The ATF, a gun-running fiasco and blackmail

What struck me about this story was the officers’ frustration that sentences are too light to persuade those arrested to turn informant:

Agents along the border had long been frustrated by what one ATF supervisor later called “toothless” laws that made it difficult to attack gun-trafficking networks. Straw buyers — people with no criminal record who purchase guns for criminals or illegal immigrants who can’t legally buy them — are subject to little more than paperwork violations. Even people convicted of buying AK-47s meant for the cartels typically just get probation for lying on a federal form attesting that they were buying the guns for themselves. With such a light penalty, it is hard to persuade those caught to turn informant against their bosses…

I’ve been watching the Canadian series ‘Intelligence’ recently.  It really drives home the extent to which the war on drugs, and the corruption and the violence that attend it, combined with our technological capabilities to spy and snoop like never before, have completely transformed how police work is undertaken.  I thought that proportionality was a basic tenet of justice- that severity of the sentence is related to the severity of the crime.  Since when should the severity of a sentence be correlated with its ability to blackmail a defendant into cooperation?

Legislating against khat has had little success in curbing demand

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs have just published a literature review on the social harms of khat use.  Key findings:

1. The review found a general lack of robust evidence on the link between khat use and social harms.
2. Reported social harms associated with khat remain a concern among the UK’s immigrant Somali community, yet beyond often contradictory anecdotal statements, this review found no evidence to show a causal relationship between khat and the various social harms for which its consumption is supposedly responsible.
3. Inferences about khat’s social harms have largely been drawn from the experience of the Somali population, as less research has been undertaken on other communities who are also consumers of khat.
4. As well as khat, many other variables might contribute to the social problems confronting the relevant communities, i.e. the effects of civil war, displacement, gender relations, and problems of integration. These need to be more fully considered in any further research.
5. Legislating against khat in Europe and North America has had little success in curbing demand and has taken place with little consideration of evidence. In those countries where the greatest evidence on khat use has been compiled (the UK, the Netherlands and Australia), import and consumption are still permitted, albeit under the control of a permit system in the case of Australia.

Hopefully this review of the evidence is enough to prevent any moves to criminalize khat sales.  See previous discussions here and here.

 

By special request

Ryan asked me to post this, in support of  US House Bill HR2306 to end the federal prohibition of marijuana.  It’s the first time marijuana prohibition has been debated in Congress since 1937. For more information, check out the Norml blog post on the Bill. As an observation, I don’t think number 5 is correct. There aren’t any countries where marijuana is legal, just some where the penalties aren’t enforced. Regardless, it’s a fun infographic in support of a good piece of legislation. Pedantry over, back to work…

Where’s befuzzled?

Admittedly, I was in a vicodin cloud for quite some time.  (Mmmmm, vicodin) but that’s not why I haven’t been blogging.  Sadly, my job has actually required that I do some real work over the past few weeks, so I haven’t had so much time during the day. That, plus the fact that it’s now gorgeously sunny at the weekends and in the evenings means that I’m not entirely sure when I’ll be back posting here rather than outdoors enjoying the summer.  Maybe when the weather gets dark and shitty again?

In the meantime, here are the blogs that I usually read:

Cop in the Hood

Dare Generation Diary

DoseNation

Drug Law Reform News from the ACLU news feed

Drug War Chronicle

Drug War Rant

La Reprobate

Mexico’s Drug War

Marijuana Policy Project

Norml

Transform Drug Policy Foundation (and in particular, their mini blog for a daily dose of news and views)

The UKCIA newsblog

4/20

I’d never heard of 4/20 until I moved here, but it seems to be a pretty established day of toking celebration on this side of the Atlantic. The story of its origins are great– a bunch of high school guys in the 70s met at 4.20 every day after school to go hunting for a mythical marijuana field. The term 4.20 became synonymous, amongst their gang, for getting baked.  They happened to hang out with the Grateful Dead, so the term has spread amongst the toking community. Now 4/20 is a day to celebrate the weed. Tony Newman  of the DPA also wants stoners to take a moment today to recognize the political context of  their use.

White House launches plan to counter prescription drug abuse

The US Drug Czar launched a plan yesterday to counter the growing levels of abuse of prescription medication. The Harm Reduction Coalition criticized the plan for not including harm reduction strategies such as making naloxone more widely available to prevent overdoses. I want to write something more insightful and analytical than this, but I had a wisdom tooth removed yesterday and now I’m totally whacked out on Vicodin and can barely think straight. Seriously, this stuff is awesome.

Three opinions of the DEA

1. It’s a waste of money 
2. It’s not up to the challenge
3. It damages US diplomatic relations with foreign countries.

via the Atlantic, Rolling Stone and the Cato Institute

There’s more than one way to skin a cat

The description below is nothing particularly new, it’s from an article in NorthJersey.com about how Newark Aiport is increasingly popular as a hub airport for traffickers moving heroin and cocaine from Central America to Europe. As you’re reading, just ask yourself this: Is this really the best way we have of stopping children from taking drugs? Isn’t there a simpler way? You know, like maybe regulating the sale in shops here in the US?

Three federal law enforcement agencies share responsibility for interdicting and investigating drug smuggling at the airports: U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the front-line defenders who “sniff out” the couriers; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations directorate, which takes over the investigations; and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which manages a national drug intelligence program aimed at taking down domestic and international drug organizations.

When couriers are caught, the game plan is to quickly flip them and get them to turn in the people who were to pick up the drugs in the hope of developing leads that could eventually dismantle a network.

Within minutes of agreeing to cooperate, a courier is often deployed in a “controlled delivery” that results in additional arrests in the arrivals terminal or the airport parking lot.

“The courier is a great help, but most often the courier doesn’t have all the information on who the ultimate receiver is going to be,” said Mark Witzal, a deputy special agent in charge of ICE Homeland Security Investigations in New York.

“Everything is very compartmentalized. They only know enough of what they need to get into the country and then where they need to go,” Witzal said. “It’s for us to build a case using the information that we can get from a cooperator, be it a courier, information we might get from other sources, and also through a lot of different investigative techniques.”

“It’s a daunting task,” Witzal said. “Investigations are multiyear in scope. To take out, disrupt and dismantle an organization, it takes a significant amount of time.

Clearly, the purpose of the government’s drug strategy isn’t just to stop children from taking drugs, it’s to stop everyone from taking drugs. Sometimes,  I think we all just need to look at that and ask why?  Why is it so important to so many people that I don’t put this particular substance in my body?

13 ways to get high

On the radio this morning I heard that a school in Frederick County, Maryland, has banned children from bringing food in to school to share with each other after a student was taken to hospital (????) after eating a cupcake that may have been a little bit magic. Sounds like a reasonable and proportional and highly rational response to me. Idiots. As a distraction from the idiocy, here’s more idiocy: 13 ways that people around the world like to get high:

Via: Medical Billing and Coding, via The Campus Socialite, and WAMU

Thanks Becky!

Canada

I tend to focus in this blog on places I have a connection with- write what you know and all that. But there is other stuff happening elsewhere. (No, really, there is.) So with today’s news that the International Harm Reduction Association is rebranding as Harm Reduction International, I’ve decided to look outside my usual ‘places I know’ perspective.

So, to Canada:

For a while they seemed to have a pretty good drug policy- back under the Liberals, before the Evil Stephen Harper, they were setting up a safe injecting site, enacting a ‘four pillar’ strategy and being all Canadian and nice and setting global standards for good practices in harm reduction. Then the Evil Stephen Harper did that traditional “tough on drugs coz it makes me look all manly” politician crap, and it’s all been a bit rubbish. But then his coalition government collapsed and now the Canadians are choosing a new government, and all the drug policy dudes are getting all excited because maybe the Liberals can knock some sense into politics and prevent the Evil Stephen Harper from introducing a crime bill within a 100 days which would criminalize EVERYTHING. None of the left wing want to appear soft on crime, obviously. Instead they’re trying to be smart on crime. (Do you see what they did there?) There’s an interesting post on how ideology has trumped evidence in recent drug policy debates in Canada here.

Things got particularly exciting this week with a judge in Ontario ruling that the country’s medical marijuana laws are so screwed, and doctors are so wary of the repercussions of prescribing/recommending/whatever process is required in Canada to get patients their weed, that the law is effectively denying patients the care they need. To address this, the Ontario Superior Court struck down two key parts of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act that prohibit  possession and production of marijuana. From the National Post:

The court declared the rules that govern medical marijuana access and the prohibitions laid out in sections 4 and 7 of the Act “constitutionally invalid and of no force and effect” on Monday, effectively paving the way for legalization.

If the government does not respond within 90 days with a successful delay or re-regulation of marijuana, the drug will be legal to possess and produce in Ontario, where the decision is binding.

Here’s hoping for inaction on the part of the government. And good luck keeping the Evil Stephen Harper out of government too!