An awesome presentation from Judge Jim Gray. He really nails a lot of important points in a few short minutes:

I will make one comment on Judge Gray's discussion here with regards to his statement that politicians are benefiting from the war on drugs. This has certainly been true in the past, but we're witnessing a palpable shift in the way these issues are approached in mainstream politics.

The drug war has become so deeply unpopular among a sizable segment of the population that the White House felt it necessary to publicly reject the "war" metaphor. It was a shrewd and arguably disingenuous political maneuver, but it illustrates vividly how far removed we are from the days when politicians went out of their way to impress the public with tough lock 'em up rhetoric. You don't hear many mainstream politicians bragging about their drug war credentials these days. Heck, Obama's most popular drug policy decision since taking office was his effort to curtail DEA raids in medical marijuana states.

We need to stop selling the idea that supporting the drug war is good for politicians. We don't want them thinking that, and it isn’t really even true anymore.

Some legislators in Vermont aren't thrilled about a bill to create 5 medical marijuana dispensaries in the state:

The bill has drawn opposition from the Department of Public Safety, where officials say they worry that dispensaries would fuel increased illegal drug use.

Well, I certainly understand your concerns, ladies and gentlemen, and I thank you for sharing them. Allow me to clarify one thing though, if I may; this is legal drug use we're talking about here. This is for sick people using marijuana legally with a doctor's recommendation.

You see, Vermont's patients can only obtain their medicine from illegal sources currently, so this is actually about creating a legal option and reducing illegal activity. If anyone is still anticipating problems here, I would refer you to the fact that you live in Vermont. Your neighbor grows marijuana. Vermont's epic pre-existing marijuana supply will not be substantially impacted by 5 little dispensaries that only sell to sick people. If your happy life in Vermont hasn’t already been ruined by hippies, then you have nothing to worry about with this, I assure you.

Cliff Kincaid, kingpin of paranoid prohibitionists, blames last week's Pentagon shooting on the attacker's use of medical marijuana. That's right folks, marijuana makes you kill people. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, where they have more medical marijuana dispensaries than Starbucks, the murder rate is at its lowest level since 1957.

As more states begin to consider reforming marijuana laws, legislators are struggling to sort fact from fiction in the marijuana debate. Fortunately, we've already made enough progress that we have plenty of practical experience studying the impact of marijuana reform.

Our friends at NORML have compiled this useful and revealing information in a new report, Real World Ramifications of Cannabis Legalization and Decriminalization. It's an excellent resource that ought to help any reasonable person understand why ending marijuana prohibition will make the world a better place.

Via Radley Balko, here's a perfect example of routine policing in the war on drugs. If it sounds supremely pathetic, that's because it is:

Another tip from a watchful citizen early Tuesday morning brought the Greensburg Police Department closer to exterminating the drug problem in the city.
…

The caller advised that there was suspicious activity, strange noises and unusual odors coming from the apartment. When GPD officers arrived, the strange smell was identified as "burnt marijuana," Chief Heaton reported.

After identifying the apartment that was emitting the odors, the GPD attempted to make contact. But inside the apartment, no one answered.

Working quickly to establish probable cause, the officers sought to obtain a search warrant from the office of the Decatur County Prosecutor.

In the interim period before the warrant was granted, the GPD kept a secure perimeter around the residence, making sure that no one went in or out of the apartment, Chief Heaton explained.

"It definitely tied up our units (for about two hours)," Heaton said.

The search warrant was secured and served at 1:23 a.m. Tuesday. Upon gaining entry to the apartment, the police found marijuana and proof of marijuana consumption and the five suspects were arrested. [Greensburg Daily News]

What a horrible place Greenburg, IN must be if the police have nothing better to do than this and the newspaper has nothing better to do than report every agonizing detail of it. The whole thing is so impressively lame, I can hardly believe I'm reading it. Good luck "exterminating the drug problem" in Indiana's most boring city.

One of the most embarrassingly mindless trends in the mainstream media's marijuana reporting is that of publishing one redundant story after another about the explosion of illegal outdoor cultivation in our national parks, while failing entirely to diagnose why it's happening and how it might be prevented: 

Pot has been grown on public lands for decades, but Mexican traffickers have taken it to a whole new level: using armed guards and trip wires to safeguard sprawling plots that in some cases contain tens of thousands of plants offering a potential yield of more than 30 tons of pot a year.

"Just like the Mexicans took over the methamphetamine trade, they've gone to mega, monster gardens," said Brent Wood, a supervisor for the California Department of Justice's Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement. He said Mexican traffickers have "supersized" the marijuana trade. [AP]

This Associated Press report is over 1,200 words long, yet does not contain one single idea for addressing the problem. Not even a stupid hopeless drug war idea like "we need more funding for eradication," or "we need to get everyone to stop using marijuana." Apparently, the AP is simply content to point out to us that our most precious natural resources are being slowly destroyed by Mexican marijuana cartels and there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it.

But, of course there is. Illegal outdoor marijuana growing will immediately end the instant it becomes legal for Americans to grow their own marijuana on private property. People don't plant pot in remote wilderness because they like to go hiking. The reason they do it is obvious, but not so obvious that the AP should be forgiven for writing so much without mentioning it.

Marijuana is illegal and until that changes, the problems associated with it will get worse every year. Keep that in mind. As devastating as our marijuana laws are today, they are actually causing greater and greater harm the longer they continue.

Calvina Fay of the Drug Free America Foundation says to ban it immediately and ask questions later:

Research has linked naturally produced marijuana to health issues, including schizophrenia. With synthetic marijuana being even more potent, it is frightening to consider its potential damage.
…
Increasing numbers of children are purchasing synthetic marijuana products because they are legal and easier to obtain than cigarettes.
…
Let's face it: Anytime you consume an uncontrolled or unregulated drug or a drug with unknown effects, you are taking a risk. Products like K2 are not made in a controlled environment, and those who use it are playing Russian roulette.
…
The U.S. should move urgently to protect the public from yet another dangerous and potentially deadly class of drugs. [CNN]

Grant Smith of the Drug Policy Alliance says to take a deep breath and remember that prohibition never delivers on its promises:

When lawmakers consider regulating K2, they should keep in mind that the government has waged a futile war against marijuana and people who use the drug for decades.
…
Time and time again, elected officials have dropped the ball when it comes to regulating drugs. Lawmakers have preferred to lazily pass the responsibility of controlling a drug on to law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

The problem is, we know from marijuana prohibition that law enforcement has no control over the drug market and the criminals who run it. Criminalizing K2 will only worsen the devastating harm our society already suffers under drug prohibition. Rather than regulation of the supply and ingredients of K2, criminalization leaves the question of what goes into the product up to drug dealers.

Rather than passing regulations that bar K2 sales to minors, criminalizing K2 will essentially give dealers the green light to sell the product to whomever they please. [CNN]

Nice job, Grant. You win. Every valid concern that exists here is better resolved by regulation than prohibition. If you don't want young people buying it, you can pass age limits. If you're concerned about what's in it, you can require more accurate labeling. If you don't want it sold in certain areas, you can use zoning laws to establish appropriate locations. Or, if you'd prefer to have no control over it at all, you can ban it altogether and let criminals make all these decisions.

Pay attention, folks. The effort to ban synthetic marijuana products could be coming to your state before you know it and it's up to you to tell your legislators that regulation is the best approach. This fight could play out 50 different times and we'll win in more states if we start thinking about it now.

As I mentioned yesterday, LEAP speaker David Bratzer has been ordered by the Victoria Police Dept. not to speak at a city-sponsored harm reduction event. If they thought they could silence the case for legalization, their plan backfired:  

I agree with Pete Guither that it's a great segment. No matter what you think about drug policy, it just seems stupid and cowardly to deny this man his chance to speak. When opponents of legalization start resorting to this sort of petty obstructionism, it doesn’t exactly reflect confidence. If the drug war is so frickin' great, it should be easy enough to defend it without attempting to silence its critics.

Check out this letter in The Baltimore Sun from an ex-cop who's pissed off about Cheye Calvo's efforts to monitor the use of SWAT teams. The writer apparently thinks police should be free to use as much violence as they choose without having to explain themselves to angry innocent citizens whose pets they kill.

Radley Balko picks the whole thing apart masterfully, resulting in a rather useful point-by-point refutation of all the most common defenses of constantly using SWAT teams for everything. There isn’t much else to say except that it still amazes me that anyone would dare condemn Calvo's advocacy. Guess what, if cops bust into an innocent family's home and kill their dogs, they're going to be extremely displeased.

Everything that happened here is the fault of bad laws, bad procedures and bad cops. None of this is Cheye Calvo's fault, and any suggestion that he's overreacting is plainly ridiculous. You can't overreact to police coming into your home and shooting your pets! It's a really big deal. This wasn't a random accident that everyone can just put behind them. There is no such thing as an acceptable number of dog killings in the homes of innocent marijuana suspects. Things like that should never happen at all, and if they do, it should be discussed constantly until every contributing factor is identified and every responsible party is held accountable.

From our friends at LEAP:

Active duty police officer and LEAP speaker/blogger David Bratzer was planning to accept an invitation to speak about drug policy and harm reduction at an official city government-sponsored event this week...until his police department's leadership stepped in and ordered him not to show up.

More details here.

When a mysterious package of marijuana arrived at the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo, police arrived moments later and murdered his dogs in a horrible botched drug raid. He was completely innocent, and now other innocent people who receive suspicious packages have to worry about being victimized by law-enforcement:

Sloan and Anderson have a German shepherd named Cheyenne. Sloan said the Berwyn Heights fiasco sprang to her mind the instant her husband told her about the coffee grounds.

"Before he even looked in to see what kind of drugs they were, I called 911," she said. "I told them exactly what was going on. I'm like, I don't want them coming through my door with guns drawn, because I love my dog." [Washington Post]

It's just so tragic that anyone would even have to worry about such a thing. Every single element of this problem is a symptom of prohibition, from the smuggling technique of intercepting packages at random addresses all the way up to the violent raids and dog killings that occur when police crash into private homes with big guns and no proof of guilt. It's a dreadful situation and no one is safe from it.

For more on the horrors of paramilitary policing, here's an interesting piece from Radley Balko and some disturbing news from Pete Guither.

You've just gotta read this editorial from Oliver North, in which he claims, among other things, that the media never reports on the Mexican drug war (they do so constantly) and that the Obama administration is trying to legalize drugs ("legalization" isn't even in their vocabulary, remember?).

The whole thing is just an impressively confused argument from a man whose extraordinary crimes against our nation will never be forgotten. The fact that this particular guy wants to see more aggressive tactics in the war on drugs is the best evidence that we need the opposite.

For more on what a hypocrite scumbag Oliver North is, see this post from Pete Guither.

Via The Agitator, here's another vexing example of the inherent hypocrisy of performing heavily armed SWAT raids in the name of protecting the public:

Police arrested Jonathan E. Whitworth, 25, of 1501 Kinloch Court on Feb. 11 on suspicion of possession of drug paraphernalia, possession of marijuana and second-degree child endangerment.
…
SWAT members encountered a pit bull upon entry, held back and then fatally shot the dog, which officers said was acting in an uncontrollably aggressive manner.

Whitworth was arrested, and his wife and 7-year-old son were present during the SWAT raid, Haden said. A second dog, which Whitworth’s attorney Jeff Hilbrenner described as a corgi, also was shot but was not killed. [Columbia Tribune]

So this guy is charged with child endangerment for possessing a misdemeanor amount of marijuana, yet police are free to enter private homes and shoot the family pets right in front of innocent children. It seems the only thing dangerous about a small bag of weed is that police might get the mistaken idea that you're a major supplier and raid your home with guns blazing.

As safe as marijuana is, it would be a hell of a lot safer if the cops didn't do these kinds of things.

The DEA's recent tough-guy tactics in Colorado aren't winning them any friends in the press, the public, or even in politics. Colorado Congressman Jared Polis sent a scathing letter to Attorney General Holder and President Obama demanding that DEA be required to uphold the administration's policy of respecting medical marijuana laws. Here it is in part:

Despite these formal guidelines, Friday, February 12, 2010, agents from the U.S. Department of Justice's Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided the home of medical marijuana caregiver Chris Bartkowicz in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. In a news article in the Denver Post the next day, the lead DEA agent in the raid, Jeffrey Sweetin, claimed "We're still going to continue to investigate and arrest people...Technically, every dispensary in the state is in blatant violation of federal law," he said. "The time is coming when we go into a dispensary, we find out what their profit is, we seize the building and we arrest everybody. They're violating federal law; they're at risk of arrest and imprisonment."

Agent Sweetin's comment that "we arrest everybody" is of great concern to me and to the people of Colorado, who overwhelmingly voted to allow medical marijuana. Coloradans suffering from debilitating medical conditions, many of them disabled, elderly, veterans, or otherwise vulnerable people, have expressed their concern to me that the DEA will come into medical marijuana dispensaries, which are legal under Colorado law, and "arrest everybody" present. Although Agent Sweetin reportedly has backed away from his comments, he has yet to issue a written clarification or resign, thus the widespread panic in Colorado continues.

On May 14, 2009, Mr. Kerlikowske told the Wall Street Journal: "Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We're not at war with people in this country." The actions and commentary of Mr. Sweetin are inconsistent with the idea of not waging war against the people of the State of Colorado and are a contradiction to your agency's laudable policies. [Westword]

Right on. We're witnessing a conspicuous disruption of the White House's carefully crafted effort to reduce controversy in the war on drugs, and it's clear that the silence must soon be broken in Washington. It's easy to say "we're not at war," but until you order the soldiers under your command to lay down their arms, it won't be possible to sugarcoat any of this.

Recent press coverage about synthetic marijuana products (commonly known as Spice and K2) is unsurprisingly leading more people to try them. Interestingly, the drug is catching on with sick people in Kansas, where medical marijuana remains illegal:

Spice is designed to produce profoundly similar effects to herbal cannabis, so it makes sense that patients are finding it helpful. There's still a lot we don't know about it, but cannabinoid research is generally associated with a number of promising medical applications and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the drug has something to offer.

At the very least, I'd give more weight to the claims from sick people who say it's helping them than to the claims from police and politicians that say it's potentially deadly.

Update: Uh-oh, it looks like the prohibition effort in Kansas is moving faster than I thought:

Topeka — The Senate on Thursday approved a bill that makes illegal the substances in K2 that law officials say produce a marijuana-like high. The legislation now goes to Gov. Mark Parkinson, who has said he supports the ban. [LJWorld.com]

I suppose you can make something illegal pretty fast if you don't waste time on scientific research or rational discussion.

This month has brought some of the most high-profile backlash we've seen since Obama's new medical marijuana policy took effect. DEA raids of a grower and two laboratories in Colorado as well as an escalating campaign by the Los Angeles DA to completely prohibit sales on his turf have again raised the stakes in a debate that many believed was almost over.

Given the rich history of obstructionism and demagoguery we've learned to expect from hard-line drug warriors, none of this is terribly surprising. But in light of the current political climate, it's really rather unclear what the opposition's gameplan is. Who's calling the shots? What's their motive? How do they expect this to play out? Having lost one public battle after another, it seems the anti-medical marijuana crusaders would want to perform some sort of cost/benefit analysis before wading once again into the political waters where they've been slowly drowning for a decade now.

Does the DEA really want to defend raiding laboratories that do nothing but test cannabis for harmful impurities? What law-enforcement interest is served by this? They tried to frame it as an administrative matter necessitated by the lab's formal permit application, but they sure as hell didn't make an appointment before crashing in there. Maybe they're more interested in the clients than the lab itself, but even if you had a database of every medical grower in the state, what would you do with it? Arresting even one of them is a political minefield.

Similarly, Los Angeles DA Steve Cooley's efforts to ban sales are so far out of step with everything around him that it's just impossible to guess what he hopes to accomplish. Even Attorney General Brown's guidelines explicitly permit distribution and there's no question at all where the people of California stand on this. Cooley is playing with fire here and he should really get a hold of himself before his madness becomes Exhibit A for the full-legalization campaign that's hitting the ballot in California this Fall.

Under Bush, I tended to assume that periodic raids and harassment were a political strategy aimed at confusing legislators in prospective medical marijuana states, but the new DOJ policy preemptively nullifies whatever dubious value that tactic may have had. Presently, it seems that medical marijuana's most impassioned enemies are at war with an inevitable reality. This isn't going to go away because nobody wants that except you. A career in law-enforcement offers many opportunities to be a hero, but this isn’t one of them.

The latest from Reason.tv:

If 80% of Americans support medical marijuana, why do we keep hearing stories like this one:

Jane Roe has suffered from severe migraines for years… Jane tried every prescription drug imaginable but none gave her relief. She finally found the answer after receiving authorization for medical marijuana from a doctor. Not long after that, Jane was hired at a company called TeleTech. Her position involved answering customer service calls for Sprint at TeleTech's Bremerton office. Jane was up front about her situation with the company from the very start.

Roe: "I knew that I already had medical marijuana; I didn't want to have to hide it. So I went to the Human Resources Department and provided them with a copy, they said they did not want one. They told me to still go take the drug test."

Jane did as she was asked and then began her training program. On her tenth day, she was called out of the training. She was told her drug test had come back positive and she would have to leave immediately. Jane felt humiliated. [KUOW.org]

She's not the one who should be embarrassed by this. TeleTech is the second company this month to get ugly press attention for discriminating against patients. In the current political climate, only an idiot would want their business associated with this sort of reckless cruelty and prejudice.

Unfortunately, those enforcing such arbitrary policies are still hiding behind claims of conflicting laws and vague liability concerns. It might be totally incoherent, but it goes to show how federal intransigence continues to leave patients vulnerable to abuse despite improvements in enforcement policy. It's time for the White House to move beyond the argument that medical marijuana raids are a "poor use of resources," and directly acknowledge that medical use is a basic human right.

Even the worst drug warriors will be the first to insist that patients aren't arrested and jailed in the war on medical marijuana. Shouldn't firing patients from their jobs be considered comparably reprehensible?

I'll be the first to tell you that medical marijuana is in a better position politically than ever before. Even the recent ugliness in Colorado doesn't approach what we've seen in years past (and you know it's true so don't accuse me of Obama-worship or naivety). But the fact remains that the current federal rules of engagement are impossibly vague and will inevitably become deeply problematic for both sides.   

LA Times explains perfectly why this is so:

The confusion can be resolved only by Washington. Fourteen states currently have medical marijuana laws, and more are likely to adopt them, multiplying the legal disarray exponentially.

The new policy of respecting state laws is already helping to expand the medical marijuana map (NJ, DC), yet the feds still claim the right to intervene at their own discretion. DEA enforcement against clear violations of state law might be tolerated politically, but their active involvement becomes less sustainable as new states enter the picture. As long as DEA maintains its authority to enforce local regulations, any inaction on their part will inevitably resemble tacit approval. It makes far more sense to step aside entirely and let state police and state courts take full responsibility for interpreting and enforcing their own laws.

If the White House wants to shield itself from political fallout over medical marijuana, the quickest and easiest approach is to get out of the game altogether.

As long as the public remains largely ignorant about 4th Amendment rights, police will continue to rely on coercive tactics that treat people as guilty until proven innocent:

Dallas police began a new initiative today to combat drugs. Citywide, officers are headed to suspected drug houses to "knock and talk" with the occupants.

The technique involves knocking on the door of a suspected drug house and trying to talk the people inside into inviting officers in to search without a warrant. Police can enter without a search warrant if they see illegal activity happening.

Dallas police have long used the technique, but its use will be widened during the next few months to include more officers and more areas within the city. [Dallas Morning News]

If this sounds to anyone like a program that only affects drug offenders, it's not. Police tactics like these are always framed as an effort to "get weapons and drugs off the street," but they are so much more than that. By definition, the people targeted under such policies are innocent citizens against whom police have no actionable evidence of criminal activity. After all, when police have credible facts indicating that drug crimes are taking place at a specific location, they may obtain a search warrant and enter lawfully.

The "knock and talk" approach is used exclusively to enter private residences in the absence of probable cause. Vague and unfounded suspicions, or even prejudices, could ultimately determine which locations are singled out for investigation. In the process, innocent people living in high-crime neighborhoods are placed at great risk of arrest in the event that a guest, neighbor or former tenant left something illegal on their property.

As misguided as these tactics are, there is one simple option available to concerned citizens who don't want police digging through their drawers: just don’t let them in. Unless you give them permission to enter, police need a warrant to search your home. You may simply decline the search and tell the officers that you'll gladly cooperate if they return with a warrant. If that makes you uncomfortable, another option is not to answer the door at all, which also reduces the likelihood of police claiming that they saw or smelled something illegal when you opened the door for them.

The bottom line is that invasive "knock and talk" programs don't work if everyone knows their rights, which is why the D.C. police simply canceled theirs after we started doing this:

Anyone in Dallas who's concerned about the new policy should consider organizing a similar effort.