For the first time in decades, a marijuana decriminalization bill is before the Congress. Actually introduced by Rep.

Graham Boyd at ACLU has a fascinating series of posts on the U.N. drug policy summit in Vienna. It is a remarkable event bringing together AIDS organizations, public health groups, human rights advocates, treatment specialists, police officers, substance abuse researchers, academics, drug policy reformers, and other experts from around the world to critique UN drug policy and make recommendations.

Not surprisingly, the Drug Czar's office felt threatened by the event and sent an enforcer to intimidate everyone:

First, the intrigue. Throughout the first day, I kept noticing this one person who harrumphed, guffawed, and muttered every time someone spoke in ways critical of the drug policy status quo. By accent, she seemed to be from the United States. And she had a yellow badge, where everyone else had a red badge. Who was she? Why did she keep shuffling over to the U.S. groups like Drug Free America and other cheerleaders for U.S. hardline policy? She settled in right behind me, and gave instructions to her allies — tactics for blocking inclusion of harm reduction. She said "one of you needs to interject to stop the hand clapping in favor of their proposals." More and more, she seemed like some sort of puppet master. As the day concluded, she rushed up to the podium, accosted the chair, and, in the most agitated way, began lambasting the chair for various procedural points.

I had to find out about the American woman with the yellow badge. At a social gathering later that evening, I described my observations to some of the NGO delegates who regularly attend these U.N. events. Turns out that the yellow-badge woman is June Sivilli, an employee of the U.S. drug czar’s office and a regular fixture at Vienna drug meetings. Until now, she has been able to speak as an official voice of the U.S. government — and the U.S. is always the most important voice on U.N. drug policy issues. Now that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are bringing the voices of ordinary people to the table for the first time ever, she was actively subverting the process, throwing every possible obstacle in the way of this quite benign process.

I’d always heard that the U.S. government played a bully role in international drug policy. But it’s really ugly to see it in practice.

It's really impossible to overstate the tyrannical role U.S. drug warriors have taken in attempting to subvert the U.N.'s deliberate effort to include diverse viewpoints in the NGO summit. I've discussed it before, and I'm not at all surprised to see the same tactics deployed in Vienna. I'd be surprised not to.

The mindset it requires to resist participation from such a vast group of experts is really an incredible thing to contemplate. One must really be in love with the drug war to struggle with such vigor to keep it just the way it is. What is it about the war on drugs that merits this devotion and loyalty? It is their deformed cannibal monster-child that must be sheltered and fed at any cost.

There exists a gaping black hole where the Drug Czar's credibility used to be. Even John Carnevale, a former big-shot at the Drug Czar's office is over at Huffington Post explaining that the drug war isn't going the way the White House says it is:

As an insider in the nation's war against drugs, I spent almost fifteen years in the executive office of the President. Eleven of these years were in the Office of National Drug Control Policy where I served four of the nation's so-called drug czars preparing the federal drug control budget, writing many of the national drug control strategies, and conducting performance measurement and analysis of the efficacy of those strategies.
…

In the latest 2008 National Drug Control Strategy, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) -- the federal executive office agency charged with shaping this nation's national drug control strategy -- claims that America has reached a turning point in the war on drugs. In reality, we have little reason to believe a significant change has occurred. ONDCP based its claim on declining use for youth -- a trend that long precedes this administration's tenure -- but ignores the lack of progress with regard to adult drug use, rates of drug addiction, the inaccessibility of substance abuse treatment, and new emerging drugs of demand such as pharmaceutical drugs and methamphetamine. If America is to be successful in the fight against drugs, the first priority for the next administration -- Republican or Democrat -- must be to reinventing ONDCP as an effective policy office capable of leading the nation's struggle with drugs.

That is basically the most polite possible way of saying these guys have their heads up their asses. It's a familiar sentiment, to be sure, but not what one typically hears from the guy who used to write the national drug control strategy.

To be clear, Carnevale is hardly the new poster child for drug policy reform. He simply wants to curtail our failed foreign drug war adventures and bring the money home to be spent on prevention and domestic law-enforcement. But his remarks serve to illustrate that there remains next to no one in America at this point who believes a single word the Drug Czar says. In this context, it seems likely that none of the people who've run that office into the ground over the past 8 years will still be working there in January regardless of who is elected president.

Update: Pete Guither has more over at DrugWarRant.

Just watch how the New York Times editorial board picks apart the Drug Czar's propaganda:

According to the White House, this country is scoring big wins in the war on drugs, especially against the cocaine cartels. Officials celebrate that cocaine seizures are up — leading to higher prices on American streets. Cocaine use by teenagers is down, and, officials say, workplace tests suggest adult use is falling.

John Walters, the White House drug czar, declared earlier this year that “courageous and effective” counternarcotics efforts in Colombia and Mexico “are disrupting the production and flow of cocaine.”

This enthusiasm rests on a very selective reading of the data. Another look suggests that despite the billions of dollars the United States has spent battling the cartels, it has hardly made a dent in the cocaine trade.

The Drug Czar's blog fired back with a predictably off-target, but uncharacteristically hostile response:

Today's New York Times has published an editorial that willfully cherry picks data in order to conform to their tired, 1970's editorial viewpoint that we're "losing the war on drugs."

Despite our numerous efforts to provide the Times with the facts, their editorial staff has chosen to ignore irrefutable data regarding the progress that has been made in making our nation's drug problem smaller.

 And yet, as anyone can see, the NYT piece clearly acknowledges this so-called "irrefutable data." They list the Drug Czar's favorite talking points right in the first paragraph. But then they do something he wasn't prepared for: they say it doesn't matter. The salient point of the whole editorial is that "the drug cartels are not running for cover." In short, for all the Drug Czar's proud proclamations of progress, the drug trade surges on unabated.

It's really just embarrassing that the Drug Czar's only response is to repeat the very points already acknowledged and overcome by NYT. His whole argument is that rates of drug abuse are lower than they were at their highest point in history. That's true, but it's not surprising, not impressive, and not even remotely a result of the Drug Czar's poisonous public policies. With the rage of a shamed tyrant, Walters claims a monopoly on "the facts," as though only the Drug Czar is qualified to interpret the success of his programs. It's like calling CarMax to ask them if they have the best deals on used cars.

Beyond all that, ponder the absurdity of the very notion that we must consult the Drug Czar and his overcooked statistics in order to know whether or not our drug policy is working really well. We can observe these things for ourselves. When we lead the world in incarceration, when we lead the world in drug use, when we drug test our own sewage, and deny organs to medical marijuana patients, and murder innocent people in their homes, and subsidize brutal civil wars in foreign nations, we have nothing to celebrate. All of these grand travesties fester before our eyes and are not mitigated, even to a microscopic extent, by the indignant self-congratulatory fulminations of the very people who visited this spectacular nightmare upon us.

In other words, when the pool is green, no one gives a crap if the lifeguard says the pH balance is normal.

The US Congress Joint Economic Committee yesterday held a historic hearing on the economic costs of US drug policy.

A number of our readers wrote in this weekend to point out that drug czar John Walters was stumping the "marijuana causes mental illness" bandwagon. It was probably inevitable. After all, a year ago we reported, "Reefer Madness Strikes a Leading British Newspaper," and this and other spurious claims have continued to emanate from various outlets and agencies ever since.

Still, propaganda is no less irritating for having anticipated it. So I could only sigh when I received a copy of a New York Times story that a member had forwarded, with his note "Walters is at it again." The article did quote people on the other side, which is good. But there's no way around the headline, which is what most people will ever read and which did not reflect any controversy or disagreement over the drug czar's claims.

Master stats and criminology expert Matthew Robinson (author of the famed "Lies, Damn Lies, and Drug War Statistics" picked a similar title for his detailed critique of Walters, "Here We Go Again: White House Makes Scary Claims About Marijuana." I'll leave it to readers to follow the link for the bulk of Robinson's analysis, but the major thing to keep in mind is that Walters has not met the three-level burden of proof to back up his claims. Those levels are the following:

1. One must show a correlation. Marijuana use and mental illness have to show up in many of the same people. That might not be so hard to demonstrate, but the reason for the correlation may be as simple as the fact that lots of people use marijuana, so most physicial or psychological issues may be represented among its users. Which leads to the second needed level:
2. One must show a temporal order. That is, it is necessary to prove that marijuana use preceded the onset of mental illness. If marijuana use began later, there obviously is no causation. Even if they start at about the same time, there may be no causation.
3. And then there is a third, very crucial intellectual requirement for drawing the conclusion that marijuana use causes mental illness. That is the need to demonstrate a "lack of spuriousness" -- which means eliminating the possibility that other factors could have led to both the marijuana use and the mental illness. For example, physical or other life issues may have led an individual to become depressed, and that person may have then begun using marijuana because of being depressed. Or there could be biological or personality factors that make both depression and drug use more likely. Or there could be other things going on.

And now you know more about statistics than the drug czar does. :)

For Immediate Release: May 6, 2008

For More Info: Contact: Jennifer Kern (415) 373-7694 or Jasmine Tyler (202) 294-8292

White House Pushes Controversial Student Drug Testing Agenda at D.C. Summit on May 7

Largest Study, Leading Health Groups Call Random, Suspicionless Drug Testing Harmful and Ineffective

Concerned Citizens to Provide Educators with Missing Information; Experts Available for Interviews

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) is conducting a series of regional summits designed to convince local educators to start drug testing students -- randomly and without cause. This policy is unsupported by the available science and opposed by leading experts in adolescent health. The Bush Administration is hosting a summit on Wednesday, May 7 at the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the 5th floor conference room of 750 17th Street, N.W. in Washington, D.C. from 1:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.

The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) will provide attendees with copies of DPA’s booklet Making Sense of Student Drug Testing: Why Educators Are Saying No, which provides resources for evidence-based alternatives and summarizes research showing that such testing is ineffective.

Studies have found that suspicionless drug testing is ineffective in deterring student drug use. The first large-scale national study on student drug testing, which was published by researchers at the University of Michigan in 2003, found no difference in rates of student drug use between schools that have drug testing programs and those that do not. A two-year randomized experimental trial published last November in the Journal of Adolescent Health concluded random drug testing targeting student athletes did not reliably reduce past month drug use and, in fact, produced attitudinal changes among students that indicate new risk factors for future substance use. 

"Drug testing is humiliating, costly and ineffective, but it’s an easy anti-drug sound bite for the White House," said Jennifer Kern, youth policy manager with the Drug Policy Alliance. "The people and educators across the country who make serious decisions about young people’s safety won’t find the information they need at these propaganda-filled summits. They need the actual research, not slogans and junk science."

The American Academy of Pediatrics, National Education Association, the Association of Addiction Professionals and the National Association of Social Workers object to testing. They believe random testing programs erect counter-productive obstacles to student participation in extracurricular activities, marginalize at-risk students and make open communication more difficult.

“Drug testing breaks down relationships of trust,” said Jasmine Tyler, deputy director of national affairs with the Drug Policy Alliance. “All credible research on substance abuse prevention points to eliminating, rather than creating, sources of alienation and conflict between young people, their parents and schools.”

A December 2007 policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Substance Abuse and Council of School Health reaffirmed their opposition to student drug testing, holding:  “Physicians should not support drug testing in schools … [because] it has not yet been established that drug testing does not cause harm.

Making Sense of Student Drug Testing: Why Educators are Saying No published by the Drug Policy Alliance and the American Civil Liberties Union can be found online at www.safety1st.org. An excerpt from the booklet is included below:

Comprehensive, rigorous and respected research shows there are many reasons why random student drug testing is not good policy:

• Drug testing is not effective in deterring drug use among young people;
• Drug testing is expensive, taking away scarce dollars from other, more effective programs that keep young people out of trouble with drugs;
• Drug testing can be legally risky, exposing schools to potentially costly litigation;
• Drug testing may drive students away from extracurricular activities, which are a proven means of helping students stay out of trouble with drugs;
• Drug testing can undermine trust between students and teachers, and between parents and children;
• Drug testing can result in false positives, leading to the punishment of innocent students;
• Drug testing does not effectively identify students who have serious problems with drugs; and
• Drug testing may lead to unintended consequences, such as students using drugs (like alcohol) that are more dangerous but less detectable by a drug test.

###

Although the use of methamphetamine has remained fairly flat throughout this decade -- contrary to popular belief -- and its half-million semi-regular users are far fewer than regular users or hero

According to a little noticed January report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), drug overdoses killed mo

EDITOR'S NOTE: Amanda Brooke Shaffer is an intern at StoptheDrugWar.org. Her bio is in our "staff" section at http://stopthedrugwar.org/about/staff

Is the American public getting tired of government lies and exaggerations about drugs? If the ballooning number of anti-drug parodies on the Internet is any measure, it sure seems so.

The emergence of YouTube.com and other popular video websites has enabled and emboldened Internet users to express their opinions about the often criticized, government-sponsored anti-drug PSAs through video clips and commentary. The public is busy at work making innovative and bold statements.

I attempted to view as many anti-drug parody ads as possible; however, I didn’t expect the search engine on YouTube.com to turn up such a high volume of videos. It soon became quite obvious that the trend of the parody ads is to expose the ridiculousness of the claims made in the anti-drug PSAs. The clip that follows is an anti-drug PSA sponsored by the government. The second is the parody of it produced by an Internet user.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=jgJdVEoVbgg, http://youtube.com/watch?v=m6FL0pmJeaE&feature=related

Clearly the second clip flat out mocks the first one by completely contradicting the message the government is portraying.

Below each video clip is space for viewers to comment. One of the numerous remarks about these two ads resembled something like this, “If I smoke then my dog will talk to me??? Puff, Puff, Pass!” This was just the tip of the iceberg of what users had to say.

A study was done on a variety of ads including the above mentioned “dog” ad to determine the effects on the youth of America. Guess what? The results showed an increase of marijuana use in girls aged 12-13 through making drug use by peers appear to be more familiar and acceptable. See: http://newrecovery.blogspot.com/2007/02/12-billion-later-national-youth-... and http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06818.pdf and http://www.nida.nih.gov/DESPR/Westat/Westat502/ExecSummary502.html

Why are we spending our dwindling tax resources on commercials that send the wrong message to their target audience? The anti-drug media campaign creates artistic and abstract ads that are unrealistic, when all Americans really need, and want to see, are commercials that tell them the truth.

Another approach the campaign employs is using upbeat and positive messages to attempt to deter youths from using drugs. It is known as “What’s Your Anti-Drug?” This parody clip (http://youtube.com/watch?v=eDXxA0hMo1I) twists the government’s message to expose the fallacy of the marijuana as a “gateway” to harder drugs myth through the line, “Weed is my anti-drug.”

It seems that no matter how hard the government works to embed the gateway myth into the public consciousness, those pesky studies that disprove a causal link to using harder drugs keep informing the public of the truth. Many clips I viewed expressed the notion that weed prevented them from using other drugs by satisfying their desires and curiosities.

I felt one parody rose above the rest. Not only was it the most viewed parody anti-drug ad I came across, but it had me and all my friends rolling on the floor with laughter. It is an ad featuring our Commander in Chief, President Bush. Bush, known for his binge drinking and cocaine use by a large majority of Americans, is an ideal person to exemplify the long-term consequences of drug abuse. This ad has the right stuff -- a notable figure and a realistic message that is powerful and clear to the viewer. Check it out: http://youtube.com/watch?v=eGgTLMC9GXg.

I think it is quite obvious why Americans are taking precious time out of their daily lives to speak out. Simply put, the extremely expensive anti-drug media campaign employed by the government over the last two decades is laughable, and government-funded research continues to conclude that these ads are ineffective at preventing and reducing drug use among youths. Yet, despite the increasing mounds of evidence proving the campaign’s ineffectiveness, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) disputes the critical conclusions of these studies and has the audacity to ask the government for even more money. The good thing is that the ease of accessing these reports, thanks to the Internet, is making it progressively harder for ONDCP to ignore the facts and hide them from the American people.

You see, the D.A.R.E. generation has had enough of the lies and distortions, and it’s fighting back with truth and sense.

President Bush and Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) head John Walters rolled out the 2008 US Nation

Gangstas better watch out. Hippies better stock up. The Drug Czar has had enough of the multi-billion dollar marijuana market, so he's decided to try even harder to stop it:

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Marijuana is now the biggest source of income for Mexico's drug cartels and the U.S. is committed to cracking down harder on traffickers, U.S. drug czar John Walters said Thursday.

"We're trying to increase the force with which we're attacking this problem," Walters said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "This is a focus because of the overlooked importance marijuana has in the violence."

Previously, you see, the Drug Czar was just trying really hard. But now he's gonna try really extra super 110% hard. It sounds like his strategy so far consists of issuing some sort of edict to prosecutors, probably by email, asking that they please put more people in prison for pot:

He added that the U.S. is "looking at additional ways in which we can have a stronger prosecutorial response," including requests for more funding and personnel.

So the Drug Czar, confronted with the failure of everything we've been doing for decades, will now request more funding to continue the same wasteful, destructive, redundant charade. Marijuana-related violence is one of the most unlikely and counterintuitive phenomena in human history, and yet it has become commonplace thanks to drug prohibition and its infinitely corrupting influence. The only remaining question is how many more declarations of redoubled drug war our nation's Drug Czars can pronounce before being pushed off their proverbial podium.

In a position paper, a leading American medical association has endorsed the medicinal us

Recent years have brought a long overdue and richly deserved implosion in the Drug Czar's credibility. It seems the truth is slowly catching up with the entrenched drug warriors at the Office of National Drug Control Policy, as the U.S. Senate, the anti-drug community, and even former staffers have joined the chorus to demand accountability from one of Washington D.C.'s most insulated institutions.

Today John Carnevale, a long-time ONDCP insider who served under four Drug Czars, has publicly slammed ineffective supply reduction efforts and called for a redistribution of federal anti-drug funding. A press release from Carnevale Associates, LLC. entitled "FY02-09 Budget Emphasizes Least Effective Ingredients of Drug Policy" directly questions the Drug Czar's strategy and accuses the nation's top drug office of wasting resources:

A review of the federal drug control budget shows that the current administration continues to favor supply reduction programs over demand reduction programs to reduce the demand for drugs by youth and adults. Since federal fiscal year (FY) 02, the budget has emphasized what research has shown to be the least effective ingredients of a federal drug control policy. This translates into almost a decade of lost opportunity in achieving performance results.

These charges are just remarkable considering their source. While Carnevale remains committed to many of the most destructive aspects of the U.S. war on drugs, these criticisms of his former office reflect a growing consensus that ONDCP has become utterly divorced from reality. The office has simply lost its prestige within the anti-drug community and, with the flood gates fully opened, must now absorb biting criticism from every conceivable constituency. Once disgraced, the schoolyard bully can now expect to be kicked in the shin routinely and can't anticipate where the next challenge will come from.

Of course, our nation's costly and fantastically unsuccessful supply reduction efforts are just the tip of the drug war iceberg. But it is notable to witness drug war insiders beginning to come to terms with our failed international drug war diplomacy. By exposing ONDCP's propensity for ignoring research, Carnevale inadvertently reveals a great deal about how that office approaches basically everything.

Did you see the Drug Czar's Super Bowl ad last week? The one with a drug dealer complaining that he'd lost all his customers because all the kids are getting high for free by stealing prescriptions from their parents' medicine cabinet? No? Well, don't worry because no one else noticed it either.

USA Today reports that ONDCP's latest ad was rated second-worst out of all 54 ads appearing during the game. Just look how many stupid ads were still vastly more popular than ONDCP's. And the #1 spot was a Budweiser™ ad, of course, which just goes to show how people would rather be offered beer than be encouraged not to eat random pills.

As usual, ONDCP's failure comes at a high cost to everyone, specifically a mind-blowing $2.7 million in tax dollars for 30 forgettable seconds. It's almost as if ONDCP's ad campaign is liquidating its remaining assets after their latest brutal congressional funding slash.

Will Congress now get the message and finally stop subsidizing this embarrassing spectacle? Hopefully so, but for once I almost feel sympathy for the Drug Czar. I've criticized ONDCP for focusing on marijuana despite the fatalities associated with increasing abuse of prescription drugs. This new message is a step in right direction and I'd give 'em the benefit of the doubt if the ad didn’t utterly suck.

The whole premise is ridiculous, implying that pharmaceutical diversion is bankrupting the illicit drug market. The last thing anyone needs is a $2.7 million announcement from the Drug Czar that we've basically won the war on illegal drugs and must now simply lock our medicine cabinets and march merrily towards total drug-freedom. Meanwhile, the actual risks associated with prescription drug abuse are ignored entirely. After all, there is a powerful perfectly legitimate industry that markets these drugs on the very same airwaves and you can bet that you'll never hear ONDCP enumerate their dangers with the same vigor they've routinely brought to bear in their towering archive of anti-marijuana propaganda.

So no, there's really nothing surprising or coincidental about the fact that ONDCP's new campaign against pharmaceutical diversion is its most boring to date.

From Glenn Greenwald:

The persuasiveness of an argument can often be determined by the willingness of its advocates to confine themselves to the truth when making it.

Glenn's talking about telecom amnesty, but, as is often the case, his point has strong relevance to the drug war debate.

Indeed, when one hears the Drug Czar proclaiming that marijuana growers are "violent criminal terrorists," it should become immediately clear how confident he is that marijuana reform arguments would prevail in a fact-based dialogue. Can you even imagine a drug policy debate in which our opposition was confined to the truth?

You'll know the whole house of cards is gonna fall when the Drug Czar, surrounded and strapped to a polygraph, finally throws his arms in the air and concedes that he just f@#king hates hippies.

This has already been addressed at DrugWarRant and The Agitator, but I'd just like to echo the observation that Dr. Bertha Madras is a cruel witch whose idea of drug prevention is willfully letting drug addicts die before our eyes.

In her capacity as Deputy Director of Demand Reduction at the Drug Czar's office, Madras is speaking out against medicines that effectively treat drug overdoses. If that sounds crazy to you, well, what can I say? These people are deranged:

...Dr. Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, opposes the use of Narcan in overdose-rescue programs.

"First of all, I don’t agree with giving an opioid antidote to non-medical professionals. That’s No. 1," she says. "I just don’t think that’s good public health policy."

Madras says drug users aren’t likely to be competent to deal with an overdose emergency. More importantly, she says, Narcan kits may actually encourage drug abusers to keep using heroin because they know overdosing isn’t as likely.

Madras says the rescue programs might take away the drug user’s motivation to get into detoxification and drug treatment.

"Sometimes having an overdose, being in an emergency room, having that contact with a health care professional is enough to make a person snap into the reality of the situation and snap into having someone give them services," Madras says. [NPR]

Um, maybe…if you don’t die. I seriously can’t believe my eyes. This is just as cold as it gets, even by ONDCP standards. Does she know or care that lives will be lost if her vision of good public health policy prevails? How many people should we allow to die in order to spread the message that heroin is dangerous?

This is one of those moments that reveal in stark terms the complete logical bankruptcy of the drug warrior mindset. By rejecting any interest in saving lives, Madras leaves one wondering what the hell she even wants. Seriously, what are we paying these people to do if not save lives?

This is not some crackpot narc spouting off silly soundbites in a local paper. This is a spokeswoman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. These people are supposedly the smartest, most competent drug experts, charged with drafting public health policies to protect us all, and their idea of the week is to cheer from the sidelines as people die from drugs so that the rest of us will learn to behave ourselves.

ONDCP's hateful, literally fatal contempt for the people they should be helping is just so creepy and awful that one struggles to understand the continued need to expose their behavior for what it is. Really, what could I say about this organization that is not made perfectly evident by the philosophy which its own spokespeople espouse openly in our newspapers?

If I didn't know better, I'd predict that ONDCP's open opposition to preventing drug overdoses would immediately cost them what remains of their shrinking legitimacy.

Last week, Scott M. Burns was promoted to the #2 position at the Office of National Drug Control Policy. He celebrated the occasion with a candid acknowledgment of the office's blatant political partisanship:

It has been quite a journey from Cedar City to the White House. All I can say is it's a great country that someone like me can have that opportunity," Burns said. "We have one year left and, as the president says, we're going to sprint to the finish." [Salt Lake Tribune]

Sure, the Drug Czar's office is part of the president's cabinet. And it's already been exposed for illegally campaigning on behalf of republicans. But couldn't Burns at least pretend he's here to serve the people and not just the Bush Administration?

Either way, he hits the nail on the head when he acknowledges that the partisan political propagandists at the helm of the ONDCP will not be reinstated by the next administration. They have "one year left," indeed. They've bucked congressional oversight at every turn, forcing ONDCP creator Joe Biden to complain that the drug czar's office is operating "like an ivory tower."

Not even a petty formality like Burns's nomination itself could proceed without the wrath of congress being entered into the record. Here's what Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy had to say:

We will also hear from one nominee for a high-level position in the Executive Office of the President – Scott M. Burns to be Deputy Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. We consider his nomination on the heels of decisions by the Supreme Court and the U.S. Sentencing Commission that represent moderate but powerful steps to reform the unfair disparity that exists in Federal crack cocaine sentencing laws.

Yet, the Administration continues to be silent on any reform in this area. For more than 20 years, we have tolerated a Federal cocaine sentencing policy that treats crack offenders more harshly than cocaine offenders. This policy has unacceptably had a disparate impact on people of color and the poor – without any empirical justification. The Administration’s failure to support even the slightest modification of crack penalties is both a surprise and a deep disappointment.

Ironically, had there been more than "one year left," one wonders if Congress would have made more of an effort to disrupt ONDCP's power structure than to simply promote a long-time insider who shares responsibility for the perpetual controversy and incompetence that we've all come to expect from President Bush's drug war experts.

Josh Burnett at NPR has a strong article debunking the absurd cocaine shortage rumor started by the Drug Czar's office. Burnett explains that increased cocaine prices are temporary and that the Drug Czar's claims of "unprecedented" progress are just false.

Burnett reached these conclusions through an increasingly rare journalism technique known as "research." Rather than mindlessly regurgitating the government's claims of drug war success, he called police chiefs in cities with supposed cocaine shortages and asked them if anything had changed. He also spoke with ONDCP veteran John Carnevale, who, despite his extensive drug warrior credentials, conceded that the real trend in cocaine prices is a downward spiral.

Of course, the inevitable consequence of researching the Drug Czar's ridiculous claims is that the Drug Czar will accuse you of bad research:

When asked about the conflicting information found by NPR, Drug Czar John Walters dismissed it. He said his information is drawn from nationwide data collected by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is based on undercover buys, wiretaps, informants, and local police reports.

"Now we can do it that way or we can do it where you call somebody somewhere and they say something else," Walters said. "That's not data. That's a guy."

It's cute how pissed he gets when someone starts fact-checking his outrageous statements. And it's just priceless to hear the master of argument-by-anecdote accuse someone else of missing the big picture.

The results of Burnett's investigation are inevitable anytime a reporter deliberately researches claims from the Drug Czar's office. The information disseminated by that organization is always false, usually to a dramatic extent, so subjecting them to even minimal scrutiny will reveal that they are wrong 100% of the time.

Reporters need to learn this. It must be understood that press releases from the Office of National Drug Control Policy are a true or false quiz and the correct answer is always "F." If you simply cut and paste their claims into a story you fail the test.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy's (ONDCP) National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign took a major hit as Congress finalized the fi