Matt Taibbi: Drug War is a JOKE

Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke

Taibblog

by: Matt Taibbi

Assistant US Attorney General Lanny Breuer

Ramin Talaie/Getty Images

If you've ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you've ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or "drug paraphernalia" in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.
Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who's ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a "record" financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.
The banks' laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC's Mexican branches and "deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows."
This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much illegal money as possible into the "legitimate" banking institution HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank's teller windows. Tony Montana's henchmen marching dufflebags of cash into the fictional "American City Bank" in Miami was actually more subtle than what the cartels were doing when they washed their cash through one of Britain's most storied financial institutions.

Though this was not stated explicitly, the government's rationale in not pursuing criminal prosecutions against the bank was apparently rooted in concerns that putting executives from a "systemically important institution" in jail for drug laundering would threaten the stability of the financial system. The New York Times put it this way:

Federal and state authorities have chosen not to indict HSBC, the London-based bank, on charges of vast and prolonged money laundering, for fear that criminal prosecution would topple the bank and, in the process, endanger the financial system.

It doesn't take a genius to see that the reasoning here is beyond flawed. When you decide not to prosecute bankers for billion-dollar crimes connected to drug-dealing and terrorism (some of HSBC's Saudi and Bangladeshi clients had terrorist ties, according to a Senate investigation), it doesn't protect the banking system, it does exactly the opposite. It terrifies investors and depositors everywhere, leaving them with the clear impression that even the most "reputable" banks may in fact be captured institutions whose senior executives are in the employ of (this can't be repeated often enough) murderers and terrorists. Even more shocking, the Justice Department's response to learning about all of this was to do exactly the same thing that the HSBC executives did in the first place to get themselves in trouble – they took money to look the other way.
And not only did they sell out to drug dealers, they sold out cheap. You'll hear bragging this week by the Obama administration that they wrested a record penalty from HSBC, but it's a joke. Some of the penalties involved will literally make you laugh out loud. This is from Breuer's announcement:

As a result of the government's investigation, HSBC has . . . "clawed back" deferred compensation bonuses given to some of its most senior U.S. anti-money laundering and compliance officers, and agreed to partially defer bonus compensation for its most senior officials during the five-year period of the deferred prosecution agreement.

Wow. So the executives who spent a decade laundering billions of dollars will have to partially defer their bonuses during the five-year deferred prosecution agreement? Are you fucking kidding me? That's the punishment? The government's negotiators couldn't hold firm on forcing HSBC officials to completely wait to receive their ill-gotten bonuses? They had to settle on making them "partially" wait? Every honest prosecutor in America has to be puking his guts out at such bargaining tactics. What was the Justice Department's opening offer – asking executives to restrict their Caribbean vacation time to nine weeks a year?
So you might ask, what's the appropriate financial penalty for a bank in HSBC's position? Exactly how much money should one extract from a firm that has been shamelessly profiting from business with criminals for years and years? Remember, we're talking about a company that has admitted to a smorgasbord of serious banking crimes. If you're the prosecutor, you've got this bank by the balls. So how much money should you take?
How about all of it? How about every last dollar the bank has made since it started its illegal activity? How about you dive into every bank account of every single executive involved in this mess and take every last bonus dollar they've ever earned? Then take their houses, their cars, the paintings they bought at Sotheby's auctions, the clothes in their closets, the loose change in the jars on their kitchen counters, every last freaking thing. Take it all and don't think twice. And then throw them in jail.
Sound harsh? It does, doesn't it? The only problem is, that's exactly what the government does just about every day to ordinary people involved in ordinary drug cases.
It'd be interesting, for instance, to ask the residents of Tenaha, Texas what they think about the HSBC settlement. That's the town where local police routinely pulled over (mostly black) motorists and, whenever they found cash, offered motorists a choice: They could either allow police to seize the money, or face drug and money laundering charges.
Or we could ask Anthony Smelley, the Indiana resident who won $50,000 in a car accident settlement and was carrying about $17K of that in cash in his car when he got pulled over. Cops searched his car and had drug dogs sniff around: The dogs alerted twice. No drugs were found, but police took the money anyway. Even after Smelley produced documentation proving where he got the money from, Putnam County officials tried to keep the money on the grounds that he could have used the cash to buy drugs in the future.
Seriously, that happened. It happens all the time, and even Lanny Breuer's own Justice Deparment gets into the act. In 2010 alone, U.S. Attorneys' offices deposited nearly $1.8 billion into government accounts as a result of forfeiture cases, most of them drug cases. You can see the Justice Department's own statistics right here:

Justice Department

If you get pulled over in America with cash and the government even thinks it's drug money, that cash is going to be buying your local sheriff or police chief a new Ford Expedition tomorrow afternoon.
And that's just the icing on the cake. The real prize you get for interacting with a law enforcement officer, if you happen to be connected in any way with drugs, is a preposterous, outsized criminal penalty. Right here in New York, one out of every seven cases that ends up in court is a marijuana case.
Just the other day, while Breuer was announcing his slap on the wrist for the world's most prolific drug-launderers, I was in arraignment court in Brooklyn watching how they deal with actual people. A public defender explained the absurdity of drug arrests in this city. New York actually has fairly liberal laws about pot – police aren't supposed to bust you if you possess the drug in private. So how do police work around that to make 50,377 pot-related arrests in a single year, just in this city? Tthat was 2010; the 2009 number was 46,492.)
"What they do is, they stop you on the street and tell you to empty your pockets," the public defender explained. "Then the instant a pipe or a seed is out of the pocket – boom, it's 'public use.' And you get arrested."
People spend nights in jail, or worse. In New York, even if they let you off with a misdemeanor and time served, you have to pay $200 and have your DNA extracted – a process that you have to pay for (it costs 50 bucks). But even beyond that, you won't have search very far for stories of draconian, idiotic sentences for nonviolent drug crimes.
Just ask Cameron Douglas, the son of Michael Douglas, who got five years in jail for simple possession. His jailers kept him in solitary for 23 hours a day for 11 months and denied him visits with family and friends. Although your typical non-violent drug inmate isn't the white child of a celebrity, he's usually a minority user who gets far stiffer sentences than rich white kids would for committing the same crimes – we all remember the crack-versus-coke controversy in which federal and state sentencing guidelines left (predominantly minority) crack users serving sentences up to 100 times harsher than those meted out to the predominantly white users of powdered coke.
The institutional bias in the crack sentencing guidelines was a racist outrage, but this HSBC settlement blows even that away. By eschewing criminal prosecutions of major drug launderers on the grounds (the patently absurd grounds, incidentally) that their prosecution might imperil the world financial system, the government has now formalized the double standard.
They're now saying that if you're not an important cog in the global financial system, you can't get away with anything, not even simple possession. You will be jailed and whatever cash they find on you they'll seize on the spot, and convert into new cruisers or toys for your local SWAT team, which will be deployed to kick in the doors of houses where more such inessential economic cogs as you live. If you don't have a systemically important job, in other words, the government's position is that your assets may be used to finance your own political disenfranchisement.
On the other hand, if you are an important person, and you work for a big international bank, you won't be prosecuted even if you launder nine billion dollars. Even if you actively collude with the people at the very top of the international narcotics trade, your punishment will be far smaller than that of the person at the very bottom of the world drug pyramid. You will be treated with more deference and sympathy than a junkie passing out on a subway car in Manhattan (using two seats of a subway car is a common prosecutable offense in this city). An international drug trafficker is a criminal and usually a murderer; the drug addict walking the street is one of his victims. But thanks to Breuer, we're now in the business, officially, of jailing the victims and enabling the criminals.
This is the disgrace to end all disgraces. It doesn't even make any sense. There is no reason why the Justice Department couldn't have snatched up everybody at HSBC involved with the trafficking, prosecuted them criminally, and worked with banking regulators to make sure that the bank survived the transition to new management. As it is, HSBC has had to replace virtually all of its senior management. The guilty parties were apparently not so important to the stability of the world economy that they all had to be left at their desks.
So there is absolutely no reason they couldn't all face criminal penalties. That they are not being prosecuted is cowardice and pure corruption, nothing else. And by approving this settlement, Breuer removed the government's moral authority to prosecute anyone for any other drug offense. Not that most people didn't already know that the drug war is a joke, but this makes it official.

NYT: Might as well be legal

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December 20, 2012

Marijuana, Not Yet Legal for Californians, Might as Well Be

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

LOS ANGELES — Let Colorado and Washington be the marijuana trailblazers. Let them struggle with the messy details of what it means to actually legalize the drug. Marijuana is, as a practical matter, already legal in much of California.

No matter that its recreational use remains technically against the law. Marijuana has, in many parts of this state, become the equivalent of a beer in a paper bag on the streets of Greenwich Village. It is losing whatever stigma it ever had and still has in many parts of the country, including New York City, where the kind of open marijuana use that is common here would attract the attention of any passing law officer.

“It’s shocking, from my perspective, the number of people that we all know who are recreational marijuana users,” said Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor. “These are incredibly upstanding citizens: Leaders in our community, and exceptional people. Increasingly, people are willing to share how they use it and not be ashamed of it.”

Marijuana can be smelled in suburban backyards in neighborhoods from Hollywood to Topanga Canyon as dusk falls — what in other places is known as the cocktail hour — often wafting in from three sides. In some homes in Beverly Hills and San Francisco, it is offered at the start of a dinner party with the customary ease of a host offering a chilled Bombay Sapphire martini.

Lighting up a cigarette (the tobacco kind) can get you booted from many venues in this rigorously antitobacco state. But no one seemed to mind as marijuana smoke filled the air at an outdoor concert at the Hollywood Bowl in September or even in the much more intimate, enclosed atmosphere of the Troubadour in West Hollywood during a Mountain Goats concert last week.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former Republican governor, ticked off the acceptance of open marijuana smoking in a list of reasons he thought Venice was such a wonderful place for his morning bicycle rides. With so many people smoking in so many places, he said in an interview this year, there was no reason to light up one’s own joint.

“You just inhale, and you live off everyone else,” said Mr. Schwarzenegger, who as governor signed a law decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana.

Some Californians react disdainfully to anyone from out of state who still harbors illicit associations with the drug. Bill Maher, the television host, was speaking about the prevalence of marijuana smoking at dinner parties hosted by Sue Mengers, a retired Hollywood agent famous for her high-powered gatherings of actors and journalists, in an interview after her death last year. “I used to bring her pot,” he said. “And I wasn’t the only one.”

When a reporter sought to ascertain whether this was an on-the-record conversation, Mr. Maher responded tartly: “Where do you think you are? This is California in the year 2011.”

John Burton, the state Democratic chairman, said he recalled an era when the drug was stigmatized under tough antidrug laws. He called the changes in thinking toward marijuana one of the two most striking shifts in public attitude he had seen in 40 years here (the other was gay rights).

“I can remember when your second conviction of having a single marijuana cigarette would get you two to 20 in San Quentin,” he said.

In a Field Poll of California voters conducted in October 2010, 47 percent of respondents said they had smoked marijuana at least once, and 50 percent said it should be legalized. The poll was taken shortly before Californians voted down, by a narrow margin, an initiative to decriminalize marijuana.

“In a Republican year, the legalization came within two points,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who worked on the campaign in favor of the initiative. He said that was evidence of the “fact that the public has evolved on the issue and is ahead of the pols.”

A study by the California Office of Traffic Safety last month found that motorists were more likely to be driving under the influence of marijuana than under the influence of alcohol.

Still, there are limits. No matter how much attitudes in California may have changed, it remains illegal in most of the country — as Californians have been reminded by a series of crackdowns by the Justice Department on medical marijuana here. People who use the drug recreationally, who said they would think nothing of offering a visitor a joint upon walking through the door, declined to be quoted by name, citing the risks to career and professional concerns.

That was the case even as they talked about marijuana becoming commonly consumed by professionals and not just, as one person put it, activists and aging hippies. Descriptions of marijuana being offered to arriving guests at parties, as an alternative to a beer, are common.

In places like Venice and Berkeley, marijuana has been a cultural presence, albeit an underground one, since the 1960s. It began moving from the edges after voters approved the legalization of medical marijuana in 1996.

That has clearly been a major contributor to the mainstreaming of marijuana. There is no longer any need for distasteful and legally compromising entanglements with old-fashioned drug dealers, several marijuana users said, because it is now possible to buy from a medical marijuana shop or a friend, or a friend of a friend growing it for ostensibly medical purposes.

That has also meant, several users said,¸that the quality of marijuana is more reliable and varied, and there are fewer concerns about subsidizing a criminal network. It also means, it seems, prices here are lower than they are in many parts of the country.

Mr. Newsom — who said he did not smoke marijuana himself — said that the ubiquity of the drug had led him to believe that laws against it were counterproductive and archaic. He supports its legalization, a notable position for a Democrat widely considered one of the leading contenders to be the next governor.

“These laws just don’t make sense anymore,” he said. “It’s time for politicians to come out of the closet on this.”

Rolling Stone: Quit Taking People To Jail For Weed

Obama's Pot Problem

Now that states have started legalizing recreational marijuana, will the president continue the government’s war on weed?

by: Tim Dickinson

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

When voters in Colorado and Washington state legalized recreational marijuana in November, they thought they were declaring a cease-fire in the War on Drugs. Thanks to ballot initiatives that passed by wide margins on Election Day, adults 21 or older in both states can now legally possess up to an ounce of marijuana. The new laws also compel Colorado and Washington to license private businesses to cultivate and sell pot, and to levy taxes on the proceeds. Together, the two states expect to reap some $600 million annually in marijuana revenues for schools, roads and other projects. The only losers, in fact, will be the Mexican drug lords, who currently supply as much as two-thirds of America's pot.
Drug reformers can scarcely believe their landslide victories at the polls. "People expected this day would come, but most didn't expect it to come this soon," says Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief who campaigned for legalization. "This is the beginning of the end of prohibition."
But the war over pot may be far from over. Legalization has set Colorado and Washington on a collision course with the Obama administration, which has shown no sign of backing down on its full-scale assault on pot growers and distributors. Although the president pledged to go easy on medical marijuana – now legal in 18 states – he has actually launched more raids on state-sanctioned pot dispensaries than George W. Bush, and has threatened to prosecute state officials who oversee medical marijuana as if they were drug lords. And while the administration has yet to issue a definitive response to the two new laws, the Justice Department was quick to signal that it has no plans to heed the will of voters. "Enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act," the department announced in November, "remains unchanged."
The 10 Best Politicians on Pot
A big reason for the get-tough stance, say White House insiders, is that federal agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration are staffed with hard-liners who have built their careers on going after pot. Michele Leonhart, a holdover from the Bush administration whom Obama has appointed to head the DEA, continues to maintain that pot is as dangerous as heroin – a position unsupported by either science or experience. When pressed on the point at a congressional hearing, Leonhart refused to concede any distinction between the two substances, lamely insisting that "all illegal drugs are bad."
"There are not many friends to legalization in this administration," says Kevin Sabet, director of the Drug Policy Institute at the University of Florida who served the White House as a top adviser on marijuana policy. In fact, the politician who coined the term "drug czar" – Joe Biden – continues to guide the administration's hard-line drug policy. "The vice president has a special interest in this issue," Sabet says. "As long as he is vice president, we're very far off from legalization being a reality."
There's no question that the votes in Colorado and Washington represent a historic shift in the War on Drugs. "This is a watershed moment," says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. "People are standing up and saying that the drug war has gone too far." And drug reformers achieved the landmark victory with a creative new marketing blitz – one that sold legalization not to stoners, but to soccer moms.
The man behind Colorado's legalization campaign was Mason Tvert, a Denver activist who was radicalized against the drug war by two experiences as a teenager. First, in high school, a bout of binge drinking landed him in the hospital. Then, as a college freshman, he made what he believed was a healthier choice to smoke pot – only to get subpoenaed by a grand jury and grilled by campus police about his drug use. "It was ridiculous," Tvert recalls, "to be spending these law-enforcement resources worrying about whether a college student might or might not be using pot in his dorm room on the weekend."

In 2005, at age 22, Tvert founded Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation (SAFER) to prompt a public conversation about the relative dangers of pot and booze. "We're punishing adults for making the rational, safer decision to use marijuana rather than alcohol, if that's what they prefer," says Tvert. "We're driving people to drink." That same year, fueled by support on college campuses, SAFER launched a ballot initiative to make Denver the world's first city to remove all criminal penalties for possession of marijuana by adults. Tvert cheekily branded then-mayor and now Colorado governor John Hickenlooper a "drug dealer" for owning a brew pub. The shoestring campaign, Tvert says, was only intended to raise awareness. "We just happened to win."
This year, Tvert and other drug reformers drew an even more explicit link between the two recreational drugs, naming their ballot initiative the "Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act of 2012." Instead of simply urging people to vote against prohibition, the measure gave Coloradans a concrete reason to vote for legalization: Taxing pot would provide more money for schools, while freeing up cops from senseless pot busts would enable them to go after real criminals. "The public does not like marijuana," explains Brian Vicente, a Denver attorney who co-wrote the law. "What they like is community safety, tax revenue and better use of law enforcement."
Equally important to winning over mainstream voters was the plan to treat pot like alcohol. While the feds continue to view marijuana as contraband to be ferreted out by drug dogs and SWAT teams, Colorado and Washington will now entrust pot to the same regulators who keep tabs on Jameson and Jägermeister. The new laws charge the Washington State Liquor Control Board and the Colorado Department of Revenue – which already oversees medical marijuana – with issuing licenses for recreational marijuana to be sold in private, stand-alone stores. The Colorado law also gives local communities the right to prohibit commercial pot sales, much like a few "dry" counties across the country still ban liquor sales. "These will be specifically licensed marijuana retail stores," says Tvert. "It's not going to be popping up at Walmart. This is not going to force a marijuana store into a community that does not want it."
10 Marijuana Myths and Facts
The legalization campaign in Colorado was a grassroots, low-budget affair that triumphed in the face of strong opposition from Gov. Hickenlooper and the Denver Chamber of Commerce. The reform effort in Washington, by contrast, received more than half its $6.2 million in funding from billionaire drug reformers Peter Lewis and George Soros – and enjoyed mainstream support. The public face for legalization was Rick Steves, the avuncular PBS travel journalist – and dedicated pothead – who chipped in $450,000 to the cause. In Seattle, the mayor, city attorney and every member of the city council supported the measure. Unlike past efforts to turn back pot prohibition at the ballot box, which saw public support crater at the 11th hour, support for the measures in Colorado and Washington actually increased through Election Day: Both laws passed by at least 10 points. In Colorado, marijuana proved more popular than the president, trumping Obama's winning tally by more than 50,000 votes.
Regardless of how the federal government responds to the initiatives, many of their greatest benefits have already taken hold. In November, more than 200 Washington residents who had been charged with pot possession saw their cases dropped even before the new law went into effect. "There is no point in continuing to seek criminal penalties for conduct that will be legal next month," said Seattle prosecutor Dan Satterberg. Local police are now free to focus their resources on crimes of violence, and cops can no longer use the pretext of smelling dope as a license for unwarranted searches. "That gets us into so many cars and pockets and homes – illegally, inappropriately," says Neill Franklin, a retired narcotics officer who now directs Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. "That ends in Colorado and Washington – it ends."
A hilarious FAQ called "Marijwhatnow?" – issued by the Seattle police department – underscores the official shift in tactics:
Q: What happens if I get pulled over and I'm sober, but an officer or his K-9 buddy smells the ounce of Super Skunk I've got in my trunk? A: Each case stands on its own, but the smell of pot alone will not be reason to search a vehicle.
Despite the immediate benefits of the new laws, the question remains: What will the federal government do in response? Advocates of legalization are hoping the Obama administration will recognize that it's on the wrong side of history. "Everybody's predicting there's going to be a backlash, and that's a good bet," concedes Nadelmann. "But there's some reason to be optimistic that the feds won't jump – at least not right away."
The administration, he points out, has yet to make its intentions clear – and that, by itself, is a sign of progress. In 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder strongly denounced California's bid to regulate and tax marijuana before voters even had a chance to weigh in at the polls. This year, by contrast, the administration said nothing about the legalization bids in Colorado and Washington – even after nine former heads of the DEA issued a public letter decrying the administration's silence as "a tacit acceptance of these dangerous initiatives."
In addition, the provisions that directly flout the federal government's authority to regulate marijuana don't take effect right away – leaving time for state and federal authorities to negotiate a truce. In Colorado, the state isn't required to begin regulating and taxing pot until next July, while officials in Washington have until next December to unveil a regulatory plan. "There's no inherent need for a knee-jerk federal response," says Nadelmann.
Most important, the governors of both Colorado and Washington have vowed to respect the will of the voters – even though they personally opposed the new laws. Gov. Hickenlooper pledged that "we intend to follow through" with regulating and taxing marijuana. But he also sounded a note of caution to potheads. "Federal law still says marijuana is an illegal drug," he warned, "so don't break out the Cheetos or Goldfish too quickly."
If Obama were committed to drug reform – or simply to states' rights – he could immediately end DEA raids on those who grow and sell pot according to state law, and immediately order the Justice Department to make enforcement of federal marijuana laws the lowest priority of U.S. attorneys in states that choose to tax and regulate pot. He could also champion a bipartisan bill introduced by Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado, that would give state marijuana regulation precedence over federal law – an approach that even anti-marijuana hard-liners have endorsed. As George W. Bush's former U.S. attorney for Colorado wrote in a post-election op-ed in the Denver Post: "Letting states 'opt out' of the Controlled Substances Act's prohibition against marijuana ought to be seriously considered."

When it comes to pot, the federal government is both impotent and omnipotent. What the feds cannot do is force either Colorado or Washington to impose criminal sanctions on pot possession. "They cannot say to states: You must keep arresting or throwing people in jail for simple use," says Sabet, the former White House adviser. "And they cannot compel the states to impose penalties on use." Individual pot smokers in Colorado and Washington will technically be in violation of federal law, but as a practical matter the DEA only has the resources to pursue high-level traffickers.
Where the federal government has great power to act is in shutting down state taxation and regulation of marijuana. Privately, both drug reformers and drug warriors believe the Obama administration is likely to take Colorado and Washington to court to keep them out of the pot business. "I would put money on it," says Sabet.
Unfortunately for drug reformers, the administration appears to have an open-and-shut case: Federal law trumps state law when the two contradict. What's more, the Supreme Court has spoken on marijuana law: In the 2005 case Gonzales v. Raich contesting medical marijuana in California, the court ruled that the federal government can regulate even tiny quantities of pot – including those grown and sold purely within state borders – because the drug is ultimately connected to interstate commerce. If the courts side with the administration, a judge could issue an immediate injunction blocking Washington and Colorado from regulating or taxing the growing and selling of pot – actions that would be considered trafficking under the Controlled Substances Act. The feds could also threaten to prosecute state employees tasked with implementing the new regulations – a hardball tactic the administration deployed last year to shut down state regulation of medical marijuana in Washington and Rhode Island.
Pot Legalization Is Coming
Such draconian measures would do nothing to curb marijuana use – particularly in Colorado, where the new law empowers citizens to grow up to six plants and share up to an ounce of their weed with other adults. "Thanks to homegrow," says Vicente, who coauthored the law, "we will still have legal adult access" – no matter how hard the feds crack down on commercial growers and retailers. But denying states the ability to regulate marijuana would eliminate the tax revenues that reformers promised voters. "If they want to act cynically," says Nadelmann, "the federal gambit would be to block regulation to make this as messy as possible" – in the hopes that the public would sour on pervasive, unregulated weed.
Ironically, if Obama succeeds in gutting the new state laws, he will essentially be serving the interests of foreign drug cartels. A study by the nonpartisan think tank Instituto Mexicano Para la Competitividad found that legalization in Colorado and Washington would deal a devastating blow to the cartels, depriving them of nearly a quarter of their annual drug revenues – unless the federal government decides to launch a "vigorous intervention." If that happens, pot profits would continue to flow to the cartels instead of to hard-hit state budgets. "Something's wrong," says Stamper, the former Seattle police chief, "when the lawbreakers and the law enforcers are on the same side."
In the end, the best defense against federal intervention may be other states standing up against prohibition. While pro-pot sentiment is strongest in the West, recent polls show that legalization is now beginning to enjoy majority support nationwide. "We're beyond the tipping point," says Stamper. Spurred by the victories in Colorado and Washington, legislators are already moving to legalize pot in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine and Iowa. "It's time for the Justice Department to recognize the sovereignty of the states," Gov. Jerry Brown of California declared. "We don't need some federal gendarme to come and tell us what to do."
Obama, the former constitutional-law professor, has relied on the expansive powers of the chief executive when it serves him politically – providing amnesty to a generation of Dream Act immigrants, or refusing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court. A one-time pothead who gave a shout-out to his dealer in his high school yearbook, Obama could single-handedly end the insanity of marijuana being treated like heroin under the Controlled Substances Act with nothing more than an executive order.
What the president needs to act boldly, reform advocates believe, is for the rising tide of public opinion to swamp the outdated bureaucracy of the War on Drugs. "The citizens have become more savvy about the drug war," says Franklin, the former narcotics cop. "They know this is not just a failed policy – they understand it's also a very destructive policy." With an eye on his legacy, Franklin says, Obama should treat pot prohibition like the costly misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan: "This is another war for the president to end."
This story is from the December 20th, 2012 - January 3rd, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.

Private Prisons Use Weed Arrests to Make Money- Duh...

War on Drugs: How Private Prisons are Using the Drug War to Generate More Inmates

by Robert Taylor

Source: http://www.policymic.com/articles/20186/war-on-drugs-how-private-prisons-are-using-the-drug-war-to-generate-more-inmates%3E



It is customary for American politicians and the media to publicly scold and criticize other countries for their human rights abuses and authoritarianism. But more often than that, the crimes U.S. officials have committed are just as bad, if not worse, than those they are chastising. Aggressive wars, sanctions, and torture instantly come to mind, but even less discussed has been the establishment of a prison-industrial-complex in the U.S.

Nowhere is this complex more evident than inCasa Grande, Arizona, where on Halloween a local high school was held on "lock down" for a drug sweep conducted by employees of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the country.

CCA is just one of many private prison companies operation in the county. All over America states are increasingly relying on private prisons to do their dirty work, turning a flawed and corrupt system of justice into an even worse form of punishment based upon profit and expediency. Companies like CCA are thriving on this, lobbying for proposals in almost every single state to buy and run state prisons. In exchange, the prisons would have to contain at least 1,000 beds and maintain at least a 90% occupancy rate.

Obviously, the incentives of this system lead to more arrests for very minor offenses, crimes with which the private prisons thrive on. Corporations like these are also very involved in pushing for three-strike laws and laws that make it very difficult to reduce the length of sentences for good behavior.

It should not be surprising, however, to learn that private prisons are on the rise in America. After all, the U.S. has the infamous distinction of having the most people behind bars, on parole, or probation. Not just per capita, but more than China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and the rest of the countries U.S. politicians like to lecture. In fact, there are more Americans locked up than the Soviets had in their gulags.

How could this be? Are Americans extraordinarily violent criminals? According to the FBI, violent crime has actually been on the decline for the last few decades.Throughout American history, the amount of prisoners per 100,000 people has remained about 100 to 110. But since 1980, the incarceration rate has nearly tripled, and is now almost 800.

Most of this increase can be traced to the federal government's misnamed "war on drugs" that was put into overdrive beginning in the Reagan administration. As the incarceration rate numbers show, it really is a war on people and has been by far the biggest reason for government encroachment on our civil liberties and the increased prison population. Combine the drug war with a merger of state and corporate power, and you have the rise of private prisons eager to profit off of caging people.

Poor and minority neighborhoods also bear the biggest brunt of this complex, as even though drug use among blacks is about the same as whites, the former are jailed at a disproportionately higher rate than whites. It is an absolute shame that those who claim to defend the interests of blacks and minorities are absolutely silent on the damage that the drug war has done (apologies to Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams).

As Adam Copnik notes in his great exposé on America's shameful prison state, "Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today — perhaps the most fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental face of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system — in prison, on probation, or on parole — than were in slavery then."

And while the drug war deserves a huge portion of the blame for the growth of corporate jailing monsters like CCA, there is also the fact nearly every single aspect of American life is politicized and criminalized. It's hard to think of any part of the economy or our personal lives that aren't subject to detailed regulation and rules, all of which are supposed to be rigorously memorized (ignorance of the law is no excuse!), and backed up by the state's threat or application of force.

Federal regulations and the tax code are so long, complex, and all encompassing that criminal defense and civil liberties litigator Harvey Silvergate estimates that the average American commitsthree felonies a day! Laws in the hand of the state, as Pierre-Joseph Proudhoun said, are "spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of the government."

With the drug war and the politicization of nearly every minutiae of American life, it's no wonder there are corporations merging with the state eager to profit off of those caught in these nets.

An easy solution to this would be the abolition of the drug war and the burning of the Federal Register, but this obviously will not be happening anytime soon. More than anything it is a cultural one as well. Like all political questions and problems, it fundamentally boils down to whether we will attempt to solve it by defending and applying individual liberty or by using force, coercion, control, and cages.

A society that accepts the premise that the state has the authority to wage a "war on drugs" and impose thousands upon thousands of coercive dictates (that it itself, of course, it not obligated to obey) should not be surprised to see their country turned into one giant, for-profit prison.