Looks the DEA cares more about their image than helping kids go to college:

(Columbia) The local Drug Enforcement Agency is pulling out of a partnership with the University of South Carolina because of their new "Four strikes and you're out" drug policy. "Based on come recent decisions by the University on relaxing their drug policy, we decided it was not a good idea for the DEA to stay associated with the university policy," said John Ozaluk of South Carolina¹s DEA. "That's why we pulled our name off the support list for the golf tournament."

The tournament raised money for a scholarship fund in honor of a fallen DEA agent. The university has not commented on the situation.

[Via NORML]

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urges a quick fix to this year's Booker decison of the Supreme Court. (By the way, if you are a new reader of TalkLeft, regular contributor TChris persuasively argued that case to the Supreme Court)

I wonder if everyone gets Gonzales' point and goal: Every federal crime should have a mandatory minimum sentence to get around the Supreme Court's decision in Booker which held the federal sentencing guidelines were advisory only. Here is the text of Gonzales' remarks. [via Sentencing Law and Policy]

Even the Washington Post disagrees with him.

by TChris

The meth crisis, like every other drug crisis since Reefer Madness, is a myth. John Tierney argues that law enforcement agencies and the politicians who fund them need to get their priorities straight:

Like addicts desperate for a high, [law-enforcement officials and politicians who lead the war against drugs] declared meth the new crack, which was once called the new heroin (that title now belongs to OxyContin). With the help of the press, they're once again frightening the public with tales of a drug so seductive it instantly turns masses of upstanding citizens into addicts who ruin their health, their lives and their families.

The failed drug war policy, recycled for each new "drug du jour," leads to absurd results:

Why don't we just call out the firing squad and shoot all sex offenders? That's what it's coming down to. Latest example: Florida has banned sex offenders from hurricane shelters. Instead, in the event of a hurricane, they are to report to prison, where they will be held in the visitor's waiting room (so they know they are free to leave.)

Sex offenders have to sign a form that outlines instructions, wear an ID badge, and they can be searched by authorities at any time.

An ACLU official makes the appropriate point:

the more steps you take to isolate and ostracize them ... there are very few options for them to live their lives and not reoffend," he said.

The New York Times highlights the folly of the drug war policy of busting clerks in stores selling pseudoephedrine.

When they charged 49 convenience store clerks and owners in rural northwest Georgia with selling materials used to make methamphetamine, federal prosecutors declared that they had conclusive evidence. Hidden microphones and cameras, they said, had caught the workers acknowledging that the products would be used to make the drug.

But weeks of court motions have produced many questions. Forty-four of the defendants are Indian immigrants - 32, mostly unrelated, are named Patel - and many spoke little more than the kind of transactional English mocked in sitcoms.

So when a government informant told store clerks that he needed the cold medicine, matches and camping fuel to "finish up a cook," some of them said they figured he must have meant something about barbecue.

Psychedelic mushrooms are making a comeback - medically. Here's the low-down on the medical 'shrooms:

In the past two years scores of British cluster headache sufferers have turned to magic mushrooms, prompted by reports from the US that suggest that LSD and psilocybin - the active ingredient of magic mushrooms - may be able to control the intensity and duration of their headaches.

Although some have experimented with psychedelics before, the majority have no history of drug taking. But many say they would rather risk jail than forgo a substance that lets them lead a normal life.

Spurred on by the large number of patients who find relief from the mushrooms,

researchers at Harvard Medical School are hoping for permission from the US food and drug administration to conduct a controlled trial.

by TChris

John Karoly Jr. thinks the Easton, Pennsylvania police department is one of the most abusive in the country. He should know. He's making a nice living representing victims of brutal police tactics, and his efforts have persuaded the city to take control of the problem.

In recent weeks, Mayor Phil Mitman has disbanded the SWAT team and hired Daniel Spang, a retired police chief and state police major, to devise policies on the use of force, high-speed chases and firearms. The goal is to win accreditation from the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association, which concluded in one report that the Easton department was "an agency in crisis."

Similar litigation may be warranted in Wellington, Florida, where police used Tasers, pepper spray, and batons to break up a 15 year old girl's birthday party.

by TChris

The feds are rounding up "suspected gang members" by the hundreds. More than a thousand "suspected gang members and associates" have been arrested in the last five months.

Under the ICE anti-gang program, local and state police departments have supplied federal immigration and customs agents with the names of thousands of suspected gang members. Federal agents are comparing those lists with federal immigration databases to target members or associates who are in the country illegally or who have committed serious crimes that make them eligible for deportation, officials said.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of Homeland Security began the program in March. Initially targeting one gang, the program "quickly expanded to encompass alleged members of 80 gangs in 25 states, including Latin Kings, Asian Boyz and Jamaican Posse." The government will seek to deport, rather than prosecute, about 90 percent of the arrestees, presumably because ICE can't prove that 90 percent of the "suspected gang members" committed any crimes after entering the country.

by TChris

The first death officially attributed to police use of a Taser occurred in Chicago.

[Ronald] Hasse was shot with the Taser as police tried to subdue him in a 26th-floor Lakeview apartment after they arrived to help Fire Department personnel and Hasse allegedly tried to bite an officer. Denton said Hasse received the electrical shock produced by the Taser for 57 seconds, more than 10 times the usual amount.

Taser International predictably denied that the medical examiner's conclusion is accurate. TI inevitably argues that people who die after being shocked by Tasers were killed by their own drug abuse. Hasse had methamphetamine in his blood, a factor the medical examiner viewed as a contributing cuase of his death. Unlike other cases, the medical examiner carefully reviewed the evidence and concluded that the Taser was "the principal cause of Hasse's death."

Even if Tasers are most likely to kill drug users, it's forseeable that some individuals who disobey a police officer (and who are Tasered as a result) will have taken drugs. Their drug use shouldn't condemn them to a death sentence. Perhaps this medical examiner's courageous conclusion will finally convince policy makers that Tasers should not be part of law enforcement's arsenal.

by TChris

As TalkLeft discussed here, some states are making it more difficult for cold sufferers to buy over-the-counter medications containing pseudoephedrine, because the drug can be used (albeit not easily) to manufacture methamphetamine. Now the federal government wants to get into the act (doesn't it always?), by requiring stores that sell Sudafed, Nyquil and other medicines containing pseudoephedrine to keep them behind the pharmacy counter.

Consumers would have to show a photo ID, sign a log, and be limited to 7.5 grams - or about 250 30-milligram pills - in a 30-day period. Computer tracking would prevent customers from exceeding the limit at other stores, according to the bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Jim Talent, R-Mo.

In its present form, the bill is even more silly, as it exempts stores that don't have a pharmacy.

by TChris

The casualties of the drug war fill our prisons, but illicit drugs remain widely available. John Tierney, commenting on DEA's war on doctors, makes a persuasive argument that the failed drug war has motivated DEA and other law enforcement agents to define deviancy up by going after physicians, the licensed drug dealers.

As quarry for D.E.A. agents, doctors offered several advantages over crack dealers. They were not armed. They were listed in the phone book. They kept office hours and records of their transactions. And unlike the typical crack dealer living with his mother, they had valuable assets that could be seized and shared by the federal, state and local agencies fighting the drug war.

Tierney also makes a convincing case that "the OxyContin crisis" -- DEA's supposed reason for chasing doctors who write more prescriptions than DEA agents believe to be prudent-- isn't a crisis at all.

by TChris

TalkLeft reported (here and here) the ordeal of Richard Paey, who, although wheelchair-bound, is serving a 25 year sentence for possessing Percocet and other medication that he used to control his relentless pain. His tragic story ends with an ironic note, reported by John Tierney:

The odd thing, [Paey] said, is that he's actually getting better medication [in prison] than he did at the time of his arrest because the State of Florida is now supplying him with a morphine pump, which gives him more pain relief than the pills that triggered so much suspicion. The illogic struck him as utterly normal.

"We've become mad in our pursuit of drug-law violations," he said. "Generations to come will look back and scarcely believe what we've done to sick people."