Daily Archives: June 21, 2017

Fighting marijuana

prohibition isn't just about marijuana. It's also about fighting police brutality, militarization, and asset forfeiture. It's about reducing a U.S. prison population that is the biggest in the world. It's about civil rights and civil liberties.

The national law enforcement group LEAP connected the dots on much of that last week in announcing the organization's name change from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition to Law Enforcement Action Partnership. Maintaining the same acronym probably saves a little money on letterheads and the like.

Success in the LEAP agenda, however, saves lives.

"LEAP wanted to start focusing beyond just speaking out against the war on drugs and talking about criminal justice reform in general," says Steve Miller, a sergeant retiree from the Canton police department and a spokesman for LEAP. "My philosophy is the war on drugs is central to all of this. If we end the war on drugs we could solve a lot of other areas that are in need of reform in the criminal justice system."

LEAP is officially making a connection that many of its members made long ago. LEAP executive director Neill Franklin, a retired Maryland State Police officer, helped convince the national NAACP board to call for an end to the war on drugs back in 2011. Not that the Detroit chapter seems to have heeded that call.

Attorney Michelle Alexander was also in the working group that helped convince the NAACP to make that choice. Her book The New Jim Crow details how the war on drugs has crippled black communities by labeling marijuana users as criminals.

Despite that, the black community has been slow to come around on marijuana legalization. At least among the local institutions that tend to support or represent African-Americans. After all, they're working on civil rights, not drug user rights. And while there are plenty of black marijuana consumers (and inmates), there are precious few in the new and growing industry. Somewhere around 1 percent.

That's something the Rev. Al Sharpton mentioned in addressing the Cannabis World Congress and Business Exposition on Friday, June 16. In a pre-exposition statement told to The Huffington Post, Sharpton said, "I will challenge the cannabis industry and its distributors in states where it is legal to support civil rights movements and ensure that we are not disproportionately excluded from business opportunities."

Sharpton asserts a connection between the marijuana insurgency and civil rights movements here. They are indeed connected.

At a time when the idea of "fake news" is prominent in the national political discourse, the war on drugs stands out as a testament to the government's ability to just make things up and destroy lives from that base. Marijuana prohibition went nationwide in 1937 as a racist attack on Latinos and blacks. When President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs it was in direct contradiction to the findings of his own Shafer Commission that recommended marijuana possession be decriminalized.

The success of that propaganda has been that even though the war on drugs has obvious detriments to black communities, most "responsible" members of those communities can't see it.

"The misconceptions out there are horrible and they are based on government lies that have been passed on for the past 80 years," says Miller. "The most dangerous part of the drug war is the drug war itself."

Can the government make things up and base life-altering policy on it? You bet it can. That's one reason why fighting marijuana prohibition is intricately tied to larger political struggles.

Here's how Dan K. Morhaim, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, put it in a May Baltimore Sun opinion piece:

"It's a war that has claimed tens of thousands of casualties both at home and abroad, destroyed the lives of countless innocent bystanders, turned neighborhoods and in some cases whole regions into killing fields, filled prisons to overflowing with non-violent offenders, poisoned farmlands and forests, undermined police and government agencies, corrupted multinational banks and financial companies, funded overseas enemies and terrorists, and despite the tremendous cost in blood and treasure, has not advanced the cause for which the war was declared. Drug use has not measurably declined since President Nixon started that war in 1970.

"Not only has the war on drugs failed, it continues to make the situation worse. It's turned into a war on people, communities, institutions, and ultimately ourselves. A new strategy is needed."

That is what LEAP seeks. It's not a strategy aimed only at drugs. It's a holistic strategy aimed at what the war on drugs has done to our people, police forces, and our communities. Even the police know we need a new strategy. Unfortunately, they generally don't speak out about it until they have retired. It's their job to enforce the law, not change it.

Miller has totally flipped his script. Since retiring from the police force he has gotten a private investigator's license and works for attorney Mike Komorn, a prominent defender of people charged with marijuana offenses. He's also become a supporter of MI Legalize, part of the Coalition to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol that is running a petition initiative to get the question of recreational legalization in Michigan on the 2018 ballot. He believes legalizing marijuana will change the way police do their business.

"For one, we're taking a huge thing away from the police to go out and use that aggressive enforcement," says Miller. "Marijuana is an easy target with its smell. It's low-hanging fruit for the police. ... The majority of my career it was get in these crappy neighborhoods and stop every kid that's passing on the street. It's all centralized in the war on drugs getting people, searching people, get in their car, find drugs. Police go out and use that and create a hostile relationship. If marijuana is legal police can move on and do other things. Drug task forces spend a large amount of time on marijuana."

In 2014, according to FBI data, almost 90 percent of about 700,000 marijuana arrests were for possession alone. It seems that if police didn't have to spend their time chasing people for marijuana possession it would save them a lot of effort and expense, let alone pressure on the courts and jails.

LEAP is on the right path and it would do us well to get with it. Repealing marijuana prohibition will ease a lot of other problems that have grown in the prohibition industry. And maybe if police don't have that adversarial relationship with communities, there could be a lot more Officer Friendly types on the streets.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been making lots of noise about enforcing federal marijuana laws and belittling the idea that the plant has medicinal value. Maybe he should spend a little time studying up on recent science about cannabinoids. However, based on the amount of things he just couldn't remember during recent testimony to the U.S. Senate, information retention isn't one of his strong points.

More here:

Ending the war on drugs - Detroit Metro Times

When the United States first launched the War on Drugs nearly five decades ago, not even the cleverest conspiracy theorists could have imagined the far-reaching consequences the campaign would have around the world. From the CIA allowing drug traffickers to flourish in exchange for their assistance in toppling leftist leaders abroad to the deal made with an infamous Nazi, check out eight things you probably dont about the War on Drugs.

The CIA introduced LSD into the U.S. with the intention of developing the ability to control minds (as depicted in the 1962 Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate, which was based on a 1959 novel). Operation Midnight Climax, part of a mind control project (that ran for more than a decade, saw CIA-bankrolled prostitutes lure unwitting testers to a CIA safe house, where the unwitting participants would be dosed with the psychedelic drug and have their altered states observed through one-way glass.

Despite his brutal reign as The Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie became a CIA asset after World War II. Like many high ranking Nazi officers, Barbie fled to South America after the war, where he became chummy with some of the most-fearful drug lords in history, including Pablo Escobar and Roberto Surez Gomz, one of the inspirations of Scarface. With the complicity of the CIA, Barbie and a team of Nazi mercenaries (known as the Fiancs of Death) helped Surez Gomz in his goal to overthrow the Bolivian government and turn it into a narco state.

The term War on Drugs entered the public consciousness in 1971, when President Nixon fired one of the opening salvos. Featuring a press conference and an anti-drug message to Congress, Nixon stated that drug abuse was worse than communism, and called drugs public enemy number one.

In an incident that became a famous photo op, singer Elvis Presley met President Nixon in the Oval Office on December 21, 1970. The crooner had asked for a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (which later merged with other federal offices to become the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA). Elvis allegedly wanted the narc badge so he could bring his pharmacopoeia stash along on his travels.

According to legend, the late-19th century folk hero Jess Malverde was a Robin Hood-like figure, a generous bandit who stole from the rich and shared the bounty with the poor. Malverde was said to have been caught by authorities and hung. As punishment, his body was left hanging until his bones fell to the ground. He was adopted by drug traffickers as their patron saint to help spin the mythology that drug dealers were on the side of the peopletaking money from wealthy customers, and redistributing it amongst the poor.

Joaqun Guzmn Loera, aka El Chapo, started working in the Mexican poppy fields at the age of 9. He rose to become the head of the Sinaloa cartel and the most powerful drug lord in the world. In 2012, he was #1,153 on the Forbes Billionaires list (#10 in Mexico, and the next year he ranked 67th on Forbes Most Powerful People list.

The 2001 anti-terror law is more often used for drug prosecutions. With it, police can search and seize without probable cause or without your knowledge. Of the thousands of warrants issued under this act, less than one percent were for terrorism; over 75 percent were for drugs. Today, the Talibans largest source of funds is Afghanistans opium and heroin industry. The country is losing its battle against the makings of the powerful drugless than 1 percent of its staggering opium production is currently being seized. Every year since the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan, the production and monetary value of its opium crop has increased.

Around 2008, pain clinics dispensing synthetic opioid painkillers such as oxycodone and OxyContin began to pop up across the country. The American Pain Clinic, started by brothers Chris and Jeff George in South Florida, quickly became the nations largest pill mill (as they were known). These doc in a box sites, where doctor-patient consultations could last mere minutes, had lines around the block, and by 2009, nine out of 10 of their patients were from out of state. The stretch of I-75 leading from West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee to South Florida became known as Oxy Alley.

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8 Times America's War on Drugs Was Stranger Than Fiction - History