How Swift Is Too Swift For Justice?.

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“How swift is too swift for justice?“:

The easiest and most expedient way to deal with court workload (and attendent injustice) is to resolve the tensions underpining ‘drug law’ and the plethora of unintended consequences. In answer to the naysayers to this suggestion, either drugs are a problem or they are not. One cannot back both horses and win.

Posted by Blair Anderson to TUMEKE! at 2/7/09 9:58 AM

note:

COHA Responds to the UN World Drug Report

As pointed out in the report, the right answer is not to regulate and heavily tax drug sales; government profiteering from citizen addiction would be neither ethical nor helpful for eliminating black markets. Allowing marginalized addicts back into society and providing medical treatment to them are large benefits of decriminalization, in addition to reducing unnecessarily costly and high incarceration rates.

Yet, despite unflagging optimism, any strategy short of legalization has proven statistically impotent and historically futile in promoting peace, democratic institutions, freedom from oppression, and strengthening the rule of law. By providing billions of dollars for the purchase of weapons and the corruption of civil institutions, prohibition has infected and destroyed not only whole families and communities but entire countries, including the lives of those who made no conscious decision to participate in drug related activities.

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Retired judge says it is time to end war on marijuana.

David A. Nichols was a Whatcom County, superior court judge for 20 years, retiring in 2004. [Washington State (Seattle is Christchurch Sister City) ]

DAVID NICHOLS – THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

Posted on Saturday, Mar. 21, 2009

A recent letter to the editor argued against reforming marijuana laws, missing the mark entirely in my opinion. After serving as a Whatcom County superior court judge for 20 years, I can assure you that the prohibition of marijuana has been a colossal failure. Arresting, prosecuting, and jailing people are an expensive and ineffective way to address a public health issue.

We should take a lesson from recent anti-tobacco public education campaigns targeted at youth. Youth initiation rates of cigarette smoking have plummeted in recent years, both in Washington and nationwide. We did not have to arrest a single cigarette smoker to accomplish these successes.

It is time we take a hard look at the irrefutable fact that marijuana prohibition is causing more harm than good. I think we can do better. That is why I support Senate Bill 5615, which has been introduced in the Washington state Legislature. This bill would make adult possession of small amounts of marijuana a civil infraction instead of a misdemeanor crime. The state estimates that the bill would save Washington taxpayers over $16 million each year, and the experience of the 12 other states who have already taken this step demonstrates no negative impact to their communities.

It is my fervent belief that this state and nation must come to recognize that continuing to treat drug users as criminals perpetuates an evil that rewards the drug sellers and corrupts our society. Until we honestly and appropriately deal with the entire drug issue as a health problem analogous to tobacco or liquor, and not as a “war” we cannot win, we will continue to reap the whirlwind of huge world-wide illegal drug profits which are costing us billions, threatening the stability of nations, causing soaring crime rates and diverting money which is sorely needed elsewhere.

The pending legislation in Olympia is a first step toward a rational approach to the drug problem and deserves to be supported by all of us.

With the exception of a few brave souls willing to stake their careers on speaking out, the nation and world are mystifyingly deaf and mute to the reality that the “war on drugs” not only is not working; it is having the opposite effect of escalating the problem exponentially.

The present generation has forgotten that emotions also ran rampant in the years leading up to Prohibition. Convinced that alcohol was evil and that society would be ruined if it were not outlawed, Congress was persuaded to pass legislation which had the inevitable result of encouraging the black market to flourish, allowing organized crime to gain a foothold which it has never relinquished, to seize control and enjoy huge profits, requiring the creation of colossal state and federal police forces to combat the crime and wasting millions of dollars, only to be repealed when enough people realized that the efforts were availing nothing. We now sensibly have liquor under state control, and treat addiction as a health problem.

We have also been smart enough to treat tobacco use the same way. Cigarettes are regulated but not proscribed. We have left it to the culture to censure cigarette smoking, which has been far more effective than if we criminalized their use.

Why cannot we understand that, even though alcohol and nicotine abuse cause far more damage and loss of productivity to our society than do drugs, by not criminalizing their use but treating their misuse as a health problem instead of a crime has allowed us to avoid all the problems that now beset us as we wage the “war on drugs?”

If we ever want to stop the craziness and futility of our present anti-drug approach, we must de-criminalize possession and use of all drugs. Education, addiction treatment and state regulation need to replace arrests, trials, jail sentences, growth of cartels and drug gangs, corrupt government institutions, and the mindless head-bashing against brick walls that characterize what we are doing now.

It will never work. It didn’t work in the past. If we would only study the past, maybe we would not be condemned to repeat it. Read More…

Dave is also an excellent artist having exhibited throughout Northwest. His art may be viewed (here and) at the Blue Horse Gallery in Bellingham, The Insights Gallery, Anacortes, WA & the Seaside Gallery, Laconner, WA.

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Legalize Drugs to End Border Violence – Miron

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Harvard Lecturer: Legalize Drugs to End Border Violence

(Published 03/24/2009 by Talkleft)

Another voice in the small but growing crowd urging legalization of drugs to end the Mexico drug war violence: Harvard Senior Lecturer in Economics Jeffrey Miron.

Argument 1: Prohibition creates violence. It happened with alcohol and gambling. End the prohibition, end the violence. [More…]

Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug market underground. This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead.

Violence was common in the alcohol industry when it was banned during Prohibition, but not before or after. Violence is the norm in illicit gambling markets but not in legal ones. Violence is routine when prostitution is banned but not when it’s permitted. Violence results from policies that create black markets, not from the characteristics of the good or activity in question. The only way to reduce violence, therefore, is to legalize drugs (emphasis supplied.)

But, there are other reasons, according to Miron: Such as, legalize drugs, reduce bribery.

Prohibition of drugs corrupts politicians and law enforcement by putting police, prosecutors, judges and politicians in the position to threaten the profits of an illicit trade.

Criminalization of drugs erodes our constitutional rights:

Prohibition erodes protections against unreasonable search and seizure because neither party to a drug transaction has an incentive to report the activity to the police. Thus, enforcement requires intrusive tactics such as warrantless searches or undercover buys. The victimless nature of this so-called crime also encourages police to engage in racial profiling.

Prohibition is bad for national security:

Prohibition has disastrous implications for national security. By eradicating coca plants in Colombia or poppy fields in Afghanistan, prohibition breeds resentment of the United States. By enriching those who produce and supply drugs, prohibition supports terrorists who sell protection services to drug traffickers.

Prohibition harms the public health:

Patients suffering from cancer, glaucoma and other conditions cannot use marijuana under the laws of most states or the federal government despite abundant evidence of its efficacy. Terminally ill patients cannot always get adequate pain medication because doctors may fear prosecution by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Prohibition breeds disrespect for the rule of law:

Prohibitions breed disrespect for the law because despite draconian penalties and extensive enforcement, huge numbers of people still violate prohibition. This means those who break the law, and those who do not, learn that obeying laws is for suckers.

And the number one reason that may resonate with the public in these perilous economic times: Prohibition is a financial drain.

Federal, state and local governments spend roughly $44 billion per year to enforce drug prohibition. These same governments forego roughly $33 billion per year in tax revenue they could collect from legalized drugs, assuming these were taxed at rates similar to those on alcohol and tobacco. Under prohibition, these revenues accrue to traffickers as increased profits.

President Obama‘s new plan to spend $700 million for border security is the wrong approach. And that’s in addition to Merida:

The funds, meant to assist what administration officials described as an “anti-smuggling effort,” will complement ongoing U.S. aid to Mexico under the Merida initiative, a three-year $1.4 billion package aimed at helping Mexico fight the drug cartels with law enforcement training, military equipment and improved intelligence cooperation.

The war on drugs is a failure. Plan Mexico will crash and burn.

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NZ On Drugs, Human Rights and Harm Reduction

New Zealand made a strong statement supporting both human rights and harm reduction. \
http://www.cndblog.org/2009/03/new-zealand-makes-strong-statement-on.html

It’s a synopsis of NZ’s presentation that omits that Dunne also talked about ‘restricted substances’ and that it presents a legislative R18 ‘soft drug’ option Beyond2008 when it was introduced into NZ law on Nov 6th 2008.

If the CND presentations by New Zealand highlighted anything at all, it was the bastardisation of the consensus of (and input into) Wellington Beyond2008.

The participation ‘by civil society’ depends on where your standing, and who one enlists to enforce non-participation. [But only Ross would understand the significance of that management decision.]

As the Beckley Cannabis Commission Report quite clearly highlights: Cannabis Use:

“Cannabis is the most widely used illegal drug, making it the mainstay of the ‘War on Drugs’. The UN has estimated that cannabis is used by 4% of the global adult population. The number of users has risen by 10% since their last estimate in 2005, despite the call for a drug free world. This compares to a figure of 1% for the use of all other illegal drugs combined. However, the focus of international attention has concentrated on that 1% which causes the most harms leading to cannabis being largely ignored in international drug policy discussions.”

I wouldnt expect the CND panel to have any difficulty with the perception of NZ acting as a global ‘social pioneer’ in needle exchange thanks to the heroic work of Doctor John Dobson. (I do resent that Mr Dunne et all should claim any credit for the harm minimization and lives saved which one could easily draw from his presentation. Niether he, nor the Government of the day, can ethically claim any drug policy kudos there, they continue to live in a world where there are only problematic drugs and problematic use)

However, with New Zealand featuring at the top of the scale for cannabis arrests AND consumption all Dunne could offer is the promise of abstention.

Doubtless he will in due course produce the ‘evidence’ he knows just how this is to be achieved… that will be just after he pulls his head out of his a….

The most important bits of the CND meetings were the side meeting with the NGO’s. There, real progress was made. I suspect the Drug Foundation (the NGO we sent) may have more juicy bits to share with us yet? Especially the bit about human rights and engagement with the ‘stoners’ (the principles that underpin ‘no decision about us without us’, disability law would be a nice place to start)

A useful point of discussion and would aid advancing the debate in NZ would be to hear what [if any] feedback has it had on the NZ Drug Harm Index [NZDHI]? And since it was launched under the aegis of a ‘Healthy Drug Law” symposium what shortcomings [if any] does the NZ Drug Foundation see in the 2010 Police Drug Strategy?

I would be keen to hear if NZDF supports ENCOD‘s call for a year of reflection and if so… how much it is prepared to engage civil society AND cannabis users in that process.

Blair Anderson
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com/

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Drug Prohibition: illiberal, murderous and pointless. [the Economist]

How to stop the drug wars

Mar 5th 2009 – From The Economist print edition

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13237193

Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution

Illustration by Noma Bar

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A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sen

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se of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless.

That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs. “Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

The evidence of Failure

Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine:
the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set
mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States. Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.Al Capone, but on a global scaleIndeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only
their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials,
including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and “harm reduction” (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of “soft” drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture. Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits. Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more
addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the state’s job to stop them from doing so. What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts—a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope. A calculated gamble, or nother century of failure? This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article). Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation
would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.

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Police shot dead an innocent criminal!

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This whole tragedy began with deviancy amplifying ‘drug policy‘ and ended as it does in other jurisdictions where the rules are pretty much the same, in an atypical matrix of dysfunction for which someone paid the unbearable price. One life to many, sacrificed to maintain a silence closely resembling stupidity. This ‘tragedy’ was entirely preventable but none dare say it. To touch on drug policy is to fall on the third rail.

Blair Anderson
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com
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Drug Policy Rendered Down

Blair Anderson
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com

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Beyond the Drug War, Inst/Policy Studies

Image: Getty Images via Daylife Excerpt from, A New U.S. Approach Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a project of the Institute for Policy Studies

….

The Obama administration could learn valuable lessons from some of its Latin American counterparts.

First, it could recognize that the international drug control policies implemented over the past several decades have failed to make any significant dent in the supply of illicit drugs.

Second, it could adopt measures that reduce the harm caused by both drug use and the “war on drugs.”

Completely eliminating the demand or production of illicit drugs is simply not achievable. The challenge, therefore, is to put into place policies that mitigate the harm caused by drug use to individuals, families, and communities, and the harm or negative consequences caused by illicit drug production and the policies intended to contain it.
…..

The issue of proportionality of sentencing is a major problem in the United States and the Latin American countries “persuaded” to follow its lead (more often than not as a result of threats of losing U.S. trade benefits and economic assistance). In addition to disproportionate sentences for crimes committed, the United States has long pushed for the criminalization of drug consumption and has continued to hold fast to that approach even as many European and other countries have increasingly treated drug abuse as a public health problem.

see http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5698

Because drugs are bad doesn’t mean prohibition is good.
Supporting prohibition and being pro-human rights is a contradiction.

The international conventions are an ‘immoral and unjust contradiction’ manufacturing quantifiable harms.

They must be changed. It is an imperative. /Blair

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Jeremy Douglas, RNZ interview.

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re: Interview by Kathryn Ryan on Radio New Zealand

09:20am New Zealand and the international drug trade / Jeremy Douglas, Manager of the UNODC’s Global Smart programme which is tracking the international drug trade, which he says is getting increasingly sophisticated. (listen here)

Jeremy Douglas, Manager of the UNODC’s Global Smart programme is obviously the product of a dumbed down education system.

There is nothing smart about this man. He is a puppet ideologue rabbiting ‘more of the same’ failed UN drug war creating fears, drug markets and drug related harms where there should be none.
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Watch the sleigh of hand descriptions associating TRIADS with precursors and local gangs, horse tranquilizers and especially Ecstasy (MDMA), one of the more benign drugs now vilified by the prohibitory politics and vested interests passing off as health prevention – and he is here professing to inform OUR Police! Keep him out of the country, he and his ’emerging drug threat’ message is more dangerous than any radical Muslim cleric.

New Zealand’s problem with and popularity of methamphetamine is a PRODUCT of the very system he describes.

He and his ilk are the very reason UNGASS is re-examining the Hoover/Nixon/Reagan/Bush ‘War on Drugs‘ as is our own Law Commission.

Supporting prohibition and being anti-crime is a contradiction. Because drugs are bad doesn’t mean prohibition is good.

Douglas no doubt must be appalled to learn that on Nov 6th, New Zealand legislated recreational soft drug use, making provision for controlled markets. Now there would have been in interesting question for someone purporting to be so well informed!

Doh!

Blair Anderson
50 Wainoni Road,
Christchurch.

03 3894065

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Doubt Cast On Psychosis Connection.

POT laws a Virtual Reality
Image via Wikipedia ….the odds of an association between cannabis and psychosis is “low.” / British Journal of Psychiatry.

Blair Anderson
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com

Parietal lobe
Occipital lobe
Temporal lobe

This really is about POT law reform . (and some wonder why this is called Blair’s Brain on Cannabis!)

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