Update from (Near) The White House, Part I

See this update on what we're up to during this historic week!

The people who are elected to make the laws that bind you

Rep. Lamar Smith from Texas on Fox News recently criticized the Obama administration's approach to marijuana and wants stricter drug law enforcement. Rep. Smith recently introduced H.R 5231, a bill would criminalize Americans working in Switzerland trying to save lives with heroin assisted treatment, for example.

“Rep. Lamar Smith (Texas), the top Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee who would likely become chairman of the committee under a GOP majority, accused the administration of being too lax in its enforcement of drug laws.

"The administration is clearly sending the message that they don't think it's bad to use marijuana," Smith said on Fox News. "So they're encouraging the use of marijuana. And that simply is not a good thing to do."

Smith blamed the administration's decision to not enforce federal laws against marijuana dispensaries in states that have legalized the drug for medicinal purposes. Smith blamed the administration's approach on drug laws for recent statistics showing an increased use of marijuana.

"We ought to be enforcing our drug laws, not backing away from them," said Smith, who also lamented a recent revision of criminal sentencing guidelines that reduced sentencing guidelines for crack-cocaine traffickers.”

Possibly Rep. Smith is referring to the 1,663,582 total arrests for drug abuse violations in the US in 2009, with someone being arrested for a drug offense every 18 seconds as being too lax. Maybe he’s referring to these ‘non-enforcements’, this ‘non-enforcement’, or possibly this ‘non-enforcement of federal drug laws as being too lax. After all, President Obama promised those raids would end while he was campaigning, and he gave respectful and thoughtful consideration to a question about the legalization of marijuana.

You know what? I did something about it. I took a total of 1 minute and 23 seconds out of my day to call Speaker Pelosi’s office urging her to cancel the vote on H.R 5231, a bill sponsored by Rep. Smith. I registered to vote when I received my driver’s license, which took all the effort of answering a few questions.

We can either stand by idly and watch our friends, neighbors, brothers and sisters be thrown into the back of a police cruiser after having their door smashed down in the middle of the night or we can take a stand and vote. Why should those who seek to criminalize non-violent, consensual behavior be allowed to impose their morals on us then utilize our money to do so in the most violent manner possible?

Register to vote, make a difference in your community.

Did You Know? The War on Drugs Edition

Check out this great video from the International Centre for Science and Drug Policy. It serves as a quick yet thorough introduction to the War on Drugs. For new SSDP members, watching the video will make them aware of drug war facts. And this new awareness could spark a desire to make a difference, a sentiment common among drug policy reformers.

The video shows that our current drug policies are harmful, ineffective, and counterproductive. The War on Drugs--which set out to reduce drugs' supply and use--has done little to accomplish these goals. After forty years of prohibiting illicit drugs and incarcerating their users, these drugs are readily accessible to youth, more so than legally regulated drugs like alcohol and cigarettes. In a damning indictment of prohibition, rates of drug use have remained mostly constant over the same four decade trajectory.

Such failures evince an ineffective strategy: by creating a profitable black market for drugs, prohibition has increased drug-related violence. Americans have seen this scenario of illegal market formation and escalating violence before, with alcohol's prohibition in the 1920s. Indeed, echoing seventeenth-century Enlightenment penal reformer Cesare Beccaria, Albert Einstein made the following observation during Prohibition:

"Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."

Einstein couldn't foresee the astronomically high rates of incarceration which have followed from prohibition in the war on drugs. Nor could anyone predict the costs upon our education and health care systems, heavy burdens for society that have fallen on drug users and non-users alike. That's why the International Centre for Science and Durg Policy's work helps us understand the unintended, devastating consequences of the War on Drugs.

Detaining the Wind: Peruvian Cocaine Production Hits New Highs

How does drug trafficking become more resilient to repression, better able to cross borders, and increase supply?

Part of the answer lies in the approach of the Washington, DC anti-narcotics policy apparatus. For example, back in the 1990s Washington's narcs and the US military decided to staunch the cocaine supply from Colombia. (It had come to Colombia in the same decade after eradication efforts in Peru squeezed growers out from its ancestral home.)

Washington's Colombian strategy changed the region: where once the powder went by sea and air, almost overnight the drug cartels opted for the overland route, through Mexico. According to Brown University scholar Peter Andreas in Border Games, not a single beltway policy wonk foresaw that coke would still flow from Colombia, surging through Mexico with disastrous consequences, an obvious yet unnoticed land bridge.

Now in a repetition of the tired but tested law of Washington's unintended consequences, Peru might go the same way as Mexico, according to the New York Times. Again, Washington has its hand in this change. Since 2000 Colombia has received $5 billion in aid to eradicate coca production. Watch this video from the New York Times.

But of course coca production hasn't declined in the Andes, it's just shifted BACK to Peru. This is known as the "balloon effect" where the problem "swells in one spot when another is squeezed." SSDP advisory council member Sanho Tree has also compared coca eradication to the game whac-a-mole and Shoveling Water. And this happens with dramatic consequences.

Soldiers, civilians and paramilitaries have died in clashes between guerrillas and Peruvian troops. US anti-narcotics aid to Peru has climbed this year from last year, reports the NYT in its article, even though the Obama Administration stated in its 2010 National Drug Control Policy to focus more on patients than prohibition. Obama's move seemed to gel with Latin America's leaders who called in February for a different, less punitive approach to US, and their own, drug policies. Yet in a continuation of the past, the Obama Administration has increased money for eradication and interdiction.

At least some in the Andes are aware that their task is impossible. The Peruvian general in charge of eradication refers to his efforts as, "detaining the wind." But the cartels are bristling in the breeze, strengthening their resolve, and increasing their profits and production.

Another $500 Million for More National Guard at the Mexican Border

President Obama has requested an additional $500 million to deploy 1,200 National Guard troops in an an attempt to secure the Mexican border. Fueled by concerns of illegal immigrants and drug-traffickers, the deployment of more troops provides the sense of security necessary to prevent the panic of Mexican drug war violence spilling across the border.

In a statement, the Mexican ambassador to the United States praised the "additional U.S. resources to enhance efforts to prevent the illegal flows of weapons and bulk cash into Mexico, which provide organized crime with its firepower and its ability to corrupt."

However, isn't it prohibition that has created the black market in which illegal drug traffickers now prosper from? What seems to be missing from political discussion is a solution that targets the root cause of drug war violence. Regardless, Senate Republicans offered an amendment to an emergency war spending bill to provide an additional $2 billion in border funding -- four times the size of Obama's proposal. John McCain also introduced an amendment to send 6,000 troops to the border.

The violence has crossed the border and escalated to a point where many Arizonans do not feel safe within their own homes or on their property," McCain and fellow Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl (R) wrote last week in a letter to Obama. "It would be irresponsible not to do everything we can to stop the escalating violence along the border with Mexico."

Fortunately, President Obama seems to understand that enforcement alone will not solve the country's immigration problems. He urged lawmakers to join a bipartisan effort to revamp the system. In relation, current U.S. drug policies need to be addressed as well. With the 22,700 death toll of the Mexican drug war, what more needs to happen in order for U.S. law makers to rethink our counterproductive prohibition strategy? As lawmakers consider such proposals to temporarily increase security, may they also think about plans for the future.The surge of more troops in hopes of solving border violence is an expensive band-aid at best.

AP Slams the Drug War

The Associated Press has hit the drug war hard with a piece that examines U.S. drug policy's efforts and claims that 40 years and $1 trillion later, we're actually worse off than we were before this thing started.

Even ONDCP Director Gil Kerlikowske admits that "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified." Attempting to grasp onto his fading limelight and defend the drug war is Kerlkowske's predecessor John Walters, who firmly disagreed.

"To say that all the things that have been done in the war on drugs haven't made any difference is ridiculous," Walters said. "It destroys everything we've done. It's saying all the people involved in law enforcment, treatment and prevention have been wasting their time. It's saying all these people's work is misguided."

That's exactly what is being said. Though he's simply lumping in treatment and prevention professionals to try and save face. Many people involved in that field feel that the war on drugs has been misguided and that it makes their jobs, which is to help people overcome addictions and get back on their feet, much harder. 

 

The money spent on law enforcement of the drug war dwarfs what is spent on treatment and prevention leaving many facilities understaffed. Treatment and prevention specialists have long criticized the far reaching implications of having a drug conviction. After completing treatment, one of the most important things a person can do to help avoid relapse is to stay busy. That's kind of hard to do when you've lost your job after being arrested and can't get a new one because of the conviction on your record. If you were getting financial aid for college at the time of your arrest you can forget about going back to school. Need food stamps or public housing? You can forget about that too.

Walters continues to live in a fantasy world for people who believe that the devastating drug war violence occurring in Mexico is actually a victory for U.S. drug policy. He lives next door to Michelle Leonhardt, acting DEA Director and they both get their paper delivered by Andrea Barthwell while they watch a TV station where Asa Hutchinson actually wins debates. Living in this drug war utopia, they're able to ignore and distort facts like the ones the AP dug up:

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:

- $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico - and the violence along with it.
- $33 billion in marketing "Just Say No"-style messages to America's youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have "risen steadily" since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.
- $49 billion for law enforcement along America's borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.
- $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.
- $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.

Does the new drug control strategy and budget go far enough to make the changes that we need to reduce drug abuse and the violence associated with the illegal drug trade? No. But did anyone really expect it to? It is a step in the right direction with modest increases in funding for treatment and prevention and we have an administration that is at least able to acknowledge the fact that drug war hasn't solved the problem. 

 

Our focus now should be to urge the Senate to not confirm Michelle Leonhart as DEA administrator.