Barack Obama is looking at CNN correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta to serve as surgeon general, providing yet more ammunition for those of us who like to constantly point out how bad his choices are when it comes to drug policy.

Here's Gupta's 2006 article "Why I Would Vote No on Pot." The reason? Because "marijuana isn't really very good for you," as though that has anything do with whether or not it makes sense to arrest nearly 1 million American a year for possessing it. The bright side is that Gupta acknowledges "health benefits for some patients." Unfortunately, he then proceeds to complain that most medical marijuana supporters "just want to get stoned legally," as though that justifies supporting laws that hurt legitimate patients.

Hopefully, if Gupta is our next surgeon general, he will come to understand that there is in fact an enormous war on marijuana users in America that harms them in all sorts of ways that aren't really very good for you either.

So, I’m checking out High Times' Top 10 News Articles of 2008 (the stories that got the most traffic on their site) and noticed that I wrote two of them (#1 and #9). Both are crazy marijuana stories that never brought us the traffic I expected, but seem to have done well on the HT site. We allow our material to be reprinted as long as StoptheDrugWar.org is credited, so this is totally legit. I guess it kinda sucks for us that they pulled more traffic from our content than we did, but it’s fun to know that I rule the High Times news archive.

Anyway, since you cool dudes at High Times are obviously reading my blog, I’d like to be perfectly clear about the fact that I will write even better articles for you if you give me some money.

They’re even doing their own diplomacy:

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – Mexico's warring cartels are negotiating a truce that, if it holds, could end one of the bloodiest eras since the 1910-20 Mexican Revolution, according to a U.S. official and experts familiar with the talks.

A peace agreement would be the second in two years and, like the last one, its chances of surviving are slim, the U.S. official said.

"In the end, greed prevails over reason," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. [Dallas Morning News]

Actually, it was the drug war that prevailed over reason. We were all watching when Calderón declared war on the cartels and…wait for it…a huge bloody war broke out! Why is anyone acting confused or surprised by what happened? It’s all perfectly clear. If you throw rocks at a beehive, expect swarms of angry bees.

The fact that they’re negotiating their own peace agreements does not reflect well on the decades-long war that was supposed to disrupt the drug industry. They’ve become a second government that even controls its own territories:

Already, the violence is crippling regions and cities, some of them on the border with Texas. Some top U.S. officials and analysts describe these cities, including Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, as "failed cities," in which cartels, not city or police officials, have control. [Dallas Morning News]

Amazingly, the U.S. and Mexican governments actually believe we should continue the policies that produced this outcome.

Someone help me understand what Mexico’s U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza is thinking:

"Calderón must, and will, keep the pressure on the cartels, but look, let's not be naïve – there will be more violence, more blood, and, yes, things will get worse before they get better. That's the nature of the battle," Garza said. "The more pressure the cartels feel, the more they'll lash out like cornered animals." [Dallas Morning News]

This is correct except for the part about how Calderón has to do this (no, he doesn't) and the part about how things will get better (no, they won't). We’ve heard all this a thousand times before and it just gets sillier every time. The bottom line is that cracking down on the cartels either works or it doesn’t. It makes no sense to say that aggressive drug war policies will create violence in the short term, and then eventually that same approach will begin reducing bloodshed. That’s not logical.

The drug war causes violence. Just admit it. Stop pretending that it’s going to produce the opposite result at some point in the future. It isn’t going to.

Over and over again, it just keeps happening:

Three metro SWAT officers were shot last night when they tried to serve a search warrant on a home in Henderson. A resident of the home told Channel 8 that the homes residents had no warning that the police were coming, they hid in a back room and fired at officers through the door thinking it was a break in. Two officers were treated and released according to Sheriff Doug Gillespie and a third will need surgery on his arm. Channel 8 is reporting that no drugs or drug paraphernalia have been found by police. [KXNT.com]

The suspect, Emmanuel Dozier, is now facing 3 counts of attempted murder. Interestingly, he’s also facing cocaine charges although nothing was found in the raid. Of course, whether or not he was involved in drug activity, this appears to be a pretty clear case of a suspect who just thought he was defending his home and family from unknown intruders. As we’ve seen so many times, the use of sudden entry tactics made the situation more dangerous, not safer.

Dozier will undoubtedly face vigorous prosecution, accused of willfully attempting to murder police. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in light of the fact that he had nothing illegal in the house and no reason to initiate a shoot-out with the cops. Stay tuned.

Washington Post has a whole story on Virginia Senator Jim Webb’s thoroughly awesome ideas about criminal justice reform:

This spring, Webb (D-Va.) plans to introduce legislation on a long-standing passion of his: reforming the U.S. prison system. Jails teem with young black men who later struggle to rejoin society, he says. Drug addicts and the mentally ill take up cells that would be better used for violent criminals. And politicians have failed to address this costly problem for fear of being labeled "soft on crime."
…
Webb aims much of his criticism at enforcement efforts that he says too often target low-level drug offenders and parole violators, rather than those who perpetrate violence, such as gang members. He also blames policies that strip felons of citizenship rights and can hinder their chances of finding a job after release. He says he believes society can be made safer while making the system more humane and cost-effective.

Sadly, one rarely hears a Washington lawmaker talk about our drug policy priorities in a way that makes any sense. So, fittingly, Washington Post dedicates plenty of space to the theory that Jim Webb’s gonna get massacred for his crazy blasphemous ideas:

"It is a gamble for Webb, a fiery and cerebral Democrat from a staunchly law-and-order state."

"…as the country struggles with two wars overseas and an ailing economy, overflowing prisons are the last thing on many lawmakers' minds."

"…Webb has never been one to rely on polls or political indicators to guide his way."

"Some say Webb's go-it-alone approach could come back to haunt him."

No, it won’t. Just watch as that completely fails to happen. Recent polls show that democrats and republicans agree the drug war has failed and that is just a fact. Too bad it’s fact that completely eluded The Post throughout a lengthy article about the politics of criminal justice reform. They found room to postulate endlessly about the supposedly disastrous political consequences of saying anything bad about our policies, but they couldn’t find a single line to show what the public actually believes.

Of course, to include actual relevant polling data would refute a central point of the article: that there’s something really mavericky and even reckless about Webb’s ideas. There isn’t. Those same ideas didn’t stop Obama from winning Virginia, so this whole political-suicide-by-drug-policy-reform narrative is garbage. Stop trying to recycle it. Just put it where it belongs.

While prosecutors in Massachusetts still can’t figure out what "decriminalization" even means, Arizona’s top drug enforcer is talking about legalization:

Attorney General Terry Goddard said Tuesday he might be willing to consider legalizing marijuana if a way can be found to control its distribution - and figure out who has been smoking it.

Goddard said marijuana sales make up 75 percent of the money that Mexican cartels use for other operations, including smuggling other drugs and fighting the Mexican army and police.

He said that makes fighting drug distribution here important to cut off that cash. He acknowledged those profits could be slashed if possession of marijuana were not a crime in Arizona.[East Valley Tribune]

Not only is all of this completely dead-on, he said it at a frickin’ massive drug bust press conference! Are you kidding me!?

Goddard's comments came following a press conference Tuesday announcing the breakup of a major ring that police said has been responsible for bringing about 400,000 pounds of marijuana into Arizona each year since 2003.

I guess somebody forgot to give Goddard the script. Ya know, the one where you’re supposed to use these big busts to declare epic progress with pillows of schwag piled to the ceiling and crow that you’ve crippled the cartels pretty bad this time.

President-elect Obama’s Change.gov website has opened a new round of questions, providing us yet another opportunity to push drug policy reform into the political mainstream. We won the last round of voting, making a marijuana legalization question the top vote-getter on the entire site.

Simply click here and create an account. Scroll through to find drug policy-related questions and vote them up. You can also submit your own. This time, the questions are broken into categories, so I assume the top question in each will get a response. Currently, there’s a drug war question in 2nd place in the "national security" section, so please start by voting for that (it’s our best chance). The "additional issues" section has several good ones as well and I'm sure there are questions in other categories that I've missed.

Keep in mind that you can vote against questions as well, so feel free to use the down-vote in a way that reflects your personal political priorities. Finally, please send your friends the link and encourage them to participate as well. Seeing consistent support for drug policy reform on his own site might give Obama exactly the cover he needs to maybe actually do something.

President Bush did a photo-op today in which he delivered used coats at the headquarters of Pathways to Housing and praised the organization’s efforts to help the homeless. Of course, there’s nothing surprising about the President doing charitable appearances during the Christmas season. What’s interesting is that Pathways to Housing offers a quite unique and forward-thinking approach to the problem of homelessness:

Founded in 1992, Pathways to Housing, a not-for-profit organization, works with individuals who have been turned away from other programs because of active substance use/abuse, refusal to participate in psychiatric treatment, histories of violence or incarceration, or other behavioral problems.
…
Pathways to Housing separates housing from treatment. It treats homelessness by providing people with individual apartments, and then treats mental illness by intensive and individualized programs that seek out and actively work with clients as long as they need, in order to address their emotional, psychiatric, medical, and human needs, on a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week basis.

This is basically a harm reduction approach to homelessness, in that active drug users receive services (including an apartment) in order to stabilize their situation and connect them to opportunities for treatment and health care. It’s a fantastic program that is achieving remarkable success, which is exactly why I’m surprised to see the President associate himself with it.

Bush’s White House has vehemently pushed an abstinence-first approach to drug treatment, even going so far as to oppose overdose prevention kits on the theory that overdosing would teach users a lesson. Pathways to Housing’s approach to drug addiction is just the complete opposite of everything Bush’s drug policy has stood for. Thus today’s appearance illustrates once again the gaping disparity between what actually works and what his priorities have been for the last 8 years.

Check out this blog post calling me a hippie and accusing me of overreacting to Obama’s rejection of marijuana legalization. This dude is cool though, I think, so it’s all good. But the whole thing misses the point of my post.

I never thought Obama was going to legalize marijuana. I was commenting on the absurdity of creating a whole Change.gov campaign and then using it to uphold the status quo. Obviously, Obama isn’t going to go change-crazy from day one, but this is a massively controversial issue, as evidenced by its #1 ranking on his site. Using Change.gov to reject popular and much-needed changes is ironic, and while I never expected anything more, I’m certainly not going to give him a pass just because his political posturing is painfully predictable.

Here’s a fun article interviewing college students in Massachusetts about their opinions on the new marijuana decriminalization policy. Unsurprisingly, most of them are all for it, but check out this remarkably candid response from an opponent:

Ed Finch, a 20-year-old sophomore from Franklin, voted against decriminalization for a couple of reasons. One was "purely financial," he said. His father is a Boston police officer who gets a lot of overtime when he has to go to court after a marijuana arrest, Finch said.

Yeah, I guess that’s pretty cool if the drug war is paying your tuition, bro. Imagine my surprise that none of the police officers who campaigned bitterly against decrim ever mentioned how much overtime the new law would cost them. It took a college student to concede the rank selfishness that drives police to defend marijuana prohibition.

Of course, it’s not just about money. It’s also about spite:

But his other reason is based on his own experience.

"I was frustrated with my stoner friends. They’re obnoxious, but I put up with them," Finch said.

Well, maybe we should pass a law that says Ed Finch’s friends watch too much Family Guy and never introduce him to any cute chicks.

When the average person forms an opinion regarding the efficacy of our drug policy, are they taking into account the totality of brutal unforeseen disasters that regularly occur in the course of our international anti-drug crusade? Alas, the reality of the actual drug war (not the one the drug czar talks about) is considerably uglier than many among us realize.

That’s why this Wall Street Journal piece from Mary Anastasia O’Grady stands out as an example of what drug war reporting in the mainstream press ought to look like.

Innocents Die in the Drug War

Of all the casualties claimed by the U.S. "war on drugs" in Latin America, perhaps none so fully captures its senselessness and injustice as the 2001 CIA-directed killing of Christian missionary Veronica Bowers and her daughter Charity in Peru.  
…
On that day the Bowers family was flying in a single-engine plane over the Amazon toward their home in Iquitos. Mrs. Bowers was holding the infant on her lap when a bullet fired by the Peruvian Air Force, under direction of the CIA, hit the aircraft, traveled through her back and into Charity's skull. The plane crash-landed on the Amazon River. Mr. Bowers, his young son and the pilot survived. Neither the plane nor its passengers were found to be involved in any way in the drug business and initial reports said that the mistaken attack was a tragic one-time error.

Yet, as O’Grady explains, this was in fact the perfectly predictable consequence of an out-of-control drug interdiction program that basically shot planes out of the sky with no investigation and no oversight. The problem isn’t just that they killed innocent people, but that they created and maintained a policy that they must have known would produce that result. It’s the perfect exhibit in the total disregard for innocent human life that is central to the drug war itself.

To her credit, O’Grady is willing to make the connection between violence and prohibition:

Consider the fact that Mr. Clinton's justification for the Airbridge Denial Program was that drug trafficking was a threat to Peruvian national security. Of course it was: Prohibition naturally produces powerful criminal networks that undermine the rule of law.
…
Since then, U.S. interdiction has put the pressure on Colombia and the problem is now resurging in Peru. The latest reports are that Mexican cartels are teaming up with remnants of the Shining Path terror network to rebuild the business, proving once again the futility of the supply-side attack as a way of minimizing drug use in the U.S.

In other words, we get nothing in exchange for the death and destruction we’ve subsidized and sustained for all these years. Nothing, that is, except a bunch of dead innocents, a smoldering civil war below our border, a world-record prison population, and a shameless political culture that still swears this is the only way to deal with drugs.

Did anyone notice how the marijuana legalization question was ranked #1 on Obama’s Change.gov site, but he answered the question 4th? Not only did Obama’s team fail to explain the "no" answer, but they didn’t even honor the 1st place popularity rank the question earned when it drew the most votes from the public.

There’s nothing surprising about any of this, but it is indeed perfectly emblematic of the profound lack of seriousness with which this issue is treated in our political culture. The marijuana question was answered second to last and received the shortest response of all the questions. It’s just not something our political leadership wants to talk about. There is scarcely anything less important to them than this and they’d really appreciate it if we stopped asking about it.

But we won’t stop. Certainly not now. Perhaps we appreciate the symbolism behind Obama’s Change.gov campaign even more than its authors do. Yes, we surged at the opportunity to push forward ideas long relegated arbitrarily to the political fringe. We seized upon this new venue for unfiltered political dialogue, an entirely unclaimed territory in which we had yet to be told we were unwelcome. We clutched it in our collective fist, squeezed it with all our might, and recoiled in disgust when it squirted us in the eye.

Sure, we got burned, but we saw it coming. They didn’t see us coming. They never could have imagined that this experiment with online democracy would find us standing at the front of the line. They shook their heads, sighed and joked that this is what you get when you let the frickin’ internet dictate political priorities.

Well, it’s fine with me if they think that, because they’re the ones kissing the internet’s ass in the first place. Will they now retreat to the editorial pages and go back to letting the pundits tell them what the people want?

Jacob Sullum pokes numerous holes in the drug czar’s recent claims of dramatic drug war progress. This in particular jumped out at me:

…if Walters wants to take credit for every drop in drug use that occurs on his watch, he'll have to take the blame for the enormous increases in past-month LSD use among high school seniors and  past-month methamphetamine use among sophomores, both of which nearly doubled between 2007 and 2008 (hitting a whopping 1.1 percent and 0.7 percent, respectively).

Be careful out there, kids! Thanks to the total failure of the war on drugs, you are up to your asses in acid and meth, but seriously, do not mix them. It will suck. You’ll get arrested (and probably tasered, too).

See, contrary to the drug czar’s wild accusations, those of us who want to end the drug war have no interest in seeing young people make poor choices. And the fact that America’s high schools are overflowing with acid and speed ought to help illustrate why closing the black market is actually a perfectly rational approach to keeping powerful drugs away from our kids.

Radley Balko has new details in the case of Ryan Frederick, the Virginia man who was charged with murder for killing a police officer who he mistook for a burglar during a questionable drug raid.

The story just gets more complicated all the time, but if one thing remains clear, it’s that the entire case against Frederick is a sham. The loss of life is regrettable indeed, but it is the result of shoddy drug war policing, not premeditated cop-killing by Frederick.

Much has been made of the fact that a marijuana legalization question was ranked #1 when President-elect Obama opened his Change.gov website up to questions from the public. In an open vote, the public spoke loudly and clearly that marijuana reform was the very first issue that the new President should address. For our trouble, we’ve been rewarded with the sorriest excuse for an answer that Obama’s transition team could possibly have provided:

Q: "Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?" S. Man, Denton

A: President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.

Care to elaborate? You see, we all knew what the answer was. The point was that we all wanted to know why.

As frustrating and insulting as it is to witness an important matter brushed casually to the side without explanation, Obama’s answer actually says a lot. It says that he couldn’t think of even one sentence to explain his position. Within the vast framework of totally paranoid anti-pot propaganda, Obama couldn’t find a single argument he wanted to associate himself with. That’s why he simply said "No. Next question."

All of this highlights the well-known fact that Obama agrees that our marijuana laws are deeply flawed. He‘s said so, and has back-pedaled recently for purely political reasons. If Obama’s transition team tried to give an accurate description of his position on marijuana reform it would look like this:

Q: "Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?" S. Man, Denton

A: President-elect Obama will not use his political capital to advance the legalization of marijuana. While he agrees that arresting adults for marijuana possession is a poor use of law enforcement resources, he believes that the issue remains too controversial to do anything about it.

It’s really that simple, which makes our job quite difficult. Any ideas?

Update: Paul Armentano says to keep doing what we've been doing and I agree. The fact that we've provoked dialogue about marijuana reform on the President-elect's website is quite remarkable. The "Open for Questions" feature will reopen for new questions soon and we'll be back to push drug policy reform to the top yet again.

On that note, please be advised that the site we're talking about is Change.gov, not Change.org. Change.org has been linked repeatedly in the comment section below, but that is not Obama's site. It fills a similar role and is worth visiting, but that's not where we should focus our energy if we want to directly confront Obama himself. I'm a little concerned that mixing these sites up could dillute our message, so please stay focused on Change.gov. I will post something when the next round of questions is open.

Last week I posted Don't Consent to Police Searches or Answer Incriminating Questions in response to this story in which three men were arrested for marijuana after mindlessly consenting to a police search. A commenter responded with this (emphasis in original):

While I respect that you disagree with me, it's my personal opinion that headlines that encourage the skirting of laws are not going to be useful in influencing the citizens and legislators we need to help us change the laws.

I agree that teaching people their rights isn’t necessarily a direct path to drug policy reform, but I want to address the idea that my headline "encourages[s] the skirting of laws," which I think misses the point. In my work with Flex Your Rights, I’ve frequently encountered a false distinction in which asserting constitutional rights is considered honorable when one has nothing to hide, but is somehow perceived as disingenuous when the assertion of those rights prevents the discovery of criminal evidence. At worst, this argument takes the form of claiming that it’s an abuse of the constitution to refuse a search when one possesses marijuana, for example (that’s not what the commenter above is saying, but it’s where that line of thinking often leads).

All of this is premised on the assumption that police are legally entitled to discover contraband and that you’re "getting away" with a crime if police procedures don’t result in your arrest. Technically, however, there is no crime until police obtain probable cause for an arrest, thus any citizen who effectively asserts 4th and 5th Amendment rights is not getting away with anything. They are legally innocent, because evidence of guilt never emerged.

Thus, the whole point of understanding and asserting basic constitutional rights when confronted by police is that you are always innocent until proven guilty under the law. Asserting your rights can never be equated to "skirting the law," because these rights are the law.

As for the larger question of whether encouraging citizens to assert their rights is a bad message for reformers, I would insist that we have nothing to gain by remaining silent on this issue as our prisons are filled with naïve drug offenders who waived their rights on the side of the road. Flex Your Rights was formed to end that silence and we’ve drawn remarkably little public criticism for these efforts, probably because our opposition recognizes that criticizing know-your-rights education comes perilously close to criticizing the constitution itself.

President-elect Obama has created a web page to accept policy questions from the public. Users can vote for their favorites and his transition team has pledged to answer the most popular questions. At this moment, I’m seeing these two in the top ten:

"Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?"

"13 states have compassionate use programs for medial Marijuana, yet the federal gov't continues to prosecute sick and dying people. Isn't it time for the federal gov't to step out of the way and let doctors and families decide what is appropriate?"

Showing that we care about these issues is vitally important, so please head over to change.gov and vote for these questions. Registration is easy and the questions should be right there on the front page (where they’ll stay if we make sure to vote for them).

This is a very cool opportunity to show the strength of our movement by making marijuana reform the #1 issue on Obama’s website.  Please help, and forward the link to your friends and family. Votes close at noon tomorrow, so please don’t delay. Thanks!

Update: As noted in comments, I failed utterly to comprehend the fact that 12:00 am is midnight (duh!), so this post actually went up 9 minutes before the deadline (our time stamp is an hour ahead for some reason). So I'm an idiot, but the good news is that marijuana legalization ended up being the #1 question. I doubt I'm going to like the answer we get, but at least we've sent a message that marijuana reform is far from a fringe issue in 2008.

Months ago, Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI) sent a pointed inquiry to the DEA demanding an accounting of the costs and methodology behind the federal raids against medical marijuana dispensaries in California. DEA’s response (pdf) recently became available and contains some interesting information, including this:

DEA does not investigate or target individual "patients" who use cannabis, but instead the Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs) involved in marijuana trafficking.
…
Again, the agency does not target individual users who are
engaged in "simple possession" of the drug - even though they too are violating federal law and entitled to no immunity.

It’s not really news that DEA avoids arresting patients, but it’s remarkable to see it in writing. This serves to remind us that DEA in fact bears no legal obligation whatsoever to enforce federal marijuana laws in states that have approved medical use. The organization’s enforcement priorities with regards to medical marijuana are shaped by politics, not a sense of legal obligation, thus patients have been quietly left off the battlefield in recognition of the obscene PR fiasco that would result if they were visibly targeted. Keep this in mind if Obama’s pledge to end medical marijuana raids is met with resistance from anyone who claims that "federal law must be enforced."

DEA’s concession also helps to illuminate the complete incoherence of any argument that state-level marijuana reforms are rendered impotent in the face of incongruous federal drug laws. Such reforms have enormous practical value by dramatically reducing the threat of arrest and conviction under state laws, which have always been the only real threat facing individual users.

This acknowledgment should end debate over the importance of state-level marijuana reform.