Another Casualty in the War

The War on Drugs that is:

Imagine you're home alone.

It's 8 p.m. You work an early shift and need to be out the door before sunrise, so you're already in bed. Your nerves are a bit frazzled, because earlier in the week someone broke into your home. Oddly, they didn't take anything; they just rifled through your belongings.

But the violation weighs on your mind. At about the time you drift off, you're awakened by fierce barking from your two large dogs. You hear someone crashing into your front door, as if he's trying to separate it from its hinges. You grab the gun you keep for home defense and leave your room to investigate.

This past January that scenario played out at the Chesapeake, Virginia, home of 28-year-old Ryan Frederick, a slight man of little more than 100 pounds. According to interviews since the incident, Frederick says when he looked toward his front door, he saw an intruder trying to enter through one of the lower door panels. So Frederick fired his gun.

The story isn't over yet. It turns out that the intruders were the Cheseapeake Police Department. They were serving Ryan Frederick a drug warrant using a tactic called a "noknock" raid .

Fredericks fired his weapon and ended up hitting Detective Jarod Shivers, who died of his wounds. Now, Ryan Frederick is on trial for murder.

Read the rest over at Reason.

Finders Keepers

A fascinating, unintended consequence of our "War on Drugs":

At first glance, Bluefields in Nicaragua looks like any other rum-soaked, Rastafarian-packed, hammock-infested Caribbean paradise. But Bluefields has a secret.

People here don't have to work. Every week, sometimes every day, 35kg sacks of cocaine drift in from the sea. The economy of this entire town of 50,000 tranquil souls is addicted to cocaine.

Bluefields is a creation of the gods of geography. Located halfway between the cocaine labs of Colombia and the 300 million noses of the United States, Bluefields is ground zero for cocaine transportation. Nicaraguan waters are near Colombian territorial limits, making the area extremely popular with cocaine smugglers using very small, very fast fishing boats.

When our Navy or Coast Guard starts tracking these small boats, the cocaine smugglers end up dumping their loads overboard. Where do those wash up? On the beaches at Bluefields.

There is no oversight from the central government and the local population governs themselves. But this is the best part:

With literally tonnes of cocaine buried in the hills, stashed in yards and piled up around town, why doesn't the Colombian mafia storm into these remote communities and repossess their coke bales by coercion or brute force?

"Hell no," says Peter, a local businessman. "The Miskito [local Indians] are guerrillas. They have been through war. They have AK-47s and up."

This is an unintended consequence of the drug war because our strategy in fighting it artificially inflates the price of cocaine. If all drugs were decriminalized, there wouldn't be any incentive for the cartels to exist at all. But then this anarchist paradise wouldn't exist at all either.

Pilfered from Lew Rockwell

Rolling Stone: How America Lost the War on Drugs

This is a pretty good overview of the "War on Drugs" since the 80's. It's long, but worth the read:

All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana - and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of ­human-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now ­repeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes.

The problem with our strategy in fighting the "War on Drugs" is that it is fundamentally unsound. The common thread, regardless of the administration in charge, is the emphasis on the supply side of the equation. Has this strategy been the best use of our tax dollars? Using our military to cut off the drug supply may be politically palatable, but not really effective. Our plan of stopping suppliers by military force isn't just applicable abroad, we do it here as well.

It's clear that when small town PD's utilize tactics that might be taught at Fort Benning, there has been a shift in law enforcement techniques that lean towards militarization. If you watch footage from Iraq on night time raids of suspected terrorists homes by our army, you won't find it much different than something a SWAT team would do in serving a warrant.

That may change if more and more innocent people become casualties of the drug war. 92 year old Kathryn Johnson was killed a year ago in a botched police raid:

It was one year ago this week that narcotics officers in Atlanta, Georgia broke into the home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston.

They had earlier arrested a man with a long rap sheet on drug charges. That man told the police officers that they'd find a large stash of cocaine in Johnston's home. When police forced their way into Johnston's home, she met them holding a rusty old revolver, fearing she was about to be robbed. The police opened fire, and killed her.

Shortly after the shooting, the police alleged that they had paid an informant to buy drugs from Ms. Johnston's home. They said she fired at them first, and wounded two officers. And they alleged they found marijuana in her home.

We now know that these were all lies. In fact, everything about the Kathryn Johnston murder was corrupt. The initial arrest of the ex-con came via trumped-up charges. The police then invented an informant for the search warrant, and lied about overseeing a drug buy from Johnston's home.

Ms. Johnston didn't actually wound any of the officers. They were wounded by fragments of ricochet from their own storm of bullets. And there was no marijuana. Once they realized their mistake, the officers handcuffed Ms. Johnston and left her to bleed and die on the floor of her own home while they planted marijuana in her basement.

Postapathy: A little about drugs, "Real Women of Canada"#links

Postapathy christens his blog with a first post on marijuana.

I'm not a fan of illicit drugs, but I'm an enemy of all policies and bureaucrats that would take away the civil liberties and freedoms and traditions our country was founded on. I can't stand the fact that the "War on Drugs" has been a waste of hundreds of billions of dollars of valuable taxpayer money and the only results we have to show for it are hundreds of thousands of citizens jailed or branded as criminals, a militarized approach to law enforcement (and the attendant growth of government that has gone along with it) and the trampling of civil rights that is the inevitable consequence of government trying to legislate morality.

Coincidently, Reason magazine has a story today on how literally our government war on drugs killed one of its citizens:

Last March, when the Drug Enforcement Administration seized less than half an ounce of cannabis that Robin Prosser, a Missoula lupus patient and medical marijuana activist, had been sent by her caregiver, the special agent in charge of the DEA's Rocky Mountain Field Division said it was "protecting people from their own state laws." Last week, unable to find a reliable supply of the only drug that relieved her pain without causing unacceptable side effects, Prosser killed
herself. Although the use of medical marijuana is legal in Montana, friends say suppliers were spooked by the DEA. Writing in the Helena Independent Record,
activist Tom Daubert calls Prosser's death "a direct result of DEA actions."

About a month ago I debated drug policy on the Dallas PBS station with a former head of the local DEA office, who insisted that marijuana was not a big priority for the agency. When I pointed out that his former employer was continuing to raid medical marijuana growers and dispensaries in California and other states, he said it couldn't very well sit back and allow that sort of thing. To which my response was: Why not? It is hard to understand, even from the DEA's point of view, how half an ounce of pot can be such a threat that it's worth risking an outcome like this one.

Of course, there may be negative consequences to ending the "War on Drugs" but is it going to be anything like this:

Reaction from the Values Voters Debate (part II)

For part one of Reaction from the Values Voters Debate see here

It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn
their prejudices into laws. -Thomas Sowell

A do gooder is a do gooder is a do gooder. Janet Folger suffers from the same syndrome that liberals who want to cure poverty, eliminate racism, and tackle global warming suffer from. That is the belief that government can solve all of the ills of society. It cannot, you cannot legislate morality the same way you cannot legislate eliminating poverty.

Prohibition was an attempt to legislate morality (how far from being a free society have we come? At one time a Constitutional amendment was deemed required to tell our citizens that a particular behavior was not going to be tolerated.) What it ended up doing was enriching organized crime. It certainly didn't stop people from consuming alchohol. What do we have to show for the billions spent on the war on drugs? The EXACT SAME THING. The illicit drug trade is a multibillion dollar underground industry. Legislating laws against it haven't stopped drug use. In addition, you could make the argument that a negative consequence of our strategy on the war on drugs is creation of a condition similar to our military industrial complex. There is an incentive not to change our strategy (with no regard for efficacy) because to do so would affect the special interests that benefit from our current strategy in our war on drugs (primarily government itself).

So just how powerful is the "Values Voters" coalition? The so called top tier of the GOP deemed them not powerful enough to not ignore them. Stated threats this week to back a third party didn't even meet the threshold for the flashing siren on Drudgereport. But keep in mind that the GOP has been a sinking ship for a number of years, for Christian conservatives to leave the party is a little like being odd man out on getting to the lifeboats.

The GOP has been hemorrhaging membership for years because of runaway spending, massive increases in entitlements, loss of privacy for its citizens, a nearly incoherent foreign policy, and all around incompetence and cronyism. Bush can hang his legacy hat on the tax cuts, his immediate reaction to 9/11, and his Supreme Court nominees (he almost missed out on this one, remember Harriet Miers?). Anything else? With a majority in Congress for so many years there should have been.

If social conservatism cannot be imposed by government fiat what is the alternative?

(to be continued)