Category Archives: Drug War

Police lie! Oh my god! Who would have thought?

The New York Times has an interesting opinion piece about cops who lie in order to bolster arrest and conviction rates.  The article quotes Peter Keane, a former San Francisco Police commissioner:

“Police officer perjury in court to justify illegal dope searches is commonplace. One of the dirty little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system is undercover narcotics officers intentionally lying under oath. It is a perversion of the American justice system that strikes directly at the rule of law. Yet it is the routine way of doing business in courtrooms everywhere in America.”

The article points out that even the NYPD (you know, that icon of truth and justice) isn’t exempt from this kind of behavior:

Remarkably, New York City officers have been found to engage in patterns of deceit in cases involving charges as minor as trespass. In September it was reported that the Bronx district attorney’s office was so alarmed by police lying that it decided to stop prosecuting people who were stopped and arrested for trespassing at public housing projects, unless prosecutors first interviewed the arresting officer to ensure the arrest was actually warranted.

So, why do they do it?

Police departments have been rewarded in recent years for the sheer numbers of stops, searches and arrests. In the war on drugs, federal grant programs like the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program have encouraged state and local law enforcement agencies to boost drug arrests in order to compete for millions of dollars in funding.

Radley Balko has repeatedly warned about the bizarre incentives created by such programs.   Incentivizing any activity generates more of it and there is no incentive not to lie because cops are rarely held to account by their superiors, prosecutors, and certainly not by the public service unions that protect them from any repercussions from their abuses of power and lack of professional ethics.

But, it’s not just because of the drug war incentives.

Even where no clear financial incentives exist, the “get tough” movement has warped police culture to such a degree that police chiefs and individual officers feel pressured to meet stop-and-frisk or arrest quotas in order to prove their “productivity.”

The general claim of “tough on crime” is what defines almost any elected position in the criminal justice system.  Advancement is yet another incentive for high arrest and prosecution numbers, which explains why prosecutors aren’t too eager to know when cops are lying on the stand.  It’s all about quantity, not quality.

Exposing police lying is difficult largely because it is rare for the police to admit their own lies or to acknowledge the lies of other officers. This reluctance derives partly from the code of silence that governs police practice and from the ways in which the system of mass incarceration is structured to reward dishonesty.

Code of silence?  Really?  I’m stunned!  Another possible reason might be that the public mostly just doesn’t give a shit.  Most people, regardless of educational level, think that people who get arrested are almost certainly guilty.  Why else would they have been arrested?  It’s like our military operations where anyone we kill must, by definition, be an enemy (otherwise we wouldn’t have killed him).  And anyone who watches cop shows on TV knows that cops are hopelessly burdened with rules that make it almost impossible to get a conviction unless they “bend” the rules.

Luckily for most of us, this kind of behavior most often targets those who are poor and largely defenseless.  And minorities.  Well, they’re minorities until they get to prison anyway.

DEA wants warrantless access to prescription records

From The Agitator’s Morning Links:

The ACLU is challenging a claim by the DEA that it can access confidential prescription drug records in Oregon without a warrant.  Basically, the DEA wants access to information already collected under Oregon state law.

In 2009, the Oregon legislature created the Oregon Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP), which tracks prescriptions for certain drugs dispensed by Oregon pharmacies, including all of the medications listed above. The program was intended to help physicians prevent drug overdoses by their patients and more easily recognize signs of drug abuse.

Yeah, right.  The government is always watching out for “the folks” (a term coined by right wing statist icon Bill Reilly).

The State of Oregon sued the DEA in federal court to defend its right to require law enforcement, including federal agencies, to obtain the warrants required by state law.

Interesting that the Oregon government argues that the DEA should get a warrant to access personal information that the state collects without a warrant.

Today, the ACLU filed a motion to intervenein the case on behalf of several patients and a doctor whose prescription records are contained in the PDMP. Our clients are concerned that the privacy of their medical information will be violated if the DEA is allowed to search through prescription records without a warrant..

Sorry, ACLU, but that ship has already sailed.  The privacy of their medical information was violated a long long time ago with programs like Medicare and the Drug War.  Where were you then?

And for all you gun rights advocates, it’s probably inevitable that prescription drug information mining will eventually be used to identify people who have been treated with psychiatric medications as means to block them from buying a gun.   According to Yahoo, even the NRA suggests people under mental health treatment are fair game for more gun restrictions:

[NRA President David] Keene said officials should focus more attention on a “devastatingly broken mental health system in this country,” if they genuinely want to end gun violence.

Cigarettes by prescrition only

Portland, Oregon, State Rep. Mitch Greenlick sponsored a bill that would make cigarettes a Schedule III drug and thus illegal to possess or distribute without a prescription under penalty of a $6000 fine or a year in prison.  This is, of course, just another attack on smokers by some political parasite who wants to get his name in the headlines.  Smokers are like strippers, prostitutes, and gamblers in the sense that no one is likely to come to their defense if they are attacked by self-serving public figures in the government and news media.  If you recall, that used to be the case with gays and blacks as well.

I first heard this story on a local news broadcast.  One of the WHNT-TV morning news anchors quickly chimed in that she thought the law sounded like a good idea.  Because, you know, there ain’t no such thing as too many ways to throw people you don’t like in prison.  This is true, folks.  No one is more willing to piss away your liberty and dictate how you should live than folks in your own community.  WHNT is an ardent supporter of the failed drug war, encouraging people to become  anonymous informants through a program called See Meth, Stop Meth.  It is this kind of dedication to locking people up that has placed “The Land of the Free” in the top spot worldwide when it comes to imprisoning its citizens.  Keep up the good work, WHNT!

Balko’s Morning Links

Check out Radley Balko’s Morning Links.  Highlights include:

  • How the American war on drugs is “one of the most catastrophic foreign policy mistakes in American history”.   I agree.  Whatever it started as, the drug war is now nothing more than a jobs program for testosterone-flooded neanderthals and it’s only accomplishment is bringing misery and destruction to people who engage in an activity that should never have been illegal in the first place.  The fact that it has now enveloped the entire Western Hemisphere in an unstoppable and ever escalating cycle of corruption and violence fits well with a foreign policy whose main goal seems to be pissing the rest of the world off.
  • Mother Jones inadvertently makes the case that banning assault weapons would probably have zero effect in reducing mass shootings.  Not that reasoning or  effectiveness actually play much of a role in any conflict between team left and team right.
  • The DEA (those folks who, as a condition for employment, are required to swear an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution) thinks it can come onto your property and set up surveillance cameras to record your activities in order to catch you in a crime, all without a warrant, of course.  Folks, this goes right to that stunningly ignorant belief (and you hear this a lot from libertarians) that it’s the government’s job to protect the rights of citizens.  It is not.  The government is, in fact, the biggest threat to citizens’ rights.  Government serves government.  Only the public, in large enough numbers, can protect citizens from abuses of power by the government.  And, I might point out that the public is notoriously incompetent in this mission.

NY Mayor Bloomberg wants to tell your doctor how to treat you

From The Agitator:

Under the new city policy, most public hospital patients will no longer be able to get more than three days’ worth of narcotic painkillers like Vicodin and Percocet. Long-acting painkillers, including OxyContin, a familiar remedy for chronic backache and arthritis, as well as Fentanyl patches and methadone, will not be dispensed at all.

The Federal government has been dictating treatment policies with regard to painkillers for years, so the fact that America’s most self-serving authoritarian mayor wants to get in on the act is not exactly a stunning surprise. What’s really funny is when you hear people declaring that Obama care won’t come between you and your doctor.

Like almost all government regulation, the people most affected and the people who pay the biggest price as a result of it, are ordinary citizens.  If you don’t have a lobbyist in Washington, you don’t matter.

This, like most drug war policy, is sold as being preventative. The real truth is that it punishes people who haven’t done anything wrong because they might do something wrong in the future. If you’ve ever seen the movie, Minority Report, you’re already familiar with the concept of arresting someone for precrime. Of course, in the movie, they only came after you if the precogs identified you personally as planning a crime. In “the land of the free”, the government dispenses with that step and arrests you simply for being in a position to commit a crime. Drug use is outlawed, because you might do something irresponsible if you use drugs. The exact same logic is used to outlaw or restrict gun ownership. Oddly (or not), conservative advocates of the drug war never see that the very same argument they use to outlaw drugs can easily be used against gun ownership.

It’s ok when our guy does it

One of the most striking aspects of the Obama administration is how uncritical democrats have become with regard to those reviled Bush administration policies that Obama, so outspoken against as a candidate in 2008, has carried forward.

Of course, it doesn’t end there and it’s not limited to party po0litics.  The entire American culture now seems quite acquiescent about a foreign policy consisting of active military aggression, torture, violations of sovereignty, and sanctions on a scale that would easily be considered acts of war if perpetrated against the U.S.   These very same policies, if carried out by any non-allied foreign power would be considered an outrage.  But, when our guy does it, it’s ok.

Quoting from reason.com:

According to the report, prepared by New York University’s Global Justice Clinic and Stanford University’s International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, American drone strikes have directly killed nearly 900 noncombatants, including 176 children, and injured more than 1,200 since June 2004.

Something to think about next time terrorists kill a bunch of “innocent” Americans.  It’s also worth considering how much devastation the drug war brings to places like Mexico and South America.  Hopefully, those people will never become so angry that they will retaliate on U.S. soil, because they aren’t half way around the world.  They are right across the border.