Monthly Archives: June 2017

As the US faces its deadliest drug epidemic, the Senate is working on a new approach to deal with the crisis: the old war on drugs.

According to a new report by Carrie Johnson for NPR, a bipartisan pair of senators Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is working on a bill that would create harsher prison sentences for selling synthetic opioids like fentanyl analogs, which have become more common as people have moved from painkillers to other opioids in the course of the crisis.

Johnson reports:

A draft of the legislation reviewed by NPR suggests the plan would give the attorney general a lot more power to ban all kinds of synthetic drugs, since criminals often change the recipe to evade law enforcement. It would impose a 10-year maximum sentence on people caught selling them as a first offense. That would double if they do it again.

Lawmakers argue that the bill is necessary to punish traffickers for drugs that arent already penalized, since the drugs theyre selling are so new that theyre not included in the schedule of controlled substances. This would, then, bring the new drugs in line with other illicit opioids.

But as Michael Collins of the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for lighter penalties for drug offenders, told NPR, the concern is that this new bill will be used to lock up even more low-level drug offenders for longer even those who dont know these new drugs are present in their product.

A key problem in the opioid crisis is that these fentanyl analogs are often added to heroin outside the country. (In some places, its estimated that the majority of heroin is now cut with a fentanyl analog.) The dealer, sometimes unaware that the heroin has been cut with a fentanyl analog, will then sell the goods as if theyre just heroin. Then the buyer will use the drugs and overdose, because the fentanyl analogs make the heroin much more potent than even a hardened heroin user can handle.

Under Grassley and Feinsteins bill, the Department of Justice would be able to punish the dealer for selling that contaminated heroin.

But the dealer might not have any idea that his heroin was cut to begin with, effectively punishing him for something he knew nothing about. These penalties would also be added on top of traditional heroin penalties (for which the dealer would likely have been punished anyway), in effect making prison sentences even longer. And this would punish low-level dealers, not the higher-ups that drive the drug trade adding to the US prison population of low-level drug offenders.

In short, more people would be sent to prison for longer due to low-level drug offenses.

This is a clear example of lawmakers repeating past problematic practices. Although state prison systems (where most prisoners in the US are held) arent made up of very many drug offenders, about half of the federal prison system holds people for drugs. Over the past few years, lawmakers said they were trying to move away from that hence the work surrounding a reform bill that would have effectively cut mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug offenses. Yet now lawmakers want to create even more penalties that could be used to lock up more drug offenders.

The evidence suggests this wont work. By dedicating more resources to more incarceration, lawmakers risk shifting necessary funds from the actual solutions to an ineffective strategy.

A 2014 study from Peter Reuter at the University of Maryland and Harold Pollack at the University of Chicago found theres no good evidence that tougher punishments or harsher supply-elimination efforts do a better job of driving down access to drugs and substance abuse than lighter penalties. So increasing the severity of the punishment doesnt do much, if anything, to slow the flow of drugs.

In fact, the research suggests that harsher punishments in general dont do much to prevent crime. As the National Institute of Justice concluded in 2016, Research shows clearly that the chance of being caught is a vastly more effective deterrent than even draconian punishment. Research has found evidence that prison can exacerbate, not reduce, recidivism. Prisons themselves may be schools for learning to commit crimes.

In other words, more certainty of punishment can deter crime, while more severity through longer prison sentences can actually make crime worse.

This is something that even some former supporters of harsh punishments for drugs now acknowledge. In congressional testimony, Kevin Ring, a former congressional aide who helped enact mandatory minimums and now speaks out against them through the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, said, Most of these guys made stupid mistakes without any idea of what the punishment was they just didnt think they were going to get caught. So you can make the severity off the charts you can do a life sentence for jaywalking its not going to stop it.

Or as former federal drug czar Michael Botticelli often said, We cant arrest and incarcerate addiction out of people.

Still, the fact is that America has an opioid problem. In 2015, there were more than 52,000 drug overdose deaths, and nearly two-thirds of those were linked to opioids like Percocet, Vicodin, heroin, and fentanyl. The total number of drug overdose deaths was far greater than the more than 38,000 who died in car crashes, the more than 36,000 who died due to gun violence, and the more than 43,000 who died due to HIV/AIDS during that epidemics peak in 1995.

That the crisis got so bad speaks to the failure of decades of policy: Years of tough on crime approaches couldnt prevent the worst drug crisis in history.

So what can we do about it?

Some policymakers have increasingly focused on the public health side. Theres good reason for that: In the most comprehensive analysis of addiction in America, the surgeon general in 2016 found that the US massively underfunds addiction care. It concluded, for example, that just 10 percent of Americans with a drug use disorder get specialty treatment, in large part due to a shortage in treatment options.

So federal and state officials have pushed for more treatment funding, including medication-assisted treatment like methadone and buprenorphine. In 2016, Congress approved an extra $1 billion in funding over two years for drug treatment in response to the opioid crisis.

But public health advocates argue that more needs to be done to make treatment accessible. Andrew Kolodny, co-director of opioid policy research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, estimates that the US needs to spend potentially tens of billions of dollars more a year to deal with a crisis so grave. Theres an empirical base for that: A 2016 study found that opioid painkiller addiction cost the economy $78.5 billion in 2013, more than a third of which was a result of higher health care and drug treatment costs.

We need a massive increase in funding for addiction treatment, he argued. Were not going to get anywhere in terms of reducing overdose deaths until you have very low threshold access to buprenorphine treatment or methadone in some cases referring to two medications used for treating opioid addiction.

Polls show that most Americans prefer treating drugs as a public health issue, not a criminal one. And many experts, including the International Narcotics Control Board, have asked for a greater focus on public health policies to curtail demand for drugs.

Even some police departments are warming to this approach. For example, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the police chief in 2015 announced that his officers will no longer charge heroin users with a crime, even if they have drugs, and instead offer to put them in rehabilitative treatment. Other cities, like Cincinnati, have adopted similar approaches.

But some governments and agencies continue perpetuating tough on crime thinking on drugs from Indiana upping prison sentences for drugs to an Ohio town charging heroin users with inducing panic to the bill the Senate is now working on. But the evidence suggests that will all be ineffective, and it could shift resources from where help is really needed.

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Congress's new approach to the opioid epidemic: the old war on drugs - Vox

Jeff Sessions wants to bring back the War on Drugs, but Samantha Bee is not having it. The Full Frontal host spend two-thirds of Wednesdays show attacking attorney general Jeff Sessions opposition to criminal justice reform, one of the few areas that the left and right can agree on, and his Justice Department's reboot of the War on Drugs. (Like most reboots, its bad.) Bee took a deep dive to explain why the first War on Drugs was such a disaster and set about proving that Jeff Sessions one-handcuff-fits-all policy is not the answer to the opioid epidemic.

To further drive the point home, Full Frontal thenalso exposed just how unreliable drug field test kits are, dramatizing two real-world Texas cases in which police pulled over vehicles and then misidentified banal substances like cat litter as illegal substances. Former Houston prosecutor Inger Chandler explains that those tests are widely accepted as evidence in court, despite giving false positives on everything from donut glaze to air. But as Full Frontals segment demonstrates, those false positives can force defendants into taking plea bargains despite a lack of actual evidenceand black defendants are disproportionately affected.

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Samantha Bee Is Here to Remind Jeff Sessions Why We Don't Need Another War on Drugs - Slate Magazine (blog)

While American foreign policy has for years fixated on the conflict in Syria and the Middle East, just across the border in Mexico and throughout Central America tens of thousands of people lost their lives last year because of the conflict between drug cartels competing to deliver illicit drugs into the United States.

According to a recent report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, whereas approximately 50,000 lives were lost in Syria last year, approximately 39,000 were killed in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, much of which is attributable to drug-war violence.

Mexicos homicide total of 23,000 for 2016 is second only to Syrias, and is only the latest development in a conflict which stretches back to 2006, when President Felipe Calderon deployed the military to combat drug cartels.

Although the exact number of people killed because of the drug war in Mexico is unlikely to ever be known, a recent report from the Congressional Research Service cited estimates from 80,000 to more than 100,000 in that country alone.

The cause of this violence is obvious, and it is a direct, predictable consequence of our failed policy of drug prohibition. In the near-half century since President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs, hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed in conflicts fueled by a lucrative illicit drug trade made possible by our prohibition of drugs.

This is an insight a certain New York developer possessed 27 years ago. Were losing badly the war on drugs, Donald Trump said in 1990. You have to legalize drugs to win that war. You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.

While Trump may have since lost this insight, the fact remains that the war on drugs does more harm than drugs themselves.

Last year, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos used his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to call for a rethink of the drug war, which contributed to decades of conflict in Colombia that killed hundreds of thousands.

Rather than squander more lives and resources fighting a War on Drugs that cannot be won including in our inner cities the United States must recognize the futility and harm of its drug policies.

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War on Drugs is costing thousands of lives - San Bernardino County Sun

(PCIJ) President Rodrigo Duterte has repeatedly said that drugs are the root of society's many ills. He also seems to see drugs everywhere and in almost anything, even in the ongoing conflict in Marawi. Yet even as his administration's controversial war against illegal drugs continues to claim lives, it has also spawned a side battle over numbers and public-relation points.

Earlier last month, the newly created Inter-Agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs (ICAD) launched #RealNumbersPH, an official report that supposedly offers the true and correct numbers on the drug warfrom the government's perspective. ICAD officials lamented what they called the misreporting and exaggeration by the news media of the numbers of those who were killed, arrested or surrendered. What the ICAD officials left out was that most of those stories were based on information provided by the Philippine National Police (PNP) and other official sources.

In fact, the government's drug war narrative so far has not only been bloody, it has also been blurry. Although government officials have not denied that lives have been lost in the anti-drug campaign, they have yet to explain its narrative that is crowded with constantly changing concepts and terms, even as it is decked in numbers inflated then deflated and later inflated again. Indeed, it is a narrative defined from a war waged mainly as a police operation, its "accomplishments" or success pegged on an ever-lengthening trail of bodies and victims, but with no certain answers for whence or how it should end, and bereft of solid baselines and firm targets.

Over the last 11 months, PCIJ has been monitoring, collecting, curating, and organizing data and documents on the government's war against drugs. It has also sent dozens of request letters to the PNP, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), the Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB), the Department of Health, the Department of Social Welfare and Development, the Department of Budget and Management, the Department of the Interior and Local Government, as well as police regional and local commands to build a database on the drug war. To clarify the numbers enrolled in #RealNumbersPH and gather even more data, PCIJ also conducted separate interviews with senior officials of the PNP, PDEA, and DDB.

Ironically, in the course of its data inquiries, PCIJ found some of the numbers enrolled in reports of #RealNumbersPH to be puzzling at best and too incredible at the very least.

That, however, is just one of the multiplying number riddles in the government's anti-drug campaign.

Headlines ( Article MRec ), pagematch: 1, sectionmatch: 1

By their own data and documents, and according to senior officials from the PNP, PDEA, and DDB interviewed by PCIJ, the Duterte administration's drug war remains wrapped in weak, flabby, misleading and not sufficiently explained and meaningful data and numbers.

It must be stressed that the officials interviewed from all the three agencies admit that these figures are not hard, real numbers. And since they all could be correct only in the particular context in which they were derived, this means they could also be wrong when used outside of that context.

In other words, 11 months into the deployment of Oplan Tokhang and Project Double Barrel, the matter of how many total drug users must be snared or coaxed to surrender under Duterte's drug war remains an unsettled issue.

The DDB's 1.8-million estimate of total drug dependents was derived from a 2015 survey that divided the country into five "regional groupings": Metro Manila, North Luzon, South Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao.

The survey aimed to reasonably represent male and female Filipino population aged 10 to 69 years old. After mathematical computations, the survey concluded that the minimum required sample size per regional group would be 838, or a total of 4,190 respondents. But apparently because it had ample available survey funding, the team raised the sample size to 1,000 per regional group, bringing total sample size to 5,000. Field work for the survey was conducted from Dec. 5, 2015 to Feb. 5, 2016.

Of the 5,000 respondents, 4,694 or almost 94 percent were categorized to be "non-users" or had "never used drugs before," including102 who were not aware of any kind of illegal drugs. Only 306 or six percent of the total respondents were "lifetime users" or had used drugs at least once in their lifetime. Of these "lifetime users," 193 or 63 percent had "used drugs before 2015" while 113 or 34 percent were "current users" or had "used drugs within January 2015 and February 2016." Of the 113 "current users," 39 (35 percent) were "one-time users," and 74 (65 percent) were "repeat users."

For much of the ongoing drug war, the PNP has chosen to use the estimate of 1.8 million drug users as basis for calculating its success or passing rate in the government's anti-drug campaign. A PNP document dated Jan. 10 includes an "accounting of drug personalities" portion that cites 70 percent of the 1.8 million estimate number of alleged drug users as the "passing target." That means PNP considered coaxing the surrender of 1.26 million of the total estimated drug users as its passing rate. By the time the document came out, police tallies already had more than 1.43 million of what it called "surrenderers." By its own reckoning thus, the PNP had already hit its minimum target at that point.

President Duterte, however, had initially quoted a 3-million figure but soon turned consistent in insisting that there are 4 million drug dependents in the country, with the figure allegedly coming from "intelligence reports."

Recently, though, PDEA did him even better, saying that drug users in the Philippines now total 4.7 million. This estimate was derived using PDEA's "formula ratio and proportion," which is in turn pegged on the number of surrenderees as a ratio of total households visited under Oplan Tokhang, divided by total number of households in the Philippines, and with a margin of error of 20 percent (supposedly representing the proportion of drug personalities "who did not surrender").

This is PDEA's formula: "The number of total houses visited (under Oplan Tokhang) is to the number of surrenderers is equal to X. Based on the said statistical computation, with a margin of error of 20% - those who did not cooperate with the law enforcers during the house visitation, there are 4.7 million drug users in the Philippines."

According to PDEA, its formula makes this assumption: "For every eight households, there is one drug personality in the household."

Thus, based on data derived from police intelligence and operations reports, PDEA asserts that as of May 18, 2017, "the real number of drug users in the Philippines is 4.7 million."

Then again, a "house" is not exactly a "household"a difference that PDEA's formula ignores. A household represents both the house and its dwellers "a social unit consisting of a person living alone or a group of persons who sleep in the same housing unit and have a common arrangement in the preparation and consumption of food," according to the Philippine Statistics Authority. In contrast, a "house" refers only to the physical dwelling.

Yet a lot more numbers that government uses and #RealNumbersPH reports to define the drug war remain flawed and flabby on two levels: their accuracy on the level of facts and context; and their policy implications.

Except for Central Luzon, there are more DUI cases that the numbers of those killed in anti-drug operations of the police. This implies that vigilante and unnamed armed groups may have netted a far bigger number of casualties among alleged drug users and pushersa sad commentary on the effectiveness and impact of Project Double Barrel. But just a fraction of so-called DUI incidents has triggered the filing of cases in court. And in a majority of these cases, the suspects remain at large.

Given that there are more DUI incidents than the numbers of those killed in police operations, the PNP's Scene-of-Crime Operations (SOCO) unit has only 680 personnel, and the PNP's Internal Affairs Service, only 664 personnel nationwide, as of August 2016. These small numbers of SOCO and IAS personnel (that include those not assigned to investigation) would be hard put running after the rising numbers of DUI and internal-cleansing cases, let alone clear their backlogs even before Double Barrel came into force.

A total of 4,654 firearms and 382 explosives had reportedly been seized by the PNP from a total of 55,481 anti-drug operations, as of May 26, 2017. The prevalence of loose firearms in the areas visited by Project Double Barrel raises concern about possible evidence recycling and how much firearms and explosive yet to be confiscated or recovered by the police.

The numbers of children (26,415, as of Jan. 31, 2017) and women (39,518, as of Jan. 31, 2017) who had "surrendered" continue to rise but there are no sufficient services for them that had been lined up. Across the nation, no government rehab center has a specific rehabilitation program for women and children enrollees; child surrenderees are often referred to government social workers or even mixed with adults in already severely congested rehabilitation facilities and detention centers. DDB reported early efforts of community-based treatment focused on women, but the program is far from being fully rolled out in the whole country.

It seems unusual that the regions registering high numbers of child "surrenderees" (Top 5: Central Visayas, 4,841 children; Northern Mindanao, 4,676; Zamboanga Peninsula, 2,514; Davao Region, 2,266; and Caraga, 2001) did not match the Top 5 regions with the highest numbers of those killed, arrested, and had surrendered under Oplan Tokhang/Project Double Barrel. By the government's composite data on those killed in police operations and DUI incidents, the following regions land on the top 5: Metro Manila, Calabarzon, Central Luzon, Central Visayas, and Northern Mindanao.

How many barangays tagged to be "affected" by drugs had been "cleared" under Tokhang/Project Double Barrel in the last 11 months? There are no specific tracking data for this, except for reports by DDB and PDEA on the numbers of "drug-affected barangays" before July 2016, compared with those as of April 2017. It is unusual that the two sets of numbers show that from only 32 to 36 percent of total barangays classified to be "drug-affected" in July 2016, the figure has grown to 48 percent, out of the total barangays in the country, by April 2017.

The data on "drug-affected barangays" before July 2016 show that the Top 10 regions with the biggest percentage of "drug affectation" are, in order of magnitude, Calabarzon, Metro Manila, Central Luzon, Ilocos Region, Eastern Visayas, Negros Island Region, Western Visayas, Cagayan Valley, Bicol Region, and Caraga. By the numbers of those killed in both police operations and DUI incidents, as of January 2017, the Top 5 regions are Metro Manila, Calabarzon, Central Luzon, Central Visayas, and Northern Mindanao. The Ilocos Region and Eastern Visayas have registered only smaller numbers.

By April 2017, the Top 10 regions, by number of drug-affected barangays follow in order of magnitude are: Ilocos Region, Calabarzon, Central Visayas, Central Luzon, Metro Manila, Cagayan Valley, Caraga, Western Visayas, Mimaropa, and Eastern Visayas. By the numbers of those killed in both police operations and DUI incidents, the Ilocos Region, Central Visayas, and Cagayan Valley have registered smaller numbers.

"Internal cleansing" of police personnel involved in the illegal drugs trade remains a belated, if also hazy, matter in the PNP, in terms of data disclosed to the public. A report received by PCIJ recently from PNP's Double Barrel Secretariat showed that for 2016, only 166 PNP officers and menout of the 145,0000-strong PNPhad been established to be "involved in illegal drugs." The 166 include 158 PNP personnel from regional offices and national support units, and only eight from national headquarters. Of the 166 total, the big clusters have ranks of PO1 (67 personnel), P03 (45), P02 (30), and SP01 (12). In addition, there are also one police superintendent, two chief inspectors, one senior inspector, two inspectors, two SPO3, one SPO2, and three non-uniformed personnel.

A related matter is what the PNP calls its "motu propio investigation" of a total of 331 cases under "remaining investigation," apart from 294 cases "terminated at IID (Investigation and Inspection Division) level, and 119 cases "for pre-charge investigation." It is not clear though if the PNP's numbers also refer to the number of respondents in the cases. Malou Mangahas, Vino Lucero, Davinci Maru, and John Reiner Antiquerra, PCIJ

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Flawed, fuzzy numbers in the war on drugs | Headlines, News, The ... - Philippine Star

Editor:

According to County Attorney Sheila Polk, there is a connection between crime and drug use. That is true, but the connection is a result of social and economic issues.

The vast majority of criminals in Yavapai County are of low education and low, if any, wage earners. I am thankful they are not murderers, rapists or robbers.

I am sure Ms. Polk knows the War on Drugs cannot be won and its financial cost is incredible. Also the most damaging drugs to our society are legally obtained. Those drugs are alcohol and nicotine. Unfortunately, it is not politically sound to admit these facts.

In a state where we grossly underfund education it makes no sense to hire more policemen, buy more vehicles and drug smelling canines to fight a war we cannot and will not win.

Bob Launders

Prescott Valley

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Letter: War on drugs | The Daily Courier | Prescott, AZ - The Daily Courier

The War on Drugs performed their chiming new single "Holding On" Monday on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

Though the band recorded as a sextet for upcoming LP A Deeper Understanding, the line-up swelled to a nine-piece unit forColbert. Singer-guitarist Adam Granduciel was backed by three keyboardists, three guitarists, a bassist and drummer, forming a textured, grandiose wall of sound full of bell-like tones and slide-guitar fills.

A Deeper Understanding, described in a statement as a "band record," is out August 25th. The 10-track LP also features "Thinking of a Place," the psychedelic, 11-minute track previously issued as a 12-inch vinyl single for Record Store Day.

The War on Drugs will launch a major tour this fall. The band will kick of a North American leg on September 18th, followed by a European trek in November.

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See War on Drugs Perform New Song 'Holding On' on 'Colbert ... - RollingStone.com