Thanks to Liz for sending me this excellent article from the writers of “The Wire” about the War On (Some Classes Of People Who Use) Drugs. I’m going to write a piece on the show’s themes for Monday morning, after the last episode airs. In the meantime, I want to fall over myself gushing the writers with praise for being brave enough to talk about what citizens who know the War On Drugs is bullshit can do to resist it. No, not use drugs. But avail yourself of a right that few people are aware they have.

But this is what we can do — and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren’t fictional.

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We wrapped up watching “The Wire” season 3 last night and am happy to see that the fourth season is out on DVD, so we’ll be able to watch all that before it starts the fifth and final season on HBO. (Watching shows in real time? I’ll be doing that for both “Battlestar Galactica” and “The Wire”, which will be a novel sensation for me. Shows on DVD has spoiled me; if you’re left on a cliffhanger, you can always watch the next episode.) The theme of the third season was reform, and of course the impossibility of it; more than the prior two seasons, this season really made the case that institutions have a life and logic of their own that railroads the people functioning inside them.

From early on, it was clear that the stories of Major Colvin and Stringer Bell were going to parallel and echo each other. Both men, for very different reasons, were dissatisfied with the way The Game was being played and sought to change the rules in their little corners of the world in ways that would reduce the violent crime rate (and for Bell, increase profits). It was obvious from the beginning that both men were going to fail wildly, and it’s a testament to the show’s writing that the predictability of that particular ending didn’t in any way detract from the suspense of the show. And the payoff was worth it; the writers didn’t have Colvin or Bell fail in the predictable way. I figured Bell would eventually cross Barksdale to the point where a hit was taken on him and the Colvin, when he was discovered, would come across so much internal bullheadedness that he didn’t even get a fair hearing.

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Via Bean and Brad Plumer, this article in the Rolling Stone about the War On (Some Classes Of People Who Use) Drugs promises to be fascinating. Brad highlights the roll of local police and city officials in reimagining the drug wars in a way that address the problems that can be controlled—street violence, violence in general, open air markets that breed violence—vs. the problems that can’t be controlled by the police, namely the demand for drugs.* The article describes one strategy undertaken by police in a city in North Carolina.

High Point police began in the West End neighborhood, one of the city’s three overt drug markets. A team of officers staked out the site, videotaping hundreds of hand-to-hand sales and mapping out a complete anthropology of the West End drug market. They found it was strikingly small: Sumner had expected as many as fifty dealers working there, but it turned out there were only sixteen. Before long, the officers had enough evidence to put away each of the sixteen dealers for good. But they didn’t. Instead, Sumner and Kennedy called them in for a meeting. They showed each of them the portfolio of evidence against them and said that unless they stopped dealing drugs, the whole file would be handed over to the prosecutors and they’d be in jail for years. Family members were brought in to urge the dealers to stop, and social-service providers pledged assistance with food, housing and job training.

“We didn’t think it would work,” Sumner tells me, “but the drug markets have disappeared.” …

In 2007, in the program’s fourth year, [the number of drug-related murders] has plummeted to two. Violent crime in the West End has declined by thirty-five percent. “The use of drugs isn’t something we could affect,” says Kennedy. “But the violence was.” His logic has an appealing clarity for overworked police departments: There are now more than sixty cities in the United States that use some version of Kennedy’s program, edging away from thirty-five years of punitive measures that have turned the United States into the world’s leading jailer to a social-work model that encourages communities and cops to engage the problem on a more human level.

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Portly Dyke has an interesting post up about the reluctance of white people to talk about racism, a subject that Pam’s written about before a few times here, and in it she had a quote that turned me into That Guy, the one who offers nitpicking criticisms.

*Now, just to be perfectly clear about that whole “whitey/honky” thing? When I’m talking about Racism, I’m talking about the cultural oppression of racial minorities by racial majorities. If you’re white and American, you are part of a 75% racial majority, and regardless of what anyone has told you, Racism is not an Equal Opportunity Oppressor.

She’s referencing white people who make like they’re victims of racism if anyone calls them “honky”, which is a claim that makes me scoff when I hear it. (The “but someone called me honky!” claim, not her claim that some white people hide behind it.) That word has fallen so far out of the general usage that it was a joke in the 1970s, and is now like the term “politically correct”, used exponentially more by conservatives erecting a strawman than anyone else.

Anyway, I agree with her that racism is not an equal opportunity offender, and that’s why the word “racism”, like “sexism”, sometimes makes me uneasy; the older terms “white supremacy” and “patriarchy” are useful for a reason, since they indicate the systematic nature of the problem and who the top dog is. It gets it out of the realm of sniffing around for hate in hearts (which can come back on prejudiced racial minorities, creating a chaotic distraction from the real problems), and it also creates that situation where white people can talk about racism, as Portly desires. One of the pitfalls for progressive whites talking about racism is the tension between the hate not in our hearts and the privilege we nonetheless hold.

My nitpick—which I shared in comments, and to which Portly immediate agreed—was that the majority/minority model also needs to be abandoned since it ignores the prevalence of apartheid systems like that used to be the law in South Africa, where a minority race rules over a majority race. Or, in a lesser degree apartheid, a minority race is still privileged over a majority race, which is unfortunately still the case in South Africa despite the formal end of apartheid, because of economic compromises the ANC made with the white government that was on its way out that protected the white financial control over the nation.

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I overslept a little and got caught up in playing catch-up, so I don’t have time for a long post before my spot in the schedule comes due. That said, I did want to share this survey I saw at The Sideshow that attacks the racist myth that white people use less hard drugs than people of color. They use more.

Non-Hispanic whites had a higher percentage of ever using cocaine or street drugs (23.5 percent) than blacks (18 percent) or Mexican-Americans (16 percent).

Yet people of color are thrown in jail more for it. Not that I want to up the number of people thrown in jail for using drugs to make parity, but this survey points to an important issue to remember, which is the War on Drugs is used as a tool to reinforce racial disparities. Since enforcement is going to be patchy anyway, it’s easy for the cops to get away with focusing more on non-white people without raising eyebrows. A little racist media that reinforces the notion that black people use more drugs than white people, and next thing you know, the practice of searching black people who you pull over but not white people becomes a national joke, but people don’t stop to question the false premise behind such profiling.

What’s interesting about this survey, conducted by the CDC, is that they’ve used new methods to try to get more honest answers about sex and drug use from people. That said, I’m skeptical that they got good answers anyway; god knows that I wouldn’t trust any government official asking questions about the number of sex partners I’ve had in this political environment. But they did get people to cop to more sex partners than they usually would:

A new nationwide survey, using high-tech methods to solicit candid answers on sexual activity and illegal drug use, finds that 29 percent of American men report having 15 or more female sexual partners in a lifetime, while only 9 percent of women report having sex with 15 or more men.

The median number of lifetime female sexual partners for men was seven; the median number of male partners for women was four.

I’m still somewhat skeptical about the huge gaps between men and women that show up on these surveys. On one hand, it’s believable that the social stigma on female sexuality restrains women’s behavior more, but there’s good reason to believe it also restrains their honesty on the matter. I know of one survey that found that when women and men thought they were strapped to a lie detector, the number of admitted partners for men went down and for women it went up, and up more than men’s went down.

Actually, now that I think about it, that issue could explain the gap between white people and others on drug use—white people might be more willing to cop to it, because they’re less afraid of the cops showing up tomorrow to arrest them for the “anonymous” survey answers.

Not a crime.

At the NAPW conference, Jessica and I had a discussion about how completely awesome the whole thing was, but how overwhelming it was to try to get out all the interesting things we learned over the course of the weekend into blog posts. And so Jessica has the bright idea of having some of the panelists at NAPW write blog posts on their presentations.

Before I link it, though, a quick introduction. While looking over the roster of panels to sit in, I pointed to one called “How Might You Be Prosecuted”, which looked to be an interesting panel on how legislators and prosecuters are seeking ways to chip away at pregnant women’s rights by inventing special crimes that only pregnant women can commit. I expressed to Jessica that I knew the panel would be interesting, but I feared it would be depressing, because there was no doubt the lion’s share of the information would be on the prosecutions of women who use while pregnant and are tried after giving birth to stillborns or babies who die shortly after birth. I fully believe that the War on Drugs continues despite a great deal of public sentiment against it because it gives legislators an opportunity to chip away at basic civil rights, and therefore I totally buy the argument that prosecutions of pregnant women for using is an extension of this, and an attempt to use extreme cases to chip away at a pregnant woman’s right to full citizenship. That said, it’s hard to muster sympathy for women who give birth to babies with drugs in their system.

Or it was before the panel. Jessica convinced me that the very marginality of the people involved in these cases meant that it was something we probably both needed to be more educated about, so we went. It ended up being the best panel I saw at the NAPW Summit, and I choked back tears a number of times. Particularly moving was Tayshea Aiwohi’s testimony about being arrested months after her baby boy died shortly after he was born—she had used meth during her pregnancy, but had cleaned up shortly thereafter. There’s no proof that her meth use was the cause of her son’s death, thought it’s likely that it was a factor. Tayshea explained her story of being in and out of rehab clinics before finally cleaning up and starting up a series of houses for mothers with drug problems and their children. She was well down the road in her career as a counselor in a rehab clinic when she was arrested for distributing drugs to her son….through the umbilical cord. To make a long story short, the entire fiasco was an exercise in drug war insanity—prosecuting a sober woman who was trying to help others for a crime that isn’t really a crime. Luckily, Tayshea plead guilty to lesser charges and managed to avoid jail.

The whole panel was great, but I was also deeply impressed by the presentations of the lawyers, who give legal assistance to women fighting off these made-up crimes, not just the non-crime of giving birth to a baby that tests positive for drugs but also non-crimes like refusing a C-section. And Feministing’s first NAPW presenter guest post is by one of those lawyers named Jill Morrison, who is Senior Counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. I highly recommend reading her post. Jill’s presentation was very illuminating for me because I’m an intellectualized sort and appreciate having the argument laid out for me in analytical terms so I can see why it’s so wrong to arrest women for giving birth to dead or crippled babies, no matter how sure you are that the woman did something wrong to cause the problem.

In sum, it’s a really bad idea to criminalize pregnancies based on outcomes. No pregnant woman is absolutely perfect and all can probably have something dug up on them that they did during pregnancy—or before it—that could be used to blame her if she has a stillbirth or gives birth to a disabled child. But Jill explains it better, so go read her post.

From Roxanne, I saw this story about the 10th anniversary of the “Dark Alliance” series that ran in the San Jose Mercury News. Reporter Gary Webb, in a three part story, established the reality of a link between the CIA and crack dealers in South Los Angeles in 80s. According to Nick Schou, the temper tantrum that the mainstream media threw after having this reporter for a tiny newspaper break one of the biggest stories of the decade was ugly. They tried every trick in the book to undermine Webb’s story and undermine the outcry that followed it, even resorting to lies and racist accusations in order to discredit the story.

All three major U.S. dailies, The Times included, debunked a claim that Webb actually never made — that the CIA deliberately unleashed the crack epidemic on black America. The controversy over this non-assertion obscured Webb’s substantive points about the CIA knowingly doing business south of the border with Nicaraguans involved in the drug trade up north.

The Washington Post titled one of its stories “Conspiracy Theories Can Often Ring True; History Feeds Blacks’ Mistrust.” The New York Times chipped in with a scathing critique of Webb’s entire career, suggesting that he was a reckless reporter prone to getting his facts wrong.

“That article included virtually none of the good things Gary did,” said Webb’s former Cleveland Plain Dealer colleague, Walt Bogdanich, now a New York Times editor. “It didn’t include the success he achieved or the wrongs he righted — and they were considerable. It wasn’t fair, and it made him out to be a freak.”

Some of the accusations flung at Webb were true, including the likelihood that he exaggerated the influence of CIA on the sale of crack in Los Angeles. But the fundamental truth of the story was not discredited, and especially infuriating is the way that the story was discredited in the bigger newspapers by running racist stories implying that black people are especially paranoid and therefore as a group cannot be trusted.

Nowadays, the first thing that comes to mind is “right wing bloggers” when I think about people who refuse to see the forest because they’re so busy running around pretending they’re discrediting trees. (For more on this subject, please read new superhero Fixateur D. Perspective explain to a bunch of schoolchildren that darkened smoke in a picture does not un-bomb Beirut and the word “later” does not make Iraqi civilians less murdered, amongst other things.) But the mainstream media can pull this stunt, too, albeit for a different reason. With the wingnuts, it’s an attempt to discredit anyone and everyone that makes Dear Leader look less than perfect. With the media, in this case at least, it’s trying to shut down anyone that makes them look bad.

When Roxanne sent this to me, she said that this whole situation was what made her really lose her trust in the major media. I can definitely say the way the media sat on and ignored the CIA/Contra tie to the crack epidemic was a biggie with me, as well. So the question of the day is: What made the scales fall from your eyes? When did you start to lose your trust in the mainstream media?

I have to come out of the closet — I’ve never tried an illegal drug, never smoked a cigarette, never finished a beer (blech). That may make me a social anomaly of some sort, but all that said, I really don’t understand the useless War on Weed^TM.

My co-blogger over at the Blend is “Radical” Russ Belville, an advocate for the reform of marijuana laws and the use of medical marijuana, and he’s got a story that illustrates the kind of waste of time, energy and resources our government and society puts into the War on Weed^TM, and its impact on otherwise law-abiding, responsible citizens.

I’m cross-posting an entry of Russ’s here that he loaded up on the Blend a bit ago, and it’s a doozy, certainly comment-worthy.
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This ad is proof positive that BushCo is nostalglic for the 30s and trying to bring back that era. (Via Salon, which has a great article on it.) I can’t wait until they start running ads implying that marijuana will turn your beautiful daughter into a prostitute. Now, pot is not my poison of choice, but I’ll be the first to say that it’s silly to think that it will make you crazy. While it seems likely to me that pot use and depression might be correlated, it’s alarmist to think that pot really causes depression.

With regard to depression, evidence of a causal role for marijuana is even murkier. In general, depression rates in the population did rise sharply during the time period in which marijuana use also skyrocketed. But there were so many other relevant sociological factors that marked the last half of the 20th century — rising divorce rates, the changing roles of women, economic shifts, and better diagnoses of psychiatric conditions, to name a few — that scientists have rarely focused on marijuana as a potential cause for the increase in depression.

Murray maintains that scientists have simply overlooked marijuana in their search for explanations. One study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2002, by New York University psychiatry professor Judith Brook and several colleagues, found that early marijuana use increased the risk of major depression by 19 percent. But that’s not a substantial amount, according to Brook. And though the association remained after other factors were controlled for, such as living in poverty, it weakened further. “I wouldn’t say that it’s causal,” Brook says. “It’s an association. It appears to contribute.”

I’m actually surprised that pot use and depression aren’t more correlated. Depressed people use drugs to self-medicate and pot is easily available for that purpose.

More than anything, I find it maddening that BushCo is using the current understanding of depression as a chemical phenemenon as a tool–people are very open at this point in time to believing that injesting this drug or that food or whatever is a more likely cause of depression than life circumstances in general. In a small way, that’s sort of good, because it’s good that people are beginning to understand the mental illness has a physical, chemical component to it and isn’t something that people can just snap out of. But I’m concerned and have been for a long time that the understanding of mental illness is beginning to err on the side of the physical and people are neglecting to realize that depression is often a perfectly logical response to having a shitty life. Going bankrupt, getting a divorce, having a death in the family, losing your way in life–all these things cause depression in people who wouldn’t otherwise be depressed, and by letting that basic fact fall by the wayside, a lot of depressed people are not making changes in their lives that will actually help their depression.

Mark Kleiman tackles John Tierney’s piece on crystal meth today. Kleiman makes a point that Tierney grossly overlooks - drug problems aren’t just about the drug, but the form it takes. Cocaine wasn’t (and isn’t) as much of a problem as crack, because it’s not as addictive and not as dangerous. That doesn’t mean that both aren’t, but crystal meth as compared to regular, medically safe amphetamines isn’t even a real comparison.

Kleiman says all of this, but it bears repeating - drug legalization should not equal drug ignorance. Reefer Madness could have actually been a film about crystal meth…and it wouldn’t have been too far from the truth.

Just legalize marijuana already, Jesus.

It’s also called “stupid”. One could argue that such experiences will happen whether or not we legalize other, more controllable drugs, but I’d have to contend that they’d not only be far less widespread, but also much less desirable as you could get an honest, better buzz from weed than you could from compressed air.

Personally, I’d rather have underage kids trying to get legal weed than I would having to ban everything that can possibly be inhaled or ingested out of fear that a teenager might use it improperly. Kids already drink massive amounts of soda in order to feel the sugar high - is Mountain Dew going to become a prohibited product, not to be sold to teenagers without adult supervision? Do we ban DVD box sets because people might stay up all night watching them?

If we live in a culture of prohibition, all we end up doing is threatening massive retaliatory punishment for experimentation promoted by the selfsame culture. Or, to be more clever about it, we’re constantly telling people not to touch the big shiny things because if they do, they’re go to jail for the next fifteen years…and to do so, we have to lead multi-million dollar ad campaigns to make sure every man, woman and child in the country knows about the big shiny untouchable.

See how that works?

Hard as it may be to believe, and I have to admit, I’m in a dead faint about it, but John Tierney wrote something that a) is well-argued and b) is absolutely right today. Hell freezes over and I joined Concerned Women for America. Okay, just kidding about those last part and this here Texan thinks a cold hell would be worse than a hot one. But it’s true–Tierney makes sense!

Of course, I tend to be libertarian in my views on personal vices. Not that I think there’s anything right about having them (despite rumors that I *heart* smoking, I actually despise it as a filthy habit that is, however, none of my business). Just that I can see with my own eyes that sometimes the cure is worse than the problem. And Tierney makes a strong case (!) that trying to protect a few determined addicts like Rush Limbaugh from themselves is not a good enough reason to browbeat doctors and deny people who suffer real pain the drugs they need.

I would also add that this is the sort of government audits and disrespect for privacy rights that will only escalate if Roe v. Wade, or god forbid, Griswold v. Connecticut is overturned. I’ve heard horror stories of elderly people on their death beds screaming and crying in pain when they should be saying their goodbyes to loved ones because the law already meddles with the doctor’s judgement and puts unfair limits on the amount of pain medication doctors can prescribe.