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.