Sow what ye reap (put THAT in your pipe and smoke it)

In parts of the United States, you can't go for a walk in the woods without bumping into apple trees. Could the debate over marijuana be settled by making marijuana plants as ubiquitous as apple trees -- so unavoidable that prosecuting people for growing and possessing the stuff becomes a preposterous proposition? More to the point, should Americans interested in easing some of the worst abuses of the drug war emulate Johnny Appleseed, the man who made apples so common, and plant marijuana seeds in every likely location?

Reader Sean Y. writes:

I propose that everyone plant their marijuana seeds in inconspicuous places. These places can be in a large city or national forest, it does not matter. Everyone that believes in liberty should plant these seeds any time that they have the opportunity. Within a couple of years this “weed” has the potential to be so prolific that the government cannot eradicate it. Not only that, marijuana enthusiasts will no longer have to search out bad characters and pay outrageous prices for a plant that grows naturally just about anywhere. Who knows, a little genetic modification could make the plants irresistible to honey bees and as prolific as the dandelion?

Sean Y. specifically references the legendary Johnny Appleseed -- actually named John Chapman -- as his inspiration. Chapman wandered the frontier for decades until his death in 1845 (or 1847 -- sources vary), creating nurseries for apple trees and helping to make sure that the apple became the American fruit. He reportedly obtained his seeds for free from cider mills, since the mills would benefit from a plentiful supply of raw material (at the time apples were drunk as hard cider more often than they were eaten. Good times.).

Marijuana seeds aren't quite so easy to come by -- but they aren't that hard to find, either. Until recently, British Columbia's Marc Emery made a profitable business of selling marijuana seeds by mail which he distributed to eager buyers around the world. Emery, a high-profile marijuana activist and advocate for overall liberty was quoted in the New York Times saying, "I've wanted to be the Johnny Appleseed of marijuana, so if we produced millions and millions of marijuana plants all over the world, it would be impossible for governments to eradicate or control all of it."

Emery's operation was maybe a little too high-profile; he's involved in a protracted battle with the United States government and faces an extradition hearing in June.

But given the ease with which marijuana adapts to nearly every environment and its rugged growth characteristics, the plan is an intriguing one. And marijuana seeds remain available from other sources. Spreading the seeds to let them grow naturally shows every sign of being a viable tactic.

By the way, if you think it unseemly that anybody should profit from such a venture, think of it this way: the potential for profit is a great incentive to make the project succeed. After all, the original Johnny Appleseed died a wealthy man and the owner of about 1,200 acres.

Hey Hillary, don't criticize; legalize

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was on to something when she conceded that America shares blame for the crime and violence that has engulfed Mexico as a result of drug prohibition. Being who she is, of course, Clinton blamed demand for drugs, rather than prohibition as the culprit, and threw in a pointless call for additional restrictions on firearms. Even so, it's helpful when politicians concede that their authoritarian and ill-considered policies have harmful effects abroad as well as at home.

Of course, Clinton is a politician, so her concession that America plays a role in Mexico's woes was less a half-step in the right direction than a quarter-step. Just a day after she conceded that Mexican criminal drug suppliers are responding to the "insatiable" demand for illegal drugs north of the border, her boss, President Obama, rejected the obvious solution: legalization.

Strictly speaking, Obama's dismissal of legalization in an electronic town hall referred only to marijuana. But if he won't consider even that basic step, then legalization of heroin and methamphetamine -- the two drugs driving the black-market violence in Mexico at the moment -- is obviously off the table.

Now that's a lack of change you can believe in.

Clinton, of course, tossed in a gratuitous nod to her ideological base, calling for tighter U.S. gun restrictions as a means of countering violence in Mexico. Even she can't believe that nonsense when such gun control stalwarts as the Los Angeles Times report that the Mexican drug gangs are battling police, soldiers and each other with fully automatic weapons, grenades and rockets -- items not generally available in Texas gun shops.

Said the LA Times:

The proliferation of heavier armaments points to a menacing new stage in the Mexican government's 2-year-old war against drug organizations, which are evolving into a more militarized force prepared to take on Mexican army troops, deployed by the thousands, as well as to attack each other.

These groups appear to be taking advantage of a robust global black market and porous borders, especially between Mexico and Guatemala. Some of the weapons are left over from the wars that the United States helped fight in Central America, U.S. officials said.

The truth is that demand always finds a supply, and black markets fuel one another. Demand in the United States for illegal intoxicants such as marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine creates a potential for profit that leads to the rise of suppliers in Mexico and elsewhere. Money flows into the coffers of those black-market suppliers, who then seek to protect their turf from other gangs, from thieves and from law enforcement officers (although the lines between the various groups can be foggy). These gangs now want to purchase weapons and have the funds to do so, and ...

The cycle continues. Want to shut it down? Too bad. You can't.

What you can do, however, is allow demand to be met through legal channels. Let people who want to get high buy their heroin from above-board businesses that purchase their poppies from perfectly legal farms and their other supplies from equally legitimate sources. Disputes between legal suppliers are settled in court with lawyers, not in the streets with assassins, massively reducing crime and violence.

We're not talking utopia here, but we are talking about respecting people's liberty, reducing violence and increasing the potential for prosperity.

If Hillary Clinton wants to help Mexico, she should promise to push for drug legalization at home and tell Mexico that the best way to get rid of the drug gangs is to legalize the whole drug trade. Ending Prohibition in the U.S. stripped the Mafia of much of its power and wealth, and ending drug prohibition in Mexico would do the same to the drug gangs.

But if Clinton, as we can expect, is unwilling to give the Mexicans good advice, they should look close to home for wisdom. Just last month, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo joined with Fernando Henrique Cardoso, of Brazil, and César Gaviria, of Colombia, to call for an end to the violence-breeding, U.S.-driven prohibition model in drug policy. The report they endorsed states:

Prohibitionist policies based on the eradication of production and on the disruption of drug flows as well as on the criminalization of consumption have not yielded the expected results. We are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs.

That's an understatement. In fact, Mexico is being torn apart by prohibitionist policies that have put whole sectors of the country in the hands of criminal gangs and produced a convulsion of violence.

With or without Clinton, Mexico should do itself a favor, and combat violence and crime by dropping drug prohibition.

Do you know what the penalty is for dealing ... err ... soap?

A while back, I wrote about a Minnesota man who spent two months in prison until laboratory tests revealed that the white powder in his deodorant container was actually deodorant -- not the cocaine indicated by an initial field test. As disturbing as that case was, it was far from the full story. In fact, a new report (PDF) funded by the Marijuana Policy Project reveals that commonly used field drug test kits are unreliable, often returning false positive results that put the freedom and reputations of innocent people in jeopardy.

This two-year scientific/legal investigation reveals a drug testing regime of fraudulent forensics used by police, prosecutors, and judges which abrogates every American’s Constitutional rights."

In False Positives Equal False Justice (PDF), forensic drug expert John Kelly, working with former FBI chief scientist and narcotics officer, Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, reports:

This two-year scientific/legal investigation reveals a drug testing regime of fraudulent forensics used by police, prosecutors, and judges which abrogates every American’s Constitutional rights. ...

Contained in this report are the results of experiments performed with field drug test kits that expose and document that they render false positives with legal substances. Based on the false positives, people continue to be wrongfully charged with, and prosecuted for, drug crimes.

Among other results, the report confirms earlier research by Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap which found that one commonly used test, NarcoPouch 928 field drug test, falsely tests positive for GHB in natural soap products and soy milk.

Kelly goes on to criticize the widely used Duquenois-Levine (D-L) for marijuana, pointing out that "As it enters its 70th year, the D-L test has yet to be validated despite being involved in the arrests, prosecutions, and convictions of millions of individuals."

Whitehurst points out further flaws with marijuana identification, "In some jurisdictions, identification is even carried out by law
enforcement officers with no more than visual, not microscopic, analysis and suspected marijuana is never even sent
to a crime lab."

Tests for cocaine are found to be equally flawed, both in their inherent accuracy and the testers' ability to distinguish results based on the color the test turns in reaction to the presence of various chemicals.

There are, of course, a number of problems with determining what blue means. First is whether the looker is color blind. Second is the inability of the human eye to resolve wavelengths of light. The blue reaction from the cobalt thiocyanate test with cocaine may give another color blue than that from another material, and yet the individual observing the blue may not be able to tell the difference in the colors."

In addition, additives used to cut cocaine's potency and increase its volume can further complicate test results.

The MPP report comes on the heels of a National Academies of Science paper that found large-scale problems with forensic "science," including such seemingly well-established fields as fingerprint evidence. To a large extent determinations of guilt and innocence, with people's liberty and even their lives in the balance, are being made based on the say-so of "experts" whose science has never actually been established according to accepted standards.

From drug field tests to fingerprints, much of what passes for scientific evidence these days is based as much on faith as Dark Age assumptions about whether or not witches float. And the stakes are just as high.

Juries quietly flip the bird to oppressive laws

In Washington, D.C., a jury ignored a military veteran's obvious violation of the city's draconian gun laws, setting him free with only a slap on the wrist. In LaSalle County, Illinois, a medical marijuana user found with 25 pounds of the plant didn't even get the slap; jurors chatted with him after finding him not guilty. While we can't know for sure, in both cases jury nullification was likely at work as regular people serving an important role in courtrooms exercised their power to quash laws they found repugnant.

Corporal Melroy H. Cort, who lost his knees to an improvised bomb in Ramadi, Iraq, was en route to Walter Reed Hospital from his home in Columbus, Ohio, when his car got a flat. He and his wife, Samantha, pulled over for repairs, at which time Cort, who has a concealed carry permit at home, retrieved his 9mm pistol from his glove compartment and put it in his pocket.

Cort's gun was spotted by somebody who called police, and Cort rapidly gained a rapid education in D.C. notoriously strict firearms laws. He was charged with carrying a pistol without a license, possession of an unregistered firearm and possession of ammunition. He spent the night behind bars for having the nerve to possess a weapon in a city that, while it has improved since its nadir in the 1990s, still has about triple the national average rate of violent crime.

Despite its crime rate, D.C. has done its best to deny residents the right to legally defend themselves. This is the city that was taken to court for its restrictions -- and lost, resulting in the landmark case of D.C. v. Heller, which reaffirmed that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to keep and bear arms. Depite that loss, city laws remain extremely restrictive, and Cort had clearly run afoul of local law.

But an amazing thing happened in court. According to the Washington Post:

After being deadlocked twice, a D.C. Superior Court jury yesterday acquitted a Marine amputee on felony charges of gun possession stemming from an arrest while he was on the way to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. ...

Although acquitting him of the gun charges, the jury found Cort guilty of possessing ammunition, a misdemeanor. He was sentenced to time already spent in the D.C. jail.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the jury ultimately saw no benefit in applying the city's tight gun laws to a handicapped man who was just passing through. Maybe they even questioned the overall propriety of the laws. In the end, they rather clearly ignored the law to set Cort free with just a nominal slap on the wrist -- which he plans to appeal.

And that brings us to the case of Loren J. Swift. Swift was arrested during a peaceful encounter at his home with a sizeable quantity of marijuana and plants -- reportedly 25 pounds and 50 pounds, respectively. He had been convicted once before for marijuana possession. A Navy veteran, Swift says he smokes marijuana to relieve pain and alleviate post-traumatic stress disorder, but Illinois does not yet have a medical marijuana law.

Twenty-five pounds of grass, plus plants, in a state where marijuana is strictly illegal. That doesn't sound good for Swift. Except ...

On Wednesday in La Salle County Circuit Court, several jurors shook hands with an emotional Loren J. Swift after finding him not guilty of a marijuana charge that would have sent him to prison. ...

In the courthouse lobby, after the verdict, two male jurors talked and laughed with Swift and his attorney, Randy Gordon; one of the jurors patted Swift on his back. However, one of these jurors refused to admit he was a juror when The Times approached him for comment about the verdict; the other juror didn't deny he was indeed a juror, but nevertheless refused to talk.

Not surprisingly, observers at Swift's trial openly speculated about jury nullification. Once again, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that jurors sympathized more with the defendant than with the law, so decided to ignore what the statute books say.

In doing so, in both cases, justice prevailed. So did liberty.

We don't know what was going through the jurors' heads in the Cort and Swift trials, or whether any jurors were even familiar with jury nullification. But it's not that difficult a concept to invent from scratch, if necessary.

Historically, as President John Adams put it, it has been the juror's "duty ... to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court." Unfortunately, you won't come across that quote from Adams in many modern courtrooms. Government officials don't like being second-guessed by the hoi polloi, so the tradition of independent juries has been allowed to wither from neglect. Few jurors ever learn about the traditional power of juries.

But you don't need to know history to have an inkling that the rights of the individual sometimes violate the dictates of the law -- and then decide to come down in favor of individual rights. And individual rights are an endangered species in a nation increasingly hemmed in by laws and regulations that seem to render ever more of our daily activities either mandatory or forbidden. They need as much protection as they can get.

To preserve what's left of our liberty, jury nullification is a good and powerful tool for checking government power. But since it is frequently discouraged by judges and prosecutors jealous of their prerogatives, it's generally exercised on the sly -- often by jurors unaware that they're doing exactly what was originally intended. For that reason, we'll likely never know exactly when nullification is being exercised.

But we can celebrate it when we see it.

So, why were you taking those painkillers last year?

Have you ever taken any prescription drugs I should know about? Let me rephrase that. Have you ever taken any prescription drugs that you think are none of my business or anybody else's, for that matter? It's all the same, if you live in a state like Arizona, where Big Brother is monitoring your prescription history and keeping records of your medications stored in one handy, centralized database.

The Controlled Substances Prescription Monitoring Program was established by an act of the legislature, and went into effect this past December. It joins Arizona with 37 other states that have or are planning similar monitoring programs. The text of the law is rather brief, creating "a computerized central database tracking system to track the prescribing, dispensing and consumption of schedule II, III and IV controlled substances" for the purposes of assisting "law enforcement to identify illegal activity" and to "[p]rovide information to patients, medical practitioners and pharmacists to help avoid the inappropriate use of schedule II, III and IV controlled substances."

Well, isn't that nice and helpful.

The rules (PDF) created by the Arizona State Board of Pharmacy are more detailed. Of particular interest, the rules allow access to the database to:

1. A person who is authorized to prescribe or dispense a controlled substance to assist that person to provide medical or pharmaceutical care to a patient or to evaluate a patient;
2. An individual who requests the individual's own controlled substance prescription information under A.R.S. § 12-2293;
3. A professional licensing board established under A.R.S. Title 32, Chapter 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, or 26. Except as required under subsection (B), the Board or its designee shall provide this information only if the requesting board states in writing that the information is necessary for an open investigation or complaint;
4. A local, state, or federal law enforcement or criminal justice agency. Except as required under subsection (B), the Board or its designee shall provide this information only if the requesting agency states in writing that the information is necessary for an open investigation or complaint;
5. The Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System [Medicaid] Administration regarding individuals who are receiving services under A.R.S. Title 36, Chapter 29. Except as required under subsection (B), the Board or its designee shall provide this information only if the Administration states in writing that the information is necessary for an open investigation or complaint;
6. A person serving a lawful order of a court of competent jurisdiction; and
7. The Board staff for purposes of administration and enforcement of A.R.S. § Title 36, Chapter 28 and this Article.

Am I the only one who thinks that's an awful lot of people to have poking through people's medication records? Note that access for law enforcement isn't conditional on a warrant, but only requires a written request stating that the information "is necessary for an open investigation or complaint." Uh huh. Don't tick off your neighbor, the state trooper.

And professional licensing boards have access to prescription information too. The specified professional boards with authority to leaf through your medication history include those regulating: podiatrists; dentists; traditional, osteopathic and naturopathic (but not homeopathic) physicians; nurses; optometrists; pharmacists; veterinarians; physician assistants; and security guards.

A "lawful order of a court of competent jurisdiction" could be just about anything -- including your ex-wife or husband taking a stab at revisiting your child custody rights. It could also be just about any fishing expedition related to a lawsuit.

And all of this is authorized access at the outset of the program. We can assume there will be pressure to expand access as the years go by -- the temptation to do so will be like ... well ... the bureaucratic equivalent of an addiction. And we can assume that some government employees will abuse access out of curiosity or for personal gain -- like the IRS agent who was sentenced to probation last year for snooping through the tax records of nearly 200 people, including celebrities. That was only the latest example of a problem (PDF) so pervasive at the IRS that it involved congressional hearings a decade ago -- which obviously didn't change anything.

Why would a centralized database of people's prescription history be any more immune to abuse than our frequently browsed tax records?

And make no mistake about it -- those records are sensitive. Schedule II drugs include drugs such as hydrocodone and oxycodone, schedule III includes testosterone and anabolic steroids, and schedule IV includes Librium, Valium and Ambien. There are perfectly good reasons for taking any or all of the affected drugs, but do you really want to have to explain those reasons to a licensing board, or a court -- or a journalist?

Oddly enough, for a program supposedly intended to combat "the inappropriate use" of controlled substances, the creation of the centralized medications database may be the best reason anybody could ever have for buying their drugs on the street.

Here's a thought: How about we take the government entirely out of the loop when it comes to acquiring and using the medications we want or need?

Spark it up, Michael Phelps

In a perfect world, Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps would respond to the publication in the News of the World of a photo of him smoking from a bong with a loud call for drug legalization. Can you see the quote: "Hey, if I can win 14 gold medals while smoking grass, how bad can it be?"

I know that's unrealistic. Sure, there are some athletes, like former NFL lineman Mark Stepnoski, who have made a name for themselves as advocates of legalization. But Stepnoski was a pro who, presumably, banked his paydays and can now thumb his nose at the drug warriors. Phelps is enjoying his paydays now through endorsement contracts with a host of companies that are potentially skittish about being associated with marijuana in even the most minor way. For Phelps to take on a controversial cause now would be to trade away his earnings.

But what a spokesman Michael Phelps would make. A top-notch athlete who dominates his chosen sport -- clearly suffering few, if any, ill effects from the recreational use of an intoxicant that just happens to be out of favor with the current gang of powers-that-be. He would be a powerful example that moderate use of marijuana and other for-the-moment illegal intoxicants can be harmless -- and even beneficial.

Maybe Phelps could testify to marijuana's power to lower tension, reduce stress and really help him achieve his goals.

Of course, in a truly ideal world, Phelps wouldn't have to worry about sponsorships. That photo in News of the World would have had big marijuana companies clamoring for his endorsement.

And a few cocaine outfits courting his favor, too.

C'mon, Barry, lay off the dope raids

Asked about medical marijuana on the campaign trail in New Hampshire just a year and a half ago, then-Senator Barack Obama said, "I would not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users. It's not a good use of our resources." Admittedly, he's been on the job just a few days, but now-President Obama's administration has just overseen its first medical marijuana raid. It's time for him to live up to his promise and call off the dogs.

It's not right to blame the new White House team for the raid in South Lake Tahoe, California. Drug Enforcement Administration officials are still hold-overs from the old administration, with the priorities of the Bush White House. So when the DEA stormed into Holistic Solutions and stole money and marijuana, they were following an old game plan -- not necessarily the new one.

So consider this a test. Did Barack Obama mean what he said about pulling the federal government out of the business of kicking in doors and hauling people to jail for using marijuana to treat medical problems? The ball is in your court, Mr. President.

Asking the new president to live up to his promises on medical marijuana is hardly radical. No, radical would be to ask him to respect people's right to consume whatever substances they please, to produce those substances, to buy them from willing sellers, and to sell them to eager customers. Radical would be to demand that he recognize that people should be free to do whatever they want so long as they don't violate the equal rights of others.

In other words, whatever is peaceful.

Asking the president to live up to his own promise on medical marijuana isn't radical at all. It's just a matter of pointing out that we want to see him walk the walk after talking the talk.

President Obama will be off to a great start if he quickly reins in the DEA and offers credible assurances that this raid will be the last such raid on his watch. If he doesn't ... Well, that will say an awful lot about what we can expect from this administration.

As for whether what we get is enough ... Well, some of us think it's long past time to make a few radical demands.

Nice little town you got here ...

After unanimously passing a resolution calling for discussion of drug legalization as an antidote to the border region's troubles with violent crime, the El Paso, Texas, city council failed to overturn the mayor's veto last week. That's because half of the members of the city council changed their votes, citing threats from federal officials. Nonsense, says U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes. He didn't issue a threat; he just wanted to "make sure they understand the things they do that aren't helpful to me."

The consequences of doing things that "aren't helpful," local officials were made to understand, could be the withholding of large sums of money with which the federal government keeps local jurisdictions on a tight leash. Play ball with the feds and the goodies get passed your way. Tick off the wrong people and you don't get to feed at the trough.

I suppose you could say that's technically not a threat, but the logical result of the state of dependency in which El Paso (like most other localities in the country) has placed itself relative to the powers-that-be in distant Washington, D.C. He who takes the king's coin becomes the king's man, after all. And El Paso takes millions of coins, from highway funds to water projects to law enforcement and beyond.

Did anybody think that wouldn't give the imperial capital a little leverage?

So El Paso backed down. And now the feds know, once again, that they can head off uncomfortable discussions by ostentatiously tucking the checkbook back in their pockets -- more in sorrow than in anger, of course.

After all, what discussion is worth all the fuss when there's so much money at stake?

Below, Terry Nelson, a 30-year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Department of Homeland Security, testifies before the El Paso city council in favor of drug legalization.

Freedom is a smoking deal across the U.S.

There's no ban or edict that any government can stuff down its subjects throats that some people will not resent and defy. Ample proof of that comes from Illinois, where The Telegraph reports, "[l]ike speakeasies during Prohibition, the area now has 'smokeasies.' Almost every town has a bar or two where people know they can go to smoke without being told to extinguish it." Welcome to the resistance, folks. Similar reports are trickling in from across the United States.

Where can you find smokeasies? Over the past few years, they've been spotted in Colorado Springs, Honolulu, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle ...

In Cleveland, where smoking and stripping were restricted at the same time, the bans resulted in two-fer "smokehouses" where sex, booze and tobacco mingle in a completely illegal environment.

Sounds like, fun, to be honest.

Elsewhere, licensed, above-ground establishments simply thumb their noses at the law, relying on loyal clientele to appreciate the scofflawry and keep their mouths shut. Logically enough, this suggests that low-profile, neighborhood establishments have a better chance at surviving as speakeasies than glitzy joints full of ever-changing changing faces.

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

The smoke-easies tend to be in neighborhood dives; the Ballard bartender noted that it's too risky to allow smoking in trendy bars like the ones in Belltown. "If you're in the Frontier Room or the Rendezvous," he said, "you can't tell who's going to mind the smoking or not because there's a different crowd there every night."

In a neighborhood dive, even a militant anti-smoker will keep his mouth shut if wants to avoid pariah status.

None of this should be a surprise to anybody. The word "smokeasy" or "smoke-easy" is, after all, a play on "speakeasy," the name for establishments that sold illicit booze to willing customers during the long, dark years of Prohibition. Politicians may please themselves or the mob with restrictive laws, but very often such laws are unenforceable, because people subject to those laws aren't willing to comply, no matter the penalty.

No matter the penalty?

That's right. In 1633, Sultan Murad IV of the Ottoman Empire imposed the death penalty for smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol or coffee. Penalties were enthusiastically enforced. Even so, his subjects were ... unimpressed. The bans were repealed by his successor.

As Cleveland police Detective Tom Shoulders put it, "You put too many restrictions on people, they're going to find someplace else to go for their entertainment."

Wisdom from the mouths of enforcers.

Prohibitions don't work because no penalty is harsh enough to make unwilling people obey. Nicotine Nazis follow in the footsteps of drug warriors who walk the same path picked by Prohibitionists. All have tried to bend people to their will, and all have failed.

They do damage, though. Bans and restrictions inflict fines and prison time on people (and sometimes death). Nanny-staters often escalate their efforts rather than surrender to reality. By raising the stakes, enforcers empower criminals, who are best suited to profit from governments' authoritarian missteps and to undermine law-enforcement efforts.

But even flawed, defiant liberty is better than submission to the control freaks who would tell us how to live our lives. Light 'em if you got 'em and puff out a toast to the smokeasies of Illinois -- and elsewhere.

Thank the drug warriors for Arizona's heroin bargains

It's too early to call it a new drug of choice, but the ranks of heroin users appear to be growing here in Arizona. The local emergency room -- in a rural area -- is accustomed to a steady flow of meth heads. But it's now seeing the occasional heroin user, with more expected. As often happens, fanciers of illicit intoxicants are responding to the marketplace, turning to a fresh flow of inexpensive opiates as prices rise for their old preferred means of getting high.

KVOA news recently reported:

The Northwest commmunity and the foothills are becoming hotspots for black tar heroin use according to some law enforcement officials.

The mother of a former heroin addict tells us, "It was so bad and so infested in the foothills, the drug dealers actually come to the end of the street."

At about the same time, the East Valley Tribune said, "In the last year, there has been a 200 percent increase in heroin trafficking arrests."

The actual number of users involved is small, but the growth in heroin use in Arizona bucks a national trend. Across the country, "The number of current heroin users decreased from 338,000 in 2006 to 153,000 in 2007," according to the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

But that decrease among heroin users was a minor blip in drug-use numbers that have remained remarkably static for years. No matter what anti-drug initiative has been pursuded, despite all the widely proclaimed busts, use of illicit intoxicants has remained at roughly constant levels.

If drug use has remained relatively steady over the years, with a recent downward blip in heroin use across the U.S., why are Arizonans switching their brand loyalty from meth to heroin?

It's all a matter of availability.

Earlier this year, the Tucson Citizen reported:

Adding to the drug's lure are the climbing street prices of methamphetamine and cocaine, caused by a crackdown on smugglers of both of those drugs by authorities on both sides of the border, local and federal drug investigators say.

While the price for meth rises, a single hit of black-tar heroin costs $10 on the streets of Tucson.

The Department of Justice's National Drug Threat Assessment for 2009 says (PDF):

Heroin production trends in Mexico and Colombia, the two primary sources of heroin in the United States, have diverged as Mexican heroin production has increased and Colombian heroin production has decreased. ...

In fact, Mexican heroin production increased 105 percent from 1999 (8.8 MT) to 2007 (18.0 MT).

During those years, the U.S. government pumped $5 billion into anti-drug efforts through Plan Colombia. The money failed to scratch cocaine production, which increased -- but heroin production, in fact, dropped by about 50%.

Mexican drug suppliers picked up the slack by increasing their own heroin production, as well as the purity of their product, from 21% in 2001 to 30% in 2006. Heroin became more available and higher quality from Mexican sources even as the drug warriors focused their efforts on methamphetamine and cocaine. And Arizona shares a border with and serves as a smuggling route for, Mexico.

Hence the surge in heroin use in Arizona, where the stuff is suddenly cheap and abundant.

That's the drug war for you. It can't actually reduce the number of people who choose to use illegal drugs. But it can invoke the laws of economics and get drug entrepreneurs to take advantage of new markets and consumers to respond to rock-bottom prices and surging availability.

Who ever would have guessed?

I need my alcospeed fix

A North Carolina man wants to force a brewing company to stop peddling alcoholic energy drinks -- and he's joined forces with a nanny-state outfit that makes its bones trying to get the government to limit the range of food and beverages from which people can choose.

According to the Wilson Times:

Mike Sprinkle wants to sue the company that produces an alcoholic energy drink he says nearly killed his daughter this summer.

Sprinkle said that on the night of July 20, his 23-year-old daughter, Amanda, drank half a can of orange-flavored Sparks, an alcoholic energy drink made by MillerCoors, at their Wiggins Mill Road home then suddenly collapsed at her computer desk.

Amanda's eyes had rolled back, Sprinkle recalled, and she had no pulse. It was only after he performed CPR on her and took her to Wilson Medical Center that she was later determined to be fine.

He says doctors pointed out the energy drink as a likely culprit.

"Honestly, if I hadn't been sitting there that night, she probably would have died," Sprinkle said.

Since then, Sprinkle has been unsuccessfully trying to organize a class action lawsuit against MillerCoors for producing Sparks, a 6 percent alcohol energy drink sold by the company. According to the MillerCoors Web site, the drink comes in three flavors - original, light and plus - and contains the stimulants caffeine and guarana, not normally used in alcoholic beverages.

Sprinkle's efforts to protect his adult daughter from her taste in beverages brought him to the doors of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. CSPI filed a lawsuit against MillerCoors back in September in an effort to get the courts to cut off the tap on Sparks.

Drinkers of caffeinated alcoholic drinks are more likely to binge drink, ride with an intoxicated driver, become injured, or be taken advantage of sexually than drinkers of non-caffeinated alcoholic drinks, according to a 2007 study conducted at Wake Forest University. ...

"MillerCoors is trying to hook teens and ’tweens on a dangerous drink," said CSPI litigation director Steve Gardner. "This company’s behavior is reckless, predatory, and in the final analysis, likely to disgust a judge or a jury."

Gardner coined the term "alcospeed" to refer to drinks that blend alcohol with stimulants such as caffeine. You may prefer other terms though, like "Irish Coffee," which, according to one recipe, consists of:

1 1/2 oz Irish whiskey
1 tsp brown sugar
6 oz hot coffee
heavy cream

Combine whiskey, sugar and coffee in a mug and stir to dissolve. Float cold cream gently on top. Do not mix.

That sounds far tastier, though possibly less healthy, than Sparks. It's probably more alcoholic, and possible more stimulating, than the caffeinated beer. Rum and coke would do the job, too. So "alcospeed" is nothing new, whatever the CSPI says.

But that's beside the point. The choice of what to consume or not consume is a personal one, to be made individually -- not by judges and politicians under pressure from presumptuous activist groups who would make our decisions for us.

Cops get schooled on entrapment in Fourth Amendment sting

I've long thought that too many civil liberties advocates (myself included) are reactive -- forever chasing the last horrendous abuse, only to be blind-sided by the next one. What we need are more pro-freedom advocates who are confrontational and take the battle to the authorities. Of course, that would probably require somebody with a bankroll to spend on good deeds, or else some way to make such confrontations into a commercial opportunity so they're self-financing. Sort of like what ex-cop Barry Cooper did when he set a trap for Odessa, Texas, police and filmed the results for his online reality show, KopBusters.

According to Cooper's Website:

KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.

The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster's attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster's secret mobile office nearby.

Cooper and company were hired by Raymond Madden, the father of Yolanda Madden, an Odessa woman convicted in 2005 of possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. Yolanda's supporters say a key witness in the case admitted in court to planting the drugs -- but that she was convicted anyway and sent to prison.

Local CBS news coverage of Yolanda Madden, Cooper and the raid here:

Cooper is a former Texas cop and drug warrior who turned against prohibition after seeing the consequences of arrests for non-violent, consensual acts on the people he brought in. "This war on people is a failed policy. We have more prisoners of this war in jail then ever before yet even the DEA admits we have more potent drugs and a larger supply of drugs available than ever before."

He's become an able self-promoter who makes money selling videos that teach people how to go about their lives, including growing, using and selling marijuana, without raising police interest. That's opened him up for some criticism, but it also means he may well be among the people best-positioned and most strongly motivated to keep setting traps for cops who cut corners and violate constitutional rights. After all, he stands to make money selling videos of the abuses.

Wow, civil liberties activism as a profit-making enterprise. I love it.

It will be interesting to see how the Odessa police react to the trap into which they walked. I suppose they could try to press criminal charges of some sort, but if Cooper and company are telling the truth, all they did was engage in perfectly legal activity and wait for the police to misinterpret the situation, probably through the use of illegal search techniques backed by fraudulent claims made to secure a warrant. Under the circumstances, any attempts at retaliation are just going to dig a deeper hole for the local authorities.

Hat tip to Radley Balko for first covering this case.

Prohibition repeal ain't a done deal

The good folks at Bureaucrash have produced one of the better video celebrations of the repeal of Prohibition (on this day in 1933) that I've seen. It rightly notes the importance of the end of one of the nastier violations of personal liberty in this country's history, but it also, cleverly, emphasizes the growing litany of prohibitions great and small in these sadly overregulated states of America.

On a range of issues from guns to plastic bags to cigarettes, our supposed public servants have appointed themselves not only our masters, but our nannies and nags. Rather than permit us to make our own choices, they prefer to substitute their own judgment, with a boot on the neck, fines and prison time the threatened penalty for those among us who dare to tell them to get lost.

And no matter the reasons why each specific good or service is targeted by the finger-waggers, the intrusion by politicians is a violation of our rights -- and one that's doomed to fail if enough people, as is usually the case, refuse to comply.

Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime,
It won't prohibit worth a dime,
It's filled our land with vice and crime.
Nevertheless, we're for it.

-- Franklin P. Adams, 1931

And so the eternal war between would-be rulers and those who won't be ruled continues.

Cops commemorate Prohibition's repeal with call for drug reform

Seventy-five years ago, one of the stupider legal experiments in American history came to a blessed end with the ratification of the 21st Amendment on December 5, 1933, repealing the 18th Amendment and ending Prohibition. An organization made up of law-enforcement officers is celebrating that termination of a disastrous violation of personal liberty by calling for an end to yet another failed prohibitionist venture: the war on drugs. As it turns out, we might just save a lot of money, as well as lives and freedom, by heeding their call.

As part of the We Can Do It Again campaign, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition has released a report pointing out the dangerous parallels between alcohol prohibition and the war on drugs, including violence, vast expense, diversion of law-enforcement resources, pointless incarceration of huge numbers of people and corruption of the criminal justice system -- even as use of the banned intoxicants actually increases amidst widespread defiance of the law.

You mean the use of drugs and alcohol increased after they were banned? You bet.

We Can Do It Again: Repealing Today's Failed Prohibition (PDF) points out:

While estimates on alcohol use before, during and immediately after prohibition rely upon incomplete data, sociologists identify two trends: first, alcohol became associated with a rebellious, adventurous lifestyle, which increased its desirability, especially among the young. Second, alcohol remained fully present in daily urban life. In New York City, for example, in the year before prohibition went into effect, there were 15,000 saloons. Five years into prohibition, those saloons were replaced by as many as 32,000 underground speakeasies. It is without question that problematic alcohol use of all kinds increased due to this policy.

The prohibited drug became more available in its most concentrated and potent form, a natural result of the costs involved in smuggling and concealing it. Beer and wine were largely replaced by liquor in illegal speakeasies.

Decades later, the same thing, predictably, occurred with other intoxicants.

According to the federal government, in the decade preceding the start of the war, 4 million people in the United States above the age of 12 had used an illegal drug in their lifetime (2 percent of the population). By 2007, the government revealed that 114 million people above the age of 12 had tried an illegal drug (46 percent of that population), an increase of 2,850 percent. Drug use became a badge of rebellion, although very widely worn. According to the World Health Organization, the United States has the highest rates of marijuana and cocaine use in the world, despite our having some of the harshest penalties.

Drugs have become more concentrated and potent, a natural result of the costs involved in avoiding law enforcement. The average purity of cocaine at retail increased from 40 percent pure in 1981 to 70 percent pure in 2003, while its wholesale cost dropped by 84 percent over the same period. The purity of street-level heroin nearly tripled, while its wholesale cost has dropped by more than 86 percent.

The money involved in satisfying the demand for illegal intoxicants fueled the growth of violent criminal enterprises then and now. The Mafia grew out of Prohibition just as various gangs and drug cartels have been spawned by laws against drugs.

The LEAP report refers to the corrupting effect of prohibitionist laws on the criminal justic system; I can find my own evidence for that claim in the headlines. Just two days ago, news broke in Illinois that "10 Cook County corrections officers and sheriff's deputies, four Harvey police officers and one Chicago officer were charged with providing protection for what they thought were a dozen large-scale shipments of cocaine and heroin." The corrupt officers were arrested in an FBI sting that was spurred by reports that the services of bent cops were widely available to drug dealers in the area.

Cops go bad because the money is so good. When you try to forbid commerce in popular goods and services, the trade goes underground and some of the loot always slips into the pockets of those willing to look the other way, or even grease the wheels of illicit business. Even more money goes to pointlessly chasing after producers, sellers and consumers of the banned substances. And, of course, underground vendors don't pay sales taxes.

How much money are we talking about?

In The Budgetary Implications of Drug Prohibition (PDF), Harvard University economist Jeffery A. Miron estimates that the war on drugs sucks something on the order of $76 billion from the economy every year.

The report estimates that legalizing drugs would save roughly $44.1 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. $30.3 billion of this savings would accrue to state and local governments, while $13.8 billion would accrue to the federal government. Approximately $12.9 billion of the savings would results from legalization of marijuana, $19.3 billion from legalization of cocaine and heroin, and $11.6 from legalization of other drugs.

The report also estimates that drug legalization would yield tax revenue of $32.7 billion annually, assuming legal drugs are taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco. Approximately $6.7 of this revenue would result from legalization of marijuana, $22.5 billion from legalization of cocaine and heroin, and $3.5 from legalization of other drugs.

That's a lot of money that government officials could use on more productive projects or even (we can dream) return to the taxpayers.

LEAP is an organization made up of current and former police officers, prosecutors and judges who have seen the effects of drug prohibition close-up and know that it's a doomed effort that does more harm than good. The executive director is Jack Cole, a former New Jersey state police lieutenant. Other board members include: Sheriff Bill Masters of San Miguel County, Colorado; Joseph McNamara, the fomer police chief of San Jose, California; Warren W. Eginton, a U.S. district judge in Connecticut; Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico; and other veterans of the badge, the bench and the prosecutor's office.

One-time drug warriors all, they've concluded that the war on drugs is a lost cause that hurts our liberty and our institutions. Seventy-five years after we conceded the foolishness of Prohibition, the law-enforcement officers of LEAP say it's time to face reality once again and end another failed effort to stop millions of people from doing what they're bound and determined to do.

If a cop asks to search your truck, you say 'no'

I am forever astonished by the number of people who willingly consent to have their vehicles and possessions searched, even when the only possible outcome is a world of legal trouble. It's not that hard to say "no" in the hopes that the police officer will have neither the inclination nor the probable cause to seek a warrant. After all, you might get off if you decline the polite invitation; if you agree to the search while in possession of contraband, you will get into trouble.

That said, the following announcement from the Arizona Department of Public Safety is making the rounds:

On Monday, December 1, 2008, at 1530 hours A DPS Officer, stopped a Large Penske Moving van that was identified as a Commercial Motor Vehicle through an interview with the driver. The officer stopped the vehicle for following too close and unsafe lane usage and conducted a Level II inspection. As a result of the inspection the officer placed the driver out of service for not having a log book and noted numerous violations. While conducting the Level II inspection the officer observed numerous indicators of illegal activity, including an unreasonable explanation of the trip, highly nervous driver, unusual rental length, non cost effective trip for merchandise being hauled as well as numerous other items. The officer asked for and received written consent to search the vehicle. The officer identified a false front wall in the truck by newly caulked walls, phillips head screws in the front wall and sheet metal along the top of the wall. A search of the false compartment revealed 1849 pounds of Marijuana.

What does the better part of a ton of marijuana look like? Take a gander:

So, you have that sitting behind you in a false compartment in your truck, a police officer clearly has his spidey senses tingling, but nothing else to go on (that's the formal translation of "an unreasonable explanation of the trip, highly nervous driver, unusual rental length, non cost effective trip for merchandise being hauled as well as numerous other items"). The cop asks if he can go probing through your belongings and, with that motherload of ganja behind your seat, you say ... yes?

Ummm ... that's the wrong answer, folks.

Here's a hint: The Fourth Amendment requires that, even in searches of vehicles, which enjoy reduced constitutional protection, police must still have probable cause. Refusing consent isn't a firm and fast roadblock to a search, but it's better protection than permitting the search to proceed.

When cops turn against drug prohibition

Norm Stamper is the former Seattle Police Chief, a position he held from 1994 through 2000. So he'd seem to be an unlikely person to advocate drug legalization. But that's exactly what he's done time and again, drawing off his 34 years of police experience, and his knowledge of the failures of the war on drugs. In 2005, he wrote the following words for the Los Angeles Times:

Sometimes people in law enforcement will hear it whispered that I'm a former cop who favors decriminalization of marijuana laws, and they'll approach me the way they might a traitor or snitch. So let me set the record straight.

Yes, I was a cop for 34 years, the last six of which I spent as chief of Seattle's police department.

But no, I don't favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of pot but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD.

See Stamper discuss his beliefs and experiences in the following video for ReasonTV. Note especially his statement, "I believe this body is mine, that it is sovereign. I believe in taking care of it. But if I didn't, it would still be my right to inject, ingest or inhale anything into this body that I chose."

Norm Stamper now works with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition in his efforts to end the threat to life and liberty posed by the doomed effort to tell people how they can and can't get high.

Eric Holder, not so great on guns and ganja

You can probably toss out those fondly held hopes for drug-law reform under the incoming Obama administration. Eric H. Holder, Jr., President-Elect Barack Obama's choice for Attorney General, is undoubtedly a competent nominee with significant Justice Department experience under his belt, but he's an enthusiastic supporter of drug prohibition even when it comes to simple marijuana possession. And if you were bitterly clinging to Obama's professed support for the Second Amendment, let the scales fall from your eyes. The likely AG-to-be is a long-time opponent of the right to bear arms.

Before he became Deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno in 1997, Holder was United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. In that office, he complained to the Washington Post that laws against marijuana in the nation's capital were too lenient.

U.S. Attorney Eric H. Holder Jr. said in an interview that he is considering not only prosecuting more marijuana cases but also asking the D.C. Council to enact stiffer penalties for the sale and use of marijuana.

"We have too long taken the view that what we would term to be minor crimes are not important," Holder said, referring to current attitudes toward marijuana use and other offenses such as panhandling.

The Washington Times reported on his charges that D.C.'s repeal of mandatory minimum sentences was "misguided" and his plans to make marijuana distribution a felony. He proposed "setting minimum sentences of 18 months for first-time convicted drug dealers, 36 months for the second time and 72 months for every conviction thereafter."

Holder is just as hostile to firearms possession as he is to the use of marijuana. As Deputy Attorney General, he put forward Clinton administration proposals for imposing draconian restrictions on private individuals who want to sell a gun or two from their personal collections at gun shows and flea markets. "Under our proposal, Brady background checks would be required for all guns that are sold at gun shows, even if the gun is sold by a vendor who is not licensed."

Even after he left government, Holder signed on to former Attorney General Janet Reno's amicus brief (PDF) in the case of D.C. v. Heller, opposing the position that the Supreme Court finally adopted: that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. The brief Holder signed explicitly asserted, "The Second Amendment does not protect firearms possession or use that Is unrelated to participation In a well-regulated militia."

After the Supreme Court rendered its pro-individual-rights decision earlier this year, Holder objected that the ruling "opens the door to more people having more access to guns and putting guns on the streets."

But what about enforcement? Can we at least expect a reprieve from the midnight raids by paramilitary squads that have resulted in injury and death for too many minor offenders, police officers and even innocent bystanders?

Don't count on it. After the violent raid by armored U.S. marshals to seize six-year-old Elian Gonzalez from his relatives and return him to Cuba, Eric Holder was one of the Justice Department officials called on the carpet to explain their actions to the U.S. Senate. Holder defended the raid to Tim Russert, despite his earlier denial that the Justice Department would try to forcefully seize the boy in the dark of night, saying, "We waited 'til five in the morning, just before dawn."

Drug warrior, gun grabber and fan of tear-gas-fueled paramilitary raids to resolve child custody disputes. That's Eric Holder, our new Attorney General.

Is there any upside to Holder's nomination?

Yes, there is, though Holder's positives are in areas that are less likely to directly affect most Americans than his negatives. Holder has, thankfully, criticized the Bush administration's affinity for warrantless wiretapping and for the use of torture against terrorism suspects -- or at least the outsourcing of such abuse to countries that have fewer scruples and legal restrictions than the United States. He told the American Constitution Society (video here):

Our needlessly abusive and unlawful practices in the ‘War on Terror' have diminished our standing in the world community and made us less, rather than more, safe.

He also said:

I never thought I would see the day when our Justice Department would claim that only the most extreme infliction of pain and physical abuse constitutes torture, and that acts that are merely cruel, inhuman or degrading are consistent with United States law and policy.

That will be a welcome change from the attitude prevailing in the current administration, though it doesn't completely offset the new almost-AG's distinct downside.

Anti-smokers hit close to home

These days, because of restrictive laws that jam one-size-fits-all rules down everybody's throats, you can't smoke in bars, you can't smoke in your office, you can't smoke on the sidewalk outside your office building, and ... you can't smoke in your home? Really?

Yep. City officials in Belmont, California, have reached their presumptuous little hands into private dwellings, pinching out cigarettes in any home that shares a floor or a ceiling with another home -- apartments and condos, in other words.

Reason.tv has the full story for you:

It's not just smoking, of course; it's all the vices, pleasures and specific preferences that make life worth living that are under fire across the country. If we want our cigarettes left alone, we'll have to extend our neighbors the same courtesy for their foie gras and saggy pants. And we'll have to dump control freaks like those that rule in Belmont.

Consider it the sort of detente that's necessary to maintain a little freedom.

Surprise! Cops down on decriminalization

I'm not sure that law enforcement officials in the Bay State really anticipated that Question 2 was actually going to pass, reducing penalties for simple possession of less than an ounce of marijuana to a $100 fine.

From the Boston Globe:

"This is certainly going to make the work of many police officers a lot more complicated," said Wayne Sampson, executive director of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association. "We're going to need guidance from the attorney general and district attorneys. There are a lot of things to work out."

Well, yes, I suppose so. But decriminalization didn't come out of the blue. The measure was much-anticipated and heavily debated. It ultimately passed with the support of almost two-thirds of voters. A little just-in-case prep work may have been in order.

Instead, we're getting a bit of a frenzy of ... whining. Chief Brian Kyes of the Chelsea Police Department drags his feet with what sounds like an Intro to Police Procedure question. "If it's a civil infraction, not a crime, can police officers search for more evidence? Now that might constitute a bad search, and that definitely will require significant changes."

Well, yes, it might. But there are actually a few items in Massachusetts, possession of which is punishable only by fines, despite the best efforts of the state legislature. If I remember right, pocket knives with blades longer than 2.5 inches fall into this category in Boston. So deciding whether or not a search is permissible after discovery of a decriminalized substance should be a more or less settled matter of law.

And Frank Pasquerello, a spokesman for the Cambridge Police Department, complains, "Now, we're going to have to figure out how much they had, not whether they were carrying it, and that's a lot more difficult."

Well, I sympathize. It would have been better if marijuana were fully legalized, but there you have it. We all have our crosses to bear.

Of course, all institutions are inherently conservative. They don't like to change their ways, and they don't like to approach old challenges from a new direction.

But, in time, I'm sure that Massachusetts police officers can learn to get along without hustling casual pot smokers off to jail.

Proposition updates at Civil Liberties Examiner

If you're not following me over at The Examiner, you're missing out! Fresh off the virtual presses tonight is news of the fate of ballot propositions dealing with marijuana, gay marriage and abortion.

Tomorrow, I'll cover Arizona's propositions and give my thoughts about the election results, but the excitement is at The Examiner now now now.

Yes, I'm drinking.

Legalize dope, says UK foundation

Legalize marijuana, tax it and regulate it.

That's what's recommended in a new report prepared for the UK-based Beckley Foundation in anticipation of a UN review of drug policy. Says the Guardian:

A report on cannabis prepared for next year's UN drug policy review will suggest that a "regulated market" would cause less harm than the current international prohibition. The report, which is likely to reopen the debate about cannabis laws, suggests that controls such as taxation, minimum age requirements and labelling could be explored.

The Global Cannabis Commission report, which will be launched today at a conference in the House of Lords, has reached conclusions which its authors suggest "challenge the received wisdom concerning cannabis". It was carried out for the Beckley foundation, a UN-accredited NGO, for the 2009 UN strategic drug policy review.

There are, according to the report, now more than 160 million users of the drug worldwide. "Although cannabis can have a negative impact on health, including mental health, in terms of relative harms it is considerably less harmful than alcohol or tobacco," according to the report. "Historically, there have only been two deaths worldwide attributed to cannabis, whereas alcohol and tobacco together are responsible for an estimated 150,000 deaths per annum in the UK alone."

That sounds remarkably sensible. Even from the perspective of those who would "protect" society from dangerous drugs, marijuana prohibition has never made much sense. It's a mild intoxicant with fewer links to problematic behavior than (perfectly legal) alcohol, and it grows in virtually any conditions, making its interdiction extraordinarily difficult. Even if you don't agree that individuals have a right to engage in whatever consensual behavior they wish, restricting marijuana seems like a poor allocation of law-enforcement resources.

I'll take a look at the specifics of the report once it's available.

Hey officer, that dope is gonna cost you

Will police in Fort Collins, Colorado have to compensate a couple for a small crop of medical marijuana that was seized and left to rot in an evidence room? That seems like an unusual question to ask -- marijuana is illegal, right? -- but it's one that may well have to be answered in the positive according to legal provisions passed very deliberately by state voters.

Colorado has a fairly sensible system regarding the medical use of marijuana -- fairly sensible that is, short of simply recognizing people's right to grow, buy, sell and ingest whatever they please. But, given the limitations of the American legal environment, it's a decent law that allows the use of marijuana to alleviate a defined set of medical conditions, and even lets doctors and patients petition to add new conditions to the list.

In some states with medical marijuana laws, police have thumbed their noses at the public's laissez-faire sentiments and gone after people buying and using marijuana anyway. The assumption seems to be that a midnight raid and confiscation of plants and equipment are punishment enough in themselves, even if the courts dismiss all charges after the fact.

It's sort of do-it-yourself Prohibition.

The plight of James and Lisa Masters in Fort Collins isn't quite so clear-cut. They were clearly authorized to use and grow marijuana, but they hadn't made their status clear to the state for economic reasons.

In 2006, James Masters and his wife, Lisa, were arrested on suspicion of felony cultivation and intent to distribute. At the time, they were growing marijuana for themselves and for at least five other people with medical problems, their attorneys said. Lisa Masters, 33, has fibromyalgia and tendinitis; her husband, 31, suffers from chronic nausea and pain from knee and hip problems, Corry said.

Both had doctors' recommendations that they ingest marijuana for their medical issues, but they had not joined the state's registry, Vicente said, because they could not afford the $110 fee.

Without all the "i"s dotted and "t"s crossed, police felt justified in taking the Masters into custody and grabbing their 39 plants. Those plants then went into the evidence room, without air, light or water. That's not really a nurturing environment for a living crop -- a valuable living crop.

Fast forward in time after all charges have been dismissed and the charges ruled illegal. The Masters' property must now be returned to them. But ...

"All the plants were dead," said Brian Vicente, one of the attorneys for the couple. "Some had turned to liquid -- this black, moldy liquid. There was mold over everything."

This is a problem, because Colorado's Amendment 20, passed by the voters in 2000, specifically holds:

(e) Any property interest that is possessed, owned, or used in connection with the medical use of marijuana or acts incidental to such use, shall not be harmed, neglected, injured, or destroyed while in the possession of state or local law enforcement officials where such property has been seized in connection with the claimed medical use of marijuana. Any such property interest shall not be forfeited under any provision of state law providing for the forfeiture of property other than as a sentence imposed after conviction of a criminal offense or entry of a plea of guilty to such offense. Marijuana and paraphernalia seized by state or local law enforcement officials from a patient or primary care-giver in connection with the claimed medical use of marijuana shall be returned immediately upon the determination of the district attorney or his or her designee that the patient or primary care-giver is entitled to the protection contained in this section as may be evidenced, for example, by a decision not to prosecute, the dismissal of charges, or acquittal.

There's no penalty specified for police departments that don't follow the law, but that would seem to provide grounds for a lawsuit.

Such as the one the Masters have filed for $200,000 to cover the cost of their destroyed plants.

I'd say they have a good case.

Pennsylvania smoking ban brings college kids out in protest

At Pennsylvania's Clarion University, something remarkable happened yesterday: a "smoke-in" defying state law. No, it wasn't a pro-marijuana protest; it was a pro-tobacco protest -- and that's remarkable.

About 50 Clarion University of Pennsylvania students protested a new ban on smoking on state-owned campuses today, calling the prohibition that forbids lighting up even outdoors unfair and unenforceable. ...

University officials handed them yellow cards warning them that they risk fines or disciplinary action. Some of the protesters responded by putting tobacco on the cards, rolling them up and lighting them so they could be smoked.

It's not just Clarion University. The new ban has been interpreted as applying even to outdoor spaces at colleges and universities, because classes and events are often held in the open air. Responses by ticked-off students have been widespread.

With virtually no warning, smoking at 14 of Pennsylvania's state-owned universities has been banned anywhere on campus — even outdoors.

The action has sparked protests around the state by some of the 110,000 students in the State System of Higher Education, who received word of the ban by e-mail late Wednesday — a day before a new state law forbidding smoking in most workplaces and public spaces took effect. ...

Students who feel the policy is too extreme have organized peaceful protests of smokers and sympathetic nonsmokers on at least three of the 14 Pennsylvania campuses, and there is talk of a coordinated statewide demonstration later this week.

College campuses are one of the more reliable cultural barometers. They're not consistently libertarian, and they're not consistently authoritarian. But, from marijuana to speech codes, they are good indicators of where the culture is going at the moment, and what the attitude of young adults is toward current legal trends.

So when college students start protesting smoking bans as excessively intrusive, arguing, "I'm standing outside. I should have the right to smoke outside," there's a good chance that the tidewaters of the anti-smoking jihad have reached their high water mark and are beginning to recede.

Pennsylvania's statewide ban, passed in June and signed by Governor Ed Rendell, was intended to be wide-reaching, with even more intrusions promised by the bill's sponsor, who regretted the exemptions required to win political support. "I believe that within several years we are going to see legislation to strengthen the law and place more broad restrictions on all public places in the state," State Senator Stewart Greenleaf told reporters.

That intolerant, prohibitionist attitude may have produced the sort of legislative overreaching that sparks public reactions -- and gets college kids marching in opposition.

In FBI data, the real crime is the number of drug arrests

The latest FBI crime figures are out, and while there's plenty to mull over, perhaps the saddest news is that nonviolent activities -- involving drugs, in particular -- that violate nobody's rights and pose no threat to anybody else, rank so highly in terms of sheer numbers of arrests. According to the FBI, "Law enforcement made more arrests for drug abuse violations (an estimated 1.8 million arrests, or 13.0 percent of the total number of arrests) than for any other offense in 2007."

Logically enough,The Marijuana Policy Project is making hay about the fact that a huge number of those drug arrests were for "crimes" involving one of America's favorite intoxicants: marijuana.

Marijuana arrests set another all-time record in 2007, totaling 872,720 — that’s a marijuana arrest every 36 seconds.

Arrests for marijuana possession totaled 775,138, greatly exceeding arrests for all violent crimes combined, which totaled 597,447.

That's especially disturbing coming just months after a World Health Organization survey revealed that 42.4% of Americans have consumed marijuana at one time or another -- a number rivaled only by apparently very mellow New Zealanders. Any one of those millions could have been among the FBI's statistics.

But let's not gloss over the fact that the rest of the drug arrests -- from possession of "heroin or cocaine and their derivatives" to sale/manufacturing of "synthetic or manufactured drugs" were for nonviolent, consensual activities. Why should anybody be arrested for such "crimes" when there is no victim, no property damage and no violation of anybody's rights?

And that's without even addressing the 77,607 arrests for "prostitution and commercialized vice" and the 12,161 unlucky risk-takers who got hauled off for gambling.

The rest of the FBI's data indicates that there's plenty of real crime worthy of law-enforcement attention, from rape to murder to arson to a variety of property crimes.

With real acts of violence against people and property to occupy the attention of the nation's law enforcers, it's hard to understand why any resources at all are being devoted to dope smokers, coke snorters, sex workers and poker players.

Just having fun shouldn't be an arrestable offense.

Tucson spurns bogus breathalyzers

Nobody likes a driver who gets behind the wheel of a car when he or she is three sheets to the wind and puts innocent people in danger on the road. But even less should we like unsubstantiated accusations of drunk driving based on fallible devices -- commonly called "breathalyzers" -- that test for blood-alcohol content using technology that might as well be so many rituals and incantations because it's kept a secret from anybody who might want to challenge the results.

And that's exactly why more than 100 DUI cases have been tossed out in recent months in Tucson, Arizona -- with a whopping 19 dismissed just yesterday.

Judge Margarita Bernal threw the cases out because CMI Inc., the manufacturer of the Intoxilyzer 8000 used in Tucson, refuses to release the software source code that runs the machines and plays a large part in the reliability -- or lack thereof -- of the devices. That's a matter of concern, because CMI President Toby Hall has himself conceded that there are certain technical vulnerabilities in his company's products.

Bernal based Monday's ruling on testimony in an unrelated Pima County Superior Court case by Toby Hall, president of the company that makes the machines.

"The testimony of Mr. Hall clearly raises anomalies, errors and issues which can impact (the machine's) reliability and credibility," Bernal wrote.

In fact, problems with the Intoxilyzer 8000 date back at least two years. The Sarasota Herald Tribune reported in 2006, "The new machine's first glitch was discovered last month, and now breath-test machines across the state need a software upgrade because state officials realized the Intoxilyzer 8000 failed in certain situations. Prosecutors in Sarasota and Manatee counties have asked judges to stop accepting plea deals in DUI cases until the issue can be resolved."

The Intoxilyzer 8000 had been adopted after earlier problems with the Intoxilyzer 5000.

Turning to CMI's competitors doesn't necessarily solve the problem either. At the beginning of 2007, retired New Jersey Judge Michael King reported to the state Supreme Court that the widely used Alcotest 7110 was unreliable, with the result, as the New York Times put it, "that thousands of convictions could be overturned."

Once again, the manufactureer, Draeger, Inc., refused to release the device's source code so that the machine's reliability could be assessed.

The manufacturerers' reticence is understandable for any company that bases its success on its technology and doesn't want that technology pirated by the competition. Keeping source code proprietary is a way of holding on to an edge. But as defense attorney Evan Levow commented after Judge King's report, "They say the source code is proprietary. Well, constitutional rights are not proprietary.”

In the absence of some knowledge of how breathalyzers work -- or whether they work -- challenging their secrecy and their reliability has become something of a cottage industry among lawyers. A simple Google search on the words "breathalyzer" and "reliability" turn up endless lawyers' Websites and blogs -- some trawling for clients, others sharing information about successful challenges among attorneys.

Those challenges are going to continue, and they'll deserve continued success, so long as drunk-driving convictions are dependent on a magic machine, the reliability of which has to be taken on faith.

Of course, not everybody got the memo about the breathalyzer's unreliability. In Massachusetts, Melanie's Law punishes drivers with automatic license suspensions for refusing to take the test -- even if they're later cleared of drunk driving.

Smokers defy regulators in the Mountain State

More than in most places, the smoking ban in Kanawha County, West Virginia, is running into grassroots resistance. Reports The Charleston Gazette:

There's a file at the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department marked "The Blitz."

Health inspectors planned to fan out across Kanawha County one night last month and check bars and gambling parlors for smoking violations.

However, "The Blitz" was called off. Someone had warned the bar owners about the expected sweep.

So proponents of personal choice apparently have somebody inside the Health Department tipping them off.

The Health Department fielded 65 complaints during the past two months, and handed out 14 warnings.

"We get three or four complaints on one place, but we go out there and don't find anything," said Anita Ray, the department's environmental director. "Either we're not catching them at the right time, or maybe it's just a bar owner with a grudge against a competitor, or maybe they're just trying to run us."

Opponents of the law are apparently phoning in bogus tips and/or using the law to settle scores against competitors.

At the Blackhawk Saloon in Charleston, the bartender called bar owner, Kerry "Paco" Ellison, after a Health Department sanitarian paid a visit two weeks ago.

Ellison instructed the bartender to light up a cigarette, according to the inspection report. The sanitarian gave a warning notice to the bartender, who promptly tore it up at Ellison's request.

"We know Mr. Ellison is chomping at the bit to go to court," Ray said.

And some businesses are overtly flipping the bird to enforcers.

This country was built by people who didn't let government officials boss them around. It's good to see that some of that spirit survives.

Column on Cindy McCain and drug penalties published in the Review-Journal

A short version of my piece on Greg Gibson's long prison sentence for transporting marijuana, as opposed to Cindy McCain's riches for also getting people high, has been published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

BOOZE-RUNNING USED TO BE A FELONY, TOO: Cindy McCain in same business as Greg Gibson

Note that I'm not picking on Cindy McCain for any reason other than the ease with which I can compare her business to the drug trade. In fact, Joe Biden is the most gung-ho drug warrior in presidential politics right now.

Bar owners tell anti-smokers to take a hike

In an inspiring display of civil disobedience, more than a dozen bars in Kanawha County, West Virginia, joined together this week to commit the currently subversive act of simply allowing their patrons to light up within the confines of privately owned establishments whose owners don't oppose the practice:

Nobody's going to tell Kerry "Paco" Ellison's customers they can't smoke at his bar.

The Black Hawk Saloon is Ellison's bar, and he'll run it as he sees fit.

"If I don't want to pray, I don't go to church," Ellison said. "If you don't want to smoke, don't come in here."

Today, Ellison and at least a dozen other bar owners across the county defiantly encouraged their patrons to smoke in violation of the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department's six-week-old smoking ban.

Not long ago, it wasn't considered all that controversial for business owners to decide for themselves the nature of the service that they'd offer and the environment in which it would be offered -- and for potential customers to either patronize the establishment or else satisfy their preferences elsewhere.

If enough people liked what the business had to offer, it thrived. If they didn't, it either changed or failed.

But the trend in recent years has been to substitute legislated majority preferences -- the more faddish, the better -- for individual choices. When the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department handed down its smoking ban (PDF) last year, it was simply going along with the cool kids, who have made public regulation of conduct on private spaces a de rigeur legal accessory for every modern government.

The argument for smoking bans is usually made on health grounds -- the dangers of second-hand smoke, in particular. Accordingly, the Kanawha regulation is salted with language claiming an urgent need to:

(a) protect the health of the public by minimizing exposure of individuals to a proven harmful environmental toxin, i.e. secondhand smoke, while they engage in public indoor commerce; and (b) direct and/or strongly encourage the proprietors of public places of indoor commerce to provide a smoke-free environment to minimize public exposure to this harmful toxin.

But the only way members of the public can be exposed to such a "harmful environmental toxin" is if they choose to enter an establishment, to do business or to seek employment, where people are allowed to smoke. In every case, there's that all-important moment at the threshold when they get that first whiff of Marlboro and have to decide whether to take the next step.

Should I stay or should I go?

Or, if you're concerned about that single whiff, health concerns could be addressed by following the advice of Barbara Lutes, one of Ellison's customers, and "Just have a sign on the door: 'This is a smoking establishment.' "

In the end, banning smoking in private businesses starts looking a lot like banning bars from playing loud rock music because you're worried that people's hearing might be harmed (and, besides, you prefer jazz). Maybe that's what you want, but why should your preferences trump other folks' choices?

Enough people understand that point that there's significant support -- minority support, to be sure -- for business owers like Ellison who tell the law to take a hike. Maybe that's why Kanawha officials wisely decided to avoid making anybody a martyr. They've declined to issue any citations over the mass act of defiance.

That's probably a good idea. In Cleveland, when authorities got tough, the result was a proliferation of underground "smokehouses" which also feature strippers.

Hmmm ... Maybe the law is on to something ...

Forbidding bar owners to permit their customers to smoke might be very trendy, at the moment, and certainly it's a democratic expression of what today's majority wants.

But, you know, the whole point of freedom is letting individuals choose -- and telling the majority that it can, from time to time, go fuck itself.

A little jury nullification in Boston

This past March, a remarkable thing happened. A juror in a federal trial in Massachusetts actually exercised his responsibility to question the government's authority to prosecute a defendant. Apparently pressed by fellow jurors to address his doubts to the bench, Thomas R. Eddlem sent a note to US District Court Judge William G. Young asking: "Where – if two-thirds of both houses of congress voted in 1919 that it was necessary to amend the constitution to give congress the power to ban mere possession of a substance (prohibition of alcohol in that case) – is the constitutional grant of authority to ban mere possession of cocaine today?"

Taken aback, Judge Young essentially replied that the government has the power because courts say it does -- based on the infinitely malleable Commerce Clause. Unmoved, Eddlem persisted, and was ultimately yanked from the jury for his troubles and replaced by an alternate.

It's impressive enough that a juror had the temerity to question the grounds for a prosecution -- most jurors today grudgingly serve their time as rubber stamps for the judge, doing what they're told and neglecting their role as representatives of the people in the courtroom.

Even more impressive is that Eddlem -- a radio talk-show host and former research director for the John Birch Society -- raised a valid objection that has been a legal sore point for many scholars. No less an authority than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas raised a similar concern in his dissent (PDF) in Gonzales v. Raich:

Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything–and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.

So Eddlem's question to Judge Young is one that has been echoed at the highest level -- hardly a fringe concern. He exercised his responsibilities as a juror and did so in an extremely credible way. Nevertheless, Judge Young was so shocked that he penned a 41-page legal memorandum (PDF) denouncing Eddlem's presumption, as well as the doctrine of "jury nullification" that he accused Eddlem of espousing.

Jury nullification is when jurors are so offended by a law or by the application of a law that they refuse to bring a conviction, even when a defendant is clearly guilty. During American history, juries have nullified (refused to enforce) laws against assisting runaway slaves, peddling alcohol in violation of Prohibition, dodging the draft and smoking marijuana, among other laws that draw the scorn of a sizeable portion of the population.

Young's memorandum cited chapter and verse about alleged abuses of nullification and the dangers it supposedly poses to American democracy -- though in doing so, he managed to completely ignore Clay S. Conrad's Jury Nullification, the definitive book on the subject, which ably addresses such objections. That's an odd omission, since Young does cite a minor article by Conrad as an example of political advocacy for nullification.

Eddlem denies that he supports nullification and, in fact, says he would have voted to convict in a state court -- his objections were constitutional in nature. But that clearly puts him in the tradition of a long line of jurors who have refused to do the government's bidding in cases of prosecutions they considered unjust.

But whether it was nullification or not, was Eddlem's action such a good idea?

Remember, every step along the way, all of the other participants in the criminal justice system exercise discretion based on their own sense of what's right. Police officers look the other way, prosecutors decide not to pursue cases, judges dismiss or reduce charges and pass down light sentences. These officials are all representatives of the state. It's only the jury, the representatives of the people in the court, that Judge Young and his colleagues say should behave like automatons. That makes no sense -- or rather, it makes an unfortunate self-serving sense when argued by a judge, whose power is diminished by independent jurors.

Really, there's every reason to recognize the jury's right to exercise at least as much mercy as the other participants in the criminal justice system -- especially given their role as the last check on the power of the state. That right was not just recognized, but celebrated by the founders. John Adams, the nation's second president, said it is the juror's "duty ... to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court."

In fact, there's some evidence that more jurors than we usually realize appreciate their power to mitigate the impact of the law. In 1999, the Washington Post reported:

The most concrete sign of the trend is the sharp jump in the percentage of trials that end in hung juries. For decades, a 5 percent hung jury rate was considered the norm, derived from a landmark study of the American jury by Harry Kalven Jr. and Hans Zeisel published 30 years ago. In recent years, however, that figure has doubled and quadrupled, depending on location. Some local courts in California, for example, have reported more than 20 percent of trials ending in hung juries. Federal criminal cases in Washington, D.C., averaged 15 percent hung juries in 1996 (the most recent year for which data were available), three times the rate in 1991.

A hung jury is simply one in which the 12 men and women around the table disagree over whether to convict or acquit. But judges, lawyers and others who study the phenomenon suspect that more and more differences are erupting not over the evidence in these cases, but over whether the law being broken is fair.

Eddlem may have drawn the headlines, but jurors across the country are quietly exercising the discretion he publicly advocates.

Sorry we shot your dogs ...

Police in Prince George's County, Maryland, are conceding that, just maybe, last week's violent raid on the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo, during which officers killed two dogs, was a mistake.

Police raided Calvo's home after he took delivery of a package containing 30 pounds of marijuana.

The package was addressed to Trinity Tomsic, Calvo's wife. But law enforcement sources said last week that they are now investigating the possibility that the mayor and his wife were unwitting recipients and that a deliveryman might have intended to intercept the package as part of a drug smuggling scheme.

The package landed on Calvo's doorstep after police posing as deliverymen brought it to the door and Calvo's mother-in-law asked that it be left on the porch. Police recovered the unopened package from the home Tuesday night but made no arrests. Calvo has said he was interrogated for hours while handcuffed and surrounded by the bloody bodies of his dogs.

OK, let's back up here. Police burst into Calvo's home with guns blazing because ... he took delivery of an officially disfavored intoxicant. There was no hint of violence, no hostages or threats -- just a lot of wacky weed.

So why the "Raid on Entebbe" tactics?

The fact is, the results could have been a lot worse. I'm not trying to minimize the slaughter of the dogs here -- I'm a dog owner myself, and I'd be driven into a murderous rage were anybody to gun the furry beasts down. But if animals died, people could have died too -- they often do in these violent drug raids. Just today, a Lima, Ohio, police sergeant was acquitted of criminal charges stemming from his killing of an unarmed woman and shooting her one-year-old son during a botched drug raid. Cory Maye is currently serving life in prison for killing a housebreaker who turned out to be a raiding police officer acting on bad information.

Violent police raids are dangerous. But marijuana, in and of itself, is not. Even if Calvo was the intended and willing recipient of that package, there's no excuse for enforcing the laws against marijuana by knocking his doors in and shooting his dogs.

As of now, the definitive study of violent, militarized policing in this country is Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America (PDF) by Radley Balko, formerly of the Cato Institute, and now of Reason magazine. The study is accompanied by an online map detailing some of the raids researchers have looked into, and their results, including the deaths of innocent people, deaths of police officers, deaths of nonviolent offenders and raids on innocent suspects. (Dogs, sorry to say, are not included).

As of 2006, Balko estimated that as many as 40,000 violent raids of the sort suffered by Calvo and his family take place every year in this country, although not all of them end in blood and tragedy.

I wish Cheye Calvo the best. But I also wish as much attention were paid to the regular people -- non-politicians -- who are usually on the receiving end of these raids.

Legalize marijuana -- if only for the votes

Even Rep. Barney Frank doesn't think much of the chances for his proposal to legalize the possession and non-commercial transfer of small quantities of marijuana, a measure co-sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul. Frank reportedly joked that the bill doesn't have a "high chance" of passing. That's a shame, because it's a good step toward getting the government out of the business of telling consenting adults what they can and can't buy, sell and -- most importantly -- put into their own bodies.

The text of the bill, H.R. 5843, is short and to the point:

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no penalty may be imposed under an Act of Congress for the possession of marijuana for personal use, or for the not-for-profit transfer between adults of marijuana for personal use. For the purposes of this section, possession of 100 grams or less of marijuana shall be presumed to be for personal use, as shall the not-for-profit transfer of one ounce or less of marijuana, except that the civil penalty provided in section 405 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 844a) may be imposed for the public use of marijuana if the amount of the penalty does not exceed $100.

Of course, Congress has rarely shown much interest in expanding the range of human liberty, whether it's run by currently triumphant Democrats or previously dominant Republicans.

But even if our current crop of legislative overlords are uninspired by the prospect of freeing Americans from the threat of arrest, imprisonment and the occasional, lethal SWAT raid for evil weed, they may at least appreciate the Machiavellian advantage to be had in distinguishing themselves from their civil-liberties-trampling predecessors by building a coalition that nibbles at the Republican base. The alliance of liberal-Democrat Frank with libertarian-Republican Paul points the way to a future in which the donkey party benefits and grows its support by taking the lead on at least a few pro-liberty issues.

If even limited legalization of marijuana -- an increasingly popular policy -- is too ambitious for the timid politicos, Frank's and Paul's companion measure, H.R. 5842, to prevent the federal government from interfering with state-level permissiveness toward medical marijuana may provide safer harbor. Repeatedly approved at the ballot box, medical marijuana laws have proven widely popular with a majority of voters -- including three-fourths of those over 50.

C'mon, oh trend-setting lawmakers. If you won't support easing drug prohibition a tad for the sake of our freedom, do it for the political advantage.

Phoenix: Not so free, not so unfree

Phoenix isn't a terrible place when it comes to personal freedom. It's not so great either, despite Arizona's overstated Wild-West reputation.

Reason magazine's Radley Balko raised a fuss in Chicago with his column in the Chicago Tribune taking that city to task for "treating its citizens like children" with a variety of nanny-state interventions into everything from sex laws to booze restrictions to firearms regulations that are designed to turn local politicians' obsessions and bugaboos into punishable offenses.

The full article from which Balko drew, rating 35 cities according to semi-scientific rankings of the various city governments' treatment of personal freedom, is available on Reason's Website. The cities are assessed on the environment they provide for personal autonomy in the areas of: Sex, Tobacco, Alcohol, Guns, Movement, Drugs, Gambling and Food/Other.

Chicago came in dead last, setting itself up for its public excoriation. Las Vegas, with a generally laissez-faire attitude toward matters that draw political and legal attention elsewhere, ranked first.

I note that Phoenix, the metropolitan behemoth of Arizona, ranks a mediocre 14. With its middle-of-the-road status, the city doesn't even rate a full text analysis of its advantages and disadvantages. The magazine merely notes: "If harassment of suspected illegal immigrants were measured in this list, the stomping grounds of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio would rank dead last."

I've written plenty about Sheriff Joe's shenanigans, so I can't disagree.

Reason's rankings are a welcome tool for assessing the livability of America's many and various jurisdictions by a variety of criteria. Measures of economic freedom are relatively easy to come by, but attempts to assess local openness to gays and lesbians, personal choice on smoking, drug laws, the ability to defend yourself within the law and other measures of the breathing room to live in a given area according to your own preferences are rare.

In fact, it's interesting to cross-reference, say, the Pacific Research Institute's U.S. Economic Freedom Index (full document here in PDF format) with Reason's rankings. Chicago's miserable last-place personal freedom ranking correlates depressingly with Illinois's overall 46 (out of 50) rank among the states for economic liberty.

Las Vegas, the top dog for personal-freedom, is located in pretty-good twelfth-ranked Nevada for economic liberty.

But the best bargain may be Denver, ranked third for personal freedom, and nestled comfortably in second-place Colorado, for economic liberty.

(Phoenix, ranked a mediocre 14 out of 35 for personal freedom, does a bit better on economics, given Arizona's slot at 11.)

Of course, rankings are only snapshots; you need to see what direction a jurisdiction is going, or you're at risk of moving to a garden of freedom just in time to watch it transform into a gulag. As David Harsanyi notes in Reason's write-up of Denver:

Often the relevant question isn’t where you are but where you’re headed. And Denver, alas, is moving in the same godforsaken direction as the rest of the country. Safety, economic and social “justice,” the children, the environment, the pets (unless we’re talking about pit bulls, a breed banned from city limits)—all of them trump individual freedom. ...

Denver is one of the freest cities in the country? That’s dreadful news for the rest of you suckers.

Oh well. Reason is going to have to repeat these rankings on a regular basis, so we have a better idea of how our homes, current and prospective, fare. It just might be better to stay in a town ranked at 14 that stays at 14 than it would be to move to a burg that starts off good and then slides, heartbreakingly, down the scale.

A grow operation in the high country

It's been a while since I've hiked Woods Canyon, near Sedona, Arizona, so I can't kick myself too hard for missing an opportunity to stroll through the woods, sampling the local flora.

Authorities raided a marijuana growing operation about 25 miles south of Flagstaff last week and seized more than 4,000 plants with an estimated value of $1.5 million.

No arrests were made. According to information from the Coconino County Sheriff's Office, officers from several local, state and federal agencies descended on the grow, located in the Coconino National Forest at the bottom of Woods Canyon Wednesday. ...

Lt. Rex Gilliland of the sheriff's office said that the two separate grows are about the size of a football field each. The grows are located south of Schnebly Hill Road about two miles west of Interstate 17. After the crops were seized, they were destroyed.

The marijuana plantation was apparently discovered by two hikers who then alerted the cops. Can somebody please tell me what sort of rat-bastard stumbles upon a huge grow operation in the wilderness, and rather than stuff his/her backpack with a sample of the goodies, treks out and drops a dime?

Bah! Philistines abound.

Oh well, if the authorities found one grow operation, they probably missed three others. In fact, marijuana farms are frequently found on public land in northern Arizona -- an inevitable result of the plants' illegal status, the ease of doing as you please in the sparsely settled region and the appropriate climate for marijuana cultivation.

The operations are sometimes booby-trapped and often guarded so, despite my light-hearted take on the situation, they do pose a potential danger to unwary hunters and hikers who stumble upon them.

But criminals wouldn't be salting the wilderness with farms, guards and traps if marijuana were legal. That is, it's dangerous to stumble on a grow operation not because of the nasty weed that's been planted in the ground, but because of the nasty laws that have been planted in the books.

Here's a message to those hikers who turned in the Woods Canyon grow operation: If you want to reduce the chance of stumbling into a similar situation in the future, put the screws to your legislators to legalize the stuff. Then the marijuana plantations will operate openly along the interstate and the only weed in the back country will be whatever you tuck into your kit.

Decision in Arizona case restores Fourth Amendment to schools

In a major slap-down to holding-pen ... err ... public-school control-freakery, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled (PDF) that there actually are limits to the power of educrats to grope and humiliate their charges in search of illicit over-the-counter medications.

From the opinion, here are the details of the search of 13-year-old Savana Redding, which took place in Safford, Arizona:

First, Savana removed her socks, shoes and jacket for inspection for ibuprofen. The officials found nothing. Then, Romero asked Savana to remove her T-shirt and stretch pants. Embarrassed and scared, Savana complied and sat in her bra and underwear while the two adults examined her clothes. Again, the officials found nothing. Still progressing with the search, despite receiving only corroboration of Savana’s pleas that she did not have any ibuprofen, Romero instructed Savana to pull her bra out to the side and shake it. Savana followed the instructions, exposing her naked breasts in the process. The shaking failed to dislodge any pills. Romero next requested that Savana pull out her underwear at the crotch and shake it. Hiding her head so that the adults could not see that she was about to cry, Savana complied and pulled out her underwear, revealing her pelvic area. No ibuprofen was found. The school officials finally stopped and told Savana to put her clothes back on and accompany Romero back to Wilson’s office.

Yes, the school had a firm-and-fast rule against the sort of medications almost everybody keeps in their medicine cabinet for casual use. As insane as that seems, it's a concern best addressed separately.

Earlier court decisions had given a rousing thumbs-up to Redding's ordeal, but the appeals court had second thoughts. Writing for the majority, Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw said:

Common sense informs us that directing a thirteen-year-old girl to remove her clothes, partially revealing her breasts and pelvic area, for allegedly possessing ibuprofen, an infraction that poses an imminent danger to no one, and which could be handled by keeping her in the principal’s office until a parent arrived or simply sending her home, was excessively intrusive.

Logically enough, the court found that "The strip search of thirteen-year-old Savana ... was conducted in violation of Savana’s Fourth Amendment rights."

Good. Not only is that ruling a sound recognition of the rights of the individual, but it will spare many fathers and mothers the unpleasant necessity to go forth and do violence to school administrators who abuse their children.

The spirit of Independence Day: defiance

From the Chicago Tribune:

TAYLORVILLE, Ill. — The sign on the door of the American Tap warns patrons not to smoke. But sitting at the bar, customers merrily puff away, sharing cigarettes with the bartender and the owner while openly defying and mocking the state's ban on indoor smoking.

"I told the health department weeks ago, 'Go ahead and fine me,' " said owner Gary McWard, flicking an ash from his cigarette into an empty beer can on the bar top. "And I'm still waiting."

Enforcement could be a long time coming. Light up indoors in Chicago and the suburbs and get caught, and it's virtually certain the law will try to snuff it out. But in Downstate Illinois, where state smoking rates are the highest and opposition to the smoking ban is most vociferous, some communities are refusing to halt indoor smoking or levy fines.

This is what America is all about. It's people running their businesses as they please, setting rules for their property that suit them and freely associating with others who share their values and preferences -- and telling government officials who'd have it otherwise to fuck off.

McWard even posts a picture of Kathy Drea, director of public policy for the American Lung Association and a prominent nanny-state advocate who lives in his town, so she can be barred from the establishment.

Because shunning control freaks is another way of striking a small blow for liberty.

Following up on the Tribune story, Phil Luciano, a columnist for the Peoria Journal Star, celebrates downstate Illinois's defiance.

The story generated a mass of online comments to the Trib. Some carried typical Chicago snootiness: "Leave it to the hillbillies to be proud of their own ignorance."

But overwhelmingly, the comments recognized that this isn't about ignorance or even smoking. It's about standing up for individual rights. As one put it, "Sounds like those downstaters got a whole lot of common sense. Good for them. This is just another Chicago law forced on the rest of the state."

Amen. And may all the great thinkers up north - and the Chicago Tribune - realize that sometimes, just sometimes, we hillbillies have the brains and guts to stand up to asinine public policies.

And Marc Hansen, a columnist for the Des Moines Register, speculates that Iowa smokers may also show a little resistance to that state's nany-state efforts to snuff out cigarettes in privately owned establishments. Commenters volunteer knowledge of several bars "that are ignoring the commie smoking ban."

This is an encouraging start to the Independence Day weekend.

Happy Fourth of July.

Americans like to get high -- and so what?

The U.S. is still a global leader in at least one area: getting high! According to a new World Health Organization survey of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and cocaine use, "Globally, drug use is not distributed evenly. In general, the US had among the highest levels of use of all drugs. Much lower levels were observed in lower income countries in Africa and the Middle East, and lower levels of use were reported in the Asian locales covered."

This is especially remarkable, given the fanatical "war on drugs" and puritanical attacks on alcohol and tobacco consumption Americans have suffered in recent years. Indeed, the WHO study found that punitive policies do little or nothing to reduce demand for intoxicants.

The US, which has been driving much of the world's drug research and drug policy agenda, stands out with higher levels of use of alcohol, cocaine, and cannabis, despite punitive illegal drug policies, as well as (in many US states), a higher minimum legal alcohol drinking age than many comparable developed countries. The Netherlands, with a less criminally punitive approach to cannabis use than the US, has experienced lower levels of use, particularly among younger adults. Clearly, by itself, a punitive policy towards possession and use accounts for limited variation in nation-level rates of illegal drug use.

The biggest factor for drug use seems to be income: affluent people can afford to get high, and across the world they tend to take advantage of their opportunities. Illegal drugs (cannabis and cocaine) are primarily consumed by single people. If you're living alone and you're rolling in the dough, there's a good chance that you're a head -- especially if you're American.

So, why are people -- especially us tipsy Yanks -- so prone to use drugs, even when the law dictates otherwise? Could it be that people perceive that they gain some benefit from using intoxicants?

That's a good question to ask on day when not only news of the WHO survey makes headlines, but we also read reports that hallucinogenic "magic" mushrooms causes many users to feel "spiritual" effects that actually improve their health.

In a previous study, the researchers gave psilocybin to 36 healthy, well-educated volunteers with active spiritual lives. After taking the substance under controlled conditions, 60 percent of the participants reported have a "full mystical experience."

When the researchers checked with the volunteers 14 months later, the same percentage said taking psilocybin increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.

"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," lead investigator Roland Griffiths, a professor in the departments of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and neuroscience, said in a prepared statement.

The drug is reported in the Journal of Psychopharmacology to have positive effects on "people with conditions such as cancer, depression and drug dependence." The researchers found no evidence of harm from the drug experiences.

This is a factor that is often missing from reports about drug use. Countering the risks of even the most potentially dangerous intoxicants are benefits enjoyed by users that partially or complete offset the downside. People get high because they get something valuable out of their experiences. That's something sufficiently valuable that the threat of legal penalties acts as no real deterrent.

There's a lesson in there for policy makers -- if they're paying attention.

Chicago, where you do what you're told

The windy city gets raked over the coals for its poor treatment of personal freedom in a Chicago Tribune OpEd written by Reason magazine's Radley Balko. A taste:

Chicago reigns supreme when it comes to treating its citizens like children (Las Vegas topped our rankings as America's freest city). Chicagoans pay the second-highest cigarette tax in the country, and the sixth-highest tax on alcohol. Chicago has more traffic-light cameras than any city in America (despite studies questioning their effectiveness), restricts cell phone use while driving, and it's quickly moving toward a creepy public surveillance system similar to London's.

Don't miss the multitude of comments attached to Balko's article,  many belonging to two general threads: one applauding the restrictions because they make Chicago more in tune with the poster's values and preferences (my taste, now mandatory); the other pointing out that a heavily regulated city gives the folks in charge unparalleled opportunities for shaking downs folks who violate or want to violate the rules.

The column is based on an upcoming Reason article assessing 35 American cities on how they "balance individual freedom with government paternalism. We ranked the cities on how much freedom they afford their residents to indulge in alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex, gambling and food. And, for good measure, we also looked at the cities' gun laws, use of traffic and surveillance cameras, and tossed in an 'other' category to catch weird laws such as New York's ban on unlicensed dancing, or Chicago's tax on bottled water."

Chicago, by the way, comes in dead last. Las Vegas is first.

There are plenty of assessments of various jurisdictions' economic freedom rankings, but this is the first I'm aware of  that actually tries to rank cities based on their overall respect for personal freedom. I look forward to seeing the full piece.

Germans and Angelinos tell regulators to get lost

In Germany, of all places, smokers are busy building loopholes into the country's internationally trendy anti-smoking laws where possible, and outright ignoring them otherwise.

The head of Frankfurt's civil order office, Hasso Haas, said his staff has better things to do than chase smokers.

"We are not the anti-smoking police. We do not patrol. If we receive a complaint we will look into it, but no, we are not proactive. It is our interpretation of the law that we do not have to be, and I think our colleagues in other states see things the same way," he told AFP.

Haas said his office instituted a period of grace and had only began issuing fines in March.

"Since then we have fined 25 pubs 280 euros (440 dollars) each but nobody has paid up."

He predicted that before long the ban in bars would be relaxed throughout the country, where nearly one in three adults smoke.

"I'll bet that within a year we will see a nationwide liberalisation. There is massive resistance and you cannot have exceptions in some places and not in others, people find it unfair and defy the law."

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, taco vendors who sell their savory fare from catering trucks are thumbing their noses at a new ban on parking in any one place for more than an hour. It's a law that County Supervisor Gloria Molina openly admits is intended to favor politically potent restaurants who resent the mobile competition.

A controversial new set of regulations regarding taco trucks took effect May 15, making it possible to bring criminal charges against lingering catering truck drivers.

But an organization of drivers said they do not plan to comply with terms of the new law. ...

Under the banner “Carne Asada is not a Crime,” more than 8,000 people have signed an online petition at saveourtacotrucks.org calling for the ordinance to be repealed.

Roxane Marquez, Molina’s press deputy, said that there were no plans to repeal the ordinance despite the defiance of some drivers.

Politicians can push and push, but nicotine fiends and taco lovers will only go so far.

French and Canadians defy smoking bans

France's high-profile smoking ban, which took effect in January, was honored at the Cannes film festival -- in the breach. Jurors, including jury president Sean Penn, lit up in defiance of the law.

Toronto's club-goers sport a similarly individualist ethos. Seventy-three restaurants, clubs and businesses have been charged for permitting their patrons to light-up despite Ontario's two-year-old ban.

Cleveland is doing its part to scoff at the law with a proliferation of underground smokehouses, but most Americans have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to telling the busybodies to take a hike.

Cory Maye case gets video treatment

Reason.tv has posted an excellent video, narrated by Drew Carey, about the horrible injustice being done to Cory Maye. If you're not familiar with the case, Maye was dozing in a living room chair one night, in December 2001, when he was awakened by the sound of somebody trying to break down his front door. He fled to a bedroom where his 18-month-old daughter was sleeping, retrieved a handgun, and prepared to defend himself in the darkened room.

Intruders rapidly forced their way into the house, and into the bedroom. Maye fired three times.

He killed a man -- Officer Ron Jones, the son of Prentiss, Mississippi's police chief. Jones was apparently there to raid Maye's neighbor, a known drug dealer, although the warrant was for both apartments of the duplex.

Maye claims he had no idea the raiders were police. The jury didn't believe him. He's been in prison ever since -- originally on death row, though he's now serving a life sentence.

Maye's attorney was later declared incompetent, the medical examiner who testified on behalf of the prosecution is now the subject of national scrutiny over his credentials and integrity, and the confidential informant relied upon by police has revealed himself as a vicious racist.

The journalistic footwork on Maye's plight has been done by Radley Balko, who is truly one of the best ink-stained wretches in the country today. His original article is here. Balko's continuing blog coverage of the case is here.

And the video is here:

For peddling a buzz, Cindy McCain gets rich and Greg Gibson serves hard time

What's the reward for selling Americans a little stress relief? If you're the wife of a presidential candidate with her hand in the beer trade, it can mean tens of millions of dollars. But if you're just a guy who peddles the wrong buzz-delivery system, it can be years of hard time.

Hensley & Co. is a major dealer in a popular intoxicant that was once illegal but is now enjoyed by millions of Americans. As the third-largest Anheuser-Busch wholesaler in the United States, Hensley & Co. has made company chairman Cindy McCain, Senator John McCain's wife, wealthy to the tune of about $100 million through its network of 5,000 accounts and over 600 vehicles.

Gregory Alan Gibson allegedly spent a couple of years transporting shipments of a popular intoxicant around the United States, but not in one of Cindy McCain's trucks. Instead, according to Maricopa County, Arizona, prosecutors and jurors, he was paid $4,000, $8,000, or $12,000 at a time to drive shipments of an intoxicant that's still illegal: marijuana. Like one of Hensley's drivers (although he was certainly better-paid), Gibson drove shipments where he was told, and was paid a fee for his services.

Cindy McCain may get deluxe taxpayer-funded quarters in the White House as a partial result of the wealth and connections that come with masterminding sales of her preferred intoxicant. For transporting shipments of his preferred intoxicant, Greg Gibson has already spent years in somewhat less-splendid taxpayer-funded quarters at the Great Plains Correctional Facility, a privately run prison that houses many of Arizona's convicted lawbreakers far from home in Hinton, Oklahoma. And a life of financial ruin along with the dodgy status of a convicted felon awaits him upon his release from prison.

Gibson became a statistic in the war on drugs on March 25, 2003 -- the day his guilty verdicts were handed down. He was sentenced to concurrent prison terms resulting in ten years behind bars, and fined $150,000 for each of twelve counts, plus surcharges of 60%.

Greg Gibson came to my attention courtesy of his fiancee, Melissa. She contacted me after reading a post I wrote in February on the large population of non-violent drug offenders in American prisons. She wrote to me with some trepidation, concerned that corrections authorities might retaliate against Gibson for bringing his case to light -- perhaps by transferring him to a less desirable prison. The reaction of other defendants in the case, particularly those who testified for reduced sentences, was also a concern. In the end, Melissa told me that they decided to go ahead and seek whatever publicity they could get for his situation.

The crimes Gibson was convicted of consisted of Illegally Conducting an Enterprise, Conspiracy and twelve counts of Transfer for Sale, Sale or Transfer of Marijuana. There's not a crime against property in the lot -- let alone a conviction for even the most minor act of violence.

But as non-violent as his "crimes" were, and despite the fact that about a third of Americans think the activities for which he was convicted should be perfectly legal, Gibson will be cooling his heels for a long time to come. According to the Arizona Department of Corrections Website, Gibson won't be eligible for release until, at best, August 7, 2011. At that time, he'll owe the Arizona Drug Enforcement Fund $2,888,000 -- the total of twelve separate fines of $150,000, plus 60%.

By contrast, when Clifton Bennett, the 18-year-old son of then Arizona state Senate President Ken Bennett, was found guilty in 2006 of sodomizing 18 boys, he received a rather lenient 30 days in jail and three years probation, with the likelihood of no permanent criminal record.

Even people without connections who are convicted of serious crimes get less severe sentences than Gibson did for transporting marijuana. In May of this year, Jonathan David Alldredge received 4 1/2 years in prison for shooting a man to death outside a diner in Lake Havasu City. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

And Nicholas David Torres was sentenced to a 3 1/2 years in prison plus five years of probation for beating an elderly man with a baseball bat.

One year is the sentence handed down to Felipe Mazo, for killing a woman in a hit-and-run car accident.

Unfortunately, this disparity between sentences handed down for crimes of violence and abuse of minors on the one hand, and non-violent drug offenses on the other, isn't confined to Gibson's case. In Arizona Prison Crisis: A Call for Smart on Crime Solutions (PDF), a report prepared in 2004 for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, authors Judith Greene and Kevin Pranis point out that Arizona has the highest incarceration rate in the western U.S. and the ninth highest rate in the country.

Why? Well, according to Greene and Pranis, "Arizona’s high incarceration rate is driven by a rigid mandatory sentencing system that severely restricts judges’ discretion in imposing sentences and crowds prisons with non-violent substance abusers." A majority of Arizona's prisoners, they write, are non-violent offenders, with one-in-five behind bars for drug offenses.

In fact, say Greene and Pranis, in Arizona "[s]entences were longer for drug sales than for many violent crimes. The average sentence imposed for drug sales (4.3 years, including marijuana sales), was longer than the average sentence imposed for assault (four years) or weapons charges (3.8 years) and the same as the average sentence for arson."

Note that these lengthy sentences for non-violent drug crimes can be handed down even for first offences. The only other arrest mentioned in Gibson's court records is one in Missouri involving the same activity that resulted in his lengthy sentence in Arizona.

As I mentioned above, Greg Gibson won't be eligible for release until 2011. The long years of his already long sentence that Greg Gibson is expected to serve behind bars can be blamed on the state's "truth-in-sentencing" statute mandating that prisoners serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. Say Greene and Pranis, "Since the law was implemented in 1994, the average time served for non-violent offenses has increased far faster than the time served by violent and other serious person offenders."

It wasn't supposed to be this way. In 1996, Arizona voters passed a ballot initiative -- that year's Proposition 200 -- mandating that non-violent drug offenders arrested for simple possession or use of an illegal drug be sent to drug treatment instead of prison for their first and second offenses. But the measure only applied to use and possession. Once a commercial aspect entered the picture, government officials were not only free, but essentially required, to impose draconian sentences.

Those long sentences for selling officially disfavored intoxicants to willing customers aren't just draconian in their effects on the lives of the convicted, they also raise questions about the integrity of the process that puts them behind bars for such sizable chunks of their lives. Melissa insists that the witnesses against Gibson were much bigger players than he and that they spun tales to please the prosecution and win reduced sentences. I have no way of testing the veracity of the witnesses' testimony, but it's clear they had strong incentive to say whatever would please the prosecutors in the case.

See this exchange between a defense attorney and a prosecution witness against Gibson and his co-defendants.

Q. All right. So, no matter what you do or say, you are not going to get more than 175 months in prison, correct?

A. Correct.

Q. And then depending on what you do and say, you may get substantially less than that, correct?

A. Yes.

Q. All right. And depending on what you do and say here and in Detroit, you theoretically could end up with probation, couldn't you?

A. Yes. ....

Q. Okay. Now, you're obligated under the terms of that agreement to provide active assistance to the United States government in good faith, true?

A. True.

Q. That's in the plea agreement, right?

A. Yes.

Q. But the person who determines whether you have done that, whether you have complied with the agreement, is, in fact, the Assistant U.S. Attorney, correct?

A. Correct.

Q. It's not the judge or somebody else, is it?

A. Correct.

Note that another witness faced a possible sentence of 20 years in federal prison and 269 years in state prison that he was trying to mitigate through his testimony. That's a lot of time behind bars that might tempt anybody to polish the truth to whatever extent is necessary to win the favor of the people holding his freedom in the balance.

Manufacturing testimony is hardly a new phenomenon. As reported ten years ago by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and more recently by Reason magazine, jailhouse networks have sprung up to sell prisoners information they need to craft credible, but false, testimony in an effort to gain reduced sentences. According to the Post-Gazette, at least one man made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling inmates confidential data. Actual participants in a case don't need to buy information -- they already have the knowledge necessary to build a story capable of winning prosecutors' favor.

I'm not arguing that Greg Gibson is an angel. According to prosecutors in his case, he fled custody at one point and tried to bribe the bail bondsman who was sent to retrieve him.

But who can blame him?

Threatened with years of lost freedom for engaging in another victimless, but illegal, trade, Deborah Jeane Palfrey chose to hang herself. Desperation makes people do ... well ... desperate things.

But if Gibson isn't an angel, he's not a devil either. He didn't kill anybody, nor did he molest a single child, or assault an old man, and it's hard to see why he should face fines and prison time more harsh than that given to those who did.

In fact, it's hard to justify punishing Greg Gibson at all for dealing in the means to get a buzz when Cindy McCain is rewarded so richly for doing pretty much the same thing, and on a much larger scale.

Uncharitable prohibitionists snuff out fund-raising

Advocates of forbidding private businesses to allow their customers to smoke are fond of claiming the bans have little impact on business, and whatever loss of patronage there is is purely temporary as smokers adjust to the new normal. At least for some businesses, though, that's not proving to be true. According to the New York Times, charity bingo games are withering and dying wherever cigarettes have been snuffed out.

In Minnesota, which adopted a statewide ban on smoking in all indoor workplaces in October, revenue from all charity gambling dropped nearly 13 percent in the last quarter of 2007, compared to the same quarter the year before, according to state officials. More than half of the drop — the equivalent of about $100 million annually — was attributed to the new law, they said.

Charlie Lindstrom, who runs the bingo nights at an American Legion post in Fergus Falls, Minn., said some of his former customers now drove to casinos on Indian reservations, where they can puff away, or across the border to Fargo, N.D., where veterans’ organizations are exempt from that state’s smoking ban.

...

Mr. Lindstrom is not alone. Managers of charity bingo games in California, New Jersey, New York and Washington State also say their states’ smoking bans have forced cutbacks in their budgets and in their support for various causes.

Few believe they can cultivate new nonsmoking players. They say smoking goes with bingo like peanut butter with jelly. Michael J. Surwill, bingo chairman at Elks Lodge No. 2501 in Ocean Springs, Miss., estimated that smokers outnumbered nonsmokers three to one at the lodge’s weekly game.

And the dip in fund-raising doesn't appear to be a temporary phenomenon either.

[B]ingo managers in states where bans on smoking have been in effect longer say nonsmokers cannot make up for the decline in revenues from smokers. Instead, they say, their industry has undergone a wave of forced consolidation.

“We actually benefited from it, but for the wrong reason — my competition was forced to close,” said Clyde Bock, bingo manager for the Ruth Dykeman Children’s Center in Seattle.

When Washington’s ban on smoking took effect in 2005, Mr. Bock was able to partially enclose a porch where bingo players could still smoke, and he got it approved as a separate facility. “It cost me $8,000, but it protected my customer base,” he said. “Other games weren’t so lucky.”

Still, revenues are down. In 2006, the bingo operation at the children’s center, which then belonged to Big Brothers Big Sisters, generated about $325,000 a year, after expenses, and employed 17 people. A year later, under the auspices of the center, it produced $150,000 and employed 13 people.

“People underestimate the impact smoking bans will have,” Mr. Bock said.

Washington used to be home to 100 bingo halls that raised money for charity. Now there are fewer than 20.

Culturally, it seems, bingo really is linked to smoking. If you take smoking out of the game, the players go elsewhere. Maybe they stay at home, or maybe they play bingo at friends houses where they can smoke, but they don't go to fund-raiser bingo games.

The article doesn't delve into the issue, but I have to assume that's a particular problem for charity-related games. Where a neighborhood bar can thumb its nose at the law and pay a few fines that amount to less than the profits from disobedience, or an underground-economy entrepreneur can operate a smoking-friendly business completely in the shadows (like the strip-joint smoke-easies proliferating in Cleveland), Big Brothers/Big Sisters or a children's hospital have limited options. By and large, they really don't want to be linked to civil disobedience or shadow economic activity. The charities are well and truly screwed.

Eventually, the charities will find new ways of raising funds. In the meantime, though, the fate of bingo games serves as an object lesson in the economic damage wreaked by restrictive laws on businesses that don't have the option of defying those laws. The customers offended by those laws can go elsewhere, including underground; the businesses just suffer.

Lost in the (fragrant) smoke screen

For the traditional 4/20 smokeout at the University of Colorado in Boulder, roughly 10,000 people showed up to defy marijuana prohibition and call for changes in the law.

With all of that highly illegal sweet-smelling smoke hovering over the crowd, did police continue their past efforts to harass, identify and arrest scofflaws?

Nope -- not a chance.

Officers in the past have gone to great lengths to catch people in the illegal act of smoking pot on 4/20.

In 2006, CU police dispatched undercover photographers to snap pictures of smokers. Photos of 150 alleged offenders then were posted on the department’s Web site, and witnesses were offered $50 to positively identify the suspects — who then were ticketed. Another year, smokers on Farrand were doused with sprinklers.

“We can’t do the same thing year after year,” [CU police Cmdr. Brad] Wiesley said hours before Sunday’s smoking began. “So I doubt we’ll do anything like the pictures. ... There’s no way our 12 to 15 officers are going to be able to deal with a crowd of 10,000. We just can’t do strong enforcement when we’re outnumbered 700 or 800 to one.”

Roughly 5,000 people gathered at the University of California - Santa Cruz for a similar event. Rich Westphal, task force commander with the Santa Cruz County Narcotics Enforcement Team, called the mass display of civil disobedience "a moral slap in the face to the cause" of drug prohibition.

That's right. Mass civil disobedience creates a reality of its own. The police either have to massively escalate their efforts and expense in an effort to counter the non-compliers -- and probably fail anyway -- or else give up. Police in Boulder and Santa Cruz quite sensibly chose to step back and leave the crowds to their peaceful, albeit illegal, pursuits.

There's a lesson here for opponents of any law. The more people they can convince to join them in disobedience of the law, the more difficult it becomes to enforce the law. Eventually, the disagreeable regulation becomes nothing more than an annoying technicality to be ignored by opponents and enforcers alike.

Spread it thick

Marijuana butter?

Prescott Valley Police arrested a Prescott Valley man on April 20 in the 3200 block of Robert Road on various charges including marijuana for sale. ...

They found nine 5-ounce jars of marijuana butter in the refrigerator. Marijuana butter is a combination of ordinary household butter and a cooked-down version of marijuana.

I don't eat dairy products -- can't stand the stuff -- but I wonder if that would work with hummus?

Still number one at putting people behind bars

Visiting an issue I've written about in the past, a New York Times story starts off with a troubling lede:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Unfortunately, as with too many Times articles, you have to go digging to find the meat of the story. The end result is still troubling, but rather more mixed than the lede suggests. As it turns out, the U.S. does have an extraordinarily high incarceration rate: 751 people behind bars for every 100,000 in population.

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

That puts the U.S. as, by far, the leader in an embarrassing category, and raises the question: why?

A big part of the answer is drug prohibition. The Times reports that, of the 2.3 million incarcerated Americans, 500,000 are in jails and prisons for drug crimes. That's up from 40,000 in 1980. About one-fifth of the prison population is there for engaging in activities that shouldn't be punishable at all.

And that's without even touching on other "crimes" that the government has no right to punish, such as gambling, prostitution and violation of many firearms laws.

But other countries have stupid laws on the books, too. And even if you eliminate victimless offenses, that still leaves the U.S. with a high incarceration rate. What gives?

For starters, more than half (52.1%) of all prisoners in state facilities committed violent offenses, according to the Department of Justice. Another one-fifth (20.8%) of prisoners in state facilities committed property crimes. That means that a lot of crimes that should be punished are being committed.

But how should they be punished? Here's where the difference lies. As the Times puts it: "If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher."

As an example, the articles cites the fact that American burglars serve an average of 16 months in prison, compared with five months in Canada and seven months in England. And English-speaking countries tend to have longer sentences than non-English-speaking countries.

That's especially bad when you're talking about prisoners who shouldn't be incarcerated at all. It's also bad when you consider prisoners caught up by various states' three-strikes laws, which can impose draconian penalties on criminals convicted of even minor crimes. According to a 2004 Justice Policy Institute analysis of California's three-strikes provision, "over 42,000 persons—or more than one-in-four prisoners—are serving a doubled or 25-years-to-life sentence."

But is the U.S. wrong to lock up murderers, muggers and rapists for longer than their counterparts in other countries?

“As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized” thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.

From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.

“These figures,” Mr. Cassell wrote, “should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate.”

Other commentators were more definitive. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.”

But, the Times goes on to point out, Canada experiences rises and falls in crime in parallel with the U.S. without imposing U.S.-style punishments.

So, what's the verdict?

I think the case is clear for eliminating laws against victimless "crimes" in which people have the right to engage whether politicians like it or not. It's bad enough to arrest somebody for selling a few pills or trading sex for money; it compounds the wrong to then impose some of the world's toughest sentences when no punishment at all is appropriate.

Also, three-strikes laws should be revisited, if only to ensure that severe sentences are being imposed only for serious crimes.

And some relatively minor crimes that are deserving of punishment are probably best treated through means other than long -- or any -- prison sentence.

But is a high incarceration rate an entirely bad thing when applied to real crimes against people and property?

That's just not clear yet.

Where law ends and resistance begins

Just how susceptible are societies to top-down change, with government using the force of law to impose the preferences of one faction on the unwilling members of another faction? In 2002, an intriguing and underappreciated book was published by Oxford University Press that addressed just that question. Can Gun Control Work?, by James B. Jacobs, Warren E. Burger Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Research in Crime and Justice at New York University, purports to address only the practicality of restricting firearms ownership in the United States, but it really applies to all circumstances in which governments try to impose policies disliked by significant percentages of their subject populations.

Jacobs himself sees the wider application of his book's findings. In the introduction, he writes:

Interestingly, many gun control believers are atheists when it comes to government regulation of mood- and mind-altering drugs. They insist that drugs cannot be kept out of the hands of those who want to use them. They point out that after an investment of many billions of dollars, and the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of individuals, our three-decade-long drug war has achieved few, if any, positive results. Does the drug war not cast doubt on schemes for gun prohibition or stringent regulation?

Indeed, it does. Advocates of gun control would do well to recognize that the failure of drug prohibition is virtually guaranteed to be replicated in the implementation of firearms regulations. Likewise, supporters of gun rights should realize that their zeal for the right to bear arms is paralleled among devotees of the autonomy of the human body and the right to self-medicate.

But the failure of drug laws is already well-documented -- indeed, it's a main feature in news stories that follow the latest drug busts and the ingenuity of drug smugglers, manufacturers and dealers. Have gun laws experienced similar failures that support Jacobs's point?

You bet.

In recent years, several states and municipalities passed laws mandating the registration of assault rifles. These laws were overwhelmingly ignored. In Boston and Cleveland, the rate of compliance with bans on assault rifles is estimated at 1%. Out of the 100,000 to 300,000 assault rifles estimated to be in private hands in New Jersey, 947 were registered, an additional 888 rendered inoperable, and 4 turned over to the authorities. In California, nearly 90% of the approximately 300,000 assault weapons owners did not register their weapons.

After summarizing the history of restrictions and the inherent weakness of the various proposals for registering firearms, restricting sales, banning some types of weapons and otherwise attempting to choke off private ownership of guns, Jacobs concludes:

If black market activity in connection with the drug laws is any indication, a decades-long "war on handguns" might resemble a low-grade civil war more than a law-enforcement initiative.

Well, that's a pretty definitive prognosis on gun control. And, based as it is on the failure of drug prohibition (and alcohol prohibition before that), it would seem to apply to any similar effort to restrict popular practices, substances and possessions. In fact, it's a lesson that anybody with a passing interest in history could learn fairly easily. At least since the Ottoman Empire's doomed efforts to prohibit the use of tobacco, laws that have suffered any real degree of unpopularity among the people subject to them have sputtered and died -- though often leaving strife, expense and ruined lives in their wake.

People, it seems, are remarkably unresponsive to legislation they dislike, even when the penalties for defiance are draconian (the Ottoman sultan, like the Russian czar, actually imposed the death penalty for smokers).

In a few cases, that may not be terribly important to the authorities. Politicians probably don't care that they get nothing approaching full compliance with taxes so long as they squeeze enough money from their subjects to pay for their pet projects and fill their personal accounts. But most laws are rendered ineffective by widespread defiance; worse, from a government perspective, scofflawry demonstrates the impotence of the state.

That should be enough reason to avoid grandiose legislative gestures. Why reveal the ruling regime as relatively feeble and disdained by much of the populace by passing laws that can't be enforced?

But there seems to be a popular delusion that transforming society is simply a matter of wanting hard enough and cleverly crafting legislation that everybody must follow as if it were a law of nature. As Jacobs puts it in the gun control context, "To a large extent, gun control is something that people believe in. It is embraced in principle without attention to practicalities, implementation and enforcement problems, and cost." Inevitably, the gun controllers, like all totalitarian "reformers," are disappointed when their neighbors prove resistant to social engineering.

I'm not troubled that a series of failed prohibitions and restrictions erodes the legitimacy of the state -- that's a beneficial outcome in my view. But the attempt to enforce those laws inevitably results in people fined, imprisoned and killed before the ultimate ineffectiveness of the policy in question becomes obvious to even the densest lawmakers.

For the sake of our liberty, it's a good thing that people are not anywhere near as malleable as politicians and frenzied advocates of schemes for "improving" society would like. It's just unfortunate that the lesson has to be relearned each generation.

Drug warriors seek to muzzle critics

Over at the Huffington Post, Maia Szalavitz has the lowdown on federal prosecutors' efforts to convict a physician who specializes in treating chronic pain -- and to muzzle family members and allies, including Siobhan Reynolds of the Pain Relief Network, who have spoken out in the press on behalf of the defendant.

New doping scandal

So, if it's congresscritters' business when athletes employed by privately owned sports teams use performance-enhancing drugs, should we expect to see Henry Waxman dragging physicists and biologists before his committee now that scientists are copping to boosting their brainpower with a host of pharmaceuticals?

According to Nature:

Nature ran its own informal survey. 1,400 people from 60 countries responded to the online poll.

We asked specifically about three drugs: methylphenidate (Ritalin), a stimulant normally used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder but well-known on college campuses as a 'study aid'; modafinil (Provigil), prescribed to treat sleep disorders but also used off-label to combat general fatigue or overcome jet lag; and beta blockers, drugs prescribed for cardiac arrhythmia that also have an anti-anxiety effect. ...

One in five respondents said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory. Use did not differ greatly across age-groups (see line graph, right), which will surprise some. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in Bethesda, Maryland, says that household surveys suggest that stimulant use is highest in people aged 18–25 years, and in students.

For those who choose to use, methylphenidate was the most popular: 62% of users reported taking it. 44% reported taking modafinil, and 15% said they had taken beta blockers such as propanolol, revealing an overlap between drugs. 80 respondents specified other drugs that they were taking. The most common of these was adderall, an amphetamine similar to methylphenidate. But there were also reports of centrophenoxine, piractem, dexedrine and various alternative medicines such as ginkgo and omega-3 fatty acids.

Oh those insidious dopers ...

Punished for offering a choice on smoking

Hamish Howitt, of Blackpool in the U.K, owns two bars. In one of them, the Happy Scots Bar, he forbids smoking. The other bar, Del Boy's, caters to smokers. Because he offers his customers a choice, Howitt has been fined £1,950 and told to pay £2,000 costs -- he even faces potential jail time. British law, as with the law in so many U.S. jurisdictions, doesn't permit freedom of choice on tobacco -- smoking in many privately owned establishments is simply banned.

As Howitt told the BBC:

"I'm not telling people how to live. You cannot make us all compulsory joggers and orange juice drinkers.

"It's not the judges I am defying - it's the government.

"I'm giving choice. One of my bars has non-smoking staff serving you and you are not allowed to smoke.

"The other bar is served by smokers. It's so simple and it's called choice, and this government has denied us choice."

Howitt shows more commitment to his cause than do most bar owners ticked off by smoking bans that tell them how to run their businesses and often drive away customers. He's founded a registered political party, UK-FAGS, devoted to protecting freedom of choice (complete with a catchy and profane theme song) and has voiced his willingness in press interviews to go to jail if necessary.

By himself, Howitt's crusade is probably doomed. Government officials will be more than happy to crush one businessman as an example to others who chafe under rules that violate their property rights and their customers' right to choose establishments that cater to their tastes.

But if there were more Howitts in Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere, all of them willing to tell government officials to go to hell ... that might well change matters for the better.

Until then, smokers will probably have to content themselves by patronizing those establishments that quietly flout the smoking ban.

New drug panic

I don't know much about salvia divinorum, except some rumors I heard during my more experimental days that the stuff can give you a pretty nasty high. That impression is reinforced by the entry over at Erowid, which says, "Its effects are considered unpleasant by many people." That makes it an unlikely candidate for reaching a wide audience of pleasure-seekers.

Nevertheless, the hallucinogen seems to be the panic-fueling drug of the moment, billed as the "next marijuana." (A hallucinogen is the next marijuana? How?) Florida is on the verge of banning the stuff because ... well, just because, as far as I can tell.

Other states are also considering criminalizing salvia divinorum after "[o]ne teen in Delaware killed himself because of Salvia" according to one report.

Ummm ... what? He killed himself because of the drug? Please explain.

To its credit, the Associated Press has a much clearer summary of the story.

In the Delaware suicide, the boy's mother told reporters that salvia made his mood darker but he justified its use by citing its legality. According to reports, the autopsy found no traces of the drug in his system, but the medical examiner listed it as a contributing cause.

So salvia divinorum wasn't even in his body when he killed himself, but he'd used it in the past, so the ME made a very tenuous link.

And thus is a modern urban legend born: salvia divinorum killed a kid in Delaware!

Mike Strain, a former Louisiana state legislator who pushed to outlaw salvia in his state, argues, "You don't make everybody happy when you outlaw drugs. You save one child and it's worth it."

But when police start arresting users and raiding dealers, and somebody gets shot by a pumped-up narc, will it still be "worth it?"

All the world's a (smoky) stage

From Minnesota, via the Associated Press:

A new state ban on smoking in restaurants and other nightspots contains an exception for performers in theatrical productions. So some bars are getting around the ban by printing up playbills, encouraging customers to come in costume, and pronouncing them "actors."

Customers are apparently pretty enthusiastic about the clever workaround. They're wearing wild outfits, staging skits, putting on accents and -- most important -- they're going to the bars that are using the loophole.

Proving anew there's no business like show business, Anderson said her theater-night receipts have averaged $2,000 - up from $500 right after the ban kicked in. Similarly, Bauman said revenue at The Rock dropped off 30 percent after the ban took effect, then shot back up to normal once the bar began allowing smoking again.

I don't expect the "theatrical productions" will be a long-term solution; legislators will, no doubt, tighten the law as best they can, and enforcers will simply start citing bars, no matter what the law says.

But the costumed rebellion, replete with enthusiastic customers happily puffing on their cigarettes, makes it clear that there is a strong constituency for allowing bars and their patrons to work out their own smoking rules. When bars are packed to the rafters with happy scofflaws, lawmakers can't claim to be doing patrons any favors.

Of course, prohibitionists have stumbled across that little hurdle to their efforts, so they've largely abandoned claims to be helping bar and restaurant customers, and now claim to be the friends of the waiters and bartenders. The American Lung Association makes that argument explicitly on its Web page dedicated to the glories of the smoke-free workplace.

Separating smokers from nonsmokers, cleaning the air and ventilating buildings cannot eliminate exposure to secondhand smoke. Smokefree workplace policies are the only effective way to eliminate exposure.

Nobody, however, seems to have asked the workers whether they want or need protection. Some are smokers themselves, many certainly appreciate the tips that come with a room full of happy customers and those most offended by smoke are unlikely to take work in a smoky establishment to begin with.

So we're left with laws intended to prevent people from smoking, sponsored and passed by intolerant folks who aren't subject to the effects of the practice themselves, but who are apparently offended that anybody could want to indulge in the vice.

Who's acting out now?

TV writers endorse jury nullification

What happens when you spend years writing about gritty life in an old-line city like Baltimore, and the tribulations visited on everyday people by the prohibition of certain disfavored intoxicants? If you're smart, you turn against the war on drugs and defect to the opposition. Five television writers, Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price and David Simon, for The Wire, HBO's acclaimed crime drama, penned an OpEd for Time magazine denouncing drug laws.

[F]or five seasons, we answered lamely, offering arguments about economic priorities or drug policy, debating theoreticals within our tangled little drama. We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked the question as best we could.

Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.

Just as important, the authors announced their own plans for undermining prohibitionist efforts. And they call on readers to join them.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.

I've written often about both the immorality and the failures of efforts to criminalize people's politically incorrect taste in cocktails. I've also mentioned jury nullification -- the right of jurors to judge the laws as well as the facts, and to render a "not guilty" verdict even in defiance of the law if they believe the law to be unjust or improperly applied.

But I don't have the reach of Time magazine or of TV writers; it's a pleasure to see new names join the fight, and lend their stature to the cause.

Jury nullification has enormous potential as a powerful tool for defanging the government's efforts to enforce many of its more obnoxious and intrusive laws. There's also evidence that the tactic is in wider use than is often credited. In 1999, the Washington Post wrote:

The most concrete sign of the trend is the sharp jump in the percentage of trials that end in hung juries. For decades, a 5 percent hung jury rate was considered the norm, derived from a landmark study of the American jury by Harry Kalven Jr. and Hans Zeisel published 30 years ago. In recent years, however, that figure has doubled and quadrupled, depending on location. Some local courts in California, for example, have reported more than 20 percent of trials ending in hung juries. Federal criminal cases in Washington, D.C., averaged 15 percent hung juries in 1996 (the most recent year for which data were available), three times the rate in 1991.

A hung jury is simply one in which the 12 men and women around the table disagree over whether to convict or acquit. But judges, lawyers and others who study the phenomenon suspect that more and more differences are erupting not over the evidence in these cases, but over whether the law being broken is fair.

Very little has appeared in the popular press since that article about jury nullification, but I suspect that's no accident. If juries are rebelling in increasing numbers, as the Post suggested, it's unlikely that judges and prosecutors want to advertise the fact, and further encourage opponents of various intrusive and oppressive laws to take their battles into the courtrooms. Many advocates of jury nullification lament the supposed failure of their efforts to take root in the public imagination. I suspect that they're underrating their success. I think nullification has become fairly widespread, and the powers-that-be are desperate to downplay the threat.

I hope I'm right. And I hope The Wire writers help to spur interest in a powerful tool for hobbling government efforts to continue the brutal and oppressive drug war, as well as other laws that violate individual rights and offend jurors' consciences.

War on drugs has prisons bulging at the seams

According to a new report from the Pew Center on the States, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 (PDF), more than 1% of all American adults are cooling their heels behind bars -- a record number. That's a staggering figure, but one that grows even more frightening when you examine specific groups. "While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine."

At a time when U.S. global leadership is being questioned in a variety of areas, there's no doubt that this country still leads in its ability to lock people up.

The United States incarcerates more people than any country in the world, including the far more populous nation of China. At the start of the new year, the American penal system held more than 2.3 million adults. China was second, with 1.5 million people behind bars, and Russia was a distant third with 890,000 inmates, according to the latest available figures. Beyond the sheer number of inmates, America also is the global leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry, outpacing nations like South Africa and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the U.S, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.

Could it be that so many more Americans deserve incarceration than Chinese or Germans? Why are these people locked up?

The Pew Center blames the surge in the ranks of the imprisoned primarily on policy choices. Examining Florida, for instance, the report says:

While crime and a growing resident population play a role, most of the growth, analysts agree, stemmed from a host of correctional policies and practices adopted by the state. One of the first came in 1995, when the legislature abolished “good time” credits and discretionary release by the parole board, and required that all prisoners—regardless of their crime, prior record, or risk to recidivate—serve 85 percent of their sentence. Next came a “zero tolerance” policy and other measures mandating that probation officers report every offender who violated any condition of supervision and increasing prison time for these “technical violations.” As a result, the number of violators in Florida prisons has jumped by an estimated 12,000.

These numbers seem to hold up across the country. In California, "A 2005 study showed that more than two-thirds of parolees in the Golden State were returned to prison within three years of release; of those, 39 percent were due to technical violations."

OK. But that doesn't tell us what brought this teeming mass of inmates to the attention of the justice system to begin with. What did they do that would make them subject to policy decisions about parole and probation? If we have a disproportionate ratio of the world's rapists, robbers and murderers in this country, maybe we need all of that expensive prison capacity.

Unfortunately, the Pew report just doesn't go there. It talks about parole, probation, long prison sentences and the high costs of incarceration. But the document steadfastly avoids addressing the overwhelming reason U.S. government officials incarcerate so many of the people subject to their authority: the war on drugs.

In 1994, the U.S. Department of Justice itself sounded a warning in An Analysis of Non-violent Drug Offenders with Minimal Criminal Histories:

Using one set of criteria which limited offenders to no current or prior violence in their records, no involvement in sophisticated criminal activity and no prior commitment, there were 16,316 Federal prisoners who could be considered low-level drug law violators. They constituted 36.1 percent of all drug law offenders in the prison system and 21.2 percent of the total sentenced Federal prison population.

By 2003, those numbers had grown dramatically. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported:

Experts say mandatory sentences, especially for nonviolent drug offenders, are a major reason inmate populations have risen for 30 years. About one of every 143 U.S. residents was in the federal, state or local custody at year's end. ...

Drug offenders now make up more than half of all federal prisoners. The federal penal system, which has tough sentencing policies for drug offenses, is now the nation's largest at more than 151,600 – an increase of 4.2 percent compared with 2001.

Simple drug possession convictions make up about 5% of the federal prison population drug offenders in federal prisons and about 27% of the state prison population drug offenders in the state prison population*, according to the federal government's own figures. Other nonviolent drug offenders were charged with nothing more than "sale or intent to sell" illegal intoxicants to willing buyers.

The legal system's reach into American life -- largely as a result of drug prohibition -- extends even farther than the Pew Center figures would indicate. In Probation and Parole in the United States 2006 (PDF), the Justice Department revealed that "About 3.2% of the U.S. adult population, or 1 in every 31 adults, were incarcerated or on probation or parole at yearend 2006."

That means that police, courts and prison authorities currently play a significant role in the lives of a shockingly high percentage of the adult population. And most of those unfortunate people are subject to loss of liberty and government supervision because they like to get high or want make a few bucks by helping other people get high. If their choice of "cocktails" were different, we'd call them bar patrons and bartenders.

So, thanks, Pew Center, for the wake-up call about the insane U.S. incarceration rate. And thanks, too, for the suggestions about parole, probation and sentencing guidelines.

But, if we want to step back from the brink of making America a land of convicts and ex-cons, we'll have to declare an end to the oppressive and brutal war on drugs.

*Thanks to Thorley Winston who pointed out in the comments that I had misstated the numbers. We are, of course, still talking about nonviolent "criminals" who engaged in victimless activity.

Tales from the smoking underground

In 2006, a majority of Ohio voters had a temper tantrum and decided they could dictate the conditions they like in private businesses -- specifically, they banned smoking in "public places" and "places of employment."

Not all business owners are knuckling under, however. In particular, lots of bar owners don't see why they should allow people who may or may not ever set foot in their establishments tell them how they can or can't cater to actual customers. Says Terry Hymore, owner of Toledo's Rip Cord bar, "It's my bar, it's my house. I can do what I want in it."

The bar owners are cooperating to stay one step ahead of the Prohibition agents:

Not only are some bars not paying fines, they're also working together, says Dr. David Grossman, with the Health Department. Grossman says when health inspectors are investigating complaints, a small network of bars start informing each other by phone.

"It's kind of in a way like bootleggers," Grossman says.

Not just bootleggers, but speakeasies are being emulated. The AP reports that in Cleveland:

Underground nightclubs where patrons can smoke freely and watch strippers after midnight have opened in some of the city's residential neighborhoods since the state began enforcing new restrictions on strip clubs and public smoking last year, police say.

Now that's the American way.

Give drugs a chance

I'm rereading Jacob Sullum's Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, several years after I first picked the book up. I'm struck, once again, by his treatment of the consumption of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and any other intoxicant you can think of as a not inherently bad thing -- in fact, a potentially good thing if done in moderation. Sullum is one of the few writers I can think of who treats the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake with respect, rather than as an unseemly vice.

Even among many advocates of drug legalization, drugs are treated as an unavoidable curse that burdens the human race, with legalization a necessary evil preferable to the ills, such as loss of civil liberties, that accompany prohibition. The very term "harm reduction," so popular now among advocates of alternatives to the War on Drugs, implies that drug use always damages the user, and that the goal is to reduce drug use by means other than criminal sanction.

This is why so many debates over legalization devolve to discussions of whether removing criminal sanctions will result in more consumption of disfavored intoxicants. See this otherwise somewhat sensible discussion from the Baltimore Sun:

A recent column on jury duty -- my first actual trial in more than 20 years of summonses to the Circuit Court of Baltimore City -- prompted a letter from reader Tom Ryugo about the decriminalization of heroin and cocaine. As you'll see, it's kind of hard to argue with this common-sense take. I've had this discussion with many people, including the former New York cop you runs an organization devoted to decriminalization, and the famous Baltimore attorney Bill Murphy. I can't make up my mind about it. Perhaps I should. . . . My fear is that legalization will lead to more use. I don't think the death penalty is a deterrent to murder, but I think the threat of incarceration and a life of addiction and misery is a deterrent to people who might be tempted to move from reefer to heroin or coke.

If you view drug use as inherently bad, it makes sense to assume that anything that might lead to increased consumption is something of a setback.

But, as many of us who have not just experimented with, but enthusiastically consumed various intoxicants know (Whoops! I bet I just blew my next job interview), the road to perdition is not usually lined with dried vegetation, white powder, pills or crystals. In fact, many a party, evening or weekend afternoon has been made more pleasant by "cocktail hours" that featured refreshments that would make John Walters weep. Some of us dabbled, a few of us indulged and there were occasional bingers, too. The vast majority of us, whether we still smoke or snort or not, suffered little or no harm -- in fact, we downright enjoyed our experiences, improved our moods and released a lot of tension in the process. And then we went about our responsibilities just a little more relaxed than we might have been.

Yet the loser pothead or scrawny junky is the image most often evoked when people think of drug use.

There's a good reason for that. As Sullum writes in Saying Yes:

We see the drug users who get hauled away by the police, who nod off in doorways or on park benches, who beg on the street or break into cars. We do not see the drug users who hold down a job, pay the rent or the mortgage, and support a family. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, people naturally assume that most illegal drug users are like the ones they notice, who are apt to be the least discreet and most antisocial. This is like assuming that the wino passed out in a gutter is a typical drinker.

Hmmm. So, how many users are, you know, addicts?

That's actually a hard question to answer, given the difficulty involved in asking people about their drug consumption habits. In fact, when prohibitionists talk about vast armies of addicts, they're talking about something they just don't know. Let's turn to psychologist, lawyer and drug researcher Stanton Peele for an idea of how many cocaine users just can't put the stuff down:

One way to calculate the number/percentage of addicts is to compare those who have ever taken a drug with those who currently take it with those who currently take it daily (or nearly so). Of course, many regular, daily users wouldn't be classified as addicts (like the physician described by Zinberg and his colleagues who for decades injected morphine daily, but did not use on weekends and vacations, without ever increasing his dosage or undergoing withdrawal -- see Meaning of Addiction, Chapter 1).

Unfortunately, you can't get government statistics on daily use. The most frequent use calculated in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA) National Household Survey on Drug Abuse is 51 or more times in the prior year, or an average of once weekly (or more), which would obviously include many users who are not addicts.

The 1995 Household Survey found that of 3.7 million cocaine users in the last year, 1.2 million used on average at least once a month and 600,000 used at least weekly on average. Although these 600,000 would not qualify as clinical addicts, Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey wants to claim these and more.

Hmmm ... so the number of addicted cocaine users actually falls below the government's measurement threshold.

Well, what about heroin? that's nasty stuff, right? Surely we have an idea of how many heroin addicts there are. Well, we can kind of guesstimate. Wrote Sullum for Reason magazine in 2003:

The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse indicates that about 3 million Americans have used heroin in their lifetimes; of them, 15 percent had used it in the last year, 4 percent in the last month. These numbers suggest that the vast majority of heroin users either never become addicted or, if they do, manage to give the drug up. A survey of high school seniors found that 1 percent had used heroin in the previous year, while 0.1 percent had used it on 20 or more days in the previous month. Assuming that daily use is a reasonable proxy for opiate addiction, one in 10 of the students who had taken heroin in the last year might have qualified as addicts.

One in ten? How does that compare with perfectly legal alcohol? Well, according to the National Institutes of Health:

A 1994 study of drug use and addiction in the U.S. showed that more than 90 percent of Americans have experimented with alcohol, and about 70 percent drink at least occasionally. About 15 percent of those who experiment become alcohol-dependent at some point in life. This compares to a dependency rate of 25 percent in those who experiment with smoking tobacco, and around 4 percent in marijuana smokers.

So, it's pretty clear that the vast majority of people who consume any intoxicant do so without developing dependency and, in fact, may well enjoy benefits from their consumption, since they presumably value the pleasure, stress-reduction and other qualities found in intoxicants. On the other hand, a few users of any intoxicant will have problems, whether their drug of choice is legal or illegal.

So, even if you don't believe that people have an inherent right to choose what to put into their own bodies (I obviously do), the "problem" of legalization isn't as simple as whether it "will lead to more use." For every abuser who suffers problems, there may be nine users who enjoy benefits. Increased use may, in balance, be a good thing since the evidence suggests that most of that use will be moderate.

All things considered, you still may conclude that prohibition, with its militarized policing, erosion of the Fourth Amendment, soaring costs and high rate of defiance (breeding disdain for the law) is a worthwhile venture. But I think Jacob Sullum makes a strong case that the drug use that prohibitionists want to stamp out is not an unalloyed evil.

Docs say: Fire up that doobie!

The federal government says the debate is over and that "[m]arijuana has no medical value that can't be met more effectively by legal drugs." Actual physicians say otherwise. According to the American College of Physicians, the nation's largest organization of doctors of internal medicine:

Marijuana has been smoked for its medicinal properties for centuries. Preclinical, clinical, and anecdotal reports suggest numerous potential medical uses for marijuana. ...

ACP strongly supports exemption from federal criminal prosecution; civil liability; or professional sanctioning, such as loss of licensure or credentialing, for physicians who prescribe or dispense medical marijuana in accordance with state law. Similarly, ACP strongly urges protection from criminal or civil penalties for patients who use medical marijuana as permitted under state laws.

Sounding just a tad desperate, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy's Bertha Madras (Bertha? People still name their kids Bertha?) promptly accused the country's second largest doctor's association of trying to "drag us back to 14th-century medicine."

With the ACP's break from the government over medical marijuana, the feds are becoming increasingly isolated on the issue. It's hard to maintain a pseudoscientific stance of medical concern while raiding pot clubs when a significant percentage of the country's medical personnel publicly say that you're full of shit. The way things are going, White House shills will soon find themselves reduced to shrieking "because we said so" when asked why cancer patients and MS sufferers are being hauled away for seeking relief in a bag of grass.

The big question, though, is whether the growing consensus that marijuana should be available as a medicine will help the larger argument that people should be free to consume whatever they please for whatever reasons motivate them. Medicalizing marijuana may help to normalize the idea that substances ought not be forbidden just because a few politicians get a burr under their butts -- or it could just firm up the popular delusion that we should have to give the government a good excuse before we're allowed to pass a substance into our bloodstreams.

It looks like we'll find out, one way or another.

Hey kids, let's drink to the liquor laws

Last night, Scottsdale, Arizona, police were hard at work, battling the threat to peace and decency posed by ... underage drinkers.

Twenty-four underage drinkers were arrested at one of Scottsdale's hottest nightclubs, Scottsdale police said Friday.

The 24 people - ranging in age from 17 to 20 - were arrested about 10:30 p.m. Thursday in the Mondrian Hotel's Skybar, 7353 E. Indian School Road, police said.

Only one of the 24 arrested, the 17-year-old, was a minor, police said. Arizona's legal drinking age is 21.

Three bar employees also were arrested, police said: two for failure to use identification logs and one for allowing a minor into the bar without a parent.

Scottsdale apparently has enough police manpower that it can spare a fair-sized force to raid a bar and bust two-dozen people (plus the folks that served them) because they elected to sip a beer without waiting for that magic age which politicians have decreed turns a crime into an acceptable way to pass the time. Which is to say, the city clearly has too many cops.

Worse, the police raided the club because some "anonymous citizen" ratted the place out for serving customers who hadn't yet seen their 21st birthdays. There's nothing quite as low as a willing collaborator with the state.

Government-mandated drinking ages have always offended me as a state intervention into what is legitimately private decision-making. Parents should decide when their minor children will be permitted to drink -- not politicians. And adults, who can marry, sign contracts and are legally required to register for the draft, have the right to purchase alcoholic beverages from those willing to sell to them, whether or not legislators like that idea. That some government officials think they have the legitimate right to reach even into the home to determine who can and can't drink is truly appalling.

I'm far past the point of being personally affected by silly legislation like drinking ages, but I remember being annoyed by them once upon a time. I also remember evading them quite efficiently. I don't know what the law was then, though I doubt it was nearly as draconian as current statutes, but I was served small quantities of diluted alcohol at home from a young age -- seven or so. I was permitted to moderately raid my folks' beer and wine stash from relatively early in my teenage years.

When my friends and I decided we wanted to buy beer to drink on our own time, we went searching for fake ID that would get us past bar bouncers and liquor-store clerks -- a job now rendered much easier in the Internet age. My first fake ID was a bogus-looking Times Square special, but it worked well enough in an era before drinking ages were taken so seriously.

Later, I became adept at altering driver's licenses and even made money informally aging classmates at college. I was put out of business by a competitor who showed up with what looked like his own Department of Motor Vehicles set-up, offering authentic-looking driver's licenses from a selection of states. Finally, I altered my birth certificate and got myself a state-issued ID that said I was three years older than I was. I was actually slugging down beer in the campus pub after showing that ID while the pub manager boasted to me that nobody underage ever got served in his establishment.

I had some news for him, but I let him figure it out in his own time.

My son is years away from his first sip of wine, but he'll have it at home, under his parents' supervision, no matter what the law says.

And if, at 17 or 18, he gets busted by cops with too much time on their hands for knocking a drink or two down in a bar before the law says it's OK, he'll have my full support. I'll even give him a few pointers on craftsman-like forgery so he can stand aside and finish his drink while the police turn their attention to less fortunate bar-goers. Because there's just no obligation to obey a law that tries to substitute government judgment for your own as to when it's OK to have a drink.

'Cop killer' gains neighbors' support

Via Radley Balko comes word that neighbors are rallying around Ryan Frederick, the man who shot and killed a house breaker who turned out to be a raiding police officer late at night on January 17. Detective Jarrod Shivers was among a gang of armed and armored law enforcers who appeared at Frederick's door because an informant mistook the man's Japanese maple trees for marijuana plants, triggering the sort of paramilitary assault that's become all-too-common a part of drug prohibition. Frederick has testified that all he knew was that his door was being battered down just days after his home was burglarized. He grabbed his gun and opened fire on the intruders, never suspecting they were police.

While authorities seem dead-set on making an example of Frederick -- even going so far as to appoint a high-profile prosecutor to press first-degree murder charges -- residents of the neighborhood have a different take. They're publicly signing their names to a sign located on a corner near the fatal shooting that voices support for the 28-year-old, risking vilification and even retaliation for backing a "cop killer." As Fox News put it:

With their signatures, residents are voicing their belief the accused killer, Ryan Frederick, was in the right when he fired that gun as police officers were trying to come through his front door to serve a drug search warrant.

An encouraging editorial in the Virginian-Pilot reads:

Faulty information is one thing, a faulty approach is another. Policeman storming into a house of sleeping occupants, who being legally armed is a matter of record, would seem to be an act of desperation. Surely the ordinary householder in an average neighborhood would not expect to be the target of such tactics, whether they meet the law's standards or not. And if storming has been the doctrine for narcotics raids, perhaps subtlety now should be explored.

OK -- that's a fake-out. The editorial is actually from 1972 when, in a nearly identical case, 55-year-old Lilian Davidson killed a policeman during a raid on her home based on faulty information. Authorities wisely dropped charges against Davidson in that case just two days after the shooting.

Balko is following this case closely, and I won't attempt to reinvent what he's already done. But Ryan Frederick's case raises questions for me that I doubt will ever be adequately answered.

For starters: Could this raid have ever been worth it, even if police had found the marijuana they expected?

As it turned out, Frederick had only a personal-use quantity of marijuana in his home; police information was simply wrong. But even if Frederick had been dealing in illegal drugs -- specifically, in a mild intoxicant like marijuana -- how does such a non-violent, albeit illicit activity, justify a violent attack on a private home in the dead of night? Such raids are always going to be fraught with danger, for both those on the receiving end and the raiders themselves. More than a few people targeted by raids have been shot by accident or misunderstanding, and Detective Shivers is far from the first police officer to be killed while breaking unannounced (or announced just as the battering ram is striking the door) into a private home.

I've heard police apologists argue that no-knock raids are necessary in order to minimize the peril that law-enforcement officers face in an inherently dangerous job. They're confronting low-lifes and need every advantage they can get.

But not every (suspected) law-breaker is one knock away from reenacting the siege of the Alamo. People engaged in consensual activities, however illegal, aren't necessarily looking for an opportunity to go down shooting. In encounters with non-violent suspects, violent raids introduce danger that wouldn't otherwise be there. Just ask Detective Shivers.

And, frankly, police work just isn't all that dangerous when compared to other trades. As Forbes magazine reported in 2002:

[I]n a normal year, like 2000, the most dangerous jobs do not involve firefighting or police work; they involve cutting timber and fishing. ...

The most common cause of death on the job in 2000, however, was the car accident, accounting for 23% of the total. Even police officers were slightly more likely to die behind the wheel than by homicide.

If, despite such facts, some police officers still find knocking on a door and waiting for a reply to be too frightening an activity to contemplate, perhaps they should consider a different line of work. After all, our primary concern in structuring the business of law enforcement shouldn't be peace of mind for folks who take the job -- it should be keeping the peace while respecting individual rights.

Overall, if we must enforce the ridiculous and oppressive laws against drugs, it seems blindingly obvious that openly approaching suspects with no history of violence so that there's no room for misunderstanding is the way to go.*

It's unfortunate that Jarrod Shivers died that night in January. But, if his family members and prosecutors are looking for somebody to blame, they should put Ryan Frederick out of their minds. The real culprits are prohibitionist zealots and the tactics they favor in pursuing the war on drug users.

Kudos to Ryan Frederick's neighbors for recognizing who the real victim was that dark night and coming to his defense.


*Just to be clear: Not only should we not enforce laws against manufacture, sale or use of disfavored intoxicants because these laws are intrusive and have disastrous consequences; such laws are inherently illegitimate, because they violate individual autonomy rights. People have as much right to resist the enforcement of drug laws as they have to resist a rape or a mugging.

Legalization gets a hearing

In a rare, high-level slap at statist orthodoxy, an international conference held in Vancouver, B.C., intended to advise the United Nations on drug policy, focused the majority of its attention on legalization. Canadian prohibitionist Judi Lalonde even complained, "Representation from the groups for legalization are probably about 95 percent, to possibly 5 percent in the area of prevention. I’m quite disappointed with the whole process of the last few days.” The Vancouver Sun was sufficiently incensed by the pro-legalization consensus that it editorialized against any loosening of restrictions on politically incorrect narcotics and attacked Jack Cole, founder of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, for his organization's support of across-the-board legalization.

Well, it's nice to see the handcuffs-and-prison brigade feel threatened for once.

Speaking of LEAP, Cole and company earned the Province's wrath and drew mentions in the press by giving voice to current and former police officers, judges and the like who argue that prohibition has been a horrible failure. There's nothing like seeing former drug warriors argue for recognizing people's right to decide for themselves what intoxicants they will or will not imbibe to add credibility to the cause. To some people, the idea of individual autonomy is a shocking concept to hear coming from a policeman's mouth.

Ironically, it wasn't long ago that Canadian authorities meekly surrendered "Prince of Pot" Marc Emery to U.S. authorities to serve hard time for running a Canadian business that would have violated draconian American drug laws -- if it were located in the United States.

One conference is good, but there's still a long way to go.

Can I get one?

A marijuana-dispensing vending machine, that is. They're the hot new thing in California.

Snuffed out for their own good

While visiting family and friends in Maryland this week, I stopped by a smoking-friendly venue in Severna Park with my father for a cigar and a bourbon. The Back Room at the Woodfire Restaurant was explicitly established as a smoking venue, with a humidor from which you can purchase cigars if you haven't brought your own, and a clientele that appreciates the smell of smoldering tobacco. The staff are mostly smokers themselves, and none too pleased by the changes coming in February when Maryland's broad smoking ban goes into effect, snuffing out smokes even in places that were specifically created to offer people an amenable environment in which to light up.

Business was light when I was there (a Monday afternoon), but the customers at the bar were interrogating the bartender over the ultimate fate of the humidor's contents. The disposition of the cigars has yet to be determined, though a smoking-ban sale seems to be in the works. The ultimate fate of the Back Room is also an open question. Can a successful cigar bar find new life as just another place to have a drink? Like it or not, the owners and staff at the Woodfire are about to find out.

And the folks who take advantage of the Back Room's looming cigar sale will probably have to count themselves lucky that they can, for the moment, still enjoy their purchases at home.

Prince of pot to serve time

"Prince of pot" Marc Emery, an activist for marijuana legalization, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and dealer in marijuana seeds, is going to have to serve some hard time after all. Canadian authorities arrested Emery at the behest of U.S. anti-drug officials, even though Emery runs his businesses entirely from north of the border. His sale of seeds to American customers was apparently the only hook ticked-off Canadian police needed to do their U.S. colleagues' bidding.

After a long fight, Emery accepted a ten-year sentence -- of which he'll have to serve at least five years -- in order to avoid an even longer sentence and to keep co-accused Michelle Rainey and Greg Williams out from behind bars.

Yes, the long arm of American drug prohibitionists reaches far and wide indeed -- even beyond their nominal jurisdiction.

Update: See the National Post's well-considered editorial regarding this case.

Smoky workplace debate resolved

Anti-smoking zealots claim that bans on smoking in the workplace are necessary to protect employees and customers -- non-smoking employees in particular, since they can't turn around and leave the way customers might. That's especially true of businesses that don't deal directly with the public, so don't have to worry about patrons wandering in and being permanently damaged by a brief whiff of cigarette smoke. The American Lung Association maintains a Web page dedicated to the benefits of a smoke-free workplace. The page contains such pearls of wisdom as:

Separating smokers from nonsmokers, cleaning the air and ventilating buildings cannot eliminate exposure to secondhand smoke. Smokefree workplace policies are the only effective way to eliminate exposure.

The European Industrial Relations Observatory, in commenting on a proposed ban in Norway, said:

The main rationale behind the government’s proposal is to provide protection against passive smoking in bars and restaurants. Tobacco smoke is seen as a particular threat to the health and well-being of employees in such establishments, and it is also widely recognised that they enjoy relatively weak legal protection against such working environment hazards.

But what if there aren't any non-smokers in the office -- and won't be, by design? What if a small German company fires all its non-smoking employees and vows not to hire any more because they're considered "troublemakers"?

The manager of the 10-person IT company in Buesum, named Thomas J., told the Hamburger Morgenpost newspaper he had fired the trio because their non-smoking was causing disruptions.

Germany introduced non-smoking rules in pubs and restaurants on January 1, but Germans working in small offices are still allowed to smoke.

"I can't be bothered with trouble-makers," Thomas was quoted saying. "We're on the phone all the time and it's just easier to work while smoking. Everyone picks on smokers these days. It's time for revenge. I'm only going to hire smokers from now on."

Well, there's no danger of non-smokers being involuntarily exposed to cigarette smoke under this arrangement. That means that anti-smoking activists should be happy, right?

Right?

Update: The story is apparently a hoax pulled by a pro-smoking activist. But I think the point raised is still a valid one.

Raid gone wrong

Lima, Ohio, remains tense after police Sgt. Joseph A. Chavalia killed a 26-year-old woman and shot and injured her one-year-old son during a drug raid. Tarika Wilson and her child were cut down during a SWAT raid targeting her boyfriend, Anthony Terry. Terry was arrested on suspicion of possession of crack cocaine.

This doesn't appear to be a wrong-address raid -- cops burst into the house named on the warrant. But a violent raid for drug possession? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't possession of an illegal substance a non-violent "crime." In the absence of evidence that Terry intended to go down shooting, knocking on the door would seem to be the appropriate means of serving the warrant.

Some people would argue that police need to kick the door in to avoid danger to officers. But what about danger to innocent people -- like unarmed women and infants, for instance? It seems to me that if anybody should shoulder the risks of police work, it should be police. Not every interaction with the public should be conducted like D-Day on the off-chance that somebody might start shooting. That's especially true since SWAT tactics all-too-often make it certain that somebody does get shot.

That police knew there were innocent people in the house is clear; according to the Toledo Blade, "[Chief Garlock] said officers were aware that children were inside the home because there were toys in the yard outside and on the front porch." That means police can't feign surprise at the presence of people other than the one named in the warrant.

The FBI has joined a probe into just how this raid went so fatally wrong. That's no guarantee of justice, but it means the guilty department won't be investigating itself.

Radley Balko (then of the Cato Institute) on the rise of often-fatal paramilitary police tactics here.

Defector in the war on (some) drugs

Richard Brunstrom, Chief Constable of the North Wales Police in the United Kingdom, is making headlines with his call for full drug legalization. He told the Times of London:

“It is not possible to run a democratic country and stop drugs getting in,” he insists. “We reckon, on the best evidence we’ve got, that we stop between 10 and 12% at best of the drugs imported into the UK.”

He also emphasizes the nonsensical legal differentiation between "good" drugs and "bad" drugs based on little in the way of scientific evidence. Specifically, he called ecstasy “a remarkably safe substance” and said it's safer than aspirin -- a point that would be especially true if the drug were legalized and available in unadulterated form.

Before we go cheering Brunstrom's defection from the ranks of the prohibitionists, it's worth pointing out that he's no consistent advocate of liberty. Specifically, he's such a fan of traffic cameras for issuing automated tickets that he's been labeled "the mad mullah of the traffic Taliban," and targeted by the Association of British Drivers.

But we'll take one victory at a time. A police officer who comes to question the prohibition of some intoxicants is a police officer moving in the right direction on an important matter.

On a related note, Texas law-enforcement officers are digging in their heels and refusing to take advantage of a law that allows them to ticket people instead of arresting them for marijuana possession.

In memory of the boozy office

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer ridicules the Cincinnati Post's unenforceable ban on booze in the newsroom on the paper's last day of publication. He (rightly, I think) criticizes the finger-wagging restriction as a repudiation of an important part of journalistic culture.

Every profession needs what academics call an "occupational mythology" to sustain it, a set of personal and social dramas, arrangements, and devices, as sociologist Everett Hughes put it, "by which men make their work tolerable, or even make it glorious to themselves and others." As hard drugs are to the hard-rocker and tattoos are to the NBA player, so booze is to the journalist—even if he doesn't drink. ...

It wasn't that long ago that alcoholics were celebrated or at least regaled in newsrooms for their heroic immoderation. Today, praise goes to the "courageous" newsroom alcoholic or druggie who enters a company-financed rehab program. Today's newspaper will fire you for taking mood-altering drugs in the workplace unless, of course, they're prescription antidepressants paid for by the company health plan. And in the old days, great status was bestowed upon the foulest mouth in the newsroom. Today, that sort of talk will earn you a write-up from HR for creating a climate of sexual harassment. Paradoxically, the language and subjects now banned as inappropriate inside the newsroom are routinely found inside the pages of the newspaper.

In issuing his dictum, Philipps surely inspired Post staffers to tote firewater to work that last day. I keep a bottle at my office for the same reason—not to drink but to symbolically cast off the petty rules and restrictions that I imagine thwart me from doing my job. If my job is to kick authority in the shins, how can I resist doing the same to the powers that cut me a paycheck twice a month?

The altered culture of the newsroom hits home for me. When I was hired away from Ziff-Davis to help launch the New York Daily News's online edition during a brief and unpleasant stint, I was abruptly told about the paper's urine test requirement only after I'd driven myself and my worldly goods from Boston to the Big Apple and showed up for my first day of work. It was a bit of a shock to me given the rather laissez-faire attitude taken by the employer I'd just left behind. Fortunately, the piss test was enforced with a nudge and a wink.

"I can't take the test tomorrow," I told my new boss.

"Why not," she asked.

"Because I'll test positive. I smoked grass just a few days ago."

"Oh. Well, we'll put it off for a couple of weeks. Be sure to drink lots of cranberry juice."

Maybe the juice did the trick; I passed the test with flying colors.

That the sober-or-bust posturing was mostly for show -- at least, then and there -- was amply demonstrated every time the newspaper suffered one of its semi-regular bomb scares. The building would empty out into two bars across the street until the "all clear" came. Much of the next day's edition was ... umm ... a tad incoherent. It was also a lot more fun to read.

Given the evolving culture, though, I suspect that the Daily News is probably a more sterile place to work now than it was in the mid-1990s. Frankly, it's not just newsrooms that have become crushingly restrictive; most modern workplaces have adopted a whole host of politically correct rules about intoxicant use, speech and conduct that might make some timid souls feel more cozy and protected, but which make the daily grind even more unpleasant than ever before for anybody who doesn't enjoy life in a straitjacket.

Boy, it's nice to be a freelancer.

Run, Louis, run

He's not exactly a model citizen -- Louis Wayne Fowler served seven years in prison for ripping off $5.1 million from the California State Water Resources Control Board -- but the Sacramento man's latest brush with the law certainly puts him in the role of the victim. Having turned his life around and opened a medical marijuana dispensary in the wake of California's legalization of such ventures, Fowler was targeted by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration for violating Uncle Sam's delicate sensibilities about marijuana and state-level efforts to liberalize drug laws. He was arrested on charges of cultivating at least 1,000 marijuana plants and carrying a gun to protect himself and his business. On the cultivation charge alone, he faces a mandatory minimum 10 years in prison -- three years longer than he served on the earlier embezzlement rap.

No wonder he's gone on the lam.

In comments to his mother, Fowler apparently hinted at intentions to commit suicide. I sincerely hope that's a diversionary tactic and that he plans, instead, to emulate his past actions. After robbing the Water Resources Control Board, he disappeared for three years, living under a false name in Arizona. Now, with even more to fear and much more justification, he would be well-advised to head for friendlier shores and make a new life for himself.

The federal jihad against disfavored intoxicants knows no rational limits. In fact, federal narcs, prosecutors and judges seem to be infuriated by efforts to ease or eliminate penalties for non-violent exchange and use of drugs. Judges have been known to hand out more time in prison than prosecutors request to people who do nothing more than grow plants under voter-driven medical marijuana provisions. Simply providing marijuana to patients in accordance with California's Proposition 215 landed one woman with a 41-month sentence.

With a prior record and a large-scale operation, Fowler has no reason to expect mercy from the court.

Yes, running is sometimes the best choice. I hope that's what Fowler is doing, and I hope he gets away clean.

Is your pharmacist a pusher?

Oh great. The War on (Some) Drugs is going so swimmingly that authorities are turning their attention to the "abuse" of prescription drugs -- that is, the recreational use of drugs available only with government permission for approved uses.

"It's readily available," says Bick. "You can buy illicit, pharmaceutical drugs on any Main Street, probably in the state of Vermont, certainly in the major metropolitan areas of the state of Vermont."

But while counselors say it's the demand that's driving the supply, there's also money to be made-- pharmaceutical drugs can sell for a dollar a milligram, which means that one 80 milligram pill can be an easy $80 for a dealer. And because the Vt. State Police have seen a drop in federal funding, they plan to ask the legislature for an additional $1 million next month to help fight the growing problem.

"We have to work, not only in law enforcement, but with the treatment people, education, and really get the word out that it's run under the radar for far too long. And it's time that we all work toward this problem to address it," says L'Esperance.

Specifically, Vermont officials want to make it even more difficult for people to acquire even approved drugs for permitted uses.

Police are currently working on a measure that would stop prescription drug fraud by preventing people from filling duplicate prescriptions at different pharmacies. Officials say they are also reassigning more officers on the force to focus specifically on the prescription drug problem.

Why is it a problem that people are getting high? That's really not explained -- it's just assumed that ingesting chemicals for the purpose of feeling pleasure is an inherently bad thing that needs to be stopped. Subjecting people to police raids and sending them to prison is apparently not so bad. The fact that all such efforts at heading off recreational pharmaceutical experimentation in the past failed miserably holds no lessons for the prohibitionists -- they still see a need to tighten the screws a few notches.

Hey, how about letting people buy and use drugs as they please without making a big deal about it? Is that really such an outrageous idea?

That noise you hear is the sound of prohibitionists sputtering in shock.

For a more reasonable take on drug prohibition, check here.

For a skeptical view of the value of prescription requirements, check here.

Thieves with badges

Luther Ricks Sr. was at home in Lima, Ohio, when burglars broke into his house. In the ensuing struggle, Ricks managed to fatally shoot one of the assailants.

But he was still robbed of over $400,000.

Even though the original thieves were driven off, police who responded to the scene absconded with a safe holding Ricks's life savings -- apparently using the presence of a small stash of marijuana as an excuse -- and then surrendered the loot to bigger bullies in the form of the FBI.

Now the feds want Ricks to prove that the money actually belongs to him and his wife before they return his life savings.

American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio Legal Director Jeff Gamso said Ricks has a tough road ahead, not impossible, but tough to get back his money.

“The law of forfeiture basically says you have to prove you’re innocent. It’s terrible, terrible law,” he said.

The law is tilted in favor of the FBI in that Ricks need not be charged with a crime and the FBI stands a good chance at keeping the money, Gamso said.

“The law will presume it is the result of ill-gotten gains,” he said.

Combine avaricious "lawmen" with an abusive war on drugs and stir. That's the recipe for the stealingest gang in town.

But they're role models!

And it's Congress's business whether private-sector athletes employed by for-profit companies are taking performance-enhancing drugs because ...?

I mean, Major League Baseball didn't hold hearings when Sen. McCain's wife, Cindy, was outed for popping painkillers like they were M&Ms.

Honestly, even if you support drug prohibition (I don't), it's hard to make a case that it's a legitimate federal concern if professional baseball players are revealed to be taking prescription drugs without benefit of a doctor's note to boost their averages and extend their careers. At most, this should be a matter for local prosecutors.

Personally, I don't care if athletes are locking themselves in hotel rooms with whiskey and hookers, a la Babe Ruth, shooting steroids, or uploading their brains into carefully crafted robot bodies. I just want to see them excel on the playing field.

Prohibition: Same as it ever was

I went to the drugstore to buy allergy medication this morning. As is often the case in this increasingly strange land, the purchase involved retrieving a card from the store shelf, going to the pharmacy counter, surrendering the card and my driver's license, signing an electronic register and then paying for the package. There was no waiting period, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

It's all for the public good, we're told. The ephedrine and pseudoephedrine contained in some medications can be used to manufacture methamphetamine, the officially scary street drug of the moment, so it's our civic duty to let government officials know when our noses are dripping so we can drive this dread scourge from our shores.

We've been through this nonsense before. I may have an especially cynical attitude toward regulations intended to prevent people from getting high because of my own family's long and lucrative experience with failed prohibitions of the past.

My father's maternal grandfather owned Marano's Bar and Restaurant in the Bronx, the speakeasy of choice for New York City's police commissioner when a tough day of enforcing the 18th Amendment's ban on alcoholic beverages left the law-and-order honcho's throat a bit parched. My great-grandfather ended up with a pocket full of cash as reward for his illicit efforts.

Of course, Giuseppe Marano had to buy his illegal liquor someplace. I've often wondered if one of his sources might have been Franz Kuntz, a German-speaking New Jersey farmer and maternal grandfather to my mother, who supplemented his income by supplying moonshine to the thirsty denizens of New York City. He never became as wealthy as Marano, but as far as I know, he never regretted his sideline business efforts.

Prohibition provided my forebears and their contemporaries with irresistible business opportunities that guaranteed that the ban on alcohol would fail.

Which brings us back to the very modern ritual of submitting to an identity check to buy allergy tablets. How did this happen?

Prohibition of intoxicants favored by many people created its own reality once again. As Russ Jones, a narcotics detective and member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, recently wrote on the organization's blog:

Methamphetamine is a direct by-product of the war on drugs. We would not have meth if pharmaceutical amphetamines continued to be available as they were through prescriptions in the 1960s. With the war on drugs and the crack down on doctors and pharmaceuticals, and since meth is easily created in home laboratories, methamphetamine was created by black marketeers to fill the demand of those who desired stimulants.

Prohibitionist government officials tried to restrict the availability of powder cocaine and amphetamines. Innovative underground chemists responded with stable, concentrated crack cocaine and home-brewed methamphetamine. Government officials then scrambled to tighten access to the chemicals that can be used to make the drugs that were created to evade the earlier bans on legally disfavored intoxicants. Round and around we go, and the next move is in the hands black-market entrepreneurs who have proven themselves creative and adaptable through generations of prohibitions.

Prohibitionists answer evidence about the inevitable failure of their efforts with emotional pleas to "do something" to stop the supposed plague of drug use and its resulting ill-effects.

But even if you believe that government has a legitimate role to play in protecting us from ourselves (I don't), you have to wonder what's worse: real, but limited, self-inflicted harm among some users of illegal intoxicants, or an endless cycle of violence, corruption and tainted, ever-stronger drugs spawned by doomed prohibitions.

Prohibition, after all, gave us Al Capone, poisonous bathtub gin and a hypocritical high-ranking police official sitting at my great-grandfather's bar. The war on drugs has given us murderous cocaine cartels, toxic waste dumps on the sites of underground meth labs and a police narcotics squad in Atlanta, Georgia, so corrupt that it shot down 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston and then planted marijuana in her house to cover its crime.

Would the world really be such a bad place if we let people enjoy their "cocktails" and just offered help to those who misuse or abuse the intoxicants of their choice?

History demonstrates that eliminating drugs simply isn't an option. People have long made it clear that they want to get high, and clever entrepreneurs stand eternally ready to supply them something to take the edge off, no matter what the law says.

As I stand at the drug store counter, signing the register, if I squint just a bit I can see the ghosts of my great-grandfathers rubbing their hands together in anticipation of new opportunities made possible by Prohibition's offspring.

Supreme Court actually decides the right way

Reason magazine's Jacob Sullum does the heavy lifting so that I don't have to. Short version: The Supremes ruled that, when judges disagree with the different sentences meted out for possession of crack and powder cocaine, they are free to depart from the sentencing guidelines. Such departures should be treated with deference. And trading a gun for drugs does not constitute "using" a firearm in the course of a drug offense.

Cory Maye coverage

The always-excellent Radley Balko has posted an in-depth musing the on the sad case of Cory Maye, the Mississippi man currently serving live without parole in prison (originally, he faced the death penalty) for killing a police officer in self-defense during a misfired no-knock raid on the wrong house. As always seems to be the case, the raid was an artifact of the "war on drugs" -- an attempt to arrest people for engaging in commerce in officially disfavored intoxicants.

Balko has followed this case from the beginning. While he's been a consistent advocate for Cory Maye, his reportage is notable for the sympathy he expresses toward Ron Jones, the man killed when police burst into Maye's bedroom in the middle of the night.

You have one man taken from his family, in the prime of his life. You have another man, also taken from his family, now losing the prime of his life. You have a son taken from his mother and father. And you have a loving father being taken from his son and daughter.

Thank this war. The goddamned drug war. It is so incredibly senseless and stupid. And it’ll continue to claim and ruin lives, because too few politicians have the backbone to stand up and say after 30 years, $500 billion, a horrifyingly high prison population, and countless dead innocents, cops, kids, nonviolent offenders, decimated neighborhoods, wasted lives, corrupted cops, and eviscerations of the core freedoms this country was allegedly founded upon, the shit isn’t working.

From my perspective, the case against Maye seems rooted in the twin evils of racism -- Maye is black and Jones was white -- and the insane assumption that police are automatically due cringing subservience, even when they crash through your door as unidentifiable raiders in the middle of the night.

Gone to pot

Hmmm ... Interesting ...

Here's the scenario: Cops seize 39 live marijuana plants from a Fort Collins, Colorado, couple who grew the pot for medical marijuana users. Cops apparently stash the plants as evidence, but don't do anything to care for them. Cops get a shock when charges are dropped against the couple because (Surprise!) medical marijuana is legal in Colorado and the couple had crossed its legal "T"s and dotted its "I"s. Now the cops have to return the seized property -- the plants.

But they're dead.

Now, the couple is suing the police for the value of the lost crop, estimated at more than $100,000.

If I had to guess, I'd say it never crossed the cops' minds that this case could go against them, and that they might eventually have to return the seized plants in anything resembling their original condition. It seems to me that "you break it, you bought it" is the operative concept here. Smugly assuming that you have an open-and-shut case shouldn't be a shield against the obligation to care for private property of which you've conditionally taken possession.

Of course, this is America -- the land of prohibition, where drugs are bad, mm'kay. Under the circumstances, I'm very curious to see how the case plays out.

Lift your glasses to Repeal Day

On December 5, 1933, Utah (Utah?) ratified the 21st Amendment, repealing the 18th Amendment and ending one of the more profoundly stupid experiments in social engineering ever engaged in by the United States of America. That makes December 5 Repeal Day -- a celebration of the availability of alcoholic beverages that should be marked by a little indulgence in the spirits of your choice.

Of course, Prohibition may be dead, but prohibitionism still walks among us, an undead example of political control freakery that sucks the life from every area of human endeavor it touches.



I look forward to the ultimate abolition of the prohibitionist impulse -- or at least to rendering it a politically impotent force touted by nasty little overgrown hallway monitors who can safely be ignored. Celebration of that victory will make for one hell of a party.

No drinks for you

The British government is considering a new alcohol limit for drivers in the UK: Zero. That's right, no drinks at all, not so much as s sip of beer or wine before hitting the road. Hell, forget drinks -- that means no cough medicine.

I think the UK has officially overtaken the U.S. as the breeding ground for the stupidest, most intrusive control-freak rules.

Well ... except for this from North Carolina (courtesy of The Agitator):

Also, as of Saturday, people can lose their driver's licenses for providing alcohol to anyone under 21. The penalty is important because many underage drinkers get alcohol from friends or family members, said Craig Lloyd, the executive director of the North Carolina chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

The law means that, theoretically, parents could be punished for giving a glass of wine to their 20-year-old son or daughter, even if the 20-year-old never gets behind the wheel.

Lloyd said that's not excessive.

"It's a zero-tolerance policy," he said. "Breaking the law is breaking the law."

Oh, OK -- the U.S. is still in the competition.

Crop substitution

Hmmm. I'm torn. Should fans of altered consciousness be sad that "[t]he fields of Balkh province in northern Afghanistan were free of opium poppies this year, a success touted often by Afghan and international officials," or happy that the pretty poppies have been replaced with majestic fields of "[t]en-foot-tall cannabis plants"?

It's mixed news indeed from the Associated Press.

The reason for the change is simple: Afghani officials put the screws on farmers to stop cultivating poppies in order to curry favor with the United Nations and foreign governments. But those same officials don't give a damn about marijuana. That makes the choice easy because:

The U.N. said cannabis yields around twice the quantity of drug per acre as opium poppies and requires less investment. The U.N. drug report estimated farmers growing cannabis could earn the same amount per acre as opium farmers.

Politically correct crops, like cotton and watermelon, simply aren't that profitable to grow. Afghani farmers need to see some profit for their efforts, so marijuana it is.

I'll bet the farmers would do better yet if the crops they grow were legalized around the world so they could sell directly to well-heeled buyers without risking the wrath of meddlesome officials.

Put a little ecstasy in your life

MDMA, better known as ecstasy, gets a second look from the Washington Post 22 years after being listed by the DEA as a Schedule 1 controlled substance. New research shows that the substance may be useful in treating post-traumatic stress disorder.

I'll add here that, while I haven't used it in years, ecstasy is, hands-down, my favorite recreational drug. For the sheer pleasure it brings, I think the stuff should be legally available from vending machines.

Of course, I think all substances that people might wish to consume should be legally available -- from the worst crap to the nectar of the gods, people have the right to produce, consume, buy and sell whatever they please.

But ecstasy ... Wow. Good stuff.

What's that smell?

Hmmm ...

This week, Denver voters ordered city police to make marijuana busts their lowest priority. That's in addition to an earlier vote that repealed city penalties for marijuana possession. The latest vote came after cops ignored the earlier ballot measure by citing violators under state law.

And in Hailey, Idaho, voters decided "to legalize medical marijuana, make enforcing pot laws the lowest police priority and to decriminalize industrial hemp..."

Party on

Remember Elisa Kelly and George Robinson, the Virginia couple who were arrested and imprisoned for serving alcohol at their son's 16th birthday party? Well, their tormentor, Albemarle County Commonwealth's Attorney James L. Camblos III, has been quite rightly bounced from office.

It couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

A little judicial remorse for a big injustice

The U.S. Constitution is pretty clear that government gets one shot at trying a criminal defendant. Says the Fifth Amendment:

nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb

The reasoning is pretty clear: Government has essentially unlimited resources to draw upon to hone its case and to, basically, throw prosecutions against the wall until one sticks. Defendants have limited resources and can easily be destroyed by the process of waging an unending defense, even if that defense succeeds. To avoid the injustice inevitable in such scenarios, prosecutors get one chance to prove their case and that's it.

Or so you'd think.

In fact, the Supreme Court has long disagreed with what seems to be the plain meaning of the Constitution. Among their interesting interpretations of that document, our legal solons decided in U.S. v. Lanza that the prohibition against double jeopardy didn't really apply to prosecutions brought by different jurisdictions.

We have here two sovereignties, deriving power from different sources, capable of dealing with the same subject matter within the same territory. ... Each government in determining what shall be an offense against its peace and dignity is exercising its own sovereignty, not that of the other.

This gives federal and state prosecutors a tempting opportunity to work hand-in-hand to bring repeated prosecutions against defendants for the same crime. That's especially tempting to government legal eagles who prefer the draconian sentences demanded by Washington, D.C. over the somewhat more humane penalties meted out by many state legislatures.

All of this comes into play in the case of Katie Heath, an Illinois resident who was tried and convicted in state court of distributing methamphetamine (a victimless activity, let me add). She served one year.

After she had served her time, returned to her community and begun putting her life back together, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Cutchin came after her on a conspiracy charge for distributing meth, based on the same activities for which she had already served time. Heath cooperated with the prosecution and signed a plea deal, reasonably expecting leniency. Instead, prosecutors rewarded her with a 20-year sentence.

Federal Judge J. Phil Gilbert was so appalled by the state's actions that, for months, he refused to impose the sentence. He also blasted prosecutors for "misconduct" and "misuse — if not outright abuse" of their power in negotiating agreements. Gilbert reportedly singled out James Cutchin for "his unwavering zeal for disproportionate punishment."

But a three-judge appeals panel ruled that federal prosecutors have all the discretion they claim to have and ordered Gilbert to reconsider. Instead, he exercised his last option and recused himself from the case. He also apologized to Heath for the gauntlet the government has put her through.

Now it's up to the next judge in the case to send Heath away for the mandated 20 years -- or (less likely) to follow Judge Gilbert's example.

Lots of little evils led to the injustice being committed in this case. Start with the "War on Drugs," which criminalizes consensual activity and has already deprived Ms. Heath of a year of her life. There's no good reason she should have gone to prison at all.

Then there's the Supreme Court's clever exception to the Constitution's ban on trying defendants twice for the same crime. Federal authorities are now free to put defendants through the ringer a second time, even when they've already been convicted and punished in state court. God help any poor fool who gets on the wrong side of a federal prosecutor.

Don't forget federal mandatory minimums, which take behavior punishable by a year or two behind bars at the state level and turn it into crimes punishable by decades in the slammer. Frankly, given the chunk of her life that's at stake, Ms. Heath would be well-advised to take her chances on the run rather than submit to the "justice" that's in store for her.

And then there's the duplicity of federal prosecutors, who lure defendants into cooperation with promises of leniency, then renege on the deals and slam their victims with the full force of government overreaction.

We have a legal system designed for the convenience of the vicious fanatics who gravitate toward prosecutorial work in general, and the U.S. Attorney's office in particular. They have the tools in their hand to destroy anybody who crosses their path, and the checks on their power are few.

Under the circumstances, we're certain to see more Katie Heaths sent away for long stretches, even after they've already been punished for crossing the state.

Contact The United States Attorney's Office -- Southern District of Illinois, the office that went after Katie Heath, here.

Saving us all from medical marijuana

Oh joy. For our own good, the Drug Enforcement Administration has staged yet another series of raids on medical marijuana dispensaries that are perfectly legal in California. That'll teach folks not to choose medicine unapproved by their government masters.

A license to decide for yourself

The U.S. and the UK have been playing an annoying game of one-upsmanship over the past decade or two in the field of intrusive policies. Political correctness, penalties for racist jokes, smoking bans, "broken window" policing, asset forfeiture laws, television cameras monitoring public streets and much more -- really dumb ideas have been winging their way back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, making life unpleasant for Americans and Britons alike. Overall, the UK has come out ahead in the nanny-state Olympics, and that unhappy country looks set to hold on to the crown.

The latest mother-knows-best proposal to make the rounds is a scheme put forth by Professor Julian le Grand, a one-time advisor to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, to require smokers to get their doctor's permission and pay 200 pounds annually to be issued a license that would permit them to purchase tobacco products. According to The Daily Telegraph, "The scheme would ensure smokers had to make a conscious decision to continue the habit and require people to become 'registered addicts'."

Prof le Grand, who lecturers in social policy at the London School of Economics and advises ministers through his chairmanship of Health England, said the idea was to make healthy choices the norm and force those who object to make a conscious effort to opt out.

The idea seems to come out of the "Libertarian Paternalism" school of thought that has become something of a craze among folks who like to crack the whip over their fellow man. For those not in the know, Libertarian Paternalism advocates imposing authoritarian policies short of outright bans to steer people to the "correct" choices, as determined by those in power, and then making such monumental presumption more palatable by attaching the word "libertarian" to it. Prof. le Grand didn't use the term -- at least, not as reported by the press -- but his proposal to permit smoking but make it harder and more expensive to be a smoker certainly fits that paternalistic philosophy.

Tellingly, le Grand advocates other mandates that also stink of aspirations to serve as philosopher-king.

He also proposed banning food manufacturers from adding salt to products, an exercise hour for all employees during the working day and free fruit in offices.

Because nothing says "we care" more clearly than forcing longshoremen and stockbrokers to take a break to perform jumping jacks side-by-side, followed by a shared apple and some good-natured bitching about the total lack of flavor in their food.

To his credit, le Grand acknowledges that not everybody would willingly go along with his scheme.

He admitted there could be a problem with an emerging black market where those with permits sold them to those without, and that it could create the impression that as long as one is licensed smoking is not harmful.

Britons might want to start looking into the practicality of growing tobacco in their gardens -- or of smuggling it in. They also should prepare for a long siege as "Libertarian Paternalists" like Julian le Grand continue to cook up ideas in keeping with their oh-so-current philosophy.

And Americans shouldn't feel too smug. If the past is any indicator, we're next.

End-run around drug laws

Ah, good old American (and foreign) ingenuity! Why battle to re-legalize recreational drugs when you can just invent new, socially acceptable drugs that do the same thing?

Horrible, horrible sobriety

There's a crisis brewing in my household. It seems that my wife and I have already blown our budget for the month. Between paying off our recent vacation, prepping our house for sale and eating out just a bit too much, we've sent our entertainment and household expenses soaring. I mean, really soaring. Wow.

Fortunately, our grocery expenditures are far below budget so far, and we're well -stocked on most items. So we have room to make up the red ink. Specifically, we've decided not to spend any more money on anything except absolute necessities this month, and that includes the grocery budget. We'll eat what's in the pantry and the refrigerator, and that's that.

But here's the crisis: My wine purchases are included in the grocery budget, and I have exactly three and a half bottles of red and one of white to get me through the next two weeks. I usually drink half a bottle each evening. That puts me on short rations.

Oh the sacrifices we make for fiscal responsibility.

Paey freed

Richard Paey, the chronic pain sufferer prosecuted and imprisoned as a "drug trafficker" for securing the medication he needs to treat his condition, has been exonerated. Florida Governor Charlie Crist granted him a full pardon, allowing him to return to his family with his rights restored.

A major irony of Paey's time behind bars has not passed without notice:

Since his incarceration, prison doctors have hooked him up to a morphine drip, which delivers more pain medication daily than he was convicted of trafficking.

Best of luck to Paey as he rebuilds his life.

And so?

According to the A.P., the dread scourge of pain-killing medication is making its way across the country like a tidal wave of ... pointless panic:

Retail sales of five leading painkillers nearly doubled over the last eight years, reflecting a surge in use by patients nationwide who are living in a world of pain, according to a new Associated Press analysis of federal drug prescription data.

The analysis reveals that oxycodone usage is migrating out of Appalachia to areas such as Columbus, Ohio, and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and significant numbers of codeine users are living in many suburban neighborhoods around the country.

Actually, the article doesn't completely treat the growth in the use of painkillers as a menace. It's much more confused than that, alternating passages like this:

Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, director of the blood and cancer center at Day Kimball Hospital in Putnam, Conn., said Vicodin is a popular painkiller to give patients after surgery, and many doctors are familiar with it.

"Over the past 10 years, there has been much better education in the medical community to ... ask if people are having pain and to better diagnose and treat it," Gordon said.

With passages like this:

More people are abusing prescription painkillers because the medications are more available. The vast majority of people with prescriptions use the drugs safely. But the number of emergency room visits from painkiller abuse has increased more than 160 percent since 1995, according to the government.

A.P. reporter Frank Bass can't seem to decide whether he's warning of a social peril or describing a commendable increase in the use of often-beneficial medications. He even, at one point, lays out the problems that some legitimate pain patients have in securing sufficient medication to treat their conditions--undermining the "dire peril" elements of the article and further muddying its thrust.

My take is that modern painkillers are an unalloyed good to which we should be happy to have access--even if some people choose to use them recreationally. Hell, recreational use doesn't necessarily strike me as a bad thing either, so long as people don't over-do it.

But a lot of people in this country seem to have trouble coming to terms with the idea that it can be morally acceptable to take and dispense substances that make people feel good. Somewhere in their makeup lurks a residue of the puritan past that insists that suffering is better than alleviating pain, and that outright pleasure-seeking is a terrible, terrible thing.

The result is news reports, like this, that can't quite commit to saying that it's a boon to the world that surgery patients, cancer survivors and the like have access to more options than ever before to make it easier to get through the day.

I'll drink to that!

Just four years after noticing that Prohibition was over for the rest of the country and belatedly legalizing the sale of beer, wine and liquor within the city limits, Athens, Alabama, faced the possible reinstatement of a ban on alcoholic beverages. Fortunately, the forces of all that is good and right in the world prevailed and Athens voters kept booze legal by a 68% to 32% vote.

Of course, the right to buy, sell and consume anything shouldn't be subject to the whims of the majority, but we'll take any victories we can get.

The only folks mourning today are bluenoses and bootleggers.

Drug war follies

Radley Balko of The Agitator has a worthwhile column at Fox News about police excesses--including everything from wrong-house raids to suppressing evidence of defendants' innocence related to drug prohibition.

The conclusion:

These sorts of police tactics would be morally dubious if they were being used to fight terrorism, or to ensure national security. But they grow more absurd—and more intolerable—when you consider the ultimate end, here. None of this deception, corruption, and abuse is being employed to catch sleeper Al-Qaeda cells, or to catch murderers or serial killers or pedophiles. It's being used to stop people from getting high.

Smoking ban scofflaw

Yet another British pub owner says he'll defy the U.K.'s draconian smoking ban.

"It's a very hard thing to prove," said Mr West. "The doormen will ask everyone who enters if they are a policeman or a council officer, which they have to declare, and they will then radio down to us.

"Our customers will then put their cigarettes in the ashtrays and even if they had lit cigarettes in front of them, how can you prove they have been physically smoking them?"

That's the spirit! I wish we'd see a lot more rebellion of this sort against the nanny-staters and professional scolds.

Personally, I'd choose magic mushrooms

Cool. I didn't know NASA was running party cruises. I have to say though, if I was being shot off into the mind-blowing heavens, alcohol wouldn't be my preferred mood enhancer.

Make mine a Cuban

Federal lawmakers seem dead-set on driving the market for tobacco as thoroughly underground as the market for marijuana. A Senate Finance Committee proposal to hike the tax per cigar from $0.05 to $10.00 -- a 20,000% increase -- seems made-to-order to make stogie smuggling every bit as profitable as packing illegal drugs across the border.

I love a good cigar, but not enough to cough up an extra ten bucks a pop to Uncle Sam. That doesn't mean that I'll stop smoking cigars, though. No, instead, I'll turn to some acquaintances of mine who already supply me with the occasional already-illegal Cuban cigar (I especially favor Romeo y Julieta Churchills). Smuggled Cuban cigars will be much more cost-competitive under the proposed tax, and my friends will no doubt add still-legal but highly taxed cigars from other sources to their inventory.

The reason for the tax hike? Why, it's for the children of course. Specifically, it's intended to fund one of the Democratic Congress's favorite welfare-state programs, the State Children's Health Insurance Program. And how could any of us meanies oppose something that's so intimately tied to wide-eyed little tykes?

That such a massive tax-hike would have the added benefit of reducing demand for an officially disfavored product is gravy for the control freaks who dominate the federal legislature.

As evidence that President Bush isn't completely wrong on every issue, the White House has promised a veto of the bill that contains the tax hike.

Whether or not the tax becomes law, however, I recommend renewing your relationship with your smuggler friends.

But it's all in a good cause

What do you do if you're a cop with a demanding arrest quota to meet and a burning desire to rid the roads of those elusive intoxicated drivers? Well, you could just randomly bust drivers who tick you off, claim that they're drunk even if they ace field sobriety tests, and shuffle them off to jail.

And you could do that in dozens of cases.

Daniel Brock won high praise for jailing impaired motorists. Mothers Against Drunk Driving honored him. So did his bosses.

But one of Hillsborough County's most aggressive DUI deputies may have wrongly sent dozens of people to jail, the Sheriff's Office acknowledged Thursday.

The agency fired Brock on May 24.

In one year, Brock arrested 58 people whose blood-alcohol content was below 0.08, the level at which state law presumes a driver is impaired, an internal affairs audit showed. ...

In 43 of those 58 cases, motorists demonstrated no visible impairment behind the wheel, according to an internal affairs report made public Thursday. In 41 arrests, Brock also failed to make a case with urine samples, the report states.

Brock apparently became a joke around the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office because of the shoddiness of his arrests and his late and incomplete arrest reports. But, somehow, this guy still stayed in uniform through years of abusing his power.

Of course, the former officer is unapologetic, saying he'd do it all again. That attitude is unlikely to change so long as he continues to win the support of prohibitionist cranks like the folks at Mothers Against Drunk Driving. About Brock, a MADD spokeswoman said, "We always felt he was a good officer."

Well, he was their kind of officer anyway--the kind who puts the crusade against demon rum above all other concerns.

You have to wonder about the culture of a police department that tolerates somebody like Brock for as long as the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office did. What are the other deputies like?

Hat tip to Radley Balko for pointing to this story.

Felonious partying

When I graduated from high school, the parents of one of my friends threw a graduation bash. It was a well-chaperoned even, but not intrusively so, and about the only complaint any of us could come up with was the quality of the beer the hosts provided. Even at that tender age, most of us had better taste than to quaff Pabst Blue Ribbon if we had a choice. But beggars can't be choosers, so quaff we did. It was a nice change of pace to drink in a comfortable backyard instead of the woods or a parking lot. After all, even in those comparatively civilized days of a drinking age of 18, most of us were under-age and accustomed to sneaking around to get our booze.

Today, my friend's parents might face jail time for providing us with a safe, supervised party. They might draw the same fate as Elisa Kelly and George Robinson, of Albemarle County, Virginia, who have been sentenced to 27 months in prison for serving alcoholic beverages at their son's 16th birthday party.

Actually, Kelly and Robinson could have done even worse. They were originally sentenced to eight years in prison by a judge who, we can only be thankful, was unable to actually impose the death penalty. Given the judge's taste for harsh sentences, I'm certain he wouldn't object to the extended horse-whipping he so richly deserves.

And let's not forget the creature who brought the charges to begin with. That would be Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney James L. Camblos III, who claims this is the worst case of underage drinking he has had to deal with in 15 years. Really? The drinkers were supervised and kept in a controlled environment where car keys were collected from the party-goers and that's the worst case he's seen? I can only assume that my friends and I would have driven him to apoplexy with our behavior.

Kids experiment no matter what you want them to do. When I was 16, I had a fake ID that I used for buying booze. I didn't use it as often as I could have only because I preferred to smoke grass--I liked the high better, and the stuff was easier to transport. Banning us from drinking (or smoking grass) didn't stop the behavior; it drove it underground into relatively risky venues. One of the safer experiences I had as a teenager was that supervised graduation party.

I'm sure the same goes for the kids hosted by Elisa Kelly and George Robinson, who provided a great service by throwing a chaperoned party for their son. The shindig was almost certainly far safer than the environments in which they usually drank beer out of sight of adult eyes before driving home three sheets to the wind.

Twenty-seven months is a long time to spend in prison for doing the right thing. I'll bet other parents will think long and hard before they provide a safe environment for their kids to learn how to drink responsibly.

Hey, Mayor Bloomberg! Got a light?

So, how are New York bars dealing with Mayor "Nanny" Bloomberg's four-year-old smoking ban? Very well, thank you--if by "very well" you mean ignoring the damned thing.

Scores of trendy clubs and neighborhood pubs across the five boroughs have become smoking speakeasies, where bartenders and bouncers regularly ignore the prohibition launched in 2003.

The Post spotted scofflaw smokers openly puffing away in a dozen bars and clubs in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island during the past few weeks - including celebrity hangouts Bungalow 8, Tenjune, Butter, Marquee, Plumm and Guest House. ...

Agency statistics show 199 establishments hit with 542 violations from April 2006 to March 2007, compared to 162 establishments getting 258 violations in the prior 12-month period. The number of complaints dropped from about 3,000 to 2,000 from last year to this year.

Hmmm ... So defiance of the law is up even as complaints are down? Good. Maybe the rabid anti-smokers are packing up their crusade against any smoke, anywhere and taking their business to establishments that prefer to cater to the clean-air crowd.

That's the best result, after all--one where everybody gets to patronize establishments that suit their tastes.

Smoked out in the U.K.

Now this is more like it!

I've written several posts about individual bars here and there overtly or covertly defying smoking bans imposed by control-freak politicians or bullying voters. While commendable, these acts of civil disobedience are generally quixotic crusades destined to garner a few headlines and then fade away. Honestly, what's one bar going to do by itself when city and state officials decide to put the squeeze to the owner--or revoke the establishment's license?

But, in the U.K., of all places, pub owners have joined together in a mass "piss off" to the nanny-staters.

A campaign of civil disobedience against next month's smoking ban will see hundreds of pubs flouting the new laws.

Landlords at up to 200 pubs are planning a "day of defiance" when the legislation comes into force next month, allowing customers to light up on July 1. The number involved is expected to grow and some publicans have vowed to continue to break the law beyond July 1 if customers want them to.

While still symbolic--most pub owners aren't saying that they won't ever knuckle under to the government--this mass action carries more weight than an individual protest could. It's a statement by a large segment of an entire industry that it resents the imposition of an oppressive regulation and is willing to break that law. As such, it's drawing respecful press coverage and is certainly gaining the government's attention.

What will be more effective is if the pub owners can keep the defiance campaign going. The state needs frequent reminders that its intrusive reach is very unwelcome.

Ganja guru gets shafted--again

This from the Associated Press:

Ed Rosenthal, the self-proclaimed "guru of ganja," was convicted again Wednesday in federal court of illegally growing hundreds of marijuana plants that he said were meant to treat sick people, which state law allows.

Rosenthal was convicted of three cultivation and conspiracy charges after U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer prohibited the marijuana activist's lawyers from telling the jury Rosenthal was working for a pot club sanctioned by Oakland government officials. The decision underscored the tension between federal law and laws in 11 states that have legalized pot to some degree.

Fortunately, Rosenthal has already served a one-day sentence on the earlier conviction, which was voided, so he doesn't face any additional prison time.

The simple fact of the conviction is troubling, however. Rosenthal's case was as widely publicized--especially in California--as any case could be. It's virtually inconceivable that nobody on that jury knew that Rosenthal was growing marijuana for medical purposes, on behalf of the City of Oakland, and that several jurors who brought the earlier guilty verdict publicly repudiated their verdict and called for Rosenthal's release. At least some of the jurors must have encountered widespread calls for jury nullification in the case--that is, for jurors to bring a "not guilty" verdict in defiance of the federal law.

All it would have taken was one juror willing to hold his or her ground to hang the jury and let Rosenthal go free--in a political climate very supportive of doing exactly that.

But the jury convicted. What went wrong?

Well, the process of screening jurors for "unacceptable" views has become more sophisticated with the years, and the government certainly exercised every effort to assure itself of a compliant jury. According to earlier news reports:

In jury selection Monday, nearly two-thirds of prospective jurors were dismissed after saying they could not be impartial in a trial involving marijuana.

Among them was ousted Sharper Image Corp. CEO Richard Thalheimer, who told the court he believed the case was "an unfortunate scapegoating" of Rosenthal for political reasons.

“I think it's tremendously unfortunate that my time is being wasted and our taxpayers' money is being wasted,” Thalheimer said, according to a court transcript.

People disgusted by the prosecution had an easy out--they needed only be honest about their opinions to be booted from the jury pool.

But not one juror of the bunch was willing to hold fast to a "not guilty vote"?

That suggests a disturbingly--and uniformly--submissive group of jurors, willing to kowtow to the government even when a large part of the population from which the jurors are drawn is upset by the case. That leaves three possibilities:

1. The court somehow found jurors entirely unfamiliar with the case and with the controversy over medical marijuana.
   
2. The court selected only those jurors supportive of the federal prosecution.
   
3. The court selected jurors unwilling to buck the government despite their own views.
   

The first possibility seems unlikely given the media circus surrounding the Rosenthal case.

The second and third possibilities are more likely, and very disturbing since they suggest that the voir dire process has become such an effective filter that it is capable of screening out all independent-minded jurors. That would reduce juries to little more than rubber stamps.

I've always been a booster of jury nullification as a check on the power of the state, but if the Rosenthal case is any indication, judges and prosecutors are becoming more effective at preventing independent-minded citizens from getting into a position to use the power of the jury.

Now that's a happy meal

It doesn't get any happier than this.

Putting juries to the test

The federal government is taking its second bite at the apple with a vindictive re-prosecution of medical marijuana guru Ed Rosenthal--a prosecution that can result in no prison sentence since he already served his time on the same charges prior to his conviction being overturned. Rosenthal is charged with growing plants for medical marijuana dispensaries--a legal act in California, but one that remains verboten under federal law.

The original case resulted in a better-late-than-never jury revolt once jurors were dismissed and discovered information about the case that had been withheld from them by the judge. Five of the jurors held a news conference, apologized to Rosenthal, and called for a new trial.

Now, for reasons unrelated to juror regret, that new trial is being held. It's occurring in an atmosphere of public controversy, with plenty of publicity. Jurors have been selected from a pool exposed to open discussion of Rosenthal's role as an Oakland-appointed grower and amidst calls for the new jury to find the defendant "not guilty" in defiance of federal law. As such, the new Rosenthal trial is a good test of whether jury nullification remains a viable check on the government and the legal system.

It's an open question. While jury nullification continues to be practiced--increasingly so, according to a 1999 Washington Post article--the government has stepped up its efforts to curtail the practice. Defiant jurors have been prosecuted, jurors are instructed that they must follow the law (a major point in the original Rosenthal trial) and the business of winnowing independent minds from the jury pool has become something of a science; nearly two-thirds of prospective jurors were dismissed from the new Rosenthal trial.

So the new trial will be a strong indicator of whether juries remain independent representatives of the people in the courtroom, or whether they can be effectively beaten into submission by judges and prosecutors. After all, if a jury won't put the law aside for Ed Rosenthal, who will it acquit?

Keep an eye on this case--and keep your fingers crossed.

Smoke this, Arizona!

Three cheers for Alfonso Larriva! He's an owner of four Arizona bars who's spitting in the eye of government officials--and the pantywaist state voters who, last November, approved a smoking ban that applies even to such meccas of healthy living as Larriva's Metro Sportz Bar. Reading the fine print of the law and seeing that it applies to "enclosed" spaces, Larriva replaced windows in his watering holes with louvered vents, the better to turn them into unregulated patios.

I don't expect Larriva's touch of legal trickery to stand. In fact, the health nazis, led by Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, have already filed suit against the bar owner, seeking nearly $50,000 in fines from the man for the terrible crime of permitting his patrons to smoke on the grounds of his own businesses.

But ill-fated as Larriva's legal strategy undoubtedly is, I admire his spunk. At least he has the nerve to tell the busybodies to go to hell; that's more than many of his fellow businesspeople can boast. Most of them whine and sigh and roll over without even a gesture of resistance.

Yes, the fines are stiff, but not all acts of resistance have to come with a hefty charge. It doesn't cost anything to very publicly ban the health inspectors who enforce the law from dropping by your bar during their off hours.

Of course, it's unfair to ban the government enforcers without making it clear that there are consequences for the drones who went to the polls to inflict their preferences on the state at large. So how about posting a sign at the front door that says something like:

If you support the state ban on smoking
in privately owned businesses, you are unwelcome here.
Please take your business elsewhere.

Posting that sign would have an add-on benefit by sending the most fanatical of the anti-tobacco zealots packing with their smoke-free noses tilted high in the air. Since there aren't enough health inspectors to make a serious enforcement effort, barring anti-smokers would reduce the chances that somebody might drop a dime on an establishment that chooses to let its patrons smoke in defiance of the law.

Such efforts would be even more effective if implemented in an organized way by a large number of Arizona bars at the same time. Here's a campaign that might make the Arizona Licensed Beverage Association a relevant organization.

But for now we have to settle for Alfonso Larriva's gesture of defiance. Doomed it may be, but for now, it's the only sign of open rebellion in Arizona.