Fair and balanced

Today in lecture, I made an announcement about how SSDP is having a week of action to repeal the HEA Aid Elimination penalty.

I made the announcement brief but thorough: explained what it is, how it's being reauthorized, how many students have been affected, how it affects students with at least a 2.5 GPA, how low-income students tend to suffer more, how it's counterproductive.

I passed out postcards for people to fill out if they so chose to take action. After class, I collected them. Not everyone filled one out - hey, freedom of choice, it's cool - but one of the otherwise blank ones contained a message for me:

"I am all for helping people out, but you did not say anything about the other side of the issue. You need to inform us about the other side."

Me and that postcard stood a while giving each other a long, hard, bewildered look.

What is the other side of the story?

Seriously. Nothing, absolutely nothing and nobody benefits from this penalty. Well, Rep. Souder, maybe drug dealers recruiting long-term customers and salespeople, apparently recruiters for the armed forces too. Schools, economy, family, human rights, minority advancement, criminal justice & law enforcement, community health & safety, faith in the government, reducing drug abuse itself... yeah, pretty much everything else stands to lose.

There is this American myth that every issue has two sides with equally compelling arguments. Like everything's a complicated issue for which you have to consider tons of different conflicting factors. Indeed there are complexities within the drug policy issue at large - in fact, the existence of complexities prompts us to work for reform and reject zero tolerance/prohibition. The HEA Aid Elimination penalty, though? Hell, even my dad the well-meaning oldschool prohibitionist immediately understood the inherent nonsense and misguided morality of the thing.

Come on, people. 9 out of 10 dentists recommend repealing this penalty; the 10th dentist is a con artist who is not actually a dentist at all but a sadist who likes ripping out teeth with rusty tweezers and without Novocaine. Use your noggins. Sometimes you really can confidently pick a side; the issue is not always way beyond your comprehension. Must we insist on remaining disoriented in order to consider ourselves open-minded? Welcome to the post-9/11 world; this has been me ranting about my pet peeve.

Frontline Delivers the Drug War Goods

If you enjoyed The Drug Years on VH1, you’re in for a treat from the great documentarians at PBS’s Frontline.

With stories from Columbian smugglers, New York City crack middlemen, DEA officials from the last 40 years, and doctors specializing in treatment, “Drug Wars,” a website run by Frontline, chronicles drug policy with accuracy and depth. It includes interviews, research, and video clips. Here are some interesting nuggets.

Drug policy wonks sometimes talk about “black markets” created by current drug laws. Dick Gregorie, an assistant DA in Florida who has spent his career dealing with trafficked cases, explains the massive scale of illegal drug operations in this interview.

How would you describe the size, extent, parameters, of the international narcotics business?

The drug trafficking business has grown into one of the world's largest enterprises--I would say equal with the oil industry or some of the major corporations in the world.

Are you talking about cash?

We are talking about billions of dollars every year in liquid cash.

Would you say they [are] controlling some economies?

They do control economies. I would say the narcotics industry in Colombia is more cash ready than [its] government, or almost any other South American [government].

What are the mega-traffickers up against? Bill Alden began working as a narc for the DEA in the 1960s. He has a story and some thoughts from the inside:

In March, 1984, the Colombia national police along with DEA in Bogota made the Tranquilandia seizure, which was the single largest cocaine seizure of that time. It was 22,000 pounds of finished, refined cocaine. ...

Later that year, I made a presentation to the California Narcotic Officers Association in San Diego. I remember alluding to Tranquilandia, and insinuating that we might have turned a corner. I really always wanted to go back and apologize for that later on. There was no impact. Almost twelve tons of cocaine was seized, and that had absolutely no impact on the market at all, on availability. It continued just as it did, as ferocious as it was before. And then we really began to realize how big it really was.

We realized that if you could seize that amount of drugs and not have an impact on the traffic, then you better start doing something else besides focusing solely on the law enforcement aspects of the problem.

Does policy get better once the drugs hit American streets? Michael Gelacek served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission in the 1990s, which recommended to Congress that crack and powder cocaine sentencing be equalized. Under the laws of that time and today (as the recommendation was rejected), possessing a gram of crack results in a substantially longer jail sentence than possessing a gram of cocaine. He traces the origin of this unfair law.

If you go back and look at the Congressional Record, you'll see that they tossed around all kinds of numbers for ratios. They ultimately settled on a 100-to-1, and I don't remember where that came from. I think they plucked it out of the sky. They talked about 20-to-1, 50-to-1, 25-to-1. In the initial ratios between powder and crack cocaine, no one talked about 100-to-1. That came about as a one-upsman contest between the House and the Senate--who could be tougher on crack cocaine. And they both proved they could be very tough...

We know treatment works. We don't spend a lot of money on treatment. We know that education works. We don't spend a lot of money on education. One thing we know that doesn't work is incarceration. We don't cure anybody by putting them in jail. All we do is take them off the streets.

If you're wondering how much of your money goes towards these policies, Frontline has a handy chart. (17.7 Billion).
And these few bits of information barely scratch the surface of Frontline’s site. If you're interested in hard facts about drug policy, there is a ton of content here.

Stop Bush's Drug War Draft!

Check out this quote from a 2003 RAND report (PDF) commissioned by the Pentagon:

The [armed] services might be able to significantly expand their pool of potential recruits by adopting policies that target youth who plan to go to college...

Hmm. Policies that target youth who plan to go to college. I'm not sure if I can think of any of those.

Oh. Right.

High School Tyranny in Colorado

Hide your cell phones, kids, unless you want your high school principal pawing through them, reading your messages, and impersonating you to entrap your friends. This is exactly what happened at Monarch High School in Louisville, Colorado.

It's stunning that adults thought that this extraordinary violation of privacy was okay.

School officials at Monarch High in Louisville are committing felonies and violating students' privacy by seizing students' cell phones, reading their text messages and making notes about it in students' permanent files, the ACLU warned Wednesday.

Why would administrators do this? What could possibly drive them to such puritanical lengths?

The never ending crusade against high school marijuana use, of course.

It gets downright creepy. In a letter to the Board of Education of the school system, the ACLU describes one mother getting her son's cell phone back from Assistant Principal Drew Adams.

When the student’s mother finally recovered it the following Tuesday, she discovered that Adams had apparently drafted a text message and had attempted to send it from her son’s phone to one of her son’s friends. The text message appeared in the phone’s outbox with an unambiguous time and date stamp showing that it was drafted while Adams had possession of the phone. The text message itself appeared to be Adams’ attempt to engage the receiving student in a conversation while Adams was falsely representing himself as a student.

The drug war has turned our public policy into a farce. Under this set of absurd laws, our officials turn into criminal impersonators and those who we think we can trust violate our basic rights. For what? To bust a dozen high school students?

Dylan Hayword, a Monarch senior, tells us why we should all be concerned by this kind of insane abuse of power.

Hayward told 9NEWS he would not want administrators searching his cell phone because of personal messages he receives from his mother.

"She lets me know about family affairs, Grandma's surgery and stuff like that," Hayward said. "I don't want everyone going through my texts and learning about my problems and stuff like that... It's not cool."

Franklin Pierce University Forced by Local Police to Help Bust its Own Students

Drug war lunacy has taken hold in Rindge, NH and it isn't pretty. A new policy of notifying local police about suspected drug use on campus has disrupted the school's educational mission and provoked widespread alarm among students.

After discovering a marijuana grinder during a routine maintenance check, campus security called police to investigate. Police then locked students out of their residence for 26 hours while obtaining a search warrant. This video made by Franklin Pierce SSDP members shows how several students were denied access to all of their possessions, including their school work, for a full day so that one of them could be investigated for drug paraphernalia:



If this sounds like a typical college campus misconduct case, it's not. Sources familiar with the situation have informed me that Rindge Police threatened campus security themselves with arrest if they didn't start sacrificing students to the local drug war. It's like saying, "We know people smoke pot on campus. Help us bust them, or we'll bust you."

It's hard to understand what could motivate this type of law-enforcement. Small-town police departments with less to occupy their time are frequently prone to drug war excesses. College town culture clashes are nothing new either. But the sheer audacity of all this is stunning, and it raises important questions about whether this police department understands its proper role in the community.

Beyond that, it highlights how quickly the war on drugs can become a war on education itself. Throughout the nation, students bear the stigma of presumed drug involvement and are targeted, not just by law-enforcement, but by federal law that removes young people from school for petty offenses. The behavior of police at Franklin Pierce University is symptomatic of the corrupted drug war mentality that we must investigate and destroy our young people if necessary in order to discourage drug use.

This is not a war which seeks to protect and uplift America's youth. It is many things, but it is so clearly not that.

By Scott Morgan - cross-posted on StopTheDrugWar.org Speakeasy

Don't Take Any Odds In This Fight

Today’s fight: on one side, Muhammed Ali in his prime; on the other, some random weak guy in a suit. The results are sure to be grotesque. But the fight is not nearly as one-sided as the next match-up: famed Chicago-school economist Milton Friedman vs. federal drug Czar John Walters.

In a recent interview, San Diego Herald Tribune blogger Chris Reed asked the Czar to refute Milton Friedman’s criticisms of the drug war. Friedman, who some call the father of the conservative movement (but who is an ideological ally of liberals on some social issues), wrote an important article for Newsweek in 1972 criticizing Nixon’s emerging “drug war”:

Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?

But, you may say, must we accept defeat? Why not simply end the drug traffic? That is where experience under Prohibition is most relevant. We cannot end the drug traffic. We may be able to cut off opium from Turkey but there are innumerable other places where the opium poppy grows. With French cooperation, we may be able to make Marseilles an unhealthy place to manufacture heroin but there are innumerable other places where the simple manufacturing operations involved can be carried out. So long as large sums of money are involved -- and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal -- it is literally hopeless to expect to end the traffic or even to reduce seriously its scope. In drugs, as in other areas, persuasion and example are likely to be far more effective than the use of force to shape others in our image.

A well-reasoned blow from Friedman. Czar Walter has some explaining to do - after all, the drug war is what puts tax-payer money in his piggy bank. Reed transcribes his flimsy response:

he said what "the facts really say" is that Milton Friedman's criticisms of the drug war were "untrue -- demonstrably untrue."

This is what happens when you match-up a heavy-weight thinker with a mindless bureaucrat who’s profession is an embodiment of unfair, irrational laws.

Time to end with a joke:
Q: What did George Bush say when asked why he opposed the position of drug czar?
A: “That job is far too important to trust to a Russian”

The danger of bread is that too much of it is spent on the war on drugs!

See because "bread" is an old slang term for money. Yeah.

Anyway, this has been circulating on the internets for a long time, but I got a kick out of it and thought it should be in DGD. (It was in my friend's livejournal. Thanks, friend.)

The Dangers of Bread

A recent Cincinnati Enquirer headline read, "Smell of baked bread may be health hazard." The article went on to describe the dangers of the smell of baking bread. The main danger, apparently, is that the organic components of this aroma may break down ozone (I'm not making this stuff up).

I was horrified. When are we going to do something about bread- induced global warming? Sure, we attack tobacco companies, but when is the government going to go after Big Bread?

Well, I've done a little research, and what I've discovered should make anyone think twice....

1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread eaters.
2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever and influenza ravaged whole nations.
4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
5. Bread is made from a substance called "dough." It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average American eats more bread than that in one month!
6. Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low occurrence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and osteoporosis.
7. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after only two days.
8. Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter and even cold cuts.
9. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.
10. Newborn babies can choke on bread.
11. Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 400 degrees Fahrenheit! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than one minute.
12. Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.

In light of these frightening statistics, we propose the following bread restrictions:

1. No sale of bread to minors.
2. No advertising of bread within 1000 feet of a school.
3. A 300 percent federal tax on all bread to pay for all the societal ills we might associate with bread.
4. No animal or human images, nor any primary colors (which may appeal to children) may be used to promote bread usage.
5. A $4.2 zillion fine on the three biggest bread manufacturers. Please send this e-mail on to everyone you know who cares about this crucial issue.

At least they didn't recommend bread prohibition. Imagine the impurities that would show up in black market bread, and the exorbitant prices, and the fires starting when people cram dangerous industrial ovens into secret basement rooms, and the violence surrounding the illegal bread trade, and the environmental destruction when people start growing wheat in national forests, and so on!

So, is your bullshit detector functioning properly? Good. Help us end the federal war on bread! I mean drugs! which is justified largely by nonsense statistics and non-causal correlations.

Similar to the dangers of bread is this classic on the dangers of water.

Some Civics Lesson…Drug Testing Teachers Too?

In a glaring violation of fundamental rights to personal privacy, Hawaii roles out a new plan to randomly drug test all teachers.

The Hawaii State Teachers Association has ratified a new contract that will require its members to undergo random drug and alcohol testing--a requirement unusual for public school teachers--as the price for receiving a 4 percent salary increase each year over the next two years…...

Greg Knudsen, a spokesman for the 181,000-student statewide district, said that even though the department was already working with the union to develop a "reasonable suspicion" drug testing policy, that doesn't imply that officials think drug abuse is a widespread problem among teachers.

"The department didn't initiate it," he said about the random testing proposal.

Education Week May 9, 2007

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If the Department of Education didn’t initiate the testing scheme, then who did? It was Hawaii governor Linda Lingle, who pressed for the testing as a part of the new contract the union was negotiating. Claiming there was a crisis of teacher drug abuse because six public education employees were arrested during the 2006-2007 school year, the Governor made it very clear that without a drug testing provision in the contract there would be no pay raise. It’s a disturbing, though classic, attempt to look ‘tough on drugs’.

…..Talks opened in June 2006, but there was no movement until April when Gov. Linda Lingle's administration delivered an offer of raises and the nonnegotiable mandate of random drug testing for teachers.

"The thing was it was put down as a take it or leave it. There was no negotiation on the governor's part. It was kind of shoved down our throats," Wurst said. "I was livid about that. To me it wasn't negotiation. It was really, really disappointing."

The Maui News, May 3, 2007

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The pay raise will bring teachers up to just above $43,000 a year. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Hawaii, but it’s quite expensive to live there, and people shouldn’t have to sign away their most basic of constitutional rights to make a living wage. With tests around $45 a person, Hawaii is looking at almost $600,000 on what is basically a test for marijuana use. In essence the system is geared to test for teachers who used marijuana over summer vacation, but not who used meth over the weekend.

Some might argue that outside of the expense, the possible trampling of civil rights, and the political pandering, if the tests can help stop drug abuse than it’s worth it. Unfortunately they’ve never been proven to work. Let me state that again. THEY’VE NEVER BEEN PROVEN TO WORK!!! That’s right folks, even the National Academy of Sciences has said that, “Despite beliefs to the contrary, the preventative effects of drug-testing programs have never been adequately demonstrated.” (Under the Influence? Drugs and the American Work Force, 1994)

What can we do to stop this cheap political trick that threatens to undermine the rights of 13,000 teachers? The ACLU is currently recruiting teachers in Hawaii to join a legal challenge aimed at ending this unconstitutional practice. You can learn more at www.aclu.org/TeachersJoinUs . Pass the word on to any teachers you know, or anyone who lives in Hawaii. Teachers can also call toll-free at (888) 9Join-Us or send an email to teachersjoinus@aclu.org

I’m reminded of Ben Franklin’s quote, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Suspicionless drug testing takes away our liberties, and does absolutely nothing to improve the safety of Hawaiian students. Shame on you, Governor Lingle.

P.S. I’m really hoping that this is just some elaborate lesson designed to get students thinking about what protections the Constitution affords every American.

"Just tell me what'll happen to me if I smoke dank nugs on the daily..."

Check out InfoMania's hilarious diss of the federal "anti-drug" propaganda campaign. (InfoMania is a program on Al Gore's CurrentTV.)

And be sure to write Congress and tell them to stop spending your tax dollars on silly, offensive, and wasteful propaganda.

"Let's analyze the poet's comparison."

Sorry, I'm an English major. And also a poet. I hereby swear to the blog gods that my next post won't be like an essay.

Okay, so in this post from June, I wrote "not every gay rights activist is LGBT, not every pro-choice advocate has had an abortion or is even sexually active, not every feminist is female, and not every environmentalist is a polar bear - duh."

I've been getting good reviews about that, particularly the part about polar bears. I like that rhetoric too, and here's why. (Note: Drug policy reformers do not necessarily support the causes/ideologies listed below.)

I hear a lot of rhetoric about how the War on Drugs is like the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement, and the abolitionist movement. This is true in the sense that a group of people are fighting social injustice over decades of powerful grassroots action, and, as with these historic movements, we are slowly but surely getting results. A growing number of people are on our side morally and intellectually. All we need is action, we can't be sure when push will come to shove, but those involved are already shoving soooo we're pretty much gonna win. Also, the connections to civil rights are clear in drug policy reform.

However, in a sense it's more like the environmentalist movement because it's not all about civil rights. It's also about creating safer communities, using our resources more wisely, and letting sound science take precedent over batshit crazy politics. There are a lot of actions we can take now to save money and improve quality of life in the long run. Another similarity is that the best advocates for reform in these camps must have a strong, very interdisciplinary knowledge base.

It's like the LGBT rights movement because we're fighting a prohibition of something that has to do with lifestyle choice. I don't personally believe that being LGBT is a choice, but in both cases people are punished and stigmatized for a part of their personal identity. Laws are enforced against people who simply are not criminals. And, as Ethan Nadelmann said when he telepathically stole my joke at the NE Regional Conference, in some ways both have to do with what you choose to stick in your own body, which is really nobody else's business.

It's like the pro-choice movement because it's based on reducing harm. We don't advocate recreational drugs any more than pro-choice activists advocate abortion. The point is meeting people where they're at and helping them in the best way possible, whether it's giving them information or giving them appropriate resources when they have a crisis. All this because abstinence-only just isn't effective.

Then there are endless ideologies that relate to drug policy reform: Libertarianism: people should be free to make their own choices. Christianity: freedom of choice, judge not lest ye be judged, compassion, and even sobriety (As the protestants learned during the temperance movement, prohibition did not cause people to "walk properly, not in drunkenness." Verse from Romans 13. If I understand Christianity, then sobriety and a law-abiding lifestyle should come from one's personal relationship with God and scripture, not from the law... but anyway). Wicca: Harm none, do what ye will. Hell, you can apply anything really. Existentialism: Well who knows why we exist but while we're here let's do something meaningful. Nihilism: Dude. Whatever, nothing matters. (Most reformers aren't nihilists - too much effort for nihilism. :D)

We shouldn't need these analogies to legitimize the movement as a whole. My feeling is that such comparisons should be focused on the context of the conversation at hand. We are not freeing slaves here, and unless you encounter the perfect context for the analogy, don't go suggesting that we think we're abolitionists. That would be misguided and sad. We are not misguided and sad. We're heavily based on strong principles and we're not out of our minds and we've thought about all the implications of the issue and we have good experience and research to back ourselves up. Every issue and philosophy is unique and multi-dimensional. Many issues overlap, but never entirely. Don't let anyone forget. Relying fully on analogy is for people with poor understanding of the issue at hand (see Godwin's law). But uh, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use them when appropriate.

Also let's get some polar bears in on this action. Can you imagine a throng of polar bears marching on the Capitol? Fuck, I can, and it's awesome. (Not all drug policy reformers have a potty mouth like me.)