How much misery can a policy cause before it is acknowledged as a failure and reversed? The US “war on drugs” suggests there is no upper limit

TO BE NOTED: From the FT:

"A criminally stupid war on drugs in the US

By Clive Crook

Published: April 12 2009 17:41 | Last updated: April 12 2009 17:41

How much misery can a policy cause before it is acknowledged as a failure and reversed? The US “war on drugs” suggests there is no upper limit. The country’s implacable blend of prohibition and punitive criminal justice is wrong-headed in every way: immoral in principle, since it prosecutes victimless crimes, and in practice a disaster of remarkable proportions. Yet for a US politician to suggest wholesale reform of this brainless regime is still seen as an act of reckless self-harm.

Even a casual observer can see that much of the damage done in the US by illegal drugs is a result of the fact that they are illegal, not the fact that they are drugs. Vastly more lives are blighted by the brutality of prohibition, and by the enormous criminal networks it has created, than by the substances themselves. This is true of cocaine and heroin as well as of soft drugs such as marijuana. But the assault on consumption of marijuana sets the standard for the policy’s stupidity.

Nearly half of all Americans say they have tried marijuana. That makes them criminals in the eyes of the law. Luckily, not all of them have been found out – but when one is grateful that most law-breakers go undetected, there is something wrong with the law.

Harvard’s Jeffrey Miron published a study denouncing drug prohibition in 2004*. He noted that more than 300,000 people were then in US prisons for violations of the law on drugs – more than the number incarcerated for all crimes in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. Today the number is higher – according to some estimates, nearly 500,000. The far larger number of people who have been convicted, at any point, of a drugs offence face permanently impaired employment prospects and all manner of other setbacks: in the US, once a criminal always a criminal.

Strict enforcement, Mr Miron explained, has reduced drug use only modestly – supposing for the moment that this is even a legitimate objective. The collateral damage is of a different order altogether. Violence related to drug crimes has surged in Mexico and in US cities close to the border, giving rise to renewed interest in the topic. Thousands are thought to have been killed by criminal gangs competing for the trade.

Many users also die because of tainted drugs, or because they share needles – consequences again of prohibition. There is an obvious national security dimension as well: in countries such as Colombia and Afghanistan, the huge surplus derived from prohibition supports terrorists.

The consequences of prohibition corrupt governments everywhere, and the US is no exception. Since a drug transaction has no victims in the ordinary sense, witnesses to assist a prosecution are in short supply. US drug-law enforcement tends to infringe civil liberties, relying on warrantless searches, entrapment, extorted testimony in the form of plea bargains, and so forth. Predictably, in the US the hammer of the law on drugs falls with far greater force on black people: whites do most of the using, blacks do most of the time.

Few policies manage to fail so comprehensively, and what makes it all the odder is that the US has seen it all before. Everybody understands that alcohol prohibition in the 1920s suffered from many of the same pathologies – albeit on a smaller scale – and was eventually abandoned.

The present treatment of alcohol, which is to regulate and tax the product, is the right approach for today’s illegal drugs. One could expect some increase in the use of the drugs in question, but also an enormous net reduction in the harms that they and the attempt to prohibit them cause. Adding the direct costs of prohibition (police and prisons) to the taxes forgone by the present system, the US could also expect a fiscal benefit of about $100bn (€75.7bn, £68.2bn) a year.

Is an outbreak of common sense on this subject likely? Unfortunately, no. Only the most daring politicians seem willing to think about it seriously. One such is James Webb, a refreshingly unpredictable Democratic senator for Virginia, who has called for a commission to examine the criminal justice system and the law on drugs. Politicians such as Mr Webb are very much the exception.

Elsewhere, signs of movement are minimal. Barack Obama has admitted that as a young man he used not only marijuana – and, unlike Bill Clinton, he inhaled; the whole point was to inhale, he joked – but also cocaine. This might suggest the president has an open mind on the subject. And in a departure from the previous administration, his attorney-general has said he will not bring federal prosecutions against the medical use of marijuana in states that allow it. But then at a recent event Mr Obama ran away from a question about the broader decriminalisation of marijuana under cover of a wisecrack.

For now, outright legalisation of marijuana, let alone harder drugs, is difficult to imagine. Even gradual decriminalisation – a policy that maintains prohibition but removes it from the scope of the criminal law – seems unlikely, though perhaps not unthinkable. A new study by Glenn Greenwald, a writer and civil rights lawyer, looks at Portugal’s policy of decriminalisation**. He judges it a success: “While drug addiction, usage, and associated pathologies continue to skyrocket in many European Union states, those problems – in virtually every relevant category – have been either contained or measurably improved within Portugal since 2001.”

Somebody in the White House should take a look. This national calamity is no laughing matter.

*Drug War Crimes, published by the Independent Institute. **Drug Decriminalization in Portugal, published by the Cato Institute

clive.crook@gmail.com"

Drug policy is being more openly debated than ever before in the U.S.

TO BE NOTED: From Salon:

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The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal

The new report on drug policy is available online now. Also: what will the Obama DOJ do today about still-secret torture memos?

Glenn Greenwald

Apr. 02, 2009 |

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

My report for the Cato Institute on the effects of full-scale drug decriminalization in Portugal -- the background for which I wrote about here -- is now available online. It can be read here, and the .pdf is here. I'll be at Cato tomorrow to present the report at noon, and the event can be watched live here. Drug policy is being more openly debated than ever before in the U.S. (Time 's Joe Klein just wrote a column advocating marijuana legalization), and the unambiguous success of Portugal's 2001 decriminalization -- which is what enabled the Portuguese Government to address their exploding drug problems in the 1990s and to achieve far better results than virtually every other Western country -- provides a compelling empirical basis for understanding the profound failures of the American approach.

I'm traveling today and it's unlikely I'll be able to write again, but today is the deadline for the Obama DOJ either to release 3 key, still-secret OLC torture memos or explain to the court why they refuse to do so. A report two weeks ago from Newsweek's Michael Isikoff (which quoted an anonymous Obama official as describing the memos as "ugly") claimed that Obama had disregarded the emphatic objections from ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden and others in the intelligence community and had decided to disclose the documents in full, but a New York Times article this week indicated that no decision has been made because of very adamant objections to disclosure from the likes of Obama counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan (whose pending appointment to be CIA Director, it's worth recalling, was opposed precisely because he was clearly an advocate for some of the worst CIA abuses of the Bush era).

I will have an interview with the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer, lead counsel in the ACLU's litigation to compel disclosure of these documents, as soon as the ACLU receives the response from the DOJ. As always, it's worth underscoring here that most of the work to compel disclosure of Bush-era secrets has been, and still is being, performed not by our establishment media or the Congress -- both of whose responsibility it is do so -- but by the ACLU and similar organizations using the power of FOIA requests and litigations to extract these secrets (it was the ACLU's lawsuit, for instance, which compelled the release of the 9 OLC memos last month which were so extreme and caused such furor).

Finally, as a reminder: I'll be on Bill Moyers' Journal tomorrow night, along with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, talking about the establishment and independent media. Local listings are here.

UPDATE: I just learned from the ACLU that the Obama DOJ has requested yet another extension of the deadline to disclose these documents, indicating -- at the very least -- that they are not yet committed to disclosure and nothing will happen today. It remains to be seen how long their extension will be, but given how many extensions they've already sought and obtained, it is likely it will be a very short one. These OLC memos are probably the most vivid and inflammatory of all the DOJ torture-authorizing documents, and there is clearly concern in the Obama administration that their release with only further inflame the demands for investigations and prosecutions. Needless to say, that is not a legitimate basis for withholding critical government documents, particularly ones that purported to authorize blatant war crimes.

UPDATE II: I'll be on C-SPAN's Washington Journal tomorrow morning (Friday) from 8:00-8:45 a.m. The program is also streamed live online here, and the program will be archived on C-SPAN's site shortly thereafter.

UPDATE III: My segment on Washington Journal this morning, which I think was actually more substantive than most televisions discussions (the questions from the host and call-in audience were almost uninformly quite good), can be viewed here."

"What we are seeing is an economic growth that is not having an impact on poverty,"

Checking in on Columbia. From the Washington Post:

"Rags in the Shadow of Riches
Prosperity of the Newly Glitzy Colombia Masks Rampant Misery Throughout Slums

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 23, 2009; A10

CARTAGENA, Colombia -- Inside Spanish ramparts built to repel pirate attacks lies a colonial gem -- the historic heart of this city on Colombia's northwestern coast, complete with $500-a-night hotel rooms, stylish restaurants and newly renovated apartments at Manhattan-like prices. To the government of President Álvaro Uribe, Cartagena symbolizes a new Colombia, vibrant and prosperous.

But outside the 400-year-old walls, away from the cobblestones and charm of the old city, is a swath of slums so miserable that public health officials compare conditions there to life in sub-Saharan Africa. Unlike those who live in and visit Cartagena' affluent heart, most of the residents of the ramshackle barrios are black. Drug trafficking is rife, children are malnourished and preventable diseases are common.

United Nations data show that Colombia remains one of the world's most unequal societies -- a root cause of the country's 45-year-old conflict. ( TRUE )

"The poverty is immense," said Adil Meléndez, a human rights lawyer and activist who works in Cartagena's poor neighborhoods. "And then there is a small pocket of very rich people who maintain a life of extreme opulence."

Yodiris Parra, 32, one of 55,000 people who arrived in Cartagena during the past decade after being displaced by war , says her life has changed very little in recent years.

Her home is a wood-plank shack in the teeming Villa Hermosa slum. There is no running water, and raw sewage flows in the streets outside. Though Parra's husband works in construction, ostensibly benefiting from a building boom, she said that the typical meal she serves her three children is soup filled out with a bone.

"Meat is too expensive," she said. "Sometimes we can get ground beef, maybe chicken, but not usually."

Although senior Colombian officials acknowledge the great gulf between classes here, they also cite government statistics showing that poverty and inequality have dipped in Colombia as the country, like most in Latin America in recent years, has prospered.

Poverty fell from 51.5 percent in 2002 to 44 percent in 2006, the last year for which figures are available. Homicides have fallen from nearly 29,000 in 2002, when Uribe took office, to 16,359 last year. The economy has grown by an average of 6 percent a year in the past seven years, and $40 billion in foreign investment has flowed in, making Colombia among the most important destinations for investment dollars in Latin America.

The Bush administration strongly supported Uribe for leading an offensive that disrupted a once-surging Marxist guerrilla movement here. Analysts say the Obama administration is expected to continue support for this strategic ally, which is important to the United States because of Uribe's commitment to its war on drugs( A DISASTER ). So far this decade, the United States has provided nearly $7 billion in mostly military and anti-drug aid( WHAT A WASTE ).

As Uribe lobbies Washington for a free trade agreement, held up so far because of Democratic concerns over human rights abuses( SERIOUS ONES ), he makes the case that his twin policies of fostering a healthy business climate and fighting armed groups have improved the lives of ordinary Colombians.( DOESN'T SOUND LIKE IT )

"In building confidence in Colombia, our work is focused on three pillars: security, investor confidence and social policies," Uribe said in a recent speech. "In these years, there is more security, and there has been more investment."

Here, inside Cartagena's ramparts and along an adjacent stretch of luxury seaside high-rises, it is easy to see signs of that investment and feel the optimism that has come with it.

Churches and houses that were falling apart have been renovated. Boutique hotels have replaced backpacker dives. The number of cruise ship passengers arriving in Cartagena has grown five-fold since 2003. And six times as many hotel rooms will be added this year as were added in 2008.

Spazio Urbano, a company that builds luxury apartments and remodels fading architectural jewels, is among the winners in the new Colombia. Its brochure declares, "The hour has come to invest in Colombia." And fortunately for Spazio Urbano, many are heeding the call, paying million-dollar sums for apartments in the old city.

Strolling through a 4,300-square-foot apartment, part of a former convent next to the residence of Colombia's Nobel laureate in literature, Gabriel García Márquez, a Spazio sales rep shows off the ocean views and sealed-coral floors that have attracted buyers from as far away as Paris and New York.

"The foreigners love Cartagena because the prices are good, it is a good time to invest, and also because we have a very safe city right now," Vicky Dunoyer said. "Our president is doing a good job, and that's helping us with the guerrillas and everything."

Featured in government-funded commercials broadcast internationally, Cartagena has attracted visitors such as Juan Lopez, a retired postal worker from California. After a tour of the city's Inquisition Museum, Lopez explained his fascination with Cartagena's rich history, which includes Francis Drake's failed invasion, cholera epidemics and pirate attacks. He was also surprised to see a vibrant modern side to Cartagena.

"From what I've seen, it's a beautiful city," he said. "When we docked, I thought I was in Chicago, with all the beautiful skyscrapers."

But to Jesús Mercado, who takes tourists on romantic carriage rides, the city that tourists see is far from being the real Cartagena. "They show the tourists and the foreigners the good face of Cartagena," he said. "But the dark side, the southeast side, they do not show that. They hide it."

Indeed, in this city of 1 million people, 600,000 are poor, and tens of thousands are destitute. The percentage of residents lacking basic necessities -- a yardstick used by demographers to measure poverty in Colombia -- is 26 percent( YIKES ), nearly three times the rate in Bogota, the capital.

Infant mortality due to diarrhea, though dropping, occurs at twice the rate of Colombia's biggest cities. Tuberculosis increased from 2005 to 2007. The number of people suffering from dengue has grown, health statistics show, and leprosy is not unknown.

Cartagena's mayor, Judith Pinedo, who took office in 2008 after years of corrupt governments( YES ), has broken sharply with her predecessors by acknowledging the scope of the problem. Her administration has embarked on a program designed to identify the poor, catalogue their needs and then channel the necessary aid.

"For a long time, we built two cities -- one the city we show off, the city that seduces the world, and the other a city closed off by lack of opportunities and poverty," Pinedo said in an interview last week. "The city is not viable if it continues to be a city with so many people who cannot live up to their potential."( I AGREE )

Pinedo said her administration plans to improve public education and public health care. She also spoke of the need to expand tourism, the city's port and its petro-chemical industry, all of which have been booming.

Still, the boom's effects have yet to trickle down to most people.( THIS IS NOT STABLE )

"What we are seeing is an economic growth that is not having an impact on poverty," said Lluís Casanovas, a Spanish doctor who studies disease and infection in poor communities here. "What I'm saying is we have a model of development that is not inclusive of the whole Cartagena population."( NOT GOOD )

That population includes people such as Miguel Ángel Urbina, 69.

The conflict uprooted his family eight years ago, and he has lived in the Villa Hermosa slum ever since. His days are spent finding odd jobs. In the evenings, he comes home to a hut on a crowded, fetid street.

"Life here is hard because there is no work," Urbina said. "This is how most of us here live( AND DIE )."

The money we give to Columbia is a waste.

A boy plays in Cartagena, Colombia, where the heart of the city is prosperous but the slums are rife with drug trafficking, malnourished

“The Bush administration has consistently turned a blind eye to Colombia’s serious human rights violations,”

From Human Rights Watch, we continue our pattern of looking the other way at human rights violations where it suits us, especially in the disaster called the Drug War:

"(Washington, DC, January 12, 2009) – US President George W. Bush’s decision to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia is a disturbing example of the Bush administration’s disregard for serious human rights concerns out of zeal to show unconditional support to governments that it views as strategic allies, seven leading nongovernmental organizations said today.( PATHETIC )

The organizations include Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International-USA, Center for International Policy, Human Rights First, Latin America Working Group, Refugees International, and the Washington Office on Latin America.

Bush is giving the award to Uribe at a ceremony in the White House on Tuesday, January 13, 2009.

“The Bush administration has consistently turned a blind eye to Colombia’s serious human rights violations,” said the organizations. “Its selection of Uribe to receive this award only further tarnishes the Bush administration’s own reputation on human rights issues in the region.”

The groups pointed out that President Uribe has repeatedly taken steps and carried out policies that are damaging to human rights in Colombia.

Under President Uribe’s watch, there has been a dramatic increase in reports of extrajudicial killings of civilians by the Colombian Army. And while Uribe’s government has strongly confronted the abusive left-wing guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Uribe has failed to take a similarly clear stance against equally abusive drug-running paramilitary groups, who have massacred, raped, and forcibly displaced thousands of Colombians in recent decades. Fundamental flaws in a paramilitary demobilization process under Uribe have permitted many of the groups to continue to engage in abuses under new names. The president's verbal attacks on his country’s human rights defenders have been frequent and disturbing. And Uribe has often opposed efforts to break paramilitaries’ influence in the political system, including by making unfounded accusations against the Supreme Court justices who are investigating more than 70 members of the Colombian Congress for links to paramilitaries."

What a disgrace.