More on the drug war exception to the constitution

26 attorneys general submitted a friend of the court brief to the US Supreme Court which basically argues that government convenience in fighting the war on drugs trumps the Bill of Rights. It's not reasonable for us to expect the government to follow the Rule of Law if it's too much trouble.

Tools

When I was a kid I knew a guy who was arrested for having a screwdriver in his back pocket. He was actually arrested for Failure to Display Proper Respect to an ego deprived cop but the reason given was Possession of Burglary Tools -- a screwdriver.

These days it would probably be a weapons charge, but back then it wasn't illegal to carry a knife.

Now we have courts referring to cell phones as "tools of the drug trade".

The agents reasonably concluded that Correa's cellular telephone, a "known tool of the drug trade," contained digital evidence about the conspiracy. United States v. Nixon, 918 F.2d 895, 900 (11th Cir. 1990).

It won't be long before your kids are being arrested for possession of drug dealing tools.

Dumb, violent cops

Watch the video.

TOCCOA - Surveillance video shows 28-year-old Jonathan Ayers entering a convenience store just minutes before he would be shot. Joe Joseph, who owns the Shell station on Currahee Street, says everything seemed normal when Ayers walked in around 2:30 Tuesday afternoon.
During the short time that Ayers was in the convenience store, he came straight to an ATM and then he left.

Joe Joseph says within the next two minutes, something very unusual happened. He heard gun shots. "I've never seen anything like that before. You know, I watch movies but this was totally different."

As you can see in the video, a black Escalade truck pulls up next to a pump and before it completely stops, a man jumps out. "I think I heard 3 shots."

The men in the Escalade were undercover drug agents. Joseph says he saw them shooting as Ayers, the young pastor, tried to back up and get away. "He pulled off and they followed." A short time later, Ayers wrecked his car.

"At that time (of the shooting), I had a parking lot full of people. I mean they could have blown up one of my pumps and that would have been a total mess."

There were, of course, no drugs in the car and the young dead man was not a target of any police investigation.

This country just has too many police and too little accountability for their behavior.

Update: Some more information and observation.

What are they talking about?

Is the DEA trying to make us think that Muslim terrorists are funding themselves by smuggling drugs into the US? What does this story mean?

Hezbollah is using the same southern narcotics routes that Mexican drug kingpins do to smuggle drugs and people into the United States, reaping money to finance its operations and threatening U.S. national security, current and former U.S. law enforcement, defense and counterterrorism officials say.

The Iran-backed Lebanese group has long been involved in narcotics and human trafficking in South America's tri-border region of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Increasingly, however, it is relying on Mexican narcotics syndicates that control access to transit routes into the U.S.

Hezbollah relies on "the same criminal weapons smugglers, document traffickers and transportation experts as the drug cartels," said Michael Braun, who just retired as assistant administrator and chief of operations at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

"They work together," said Mr. Braun. "They rely on the same shadow facilitators. One way or another, they are all connected.

I'm pretty sure it has no meaning at all "One way or another, they are all connected".

One way or antoehr, we're all connected to Kevin Bacon.

Read the whole thing, it's just nonsense written so that it soulnds like it says something.

h/t Classical Values

What's wrong with us?

Why do we lock so many people up?

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

Killing fields

We used Agent Orange to kill off foliage in Vietnam. It also created a generation of vets with diabetes and other major health problems.

Now we want to do the same thing to consumers of grapefruit from the Rio Grande Valley.

The U.S. Border Patrol plans to poison the plant life along a 1.1-mile stretch of the Rio Grande riverbank as soon as Wednesday to get rid of the hiding places used by smugglers, robbers and illegal immigrants.

The Drug Problem

The liberal approach to the drug problem is that "You have a problem with drugs and the government will help you fix it." They call this reducing demand.

The conservative approach to the drug problem is that "You have a problem with drugs and if you don't fix it the government will come down on your head". They call this going after supply.

The rational approach to the drug problem is that the only drug problem is that government thinks there's a drug problem. There is no actual drug problem.

Government supports a criminal market system which supplies drugs. If we allowed a free market system (or a regulated market might be better) they would be cheaper, safer, and the only problem would be finding productive employment for all thosw drug warriors who'd be freed up to do stuff like make cars.

Drug Warriors are fighting for job security

There's a proposition on the ballot in Michigan to allow for medical marijuana. And the federal drug warriors are afraid.

The US Dollar, price of cocaine, and price of oil

The DEA recently sent out a news release touting a recent rise in the price of cocaine and claiming that it demonstrates success of their interdiction efforts.

Among others, Mother Jones points out that the rise in the price of cocaine has more to do with the value of the dollar than to actual supply restrictions.

While true that there is less drug smuggling into the US recently, it's mostly because the value of the dollar has fallen while the value of the Euro has risen, making it much more profitable to smuggle into Europe.

So I guess if you're a drug warrior that's one of the good things resulting from the Iraq War -- it's caused a reduction in the local supply of cocaine.

Inscriptions and your government

I didn't know what a Leatherman Micra was. I had to look it up.

But, the DEA knows what it is and they want to give them to agents. With an inscription to ensure they don't forget how important a focus on civil forfeiture is to the security of our country. Because if our government isn't seizing your property then the terroists will have won.

Ziploc bags

As their contribution to the War on Drugs, the City of Chicago wants to ban Ziploc bags. The Chicago police thinks that would be a helpful tool in the Battle Against Grocery Stores part of the War on Drugs.

Isn't America just great? What other country is willing to make the hard choices to take the steps necessary to combat Evil Plastic Devices. It's for your own good.

An update on Ryan Frederick

The Agitator has an update of the guy in Virginia who's sitting in jail, the victim of really bad police work that had a tragic consequence.

Frederick was a garden hobbyist, who had converted part of his garage to a nursery. An informant told police (falsely) that Frederick had a marijuana grow operation in his garage. They didn't investigate past sending the informant in to burglarize Fredericks home for reasons which are unclear.

A few days after his home had been burglarized Frederick awoke to a home invasion. He fired at whoever was trying to break in his front door. One cop dead. One guy who'd been minding his own business until attacked in his home in jail on first degree murder charges.

The police version of the raid does not agree with Frederick's version. Neighbor's who witnessed the raid give a version which agrees with Frederick's version.

This is not a gang-ridden neighborhood. It's a working class neighborhood, the police chief lives a block away.


This is the kind of crap giving too much power to the government gets you.

Let's outlaw sage

Salvia is a form of sage that's native to a small, isolated region of Mexico. It's been imported to the US over the last 60 years or so.

Here in Oklahoma a few nutcases want the plant banned. Wiki has some non-FoxNews facts about the plant.

Ryan Frederick

Ryan Frederick lives in Hampton Roads, a beach town in southern Virginia. Right now he's in the Hampton Roads jailhouse, a victim of the drug war and a handfull of nutcase cops.

If you don't follow Radly Balko at The Agitator regularly then you should. He's made a niche for himself in following police SWAT raids gone bad. And there's plenty of them to keep him busy. Recently he's been following the Case of Ryan Frederick, a guy who shot a cop breaking into his home. A cop that had a warrent based on unreliable and false information part of a team of thugs who just battered the guys door down in the middle of the night.

A summary of what happened is that Frederick was a nursery hobbyist and had converted his house into a grow house for some oriental plants. Some of the plants seem to have leaves similar in shape to the pot leaves. His nursery equipment included some of the same heat lamps and hydrophonic equipment one might use for a marijuana growing operation. Somebody saw the nursery. Probably from the street. Frederick certianly wasn't keeping it secret.

The somebody who happened to see it was a police informant who just happened to need some kind of favor from the local drug cops. So he told them about this major mariuana growing operation. The cops even sent him to break into the house on a scouting mission a week before the raid. It's not clear what that was about.

Frederick knew his home had been burglaized. So when some clown broke down his front door in the middle of the night he rationally thought it was a burglarer and fired his personally owned, perfectly legal handgun. A cop ended up dead. Frederick ended up in jail, charged with murder. He's also charged with a misdemeanor pot possision charge, it turns out Frederick did have a small amount of persoanl use pot in his home. Whether it was his or planted by the cops informant isn't clear. The cops aren't talking, they're way to busy trying to circle the wagons and railroad.

The PC position is that this is a tradedy for all concerned, both Frederick and the dead cop and his family. But, I don't feel very PC about this sort of thing. It's Police State bullshit, the police have no business breaking into peoples homes in the middle of the night. There's no need for that kind of behavior at all. It does not enhance safety, it creats dangerious, violent situations for no reason other than to give a few thugs in uniform a thrill.

And that's why I don't feel sorry for the dead cop and his family. He was nothing more than a professional thug. A guy who made his living breaking into peoples homes and destroying people's lives. The kind of people who are willing to be SWAT team members in the kind of police departments we have in this country are the kind of people who should never be police officers, who should not be given any kind of governmental sanctioned authority.

I have pretty strong feelings about this sort of police behavior and it's really time for us to wake up and look at what's happening in our country. It's not a pretty picture. Immigration and Muslims aren't the problem. The problem is right here at home and we need to fix it.

Another reason to support anybody buy Hillary

I only realized this when I read a post from The Agitator, but Hillary is the only democratic candidate that didn't support the recent federal change in mandatory minimum sentences to make sentences for crack cocaine the same as those for powder cocaine (they had been much, much higher).

That pretty much makes her a drug warrior right in line with Bush/Cheney. We don't need more of that kind of crap. The drug war creates all kinds of problems for us and throughout the world. It's eroding our constitution, it's wrecked the economy of Mexico, which causes our immigration problems, it fills up our prisons to a point where we imprison more citizens than any other country in the world, and on and on.

We don't need Hillary Clinton.

Real military fighting the drug war

I guess that makes it a real war.

I was struck by this passage in a story about two sailors from the USS Fort McHenry found dead in Ghana

During a six-month mission, the Fort McHenry will train West African navies to fight drug smuggling and maritime security threats in a region which supplies nearly a fifth of U.S. oil imports.

We are fighting two different wars, one in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, we're preparing for a new one in Iran and it's starting to look like Pakistan might be opening up as a new front.

And we have so many military resources left over that we can use the US Navy to fight the drug war in some random African country?

What the hell is the matter with us?

Drug warrior

I can't think of anything more un-American than to support the drug war. And John McCain is not only a drug warrior, he's proud of it.

Illegal possession of a test tube

When I was a kid I had a chemistry set. Kids back then were encouraged to learn how to blow stuff up.

These days you need to be careful with those test tubes. We have laws.

Not laws that the government is expected to follow, but laws for you to follow.

The Drug War

Why does this mother need to be in prison?

More on John Lott and hyper-rationality

I recently made a short post about John Lott after watching a CSPAN presentation he made on his recent book, Freedonomics.

I had said he seemed to be assuming that humans are hyper-rational, and that's a scary mindset for someone who had been in a position to influence US Sentencing Commission policy.

Lott responded.

I definitely am not assuming that people are hyper rational in the way that you describe. All I say is that if something becomes more costly, people do less of it. If you get a greater return from doing something, you do more of it. I do not say how much they change their behavior, just that they do. If the price of apples go up, everything else equal, you buy fewer apples. If the cost of committing crime increases (higher arrest rates or conviction rates or longer prison terms), fewer crimes will be committed. What is hyper rational about that? What is "scary" about that? I am not saying that all criminals will change their behavior, but that on net there will be a reduction in the amount of crime.

Of course what he says here is true. But that doesn't mean it has relevance to actually making government policy choices. And that's where the scary part comes in, he uses his simplistic assumptions and arguments to make policy.

His apple example is an example of the dangers of his hyper-rationality. "Everything else being equal" is his argument. That pretty much negates the relevance to policy determination of anything he's saying. The world is not linear, just because something might be true if everything else is held constant does not mean it's going to be true when everything else isn't actually equal, and we know it's not going to be equal.

Let's think about drug policy as an example. Everything else being equal, if we raise the price of drugs to the recreational users then they'll use less. Right?

No, that's not true. It's not true because many of the policies we use to try to raise the price of drugs tend to raise the search costs. When you're buying an illegal substance the search cost of acquisition is a big deal. You have to actually find the product and that might take all day. Maybe even a couple of if your usually supplier just got arrested.

If the search cost component of a purchase is high then the buyer will tend to want to buy in bulk. If he knows he can easily find some tomorrow then he'll just buy what he wants for a day today. But if he doesn't know he'll want to buy in bulk and stockpile.

Him having a stockpile means two things. 1. He'll probably sell some to his friends. 2. He's more likely to engage in binge usage.

It's not clear one way or another whether increasing the cost of drugs by making them harder to get will actually decrease drug usage. It might. But if you follow the line of thought above it's also clear it might not. It will tend to increase binge usage however, which almost certainly tends to make the effects of drug usage worse.

This is just an example of how simplistic arguments based on simplistic economic models of hyper-rationality lead to bad policy.

I'd never read anything by Lott before. I knew he'd written some anti-gun law stuff, but I didn't really know much about him other than that. After seeing his CSPAN presentation and seeing his comment on my blog post I went to his site and read some of his op-ed stuff linked to from there.

He has an op-ed about murder rates in Philadelphia that illustrate further how simplistic economic thinking can lead to bad policy.

Philadelphia was experienced high homicides and low homicide clearance rates. The city was arguing that they needed strong gun control to reduce the homicides. I think that's just silly, and I agree with Lott when he says it's silly. But Lott's proposed solution to the perceived problem is just as bad. He thinks they need to hire more cops.

On the other side of the spectrum, House Speaker John Perzel (R., Phila.) wants more police, with the state picking up half the cost of any new hires.

So why are Philadelphia's crime rates increasing so dramatically? To put it bluntly, the city isn't doing a very good job at law enforcement. While the arrest rate for violent crimes such as murder has fallen across the state, arrest rates have plummeted in Philadelphia. Criminals are simply not being caught. The drop has been stunning. While 81 percent of murderers were arrested in 2000, just 61 percent were arrested in 2005. And the rate has continued falling this year.

Over the next four years, Perzel's police program, if enacted, could help fund as many as 1,345 officers in Philadelphia - a 20 percent increase from today. Up to 10,000 police could be hired statewide. Hiring more police is one proven way to reverse much of the recent decline in arrest rates, though one must be careful to ensure that the money isn't diverted by localities into other activities. Perzel also seems serious about avoiding many problems that plagued President Clinton's police program, where buying items such as computers were counted as hiring police or the money was spent planting trees or doing other non-police work.

The idea that increasing arrest rates for homocides will automatically reduce the homocide rate is something right out of the economic model of deterrence. The idea being that if you increase the probabilty of arrest you'll increase the expected cost of the crime and reduce the number of the crimes committed.

But there's actually a possibility it will have exactly the opposite effect. Why are these murders being committed? Are they over turf wars for illegal drug distribution?

If that's the case then more cops will tend to increase the immediate profits from owning drug turf. And criminals tend to have a high discount rate, putting more weight on the immediate benifet and not much wieght on the costs they might have to pay later.

If turf control becomes more valuable it may well increase the incentive for killing potential competitor drug dealers.

So, depending on what is driving the homocides, increasing clearnace rates might cause a decrease in homocides or it might not.

But it's very likely that stopping the drug war and having fewer cops will cause a decrease in Philidelphia homocides.

But of course Lott doesn't want to consider that. The model gets to complicated to fit into an op-ed.