• Honors student suspended, stripped of his class vice president title for buying a bag of Skittles at school.
• My colleague Jacob Sullum already addressed this press release about declining meth use among job applicants at places that administer drug tests. Here’s my question: Why is a high-ranking employee with the federal government giving quotes for a private company to use in its press releases?
• Remember Total Information Awareness? It’s back.
• Looks like that Oklahoma legislator caught going off on an anti-gay rant a couple of weeks ago may have a gay son.
• Photos of the woman who brought down Spitzer.
• Nebraska’s legislators haven’t yet passed a law banning Savlia, the moral outrage drug du jour at the moment. No worries, though. Police are going ahead and arresting people anyway.
• Man rushes to the hospital to be treated for his worsening pneumonia. Cop pulls him over. Man blows 0.0 on breath test. Cop arrests him for DUI, anyway, then takes him to jail, where they keep him until 2am.

Last week, police in Kentucy went on a 24-hour drug raid blitz, where they…

…discovered 23 meth labs, seized more than 2,400 pounds of marijuana, identified 16 drug endangered children and arrested 565 individuals in connection with illegal drug use in a 24-hour period.

What inspired this sudden burst of drug war aggressiveness? Complaints from the citizenry? A vicious string of drug-related murders? A series of overdoses?

None of that. Seems they were concerned that the federal government is about to turn off the spigot.

During "Operation Byrne Blitz," which took place Wednesday, state police and highway patrol agencies, local police and sheriff’s departments, and drug task forces throughout the country conducted undercover investigations, marijuana eradication efforts and drug interdiction activities. The collaborative effort, named for the federal grant program which funds many of the anti-drug efforts, underscored the impact that cuts to this funding could have on local and statewide drug enforcement.

The Byrne Grant is problematic for a lot of reasons. But chief among them is the way it warps police priorities by tying drug arrests to the federal teat, reinforcing the disastrous numbers game Ed Burns spoke about in my interview with him last week. Byrne Grants exacerbate the militarization of the drug war, too. If you’ve got an expensive-to-maintain SWAT team, you can earn some easy federal money by sending them out to bust up a low-level drug offender a few times a week. Actually arresting the perpetrators of violent crimes that aren’t drug related doesn’t bring in the cash.

Byrne Grants have been blamed for a lot of drug war disasters, including the clusterfuck of wrongful arrests in Tulia, Texas, which were then followed by similar outrages across that state. It led to Texas eventually abolishing the multi-jurisdictional (and unaccountable) drug task forces largely funded with Byrne Grants.

In a rare case of passing some sensible crime policy, the GOP Congress started phasing out Byrne grants in the 1990s, a trend that has continued through the Bush administration. It’s a good idea. Even if you support the drug war, these grants do little to help fight it, and only serve to make local police departments less accountable and less transparent. Even the White House Office of Management and Budget has been sharply critical of the program.

Unfortunately, Congressional Democrats (and many Republicans) can’t resist the easy, positive publicity that comes with a press release announcing the procurement of federal crime-fighting pork for the local police department. They want to bring back Byrne grants in full force. One leading senate proponent of re-funding the grants is, unfortunately, Democratic presidential frontrunner Barack Obama.

Back to the story in Kentucky:

"The impact of our drug task forces can be clearly seen in the success of this one-day blitz," said Justice and Public Safety Secretary J. Michael Brown. "While combining these efforts in a 24-hour period makes a statement, it’s important to remember that these types of activities go on every day, and are a critical tool in eradicating illegal use."

Adds Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin:

"Every year the Byrne grants are slashed, we run the risk of keeping more drugs and criminals on the street,"

But if police in Kentucky can go out and find 2,400 pounds of marijuana in 24-hours just to make a political statement, isn’t that a pretty good indication that the grants aren’t working?

• TalkLeft on Cindy McCain’s drug problem. Someone needs to ask John McCain to rectify the sweetheart deal his wife got with his own hawkish voting record on drug prohibition.
• Ed Brayton has more on the status of his FOIA request about the U.S. settlement on the Internet gambling ban. He’s now getting help from a member of Congress.
• Speaking of which, Sallie James notes at Cato’s blog that despite the settlement, the EU is now investigating the DOJ’s arrest of European nationals for infractions of gambling laws that don’t exist in Europe.
• John Cole on the continuing problems with transparency with Bush’s executive agencies.
• Megan McArdle on the economics of The Wire.

A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Ed Burns, the co-creator of HBO’s The Wire.  We covered the show, the drug war, criminal justice, police work, public education, and politics, as well as the upcoming HBO miniseries, Generation Kill.

The interview is now up at reason.

A pretty bold (and awesome) statement in Time magazine from the show’s head writers, Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren’t fictional.

Regular readers of this site can think back to very real names like Kathryn Johnston, Isaac Singletary, Daniel Castillo, Tarika Wilson, or Jarrod Shivers. Or for that matter, any of these.

The one problem with jury nullification is that judges and prosecutors often set perjury traps that pick would-be nullifiers off during the voir dire process. Worse, judges sometimes even wrongly instruct jurors that their only option is to consider the defendant’s guilt or innocence, explicitly instructing that they aren’t to judge the justness or morality of the law itself.

One of the most significant policies drug reformers could get enacted would be to work Congress and state legislatures to pass legislation protecting and preserving the rights of jurors to nullify—or better yet, to even force courts to notify them of that right before deliberation.

For more on nullification, check out Clay Conrad’s excellent primer on America’s long history of this important, powerful form of activism.

Chicago gets tough on drugs:

Tiny plastic bags used to sell small quantities of heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs would be banned in Chicago, under a crackdown advanced Tuesday by a City Council committee.

Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd) persuaded the Health Committee to ban possession of “self-sealing plastic bags under two inches in either height or width,” after picking up 15 of the bags on a recent Sunday afternoon stroll through a West Side park.

Lt. Kevin Navarro, commanding officer of the Chicago Police Department’s Narcotics and Gang Unit, said the ordinance will be an “important tool” to go after grocery stores, health food stores and other businesses.

Next year, look for a ban on bags “slightly larger than those we banned last year.”

…is on naloxone, and drug warriors who’d rather see drug users dead than high.

I’m not wild about the headline.

Former Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy returns to his old stomping grounds to take a swing at the steroid hypocrisy:

I’m hoping that Roger Clemens polls the members of Waxman’s committee on their use of performance-enhancing drugs. Start with Viagra. Or Cialis, ready for action “when the moment is right” — say, a congressman stumbling home after a late-night floor vote on an earmark bill. Clemens might ask the members how many need shots of caffeine drugs to get themselves up and out every morning. He might ask the members how often they reach for another shot of Jack Daniels to enhance their performance while grubbing for bucks from lobbyists at fundraisers. And before leaving Capitol Hill, he should grill the allegedly clean-living baseball reporters on how many of them sit in the press box enhancing their bodies with alcohol, nicotine and caffeine drugs. And a blunt or two when night games go extra innings and deadline nerves need steadying.

I see steroids, and all drugs, as an issue of personal freedom. Is there a difference between fans at big-league baseball games stoned on alcohol while cheering athletes on the base paths juiced with steroids? What’s the difference between scoring with Viagra and scoring with steroids? What’s the difference between people freely abusing their bodies with one drug but not another, as long as no one else is harmed and the consequences are self-sustained?

No difference but one. Some protectors of the public good–reluctantly, the 30 big-league team owners and now the Waxman committee and the sanctimonious sports media posing as guardians of baseball’s purity–have decreed a crackdown.

For a shining example of said sanctimony, see Orin Hatch in today’s WaPo.

Fascinating piece on a native village in Nicaragua that’s been the serendipitous beneficiary of the confluence of ocean currents, geography, and the U.S. drug war. Seems that when drug runners’ boats get accosted by the U.S. Coast Guard and they pitch their contraband overboard, it tends to wash up on the beaches of this village. Floating bales of “white lobster” wash ashore at the rate of one or more per week.

“We know there are small shop owners who do this,” says Yorlene Orozco, the local judge. “We are talking about people without a profession, no home, no job. One day later they have a new car, go to the casino and are building a home that costs I don’t know how many thousands of dollars.”

Law enforcement in Bluefields is practically invisible “I just had a Swiss tourist tell me that when she went to the supermarket they tried to sell her cocaine,” says Orozco.

The police and Navy have few resources and less trust from the local public. Bluefields is effectively an anarchist nation - no Government, no organised institutions and the rules are made by community groups.

Given the massive amount of cocaine in town, violence is surprisingly rare. Gunfights are nearly unheard of and most of the town seems to lounge around or play baseball all day and then erupt into a frenzy of energy by late afternoon, fuelled by Flor de Cana, a Nicaraguan rum, fresh fish, an endless supply of native oysters, and “the white lobster”.

The “catch” has made the town enormously wealthy.

At a local price of $3500 per kg, the typical 35kg sack nets a cash sale price of $122,500, which by all accounts is spent immediately.

“Last time bags and bags washed up, everyone [felt like] a millionaire, but that money does not last.” explains Helen, who runs a university research institute in Bluefields. Asked how the locals unload their cash, she said: “Beer, beer, beer. You should see the amount they drink here. Go to the pier and see how much alcohol goes out to the islands.”

“When the drugs come in, everyone is happy, the banks, the stores, everyone has cash.”

Arana, the former mayor, recalled one month when the village bought 28,000 cases of beer.

Actually, it doesn’t all go for beer…

The cocaine business is reshaping the face of these Indian communities. Tasbapauni Beach is now nicknamed “Little Miami”, because so much cocaine washes up on its long shoreline that it has fuelled a construction boom. Luxurious oceanfront condos protected by security guards now sit side by side with wooden fishing shacks.

“If shit washes up on your shore it belongs to that family. Every family owns their turf,” said a Miskito fisherman.

But when a fisherman finds white lobster the entire village shares the treasure, with a percentage going to the community, a smaller percentage to the church and the majority split among the crew of the small boat that found the loot.

“It is like a municipal tax,” says Sergio Leon, a local reporter who has been writing about the drug situation in Bluefields for many years. “The schools and churches are not built by the Government, that money comes from the fishermen and their finds.”

Drug money has been used to build a school and replace the church roof. “The pastors here get mad when they don’t get their cut from the find,” says Francisco a court official. “If a member of the congregation has found 15kg, the church calculates 15 times $3500, that’s $52,500, and at 10 per cent they are saying: where’s the $5250?”

• 100-year-old tortoise adopts baby hippo.
• You gotta’ read this article to really believe it. The city of L.A. is going to bizarre lengths to prevent vendors from selling . . . grilled bacon-wrapped hot dogs.
• Mitt Romney’s classless exist: Too much porn gives us bastard black babies!
• Ah, federalism and property rights–two fundamental principles of conservative philosophy, right? Looks like the Bush administration DEA’s new tact on medical marijuana is to threaten landlords who rent out space to marijuana dispensaries with forfeiture unless they boot their tenants. I’d say the guiding principle of this administration is moral rectitude.
• Judge in Pennsylvania throws out “outrageous” case in which police paid an informant to have sex with a suspected prostitute . . . four times. Good work if you can get it, I guess.

A Maryland legislator wants everyone under 21 to pass a drug test before being given a driver’s license.

Via Trevor Bothwell, who explains some of the logistical problems the noble public servant neglected to consider.

Over at Reddit, someone reposted this old Stanton Peele piece on Cindy McCain. It’s worth revisiting:

McCain was investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration after the agency was approached by a former staff member of her charity. The investigation resulted in no charges or prison time for her, and she entered a diversion program. While these records were not made public at the time, Mrs. McCain eventually confessed her drug use when she learned that a reporter was investigating the story.

Is Mrs. McCain to be judged as a pitiable victim or as a criminal felon? This debate is at the heart of the discussion of American drug policy. Should we deal with illicit drug users as victims or as criminals?

Let’s examine Mrs. McCain’s position in these terms. She was the privileged wife of a prominent family and spouse of an important politician, a person who had her own position of prestige and power. Should she not be held at least as accountable for her actions as an uneducated inner-city drug user? After all, she could enter drug treatment at any time she chose, unlike many drug users who find themselves in prison.

Moreover, Mrs. McCain was violating a position of trust by stealing from a charitable organization, using its money and medical expertise to fuel her drug use. Is this not morally more reprehensible than simply purchasing drugs illegally?

Finally, Mrs. McCain was the mother of four children at the time she admits to using drugs–between 1989 and 1992. Her children were born in 1984, 1986, 1988 and 1991. In other words, Cindy McCain was using drugs while raising small children, one of whom she adopted while she was an addict. In most states, family services will remove children from a woman who is known to be an active drug addict, and she would certainly not be allowed to adopt a child while addicted.

John McCain is a hawk in the drug war. He advocates stricter drug laws, penalties and enforcement against drug sellers. He has had nothing to say about redressing our punitive approach toward drug users. Of course, McCain also supports family values. Yet if John and Cindy McCain were not well-off and influential, they might not have a family at all. McCain’s lack of concern for street drug users contrasts sharply with the support and understanding his wife received.

McCain’s condescending, dismissive attitude toward medical marijuana patients only exacerbates the hypocrisy. Cindy McCain’s powerful husband and high profile probably had something to do with the fact that she didn’t get the Richard Paey treatment. But as with Rush Limbaugh, prosecutors likely laid off of her also because she played the drug war game—she admitted she was an “addict,” repented, and sought treatment. Paey had the audacity to insist that he oughtn’t go to jail for treating his own pain, and that he wasn’t an “addict,” but a chronic pain patient who was dependent on the medication in order to lead a normal life.

Contra my friend Jeremy Lott, the problem with the hypocritical practice of letting politicians’ family members get off for drug crimes that land normal people in prison is that it doesn’t seem to do much in the way of making them more sympathetic. It just hardens them into more militant drug warriors. We have to throw Richard Paey in prison so we don’t get any more Cindy McCains. See the logic?

Today, officials in Chesapeake announced that a special prosecutor will be handling the murder case against Ryan Frederick, they say because the local prosecutor worked too closely with the deceased Det. Shivers on prior drug cases. I find that reasoning odd, unless the DA’s office itself was complicit in the series of bad decisions that led to this raid.

The bad news is that the new prosecutor is Paul Ebert, the Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorney for Prince William County. If you read my personal blog regularly, you’ll know Ebert as the prosecutor who has steadfastly refused to investigate the allegations of rampant corruption by public officials and police officers in Manassas Park, Virginia in the Rack ‘n’ Roll Billiards case. He’s also the guy whose constituents were so upset he didn’t have an opponent last election, they started a write-in campaign for a ham sandwich.

Here’s a story along the same lines as the story the other day about how the ONDCP is opposing the distribution of an antidote to heroin overdoses: A DA in San Antonio is charging needle exchange volunteers with distributing drug paraphernalia.

Unbelievable. If the drug war is about protecting people from the effects if illicit drugs, it’s an odd sort of protection that throws people in prison, lets them die of overdoses, HIV, or hepatitis, isn’t it?

Via Hit & Run.

ESPN investigative reporter Tom Farrey surveys the medical literature, and finds that HGH may help NFL players with pituitary damage caused by concussions and other head injuries, which can be progressively debilitating, even after a player retires.  Unfortunately, anti-PED hysteria will likely prevent the league from allowing HGH to be used as treatment in these cases—at least legitimately:

The league is in a precarious situation. Even if it were willing to test for deficiencies, the fact remains that the medically accepted therapy calls for hormones that have been banned. To complicate matters further, head trauma isn’t the only way to wreck a pituitary. Taking high amounts of steroids can shut down the natural production of hormones as well, at least temporarily. Understandably, the NFL doesn’t want to create a scenario in which drug-abusing players who show a hormone deficiency are rewarded.

Consider the implications of this passage for a sec.  The league has banned HGH (on very little evidence), allegedly to protect its players from the harm it allegedly does to their health.  But the game of football itself is causing debilitating, potentially life-threatening injuries to players, and we think little of it.  These injuries are the entirely predictable result of the slobber-knocking hits that make the game so much fun to watch, both live, and from the six different angles in various highlight packages on SportsCenter. 

So we’re okay with trusting players to take the risks to their health that come with actually playing football.  But we draw the line at letting them use artificial drugs to help them recover more quickly from those injuries.  Because that might be dangerous.  Or it might benefit players who are using PED’s for non-medical purposes.

As Farrey explains, the good news is that the underground labs are miles ahead of testing technology.  So most of the league is getting treatment anyway.  It’s just too bad that players have to protect their own health on the sly, and that the people who treat them risk their careers, and possibly their freedom.

Just in case you thought talk about how the drug war has "militarized" our police departments was exaggerated:

Officials in Clayton County have intensified their efforts in the war on drugs. Sheriff Victor Hill announced he is planning an invasion into drug-infested communities.

The ACLU said the question of whether or not the so-called invasion is legal, is a troubling one for them.

[...]

Deputies have identified five known drug houses, that they want to investigate. Thursday night, deputies set up a road block, and checked each car coming into or out of the street in question for drugs.

The operation has been dubbed Operation Jericho. Mobile police checkpoints have been set up outside suspected drug houses in the neighborhood. Clayton County Sheriff Victor Hill said the plan is to occupy suspected drug territories with deputies — one house, one location at a time.

[...]

Hill said the conventional method of warrants and arrests are not working, and that military-like occupation of deputies is necessary.

[...]

"The war on drugs in Clayton County, as in most jurisdictions, I liken it to the Vietnam War," Hill said. "Hit and miss, there is no clear win — we don’t know if we’re gaining ground or not. What we want to do is we want to change our strategy. We want to make this more like a Normandy invasion."

And of course when you’re fighting a war, you can’t really concern yourself with collateral damage.

A 14-year-old boy in Lewisville, Texas was arrested, booked, and fingerprinted last October for sniffing his teacher’s hand sanitizer.

Mr. Ortiz said the family’s ordeal began Oct. 19, when his son picked up a bottle of hand sanitizer from the desk of his fifth-period reading teacher at Killian Middle School in Lewisville. He rubbed the gel on his hands and smelled it.

In the view of school officials, the boy "inhaled heavily," according to Mr. Ortiz, who said his son sniffed the cleanser "because it smelled good."

The youth was sent to the principal’s office, and the Lewisville police officer assigned to the school began investigating.

[...]

The teen was required to serve a brief in-school suspension and was also fingerprinted and photographed at the Lewisville Police Department. He returned to regular classes at the school, including one with the teacher whose sanitizer he sniffed.

Mr. Ortiz said he believed the matter was over until Tuesday when he was served with a petition charging his son with delinquency for inhaling the hand sanitizer to "induce a condition of intoxication, hallucination and elation."

He said he couldn’t believe that his son would have to go to court for smelling hand sanitizer. "I think it’s ludicrous," said Mr. Ortiz, who blames overzealous police and prosecutors for initially pursuing the case.

Joni Eddy, assistant police chief in Lewisville, said Friday that hand sanitizer has become a popular inhalant. "That is the latest thing to huff," she said.

The local prosecutor had the common sense to not pursue the charges.

A college buddy of a sitting U.S. senator writes his old pal a letter asking him to cut the BS and hypocrisy on marijuana.

Some truly astonishing behavior at ONDCP:

Public health workers from New York to Los Angeles, North Carolina to New Mexico, are preventing thousands of deaths by giving $9.50 rescue kits to drug users. The kits turn drug users into first responders by giving them the tools to save a life.

[...]

The nasal spray is a drug called naloxone, or Narcan. It blocks the brain receptors that heroin activates, instantly reversing an overdose.

Doctors and emergency medical technicians have used Narcan for years in hospitals and ambulances. But it doesn’t require much training because it’s impossible to overdose on Narcan.

[...]

John Gatto, executive director of the Cambridge program, says such dramatic results are unusual in the world of substance abuse treatment and prevention.

"In the work that we do, oftentimes the results are very intangible," Gatto says. "This is amazing to be involved in something that literally can save people’s lives. Why wouldn’t we do it?"

Indeed. Why wouldn’t you?

But Dr. Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, opposes the use of Narcan in overdose-rescue programs.

"First of all, I don’t agree with giving an opioid antidote to non-medical professionals. That’s No. 1," she says. "I just don’t think that’s good public health policy."

Madras says drug users aren’t likely to be competent to deal with an overdose emergency. More importantly, she says, Narcan kits may actually encourage drug abusers to keep using heroin because they know overdosing isn’t as likely.

Madras says the rescue programs might take away the drug user’s motivation to get into detoxification and drug treatment.

"Sometimes having an overdose, being in an emergency room, having that contact with a health care professional is enough to make a person snap into the reality of the situation and snap into having someone give them services," Madras says.

Digest that for a sec. Better to let a heroin user die than administer a product that, in some cases, may remove the threat of overdose death from people who use heroin to excess. This is the mentality of your modern drug warrior. We’re fighting drug use not because it’s dangerous or harmful, but because they believe drug use is, in and of itself, immoral.

Today’s drug war isn’t about saving lives, it’s about saving souls. it’s the same mentality that led some family values types to oppose the marketing of Gardasil. Remove the threat of cervical cancer from premarital sex and, golly, some girls might have more premarital sex. If a few have to learn an important lesson by dying of cervical cancer, so be it.

Via Mark Kleiman, who adds:

Why not just go all the way and poison the heroin supply? If withholding Narcan in order to generate more overdoses in order to scare addicts into quitting were proposed as an experiment, it could never get past human-subjects review. But since it’s a failure to act rather than an action, there’s no rule to require that it be even vaguely rational.

Kleiman is hyperbolizing. But it probably won’t surprise you to learn that there are idiots out there who aren’t.