This is a matter mentioned here from time to time and
I thought this might help explain it to some who have a problem
with the idea.
The police raided a mj farm in the steep terrain West of Saratoga,
California yesterday morning by the way and killed on armed
farmer and are in pursuit of 2 others, "armed and dangerous".
It would chill your blood to see the risks taken with helicopters in
the steep terrain as they pursue these men.
With the legalization of cannabis this farm and many like it would
not exist.
-------------------------
2. Feature: Vested Interests of Prohibition I: The Police
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/542/vested_interests_drug_prohibition_law_enforcement
Drug prohibition has been a fact of life in the United States
for roughly a century now. While it was ostensibly designed to
protect American citizens from the dangers of drug use, it now
has a momentum of its own, independent of that original goal, at
which it has failed spectacularly. As the prohibitionist
response to drug use and sales deepened over the decades, then
intensified even more with the bipartisan drug war of the Reagan
era, prohibition and its enforcement have created a
constellation of groups, industries, and professions that have
grown wealthy and powerful feeding at the drug war trough.
By virtue of their dependence on the continuation of drug
prohibition, such groups -- whether law enforcement, the
prison-industrial complex, the drug treatment industry, the drug
testing industry, the drug testing-evading industry, the legal
profession, among others -- can be fairly said to have a vested
interest in maintaining the status quo. While the fact that such
groups are, in one way or another, profiting from prohibition,
does necessarily negate the sincerity of their positions, it
does serve to call into question whether some among them
continue to adhere to drug prohibition because they really
believe in it, or merely because they gain from it.
In what will be an occasional series of re****ts on "The Vested
Interests of Prohibition," we will be examining just who
profits, how, by how much, and how much influence they have on
the political decision-making process. This week we begin with a
group so obvious it sometimes vanishes into the background, as
if it were just part of the way things are in this world. That
is the American law enforcement establishment.
That's right, the cops, the PO-lice. The Man makes a pretty
penny off the drug war. How much? In an op-ed in the Los Angeles
Times
(http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-fleming5-2008jul05,0,4580840.story)
earlier this month, long-time drug war critic Orange County
(California) Superior Court Judge James Gray put the figure at
$69 billion a year worldwide for the past 40 years, for a total
of $2.5 trillion spent on drug prohibition. In written
testimony
(http://jec.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.HearingsCalendar&ContentRecord_id=9d0729b4-eefe-2b3e-7931-fb353bebe2a8)
presented before a hearing of the Congressional Joint Economic
Committee last month, University of Maryland drug policy analyst
Peter Reuter, more conservatively put combined current state,
federal, and local drug policy spending at $40 billion a year,
with roughly 70-75% going for law enforcement.
In either case, it's a whole lot of taxpayer money. And for
what? Despite years of harsher and harsher drug law enforcement,
despite drug arrests per year approaching the two million mark,
despite imprisoning half a million Americans who didn't do
anything to anybody, despite all the billions of dollars spent
ostensibly to stop drug use, the US continues to be the world's
leading junkie. That point was hit home yet again earlier this
month when researchers examining World Health Organization data
found the US had the planet's highest cannabis use rates (more
than twice those of cannabis-friendly Holland) and the world's
highest cocaine use rates. (See related feature story at
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/542/US_leads_cannabis_cocaine_use_rates_who_study
this issue.)
By just about any measure, drug prohibition and drug law
enforcement have failed at their stated goal: reducing drug use
in America. Yet in general, American law enforcement has never
met a drug law reform it liked, and never met a harsh new law it
didn't. The current, almost hysterical, campaign around
restoring the Justice Action Grants (JAG or Byrne grant) program
cuts imposed by the Bush administration in a rare fit of fiscal
responsibility is a case in point.
The Byrne grant program, which primarily funds those
scandal-plagued multi-jurisdictional anti-drug law enforcement
task forces, has been criticized by everyone from the ACLU to
the GAO as wasteful, ineffective, and ridden with abuses, yet
the law enforcement community has mobilized a powerful lobbying
offensive to restore those funds. Now, after yet another year
where congressional Democrats, fearful of being seen as "soft on
crime," scurried to smooth law enforcement's ruffled feathers,
the Byrne grant program is set to receive $550 million next
year, a huge $350 million increase over this year's reduced --
but not zeroed out -- levels.
"The law enforcement lobby is enormously powerful," said Eric
Sterling, former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, who
now heads the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation
(http://www.cjpf.org).
"Law enforcement unions are extremely
im****tant in endorsements for state and local elections,
especially in primary elections."
When it comes to Wa****ngton, rank-and-file organizations like
the Fraternal Order of Police are joined by a whole slew of
national management organizations, such as the International
Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Sheriff's
Association, the National District Attorneys Association, and
the National Narcotics Officers Associations Coalition. On
occasion, as is the case with the campaign to restore the Byrne
grants, groups like the National Association of County Officials
(which includes sheriffs) lead the charge for law enforcement.
"All of these groups are very powerful, and members of Congress
are loath to be criticized by them or vote against them," said
Sterling.
"Without a doubt, the war on drugs creates a lot of jobs for law
enforcement and various aspects of the war on drugs create huge
profits for law enforcement," said Bill Piper, national affairs
director and Capitol Hill lobbyist for the Drug Policy Alliance
(http://www.drugpolicy.org).
"With those revenues, they can
employ more police and continue to expand their turf. The law
enforcement lobby is very strong and effective," said Piper. "No
one wants to deny them what they want. The Democrats are
terrified of them, and most Republicans, too. Everyone just
wants to go back to their district and say they're tough on
drugs. The law enforcement drug war lobby is a train that is
very, very difficult to stop."
Faced with those solemn line-ups of men in blue, American flags
fluttering behind them, most politicians would rather comply
with the demands of law enforcement than not, whether at the
state, local, or federal level. And that's fine with police, who
have become habituated to a steady infusion of drug war money.
"Law enforcement at all levels of government has become
dependent on the drug war, which in turn is predicated on drug
prohibition," said former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, who
joined the anti-prohibitionist group Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition (http://www.leap.cc)
shortly after his retirement.
"They are addicted to the revenue streams that have become
predictable and necessary for the day-to-day operations of
departments all across the country," he continued.
"State and local governments get anti-crime funding from the
federal government, and there are line-items dedicated to things
like those regional narcotics task forces," Stamper said. "It
wasn't a whole lot of money at first, but over the years we are
now talking billions of dollars."
It isn't just departments that benefit from prosecuting the drug
war, individual police officers can and do, too. "Both police
departments and individual officers have a strong vested
interest in maintaining prohibition," said Sterling as he
related the story of his ride-along with Montgomery County,
Maryland, police a few years ago. After cruising suburban malls
and byways for a few hours one cold December night, Sterling and
the officer he accompanied got a call that an officer needed
back-up.
The officer needing back-up was accompanied by Sterling's then
assistant, Tyler Smith, who, when Sterling's car arrived, told
him that his (Smith's) cop had pulled over nine cars and
convinced four of their drivers to consent to drug searches. In
the present case, the officer had scored. The three young men in
the car he had pulled over consented to a search, and he found a
pipe in the car and a few specks of marijuana in one young man's
pocket. By now four different police cars were on the scene.
"Now, all four officers are witnesses," Sterling noted. "That
means every time there's a court proceeding, they go down to the
courthouse and collect three hours overtime pay. They're almost
always immediately excused, but they still get the pay. That's
four cops getting paid for one cop's bust, so they have an
enormous personal stake in backing up the one gung-ho cop who's
out there trolling for busts. Collars for dollars is what they
call it," Sterling related.
"I think we need to take into account the fact that individual
officers at all levels are character challenged and profit
personally from prohibition," said Stamper.
"It's also generally easy police work," Sterling noted. "You
start in a position of strength and assertion, you're not
arriving at a scene of conflict, you're not stopping a robbery
or responding to a gun call; it's a relatively safe form of
police activity. You get to notch an arrest, and that makes it
look like you're being productive."
And despite repeated police protestations to the contrary,
enforcing the drug laws is just not that dangerous. Every year,
the National Police Officers Memorial puts out a list of the
officers who died in the line of duty. Every year, out of the
one or two or three hundred killed, barely a handful died
enforcing the drug laws
(http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/468/more_police_died_directing_traffic_than_fighting_the_drug_war).
And those dead officers are all too often used by their peers as
poster-children for increased drug law enforcement.
But if law enforcement profits handsomely with taxpayer dollars
at the state or federal level as it pursues the chimera of drug
war success, it has another im****tant prohibition-related
revenue stream to tap into: asset forfeitures. Every Monday, the
Wall Street Journal publishes official DEA legal notices of
seizures as required by law. On the Monday of June 30, the legal
notice consisted of 3 1/4 pages of tiny four-point type
representing hundreds of seizures for that week alone.
According to the US Justice Department, federal law enforcement
agencies alone seized $1.6 billion -- mainly in cash -- last
year alone. That's up three-fold from the $567 million seized
in 2003. But that figure doesn't include hundreds of millions of
dollars more the feds got as their share of seizures by states,
nor does it include the unknown hundreds of millions of dollars
more seized by state and local agencies and handled under state
asset forfeiture laws. Last year, Texas agencies alone seized
more than $125 million.
"Revenue from forfeited assets represents a particularly
unconscionable source of funds, particularly when police
agencies set out to make busts to create additional funding for
themselves," Stamper said. "Even if the money is going to
agencies and not into the pockets of individual cops, you still
develop that mentality that we're enforcing the law in order to
make money. That's not how it's supposed to be," he said.
"Unfortunately, there are many departments that see this as a
useful way to deter drug use, even though there is no evidence
to sup****t that," said Sterling. "Still, they can justify taking
private property as serving an im****tant law enforcement
purpose, but there are many accounts of departments that are
almost entirely self-funded by the proceeds," he said.
"If Byrne is cut back or zeroed out, and the police agency is
fortunate enough to have an interstate highway to patrol, they
are in a position to target vehicles and go fi****ng for
dollars," he noted.
"These revenue streams, whether it's Byrne grants or seized
cash, create dependency in the departments that rely on them,"
said Stamper, "and that makes it less and less likely that the
police in your community are going to be critical and analytical
in questioning their ways of doing business. Does prohibition
work, does it produce positive results? The answer is no and no.
We have a situation where we are actually doing harm in the name
of law enforcement, and it's deep harm, this notion that
prohibition is workable. Drug law enforcement is funded at
obscene levels, and this is money that could be used for things
that do work, like drug abuse prevention and treatment," the
ex-chief continued. "It's safe to say that American law
enforcement has developed an addiction to the monies it gets
from drug prohibition."
================
later
bliss -- C O C O A Powered... (at california dot com)
--
bobbie sellers - a retired nurse in San Francisco
"It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of cocoa that the thoughts acquire speed,
the thighs acquire girth, the girth become a warning.
It is by theobromine alone I set my mind in motion."
--from Someone else's Dune spoof ripped to my taste.
Ningen banji Human beings do
Samazama no Every single kind
Baka a suru Of stupid thing
--- 117th edition of Haifu Yanagidaru published in 1832
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