn't realize former presidents needed personal foreign policy assistants.)



Various cities in the Netherlands have placed additional restrictions on coffee shops that sell marijuana, such as not permitting them to operate within 200m of a school. The Wikipedia entry on drug policy in the Netherlands documents this, along with the details of their decriminalization (not legalization) policies.

Corrupt drug cops in Philadelphia

From the Philadelphia Daily News:

ON A SWELTERING July afternoon in 2007, Officer Jeffrey Cujdik and his narcotics squad members raided an Olney tobacco shop.

Then, with guns drawn, they did something bizarre: They smashed two surveillance cameras with a metal rod, said store owners David and Eunice Nam.

The five plainclothes officers yanked camera wires from the ceiling. They forced the slight, frail Korean couple to the vinyl floor and cuffed them with plastic wrist ties.

“I so scared,” said Eunice Nam, 56. “We were on floor. Handcuffs on me. I so, so scared, I wet my pants.”

The officers rifled through drawers, dumped cigarette cartons on the floor and took cash from the registers. Then they hauled the Nams to jail.

The Nams were arrested for selling tiny ziplock bags that police consider drug paraphernalia, but which the couple described as tobacco pouches.

When they later unlocked their store, the Nams allege, they discovered that a case of lighter fluid and handfuls of Zippo lighters were missing. The police said they seized $2,573 in the raid. The Nams say they actually had between $3,800 and $4,000 in the store.

The Nams’ story is strikingly similar to those told by other mom-and-pop store owners, from Dominicans in Hunting Park to Jordanians in South Philadelphia.

Via The Agitator. Officer Cujdik has other issues.

The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal

Portugal decriminalized drugs in 2001, and Glenn Greenwald discusses the evidence that he says shows it has been "an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense."

Legalize pot and tax the crap out of it

Today's Overcompensating makes a timely proposal. Just as the repeal of Prohibition during the Great Depression helped economic recovery and reduced associated criminal activity, repealing the drug war could do the same. Legalizing prostitution along the lines of the New Zealand model (adopted in 2003, and in 2008 in Western Australia) is also a good idea.

Now that Attorney General Eric Holder has confirmed Obama's campaign promise that the feds will not engage in drug raids against medical marijuana operations in states that have legalized such activity, the time is right.

What Michael Phelps should have said

At The Agitator blog, Radley Balko writes what Michael Phelps should have said when a photograph of him taking a bong hit was published in a tabloid:

Dear America,

I take it back. I don’t apologize.

Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months per year. It’s that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brief window of down time I want to relax, enjoy myself, and partake of a substance that’s a hell of a lot less bad for me than alcohol, tobacco, or, frankly, most of the prescription drugs most of you are taking, well, you can spare me the lecture.

I put myself through hell. I make my body do things nature never really intended us to endure. All world-class athletes do. We do it because you love to watch us push ourselves as far as we can possibly go. Some of us get hurt. Sometimes permanently. You’re watching the Super Bowl tonight. You’re watching 300 pound men smash each while running at full speed, in full pads. You know what the average life expectancy of an NFL player is? Fifty-five. That’s about 20 years shorter than your average non-NFL player. Yet you watch. And cheer. And you jump up spill your beer when a linebacker lays out a wide receiver on a crossing route across the middle. The harder he gets hit, the louder and more enthusiastically you scream.

Yet you all get bent out of shape when Ricky Williams, or I, or Josh Howard smoke a little dope to relax. Why? Because the idiots you’ve elected to make your laws have have without a shred of evidence beat it into your head that smoking marijuana is something akin to drinking antifreeze, and done only by dirty hippies and sex offenders.

You’ll have to pardon my cynicism. But I call bullshit. You don’t give a damn about my health. You just get a voyeuristic thrill from watching an elite athlete fall from grace–all the better if you get to exercise a little moral righteousness in the process. And it’s hypocritical righteousness at that, given that 40 percent of you have tried pot at least once in your lives.

Read the rest at The Agitator.

What Does It Take for a Police Officer to Get Fired?

Radley Balko, guest-blogging at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, describes three police officers, asking whether each has engaged in egregious enough conduct to be fired:

One,

Shoving a 71-year-old Walmart greeter to the ground and, when another customer came to assist, shoving that customer through a glass door?

Two,

How about three DWI incidents within a one-year span, including one in which the officer ran a roadblock, then had to be tasered, pepper-sprayed, and wrestled to the ground; another in which he hit another car, then left the scene of the accident; and another in which he fell asleep in his cruiser in front of a school, while in drive, with his foot resting on the brake?

Three,

How about an officer with an otherwise stellar record, who has a reputation in the department for honesty, but who became an outspoken critic of the war on drugs, and on one occasion declined to arrest a man after finding a single marijuana plant growing outside the man's home?

Can you guess which of these officers lost their jobs for the described conduct? Read Balko's post to find out.

The Constitution-free zone

Via the Reason blog: The 1976 U.S. Supreme Court case of U.S. v. Martinez-Fuerte established an exception to the Fourth Amendment, allowing the federal government to establish roadblock checkpoints within 100 miles of U.S. borders to stop people and search for illegal immigrants and smuggling.

The ACLU notes that 190 million people live within 100 miles of U.S. borders, providing this helpful map. (Although Lake Michigan is entirely within U.S. boundaries, by treaty Canada is allowed full navigation rights to the lake--so it's not clear if that 100-mile boundary would actually be as in the ACLU's map around Lake Michigan.)

There are currently 33 checkpoints in operation within the boundary area. Here's some video footage of one of them in Arizona:


(Via Checkpoint USA, which has numerous videos of interactions at one of these temporary checkpoints.)

Mexico to try again to decriminalize drug possession

Mexico's President Felipe Calderon has sent a proposal to Congress to decriminalize possession of small amounts of heroin, methamphetamine, opium, and marijuana for personal use. This is similar to a proposal that actually passed Congress in 2006 which then-president Vicente Fox said he would sign, but then backed down from after pressure from the United States.

The purpose is to free up police and court resources to go after the major drug gangs, which it would certainly do.

Drugs in drinking water are controlled substances

In another amusing unintended consequence of the war on drugs, it turns out that the pharmaceuticals most likely to get disposed of into city water supplies are controlled substances. The restrictions on who has access to over 365 controlled substances are such that they can't be disposed of via normal hazardous waste disposal methods such as incineration, due to the costs of maintaining the controls on contractors who handle and haul away drugs for disposal.

As a result, hospitals and assisted living facilities are dumping drugs like codeine, morphine, oxycodone, diazepam (e.g., Valium) and methylphenidate (e.g., Ritalin) down the drains, behind locked doors with a witness to the disposal for record-keeping purposes.

The DEA is reportedly working out some modified regulations with the assistance of the EPA.

Cindy McCain's drug-related crimes

Radley Balko at The Agitator replies to Jennifer Rubin at Commentary about why the Washington Post's coverage of Cindy McCain's addiction to painkillers and commission of crimes to support it is newsworthy.

Balko gives two reasons:

• John and Cindy McCain have touted her addiction an example in overcoming adversity. That presents quite the contrast to McCain’s legislative history as an ardent drug warrior. People accused of crimes similar to those Cindy McCain was accused of committing usually go to prison (even when they’re innocent). Her crimes haven’t been well-reported in the media. And they show how John McCain (who, by the way, is running for president) believes in one set of rules for the friends and family of powerful politicians, and a different set of rules for everyone else.
• While Cindy McCain’s addiction and theft from her children’s charity to support that addiction were lightly covered at the time, there has yet to be much coverage of it at all during this campaign. And one aspect of the case that’s been covered even less is John and Cindy McCain’s attempt to railroad Tom Gosinski, the guy who blew the whistle on Cindy McCain’s theft from her children’s charity. The Post story is one of the first to get his version of what happened.

And Balko concludes:

So here we have a U.S. senator who tried to destroy the guy who blew the whistle on his wife’s crimes, who then used his political power to work out a sweetheart deal with prosecutors to get his wife a slap on the wrist for those crimes (which often send others to prison), and who has then spent his entire career fighting for longer sentences and less leniency for people who commit similar crimes. And he’s now running for president.

The Washington Post story is here. Phoenix's New Times covered the story of Cindy McCain's drug addiction and Tom Gosinski whistle-blowing back in 1994. The New Times story contains much more detail than the Post story, including lies told by Cindy McCain as part of the McCains handling of the unwanted media coverage of the story.

Amy Silverman of New Times, who has covered McCain in detail for many years, has a lengthy recent article about McCain here, which includes stories about McCain such as his sabotaging a hearing of Arizona Gov. Rose Mofford, Barry Goldwater's irritation with McCain, McCain's exploitation of the illness of Mo Udall for publicity, and more.

Cocaine plane was used by CIA

The Gulfstream II jet that crashed in Mexico last year with 3.7 tons of cocaine on board was frequently used by the CIA to fly terror suspects to Guantanamo Bay, and may have also been used for "extraordinary rendition" flights to CIA prisons overseas, as well as for Bush fundraisers. Donna Blue Aircraft, the company the plane was registered to, took down its website yesterday.

(Via The Agitator.)

Tough questions for McCain and Obama

Ed Brayton gives a summary of Radley Balko's list of tough questions for the candidates. It's a pity that our mass media is unlikely to ask any of them. (Yet kudos to Fox News for publishing Radley Balko's columns asking them--they seem to be a whole lot better on the web than they are on television.) Brayton quotes the questions for McCain about how serious he is about cutting corporate pork when he personally profits from it (the laws that mandate alcohol be sold through distributors like Hensley & Co, where his wife got her fortune) and how he reconciles his support for the drug war with the fact that his wife was permitted to avoid any criminal penalties for her prescription drug problems. For Obama, he selected as favorites how Obama plans to pay for his proposed civilian national security force, how he reconciles his support for the drug war with his own past use of marijuana and cocaine, and why he supported the farm bill and supports ethanol subsidies.

I think Ed clearly picked out the best questions Balko asked of McCain, but here are a couple other questions for Obama that I particularly liked:

In a speech to Cuban-Americans in Miami, you called the Cuban trade embargo "an important inducement for change," a 180-degree shift from your prior position. The trade embargo has been in place for 46 years. Did denying an entire generation of Cubans access to American goods, culture, and ideas induce any actual change? Wasn't the real effect just to keep Cubans poor and isolated? In communist countries like Vietnam and China, trade with the U.S. has ushered in economic reform, and vastly improved the standard of living. Why wouldn't it be the same if we were to start trading with Cuba?

In addition to the drugs, Cuba, and school voucher issues, you have also changed or revised your position in recent months on the war in Iraq, government eavesdropping and immunity for the telecom companies, and holding employers accountable for hiring illegal immigrants. Under some circumstances, changing or revising one's position can show admirable introspection — the ability to revise prior conceptions with new information. Some of your new positions are more conservative. Some are more liberal. But they do seem to have one thing in common: Should we be concerned that your shifts have been to those positions that give more power and influence to government? Are there any areas where you'd actually roll back the federal government?

Balko asked a question of McCain about the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA, also known as McCain-Feingold), which I think did serious damage to the First Amendment and protects incumbent politicians by prohibiting any corporation (including nonprofits) or by an unincorporated entity using any corporate funds from running ads critical or supportive of a candidate within 30 days of a primary or within 60 days of a general election. I agree McCain should be asked tough questions about his apparent disrespect for political speech, but I didn't particularly care for the specific question Balko came up with.

Medical marijuana in California

There's an interesting article in the July 23, 2008 The New Yorker by David Samuels, "Dr. Kush: How medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry." It describes the current state of medical marijuana business in California, where the operators of small dispensaries, which are fully compliant with state law but not federal, are not prosecuted despite occasional fed harassment. That harassment will no doubt continue until either Raich v. Ashcroft gets overturned (it was a terrible Supreme Court decision) or the feds decide to decriminalize marijuana themselves, one of which I expect to happen in the next decade.

Mexican suicide aid

The New York Times reported Monday about Mexican pet shops selling pentobarbital, which is being purchased by international visitors for euthanasia purposes. The pet shops sell it for pet euthanasia, and were apparently surprised to hear that their recent sales have been for use on humans.

Lippard-related crime update

Tredell County deputies have confiscated 175 marijuana plants from a barn on Lippard Farm Road in Statesville, NC. No arrests have been made in that case, but "charges are pending."

Come on, North Carolina. If you can grow tobacco, why not marijuana?

God arrested for selling cocaine near Tampa church

Offered without comment.

Who profits from the war on drugs?

Well, apart from those in the illegal drug business themselves, who benefit from the lack of legal competition, it looks like the big winners are government contractors--DynCorp and now Blackwater.