DEA RAIDS

Last Thursday evening 30 federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Cooperative, a medical certification and dispensing center for physician-certified patients who are authorized by California law to cultivate, possess and use cannabis, or marijuana. No charges have been filed, although all of the center's plants, patient records, computers, gardening equipment and marijuana were seized.

"This represents a major escalation in the federal war on marijuana patients," Dale Gieringer of California National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws told us. "Previously the feds used civil injunctions to close Northern California coops. But this raid, combined with a raid three weeks ago on a grower in Ventura, the raid on Dr. Marion Fry in Cool and reports of increased surveillance at Northern California facilities, suggest the feds are looking for serious jail time for patients and care providers."

The U.S. Supreme Court decided in June that federal law does not include a "medical necessity" defense against federal marijuana prohibition laws. Although the court did not invalidate California's medical marijuana law, passed by voters in 1996 as Proposition 215, most activists had expected some federal action, especially once former Rep. Asa Hutchinson was confirmed as head of the DEA.

If charges are filed, they should present some interesting state and local government versus national government federalism issues. The Los Angeles cooperative has worked closely since Prop. 215 was passed with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Dept., which patrols its location in West Hollywood, and with the West Hollywood City Council.

On Friday Sheriff's Capt. Lynda Castro, along with all five members of the West Hollywood City Council and representatives from Rep. Henry Waxman, state Sen. Sheila Kuehl and Assembly members Paul Koretz and Jackie Goldberg, participated in a news conference expressing sadness at an action that will leave 900 AIDS patients with no secure access to a medicine that their doctors say helps them. The stage is set for a national-local power struggle, with the feds wondering if they dare risk a jury trial of a patient in California.

As a rule, political disputes feature conflicting positions that are obviously or at least arguably rational.

There are, however, exceptions. A particularly striking illustration of an exception to the rule is provided by the dispute over medical marijuana laws. Currently eight states, including Colorado, feature such laws, which allow physicians to authorize the dispensing of marijuana to patients to relieve pain from conditions ranging from glaucoma to cancer to AIDS.

The federal government in general, and the Bush administration in particular, has taken the position that, since there is no federal law permitting doctors to prescribe marijuana for medical purposes, people who supply or possess marijuana legally under state law for medical purposes should be prosecuted under federal law. This is not a rationally defensible position.

Under federal law, marijuana is categorized as a Schedule I drug, which means that, according to federal government, it is both highly dangerous and has no recognized medical use. Both of these claims are obviously false, and the federal officials who are charged with carrying out the laws that flow from this indefensible categorization of the drug are well aware of that fact. The argument that marijuana is both so dangerous and of so little medical value that - unlike, say, morphine - it is something that doctors should not have the professional discretion to administer to their patients is beneath contempt.

It is, in short, the kind of argument that fails what lawyers refer to as "the red-face test."

Marijuana is far less dangerous than the literally hundreds of prescription drugs that can be ingested in fatal quantities (there has never been a recorded case of someone dying from an overdose of marijuana, and indeed, as a practical matter, such a thing is physiologically impossible), and that are far more addictive than cannabis.

Furthermore, despite the strenuous efforts of the federal government to block scientific research regarding the potential medical uses of marijuana, a great deal of evidence has accumulated in recent years that marijuana is an effective - indeed, sometimes the most effective and least problematic - pain killer for people suffering from a wide variety of serious and often excruciatingly painful conditions.

Given all this, it isn't surprising that several states have enacted laws designed to offset the effects of the federal government's profoundly irrational policies regarding the medical use of marijuana.

What is rather surprising is the hypocrisy of the Bush administration's response.

Now, of course, only the terminally naive are surprised when politicians deal with drug questions hypocritically. Even so, the depth of the current administration's hypocrisy should perturb even the most cynical observer.

Even if we leave aside the utter irrationality of the federal government's attitude toward medical marijuana use, the fact remains that federal prosecutions of people who are acting perfectly legally under state law when they use marijuana for medical purposes violates every principle of states' rights that George W. Bush has repeatedly pledged to uphold.

Indeed, when he was a presidential candidate Bush announced that he opposed the precise policy that his own Justice Department and DEA are now carrying out.

There is, needless to say, a rational explanation for all this. Although the federal government's marijuana policy isn't rationally defensible, politicians from the president on down are terrified of the accusation that they are soft on drugs.

As absurd as that accusation is in the land of Budweiser and Percodan and mandatory prison sentences for millions of drug offenders, it still carries enormous political power.

The Bush administration's policy on medical marijuana use seems clear: If values such as democracy and federalism and common human decency happen to conflict with the administration's policy, so much the worse for them.

Monday, June 03, 2002

Did The Drug War Claim
Another 3,056 Casualties On 9-11?
By Arianna Huffington

The Phoenix memo. The Rowley letter. The Oklahoma red flag. All elements in this true and tragic story of fumbling feds that has more smoking guns than a Quentin Tarantino movie.

So why did the FBI, whose job it is find smoking guns, fail to see the smoking guns popping up all around it?

In announcing his big reorganization plans, Director Robert Mueller seemed to consider the FBI's tragedy of errors a question of flawed management flow charts, nothing that a rejiggered PowerPoint presentation couldn't fix. But there was a much more fundamental problem plaguing the bureau before Sept. 11. And it wasn't one of office politics, but of office-wide priorities. Namely, the agency's crippling addiction to America's war on drugs.

While Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida minions were diligently preparing for their murderous mission, the FBI was looking the other way with equal determination. More than twice as many FBI agents were assigned to fighting drugs (2,500) than fighting terrorism (1,151). And a far greater amount of the FBI's financial resources was dedicated to the war on drugs.

And this pathological prioritization of the drug war extended well beyond the allocation of money and manpower. It was ingrained in the culture. Counterterrorism units were treated like the bureau's ugly stepchildren, looked down upon by FBI management because they weren't making the kind of high-profile arrests that spruce up a supervisor's resume and make the evening news. Let's face it, canvassing flight schools in search of suspicious students is nowhere near as sexy as one of those big drug busts with the bags of coke or bales of pot piled high for the cameras.

It's now painfully clear that there were terror warning signs aplenty but that they were disregarded by distracted FBI officials who had their eyes on a very different prize.

In Phoenix, where the now infamous Ken Williams memo originated, counterterrorism agents complained bitterly about their efforts being given "the lowest investigative priority" by a supervisor who preferred glamorous drug-fighting investigations. Even though the anti-terror squad was understaffed, having been assigned only eight of the division's 200 agents, it had managed to infiltrate groups of suspected terrorists through the use of paid informants, including a man who was being trained to be a suicide bomber. They had also uncovered local men with ties to World Trade Center bomber Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and to a virulently anti-American Muslim organization linked to al-Qaida.

So what was their reward for all this? Regular head-butting sessions with higher ups who balked at having to allocate resources for information that didn't lead to immediate arrests. I'll bet doubloons to donuts that the Phoenix agents doling out cash to drug case snitches very rarely ran up against the same sort of resistance -- what one veteran terrorism squad member described as "micromanaging, constant indecision, and stonewalling."

Meanwhile, across the country in Boston, Raed Hijazi, an admitted al-Qaida member who had become an informant in exchange for avoiding jail, tried to warn FBI agents about Arab terrorists and sympathizers, particularly Nabil al-Marabh, a member of an al-Qaida terrorist cell who was arrested in the wake of 9-11. But the FBI wasn't interested in Hijazi's terror leads -- they only wanted to hear what he knew about heroin being smuggled into America from Afghanistan.

And it wasn't just the FBI. This Drug War Uber-Alles mindset infected the entire law enforcement community, starting at the top. "I want to escalate the war on drugs," said Attorney General John Ashcroft in his first interview after being nominated for the post. "I want to renew it. I want to refresh it." And he was true to his word. Witness the $43 million the Bush administration gave to the Taliban just four months before Sept. 11. Sure there was the small detail of harboring a guy named bin Laden, but the Taliban had agreed to ban the production of opium poppies. And so the drug war trumped the terror war once again.

So is this kind of thinking finally a thing of the past? I'm not so sure. Even after last week's highly touted reorganization, which included the reassignment of 400 narcotics agents to counterterrorism, there will still be 2,100 agents spending their invaluable time and energy fighting a fruitless drug war. This despite the fact that combating drugs didn't even make Director Mueller's official Top Ten list of priorities.

Which raises the question: if the drug war is suddenly lower on the FBI pecking order than combating white collar crime (#7), protecting civil rights (#5), and taking on public corruption at all levels (#4 with a bullet!), then how come 1 out of 6 agents will still be working that beat? The numbers just don't add up.

According to high-ranking FBI officials, Mueller originally intended to pull the plug on his agency's involvement in the drug war, shifting every one of his counternarcotics agents to counterterrorism activities, but was talked out of it by drug war generals who can't admit defeat. Not only should the White House follow though on Mueller's instinct and choose the war on terror over the war against drugs, they should insist that the FBI hire new kinds of people to fight this new kind of war.

"Merely reassigning traditional FBI agents to fight terrorism isn't enough," former senator Gary Hart, who co-chaired the U.S. Commission on National Security, told me. "The new counterterror team should be more like the Delta Force. Not standard-issue agents in dark suits and ties, but young, imaginative 21st century investigators recruited from outside the bureau."

At the same time, we should make sure that the administration doesn't just transfer the drug war and its attendant lavish funding from the FBI to the DEA, which will no doubt show up on the Hill any day now, looking for more money to take up the drug fighting slack.

As the soaring budget deficit reminds us, federal coffers are not a bottomless well.

Everything comes with a price. Sadly, it's looking more and more like the price of the drug war may have included the 3,056 lives lost on Sept. 11.

What? Our nation's war on rugs? Hello?
Jon Carroll Wednesday, May 29, 2002

TURNS OUT THAT one of the programs that's part of the government's war on drugs is something called the National Drug Control Strategy, the goal of which is to "educate and enable America's youth to reject illegal drugs as well as alcohol and tobacco."

One of the objectives of this strategy, which costs about $929 million a year, financed mostly by taxpayers, is to "pursue a vigorous advertising and public communications program dealing with the dangers of drug use by youth."

Being a government program, it is subject to periodic evaluation. One such evaluation was recently concluded by Westat, a private research and data collecting service, together with the Annenberg School of Communication. The quotes above are from that evaluation.

Here's the key finding: "Thus far there is little evidence of direct Campaign effects on youth. There is no statistically significant change in marijuana use or in beliefs and attitudes about marijuana use, and no tendency for those reporting more exposure to Campaign messages to hold more desirable beliefs."

A shorter way to say that would be: It doesn't work. The money was wasted. There are, need I say, no plans to shut down the program as a result of this report. The entire War on Drugs is not really about stopping drug use; it's about being seen to stop drug use. It's about image.

The use of psychoactive substances by humans is older than history; humans have always wanted to get loaded. There are healthy and less healthy ways of doing that, but the War on Drugs is not about health, or it would right now be spending all its energies trying to ban alcohol and tobacco.

Right now, the best anti-alcohol campaign on television is "Cops," whose eternal message is "booze makes you stupid."

I imagine the abuse of drugs by young people is a problem with many causes. A lot of these causes are the downside we pay for our modern life -- boredom, fractured families, the lure of mass communications, the wonders of modern chemistry.

It's part of a system, and it's very very difficult to use the system against itself. Dedicated cultural revolutionaries have tried to hack the mass media, and the results have been spotty and inconclusive. You wanna fix it, change the system. If you can't do that, move. None of this is rocket science.

Look at it this way. If your government came up with a series of ads that said, in one way or another, "don't eat cookies," would that discourage you from eating cookies? I don't think so. Illegal drugs are already, well, illegal -- if the threat of jail time doesn't work as an inhibiting device, what chance does a TV ad have?

It's retrenching time in the War on Drugs.