Either the Dayton police have been up late staring at too many drug files, or they’re about to pitch a pilot of Unsolved Mysteries: Dayton Edition to their local network executives. It seems that the brass there would like to blame several recent area shootings on the assailant’s or victim’s possession of small amounts of weed.

According to baffled Lieutenant, Patrick Welsh:

The trend in several of the homicides and even non-fatal shootings is that they’re related to marijuana use and sales.

And the evidence for this? Apparently Dayton police found a man shot at a residence in which they had made a weed-related arrest three-months earlier. Let’s forget, for a moment, that the same residence was cited as an after hours alcohol distributor. This, combined with a few scattered cases of Dayton weed dealers being hit for either money or baggies prompted the Dayton Daily News columnist (of the story in question) to conclude:

Now, marijuana seems to be the dangerous drug.

Sherlock Holmes, this guy isn’t. Any Drug War newbie could tell you that the presence of the drugs in these cases are completely irrelevant, save for the fact that they’re worth money. And they’re worth so much money because of their illegality. Do you really think people would be shooting each other over this easily cultivated plant if anyone could grow it without fear of arrest or reprisal? Do people shoot each other over basil or tarragon? How many rosemary-related murders have we tallied this year?

Criminalization of plants is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you increase the value of an object and prohibit legal businesses from selling it, then you are literally handing a valuable monopoly over to the black market. That’s the market where business is settled with the business-end of a sawed-off shotgun. So, logically speaking, it was the police who were the cause of the very crimes that they were investigating. Elementary, my dear Watson.

The U.S. has changed it’s policy when it comes to eradicating poppy fields in Afghanistan, that’s done nothing but put Afghani farmers out of work.

Richard Holbrooke, U.S. envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan said at the G8 conference in Trieste, Italy on Saturday:

The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure. They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work. [...] We are not going to support crop eradication. We’re going to phase it out.

The new plan, being all about bringing the fight to the drug lords and drug suppliers, seems more like an old plan, seeing how the drug lords in these regions are also the Taliban. The U.S. has been in that region fighting the Taliban since the invasion in 2001, yet according to the U.N., Afghanistan’s opium production has risen 40-fold.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime said the effort has been a “sad” joke and:

Sad because many, many Afghan policemen and soldiers … have been killed and only about 5,000 hectares were eradicated, about 3 percent of the volume.

The U.S. plans on reducing the budget it allocates for crop eradication in Afghanistan and spending several hundred million dollars on supporting legal crops.

The Modesto Bee told a heart-wrenching story last weekend of a young Tijuana meth dealer named Hector Rodriguez Estrada, who was killed in cold blood along with his pregnant girlfriend, by a rival gang attempting to seize his drug turf. The story gives a face to the deteriorating social system in many parts of Mexico, in which cities are morphing into nothing more than shooting galleries between rival cartels.

In impoverished areas where factory workers make $60 a week, selling meth on a corner can be a very attractive economic option. According to Rodriguez’s older brother, Samuel:

When you live by the sea, you look for fish.

In other words, for many people in the poorest nations of the world, drug production or distribution is not a moral or ethical issue. It’s a matter of survival. These people exist within a black market that provides massive financial incentives to participate. Without any regulation or government-imposed morality, there is also a huge incentive to kill off competitors. This is a completely free market economy. There are no longer any rules or norms.

Perhaps once cartels saw benefit in respecting rival turf and developing in areas without conflict. But an aggressive campaign by President Calderon, coupled with an influx of US military weapons and aid has created a virtual anarchy to replace a tenuous balance. Tijuana drug rivalries fueled 443 murders in the last three months of 2008. Gang members were left in dumpsters by the dozens with severed heads, limbs, and fingers.

Until this economic system is supplanted with another, the cycle of violence will continue. There will be many more Hector Rodriguez Estradas. And there will be just as many rivals willing to punch his ticket for a new drug corner to run. Madness begets madness.

The UN 2009 World Drug Report was released and our very own Gil Kerlikowske, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, endorsed it within his own statement. Although decriminalizing the publicly supported recreational drugs is exactly what was done in certain cities in Europe, the U.S. Drug Czar failed to mention the word “decriminalization,” yet seemed to be in support of the ideas that led to the successful statistics of Portugal and Switzerland.

Basically, Kerlikowske wants to stop blindly throwing people in jail without really seeking to help them with their addiction. More money is planned to be spent on programs for juveniles and family courts. On top of this the U.S. vows to pump more money into bringing down the most hardcore drug traffickers throughout the world, ironically starting in countries that we’ve already had a heavy presence in, for decades.

The U.S. plans to reduce the amount of weapons the cartels obtain, put a dent in the drug profit and slow the flow of the chemicals needed to make some of these drugs. Over a billion dollars will be put into more research and studies that won’t be published unless it aids the negative antiquated psychobabble rhetoric accustomed with the war on drugs.

It seems that Kerlikowske had more of a free reign while in Seattle as Chief of Police, but now he seems to be doing the bidding of the Obama Administration which is business as usual, when it comes to the drug war.

To the chagrin of progressives everywhere, the Obama budget was released this week without any alteration to the 20-year old ban on funding needle-exchange programs.

According to White House Spin Meister Ben LaBolt:

We have not removed the ban in our budget proposal because we want to work with Congress and the American public to build support for this change.

The Obama White House is making an appeal here to higher minded politics by claiming to put the needle exchange debate on the floor of Congress instead of obscuring it in the murky land of Omnibus. Unfortunately, there are several problems with this approach:

Firstly, if Republicans have been waging political war through the budget for the better part of a decade, Dems are ceding a great deal of ground by refusing to go back and revise it. A budget provision to ban needle exchange funding is inherently political, in itself. We’re not talking about a grey area where funding can vary administration to administration. This is a prohibition on federal support for all time until the ban is lifted.

Secondly, wasn’t the Obama budget already hailed as a political statement? Obama’s first address to Congress repeatedly stressed the budget’s importance in setting a new national agenda. Health care, renewable energy, and education funding were hammered into the budget as a direct statement of purpose by the new administration. Therefore, we can only assume that Obama is selectively choosing what budget items to play politics with and what not to. This is exactly what Bill Clinton did on this issue in 1998, when a lifting of the needle exchange ban became a victim of political negotiations and remained intact.

The new dialogue on drugs in this country (as embodied by Obama and Kerlikowski) is supposed to dispose of the crusader’s ‘moral’ approach to the problem. In point of fact, there is no moral approach to the problem. What people choose to put in their own bodies is not a moral issue, it’s a public health issue. And public health officials have been crystal clear on the benefits to having these clean needle programs.

The premise of this program is mind numbingly simple. Needle exchange reduces the spread of HIV, and thereby reduces suffering and death. No one on either side of the political aisle disputes this. Any stance that opposes needle exchange, therefore, fosters an increase in HIV and deaths. If that’s the moral approach to the issue, then I’m a monkey’s uncle.

Over the last few months, stories of the debilitating drug violence in Mexico have become commonplace in the US media. While the murders of civilians and law enforcement officers continue to climb, other casualties of this escalation are going unnoticed. As reported in the Christian Science Monitor, the government’s assault on Mexican cartels has vastly increased the availability of drugs in the country.

As major cartels are targeted by Mexican law enforcement, they have begun to fragment, causing more competition among a greater pool of lower-level dealers. When the cartel hierarchies break down, the additional competition for sales not only increases the purity of the product (be it cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamines), but also considerably decreases the price. At current rates, a gram of cocaine can be had for as little as $11, a price that is one-third that of a few decades ago.

This flooding of the market has created an entire new generation of addicts. Over the last six years, Mexico has suffered a 50% rise in addiction, towards a number approaching half a million.

Short of creating a completely facist, totalitatiran state (something well beyond the abilities of Mexican authorities) there seems to be absolutely no violence-based solution to the drug problem. In the meantime, Mexico is being laid to waste by its denial of the immutable, uncompromising laws of the drug trade.

Academics and left-wing activists are well known for their opposition to the war on drugs. It’s less often that one hears the criticism straight from the horse’s mouth. In an interview for Allison Kilkenny’s blog, a former detective lieutenant and narcotics officer offered up some first hand evidence that the war on drugs is little more than a police-orchestrated charade.

The detective, Jack Cole, is now a member of LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.) A 26-year veteran of the New Jersey state police, Cole was well-acquainted with the discrepancy between department objectives and the reality on the ground:

We nor our bosses had any idea of how to fight a war on drugs. Our bosses did know one thing though; they knew how to keep that federal cash-cow being milked in their personal barnyard. To accomplish that they had to make the drug war appear to be an absolute necessity. So early on we were encouraged to lie about most of our statistics and lie we did.

And so the department inflated arrest statistics, seizure statistics, and any other metrics that would make them look successful:

We exaggerated the amount of drugs we seized by adding the weight of any cutting agents we found (lactose, mannitol, starch, or sucrose) to the weight of the illegal drug. So we might seize one ounce of cocaine and four pounds of lactose.

And as the lie steamrolled onward, the department funding poured in. Soon, “cooking” the stats was a mere formality and part of everyday policework. And, as they tend to do, the lie spiraled out of control.

In Cole’s words:

The War On Drugs gives the racists an easy hook to hurt people they don’t like. And they do.

The need for stats bred racial profiling, destroyed minority communities, and locked up hundreds of thousands of non-malicious, non-violent youths.

Last week, Bill Mahr’s HBO series, Real Time, featured drug policy guru and tv production savant, David Simon. Having created The Wire, one of the most nuanced and insightful television series ever, Simon has ascended to the rank of soothsayer amongst progressive political talking heads.

Too weighty to be a simple panelist, Simon was invited onto the show in a specially dedicated interview segment to discuss his take on Obama’s drug policies, amongst other things. One striking point made by Simon, was his avocation for jury nullification. Jury nullification is a mostly archaic court occurrence whereby the jury decides to acquit a defendant regardless of the evidence held against him. Simon argued that all juries should use this practice to protest the overzealous prosecution of non-violent drug crimes.

Just another instance of Simon’s forward thinking in the land of no creativity. If the legislators, magistrates, and attorneys won’t act, the people certainly should.

Few contemporary television producers have either the time or the inclination to go about the business of exposing corrupt bureaucracies and hypocritical leaders when it’s so much easier to provide empty entertainment. David Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire, is a welcomed exception to the rule. His portrayal of Baltimore street life in the midst of the War on Drugs has been lauded as one of the finest television dramas ever created. This week, Simon appeared as a guest on PBS’s Bill Moyers’ Journal, to discuss his work.

A former career journalist with the Baltimore Sun, Simon found it prohibitively difficult to intelligently discuss any social ills in the course of writing a column. He recalls:

I was trying to explain how the drug war doesn’t work. And I would write these very careful and very well-researched pieces. And they would go into the aether and be gone. And whatever editorial writer was coming behind me would then write, ‘Let’s get tough on drugs.’ As if I hadn’t said anything. Even my own newspaper. And I would think, ‘Man, it’s just such an uphill struggle to do this with facts.’

Simon goes on to explain that the hustlers and street folk portrayed on The Wire often have no viable choices but to participate in the only economy they have access to — the drug economy:

In some ways it’s the most destructive form of welfare that we’ve established, which is the illegal drug trade in these neighborhoods. It’s basically like opening up a Beth Steel in the middle of the South Bronx or in West Baltimore and saying, ‘And you guys are all steel workers.’ To just say no? That’s our answer to that? You know, the economic model does not work. You know, listen, the only reason that alcohol and cigarettes, which do far more damage than heroine and cocaine, are legal, is that white people and affluent white people at that, make money off that stuff.

Through the show, Simon is able to give the urban underclass a chance to share their side of the story. He characterizes their struggle as follows:

The fact that these really are the excess people in America, we — our economy doesn’t need them. And certainly the ones that are undereducated, that have been ill served by the inner city school system, that have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy. We pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we’re actually including them in the American ideal, but we’re not. And they’re not foolish. They get it.

Thanks to David Simon and The Wire, many Americans who aren’t trapped in the forgotten circles of urban life now get it too.

A full transcript of the interview is available here.

A movement is building behind a Texas libertarian candidate who pledges to end the war on drugs. Ron Paul, you say? No dice. It’s former DEA agent, turned counterculture warrior, Barry Cooper. Speaking to a crowd of students at the University of Texas, Monday, Cooper announced his intentions to run for Attorney General in the upcoming state election.

Rehabilitated from the depths of the straight and narrow, Cooper now flies his freak flag with abandon. He has already become widely internet-famous for the creation of a series of safety lectures for weed growers entitled, “Never Get Busted.”

The video series educates weed entrepreneurs on DEA and police enforcement and surveillance tactics that could be potentially used against them.

Middle Americans have not seen a self-proclaimed outlaw make a serious run for public office since drug-culture icon, Hunter S. Thompson nearly was elected sheriff of Aspen, Colorado in 1970. While Thompson’s platform included such things as mandatory LSD trips for local police and renaming Aspen, “Fat City,” Cooper seems to be a bit more reserved in his thoughts on governance.

Cooper said:

Our goal from day one — and it has not changed — is to free our prisoners. We currently have 1 million people in jail for non-violent, drug-related crimes, and it makes no sense.

Unfortunately for Cooper, those million non-violent offenders are no longer afforded the right to vote. However, given the meteoric rise of Dr. Paul and other Lone Star oddballs, one thing seems clear: anything can happen in Texas.

Check out this great rant from Adam Corolla (of Loveline, The Man Show, and his brand new, uncensored podcast, which you can find via iTunes.) He brings up a lot of good points in an effort to focus on decriminalizing marijuana.

What he says about the North Hollywood bank robbers is hard to believe, but true. How can a car full of people, who had all the tools of a bank robbery, not be arrested for intending to do the crime yet if you are caught possessing more than 14 grams of weed you could be arrested for intent to distribute? Is the legal system that corrupted and damaged? I believe in that saying, Justice is blind — add deaf and mute as well. We know our government needs a complete overhaul, does our legal system?

Carolla understands the difference between a horrible, physically and mentally destructive drug like meth and an at best, recreational drug like marijuana. He’s all for eradicating meth, cocaine, crack and other drugs that are harmful to society. What he says about the Pharmaceutical Industry getting involved is hilarious.

Something tells me we’ll be hearing a lot more from Adam on this topic down the road.

As the drug violence goes back and forth across American and Mexican borders, a recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle talked about the alarming rise in Mexico’s addiction rates.

A cited study by the Mexican government claimed the number of addicts has doubled in the last six years, although that number could be significantly higher in the more lawless areas, “but hard to quantify due to difficulties in polling states with heavy drug violence.”

I would imagine a poll would have integrity issues anywhere there are roving death squads, beheadings and corrupt law enforcement.

One of the great ironies of the article is that the U.S. is held partly accountable according to a Brookings Institute report that posited American dollars used to fight drug manufacturers should have been spent on education, not enforcement.

I know this is pretty obvious to everyone in hindsight, but in light of how remarkably inefficient law enforcement has been at reducing drug use, violence or illegal activity of any kind in either direction – maybe it’s time to attack the demand rather than the supply.

The worst part is the lack of surprise this should be to American policy makers. In their Oct., 2007 piece, the New York Times chronicled the Mexican drug trade and addiction epidemic sweeping through Central Mexico. For a dated dose of depressing imagery, check out the NYT’s addiction gallery.

[photo via LA Times]

NOTE: Turns out this video auto-loads and plays, and that’s not good for our slow bandwidth brethren. The post image is now a screenshot of the video, which you can see after the jump.

Here’s a video of Guy Lawson, a rather contentious reporter for magazines such as Rolling Stone and GQ, explaining the literal drug war that is being waged in Mexico.

We’ve covered this violence before, but never in such depth and with such impact as the Rolling Stone video.

It helps us understand how the political and social climates of our neighbors can be of great importance here at home. Additionally, it really makes you appreciate the difference between living in the United States and the rest of the world.

See the video after the jump…

In a U.S.-centric culture, we tend to forget that there are lots of other people struggling with drugs, drug wars and drug problems (although in this particular instance our colonization probably played a big role.)

A Fiji blogger writes about the changing culture of drug use on the island which has been altered by recent enforcement efforts. This tiny agricultural island nation with a population of less than one million has seen over $50 million in drug busts in the last three years.

[image via Nation Geographic by James L. Stanfield, 2007]