(Raw Story) A woman serving a short sentence in a Houston, Texas, jail for possession of marijuana died in custody over the weekend, and officers are not saying how or why.
The 29-year-old, identified as Theresa Anthony, had expected to spend just two and a half weeks behind bars in the Harris County lockup. On Saturday, Cynthia Prude, Theresa’s mother, received a phone call from the jail’s Chaplain informing her that her daughter was dead.
Theresa Anthony, victim of prohibition
Prude has not been allowed to see the body, nor has the Harris County Sheriff’s Department even spoken with her, according to area media.
On 4 June 2009, the Justice Department concluded a 15 months-long investigation into the Harris County facility and determined in the subsequent 27-page report that over 142 prisoners had died there since 2001. Most expired due to lack of medical care, the report claims.
The Associated Press noted that after the Justice Department declined to make its findings public, The Houston Chronicle was able to obtain a copy, which it released on the Internet.
Wait a minute, how is this possible? According to our last Drug Czar, John Walters, finding a non-violent offender in jail or prison for simple possession is like finding a unicorn.
Theresa Anthony could be you or me. Or could have been a young Barack Obama. Just another dead unicorn, expiring in a cage for the crime of preferring the safest choice of social relaxant or therapeutic medicine.
President Obama, if you can stop giggling for a moment, could you please put “legalization” back on the table? Director Kerlikowske, could you please find the time to add “decriminalization” to your vocabulary? You have the power to see to it that Theresa Anthony is the last unicorn to die in a cell.
14 May 2009
——- Kerlikowske Says Analogy Is Counterproductive; Shift Aligns With Administration Preference for Treatment Over Incarceration
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting “a war on drugs,” a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.
In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation’s drug issues.
“Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” he said. “We’re not at war with people in this country.”
View Full Image Gil Kerlikowske, the new White House drug czar, signaled Wednesday his openness to rethinking the government’s approach to fighting drug use.
Mr. Kerlikowske’s comments are a signal that the Obama administration is set to follow a more moderate — and likely more controversial — stance on the nation’s drug problems. Prior administrations talked about pushing treatment and reducing demand while continuing to focus primarily on a tough criminal-justice approach.
The Obama administration is likely to deal with drugs as a matter of public health rather than criminal justice alone, with treatment’s role growing relative to incarceration, Mr. Kerlikowske said.
Already, the administration has called for an end to the disparity in how crimes involving crack cocaine and powder cocaine are dealt with. Critics of the law say it unfairly targeted African-American communities, where crack is more prevalent.
The administration also said federal authorities would no longer raid medical-marijuana dispensaries in the 13 states where voters have made medical marijuana legal. Agents had previously done so under federal law, which doesn’t provide for any exceptions to its marijuana prohibition.
During the presidential campaign, President Barack Obama also talked about ending the federal ban on funding for needle-exchange programs, which are used to stem the spread of HIV among intravenous-drug users.
The drug czar doesn’t have the power to enforce any of these changes himself, but Mr. Kerlikowske plans to work with Congress and other agencies to alter current policies. He said he hasn’t yet focused on U.S. policy toward fighting drug-related crime in other countries.
Mr. Kerlikowske was most recently the police chief in Seattle, a city known for experimenting with drug programs. In 2003, voters there passed an initiative making the enforcement of simple marijuana violations a low priority. The city has long had a needle-exchange program and hosts Hempfest, which draws tens of thousands of hemp and marijuana advocates.
Seattle currently is considering setting up a project that would divert drug defendants to treatment programs.
Mr. Kerlikowske said he opposed the city’s 2003 initiative on police priorities. His officers, however, say drug enforcement — especially for pot crimes — took a back seat, according to Sgt. Richard O’Neill, president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild. One result was an open-air drug market in the downtown business district, Mr. O’Neill said.
“The average rank-and-file officer is saying, ‘He can’t control two blocks of Seattle, how is he going to control the nation?’ ” Mr. O’Neill said.
Sen. Tom Coburn, the lone senator to vote against Mr. Kerlikowske, was concerned about the permissive attitude toward marijuana enforcement, a spokesman for the conservative Oklahoma Republican said. [drug war]
Others said they are pleased by the way Seattle police balanced the available options. “I think he believes there is a place for using the criminal sanctions to address the drug-abuse problem, but he’s more open to giving a hard look to solutions that look at the demand side of the equation,” said Alison Holcomb, drug-policy director with the Washington state American Civil Liberties Union.
Mr. Kerlikowske said the issue was one of limited police resources, adding that he doesn’t support efforts to legalize drugs. He also said he supports needle-exchange programs, calling them “part of a complete public-health model for dealing with addiction.”
Mr. Kerlikowske’s career began in St. Petersburg, Fla. He recalled one incident as a Florida undercover officer during the 1970s that spurred his thinking that arrests alone wouldn’t fix matters.
“While we were sitting there, the guy we’re buying from is smoking pot and his toddler comes over and he blows smoke in the toddler’s face,” Mr. Kerlikowske said. “You go home at night, and you think of your own kids and your own family and you realize” the depth of the problem.
Since then, he has run four police departments, as well as the Justice Department’s Office of Community Policing during the Clinton administration.
Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, a group that supports legalization of medical marijuana, said he is “cautiously optimistic” about Mr. Kerlikowske. “The analogy we have is this is like turning around an ocean liner,” he said. “What’s important is the damn thing is beginning to turn.”
James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest law-enforcement labor organization, said that while he holds Mr. Kerlikowske in high regard, police officers are wary.
“While I don’t necessarily disagree with Gil’s focus on treatment and demand reduction, I don’t want to see it at the expense of law enforcement. People need to understand that when they violate the law there are consequences.”
More people seek drug treatment for pot than all other drugs combined. Technically true, but only because between 60 percent and 70 percent of individuals enrolled in substance abuse ‘treatment’ for cannabis are small-time pot offenders who were referred there by the criminal justice system. In fact, according to the latest federal data, nearly four in ten people admitted to substance abuse treatment programs for cannabis did not even use it in the month prior to their admission.
Consuming cannabis leads to violent behavior and other criminal acts. Apparently, when pot doesn’t make you “docile and unresponsive, to the point of helplessness,” it makes you unpredictably violent. Or not. Look, I asked this question on Monday and I’ll ask it again: Read about any gang-related violence surrounding the sale of alcohol lately? How about vicodin or paxil? Didn’t think so. Consuming marijuana doesn’t cause violent or criminal behavior, but criminals and violent people do engage in the black market trafficking of illicit drugs. The irony, of course, is that the very ‘violence’ that Walters claims to lament — that is, when he and his colleagues over at the DEA aren’t hailing the increase in drug-related violence as a good thing — is a direct consequences of the public policy (prohibition) he reflexively endorses.
**Side note: Maine Gov. John Baldacci just signed legislation into law on Friday making the possession of up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana a civil violation, punishable by a fine and no jail time. (Read more about this law in this week’s NORML News stories.) Expect to hear Walters ranting and raving about marijuana cartels setting up shop in the Pine Tree state any day now.
Finally, for good measure, Walters even resurrects the claim that there are now more medical marijuana dispensaries in the city of San Fransisco than there are Starbucks — an allegation so absurd that the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper laughed it out of the room some six months ago.
So here’s my question: Gov. Schwarzenegger — as well as U.S. Senator Jim Webb — have called for a “debate” on whether or not to legalize the use and distribution of cannabis for adults. Webster’s dictionary defines “debate” as “to argue opposing views.” But as Walters’ comments so adeptly illustrate, the opposing side has no actual “views,” it only has lies and seven decades of bulls—-t.
Therefore, I say we skip the public debate and go straight to the public ‘debunk’ (verb: to expose the fallacy or fraudulence of). I’m sure we can find Mr. Walters a seat at the head of the table.
Anyone blind to the irony? Gil Kerlikowske, my successor, is on his way to the other Washington to assume the mantle of “drug czar.” I am, on the other hand, a proud and vocal member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Gil will have a national, indeed international platform from which to make his case for a continuation of the nation’s drug laws. I’ll use this space, at least for this initial post, to make the argument that our drug policies don’t work, and that the “War on Drugs” has caused far more harm than good.
Since Richard Nixon pronounced drugs “Public Enemy Number One” and declared all-out war on them in 1971, we have spent over $1 trillion prosecuting that war. We’ve incarcerated tens of millions of our fellow citizens for nonviolent drug offenses, arresting wildly disproportionate numbers of young people, poor people, people of color–most for simple possession of marijuana. Wrenched from their families, these folks have lost jobs, forfeited school loans, been booted out of public housing. And to what end?
Drugs are more readily available today, at lower prices and higher levels of potency than in the history of the drug war. Prices fluctuate, use levels ebb and flow but one thing remains constant: the unrepealable law of supply and demand. If people want mood or mind-altering drugs, suppliers will make sure they get them. And, as long as those drugs remain illegal, the illicit, untaxed profits associated with them will continue to grow. As will the violence associated with their commerce.
Prohibition, as we learned during the 1920s, breeds lawlessness. In fact, it guarantees it. Yesterday’s bootleggers and today’s drug traffickers must arm themselves in order to protect or expand their markets. For years we’ve struggled with open-air drug markets, drive-by/drug-related killings, the police in one city or another occasionally shooting up the wrong house in a drug raid.
Americans wised up to the folly of alcohol prohibition, repealing the Volstead Act in 1933 and putting a virtual end to that era’s drive-bys (picture Al Calpone’s minions firing Thompsons from the back seat of a ‘29 Model A), drug overdose deaths (think bad bathtub gin), property values shot to hell, entire neighborhoods rundown if not abandoned altogether.
Replacing alcohol prohibition with a regulatory model worked. Not perfectly, of course, but well enough that it drove the bootleggers out of business. And it produced a formidable barrier between kids and products they ought not to be taking. (When’s the last time you heard of a street drug dealer carding a 14-year-old?) Regulation and control of alcohol made our communities healthier, our children safer.
Seattle and the state of Washington are poised to take a strong leadership position in the campaign for sane and sensible drug laws. We’ve passed a medical marijuana law, and Seattleites have made simple, adult marijuana possession cases the lowest law enforcement priority in the city. University of Washington researchers Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert just last week issued a report that concluded that “penalizing doesn’t reduce use of marijuana and lessening or removing penalties doesn’t increase it.”
Think of the money we’d save if we focused our law enforcement resources on people who drive under the influence of any drug, including alcohol. Or who furnish drugs to kids. Or who, under the influence of booze or other drugs, jealousy, insecurity or greed, steal a car, batter a spouse, abuse a child, rob a bank…
And think of the lives we’d save if we invested not in a futile drug war but in prevention, education and treatment.
I doubt our new drug czar will favor an end to prohibition. For one thing, it would put him out of a job. But perhaps, unlike former drug czar John Walters, he’ll be willing to listen to the argument. Or debate its merits.
This article was originally published by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Well, some of the much vaunted and promised ‘change’ under a President Obama appears to be coming true in the formal nomination yesterday of Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, and the mainstream media certainly seems to be picking up on all of the positive and salient points about Chief Kerlikowske that drug policy reform advocates have been touting since his name was first floated almost a month ago. Listen to the coverage of the announcement at National Public Radio.
Unlike the prior Drug Czar, John ‘Unicorn’ Walters, a moral crusader (aptly dubbed Bill Bennett’s ‘Mini-Me’ by the DPA’s Ethan Nadelmann), Chief Kerlikowske crafted pragmatic public policies and law enforcement practices that immediately distinguish him from his predecessors such as Bennett, Gen. Barry McCaffrey and Walters.
To wit:
-200,000 pro-reform cannabis law supporters converge on the waterfront in Seattle in mid-August for the world famous Hempfest, where adults openly consume cannabis and the hundreds of police present make few to no arrests (and where, ironically, alcohol use is strictly forbidden).
-Local law enforcement in Seattle apparently does not harass the artisans who craft and market the remarkable glass paraphernalia (AKA, medical delivery devices) for which Seattle is famous.
Compare that with Walters’ and former Attorney General Ashcroft’s zealous pursuit and culture-smashing symbolism of arresting, prosecuting and actually incarcerating NORML Advisory Board member Tommy Chong for nine months in a federal prison for the ‘crime’ of selling high-end artisan, Chong Bongs.
-Seattle police have a generally good track record working with medical cannabis providers, physicians and patients—including Chief Kerlikowske meeting with medical cannabis stakeholders about how to best implement Washington State’s 2000 medical cannabis laws. Compare this with Walters and McCaffrey who collectively spent 14 years insisting that there is no such thing at all as medical cannabis (often comparing it to crack cocaine), patients who claim efficacy or relief from cannabis as ‘fakers’, recommending physicians as ‘kooks’ and the majority of citizens who’ve voted for medical cannabis law reform as ‘easily duped by legalizers’.
-Rumor has it that Chief Kerlikowske has actually employed the term ‘harm reduction‘ in a sentence without employing foul language! In fact, under his leadership (and that of former Seattle Police Chief and NORML Advisory Board member Norm Stamper before him) Seattle police both recognize and practice the increasingly popular, European-inspired police/public health doctrine known as harm reduction. Two of the important tenets of harm reduction are concentrating police resources on so-called ‘hard’ drugs rather than cannabis consumers and needle exchange to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases–both championed by Chief Kerlikowske, and totally dismissed as ‘tools for legalization’ by McCaffrey and Walters.
-Despite publicly opposing a reform effort in 2003 in Seattle to make adult cannabis possession a low law enforcement priority, once I-75 was passed by a majority of voters, Chief Kerlikowske shrugged off the lost, embraced the public-health centric arguments advanced by reform advocates, and met with law reformers in the Seattle-area like I-75 campaigner and NORML board member Dominic Holden, defense attorney and NORML Board member Jeff Steinborn, popular travel author/TV host and NORML advisory board member Rick Steves.
John Walters on the otherhand would not even appear in the same green room with me backstage on TV news show, let alone debate live on the same sound stage.
Looks to me like Chief Kerlikowske is a real man…not a moralistic, lie-to-beat-the-band bureaucrat.
-Chief Kerlikowske’s former colleagues on the police force, cannabis law reform activists, medical patients, civil rights lawyers and public health officials all seem to recognize that science and ‘smart on crime’ (as compared to ‘tough on crime’ and ineffective platitudes like ‘just say no’ or ‘drug-free America’) drive his policing—not ideology and a twisted sense of personal morality.
With the recent report from a pair of WA researchers affirming that the ONDCP under McCaffrey and Walters obsessed too much on cannabis prohibition, and not enough on meth, crack, heroin…a decided change in leadership at ONDCP can’t happen fast enough.
Lastly, it was also announced yesterday by the 1980s congressional author of the ONDCP charter, no less and with sweet karmic irony, Vice President Joe Biden, that despite the best intentions of placing the ONDCP into the President’s cabinet in 1988, from this point forward the ONDCP is no longer going to be a cabinet-level office.
Whoa. Now that is change NORML and taxpayers can believe in!
Please tune in to NORML’s podcast tonight at 4:20pst when host Russ Belville will interview former Seattle Police Chief and NORML Advisory Board Member Norm Stamper regarding the selection of colleague Gil Kerlikowke as Drug Czar.
According to just published news reports, President Barack Obama has tapped Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske to be the nation’s next ‘Drug Czar.’
Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske has been appointed to a law enforcement post within the Obama administration, which would return him to Washington, D.C., after almost a decade as Seattle’s top cop, sources said Tuesday.
… Kerlikowske came to Seattle in 2000 after serving as deputy director in the Justice Department, overseeing the Community Oriented Policing Services grant program. A military veteran with 36 years in law enforcement, he spent four years as Buffalo’s police commissioner after starting his career in Florida.
On the positive side, Kerlikowske hails from Seattle — a city that has elected to make the enforcement marijuana crimes cops’ lowest priority. And although the police chief spoke out against the initiative effort — which passed with 58 percent of the vote in 2003 — he’s abided by the will of the people since then. As a result, there are now fewer marijuana-related arrests in Seattle than in virtually any other major city in the United States.
On the negative side, Kerlikowske is first and foremost a cop. He’s served 36 years in law enforcement, and it is foolish to assume that he will in any way embrace our issue with open arms. That said, I find myself in cautious agreement with NORML Board Member (and longtime Seattle resident) Dominic Holden, who believes that Kerlikowske may bring a “progressive” approach to an agency that has, almost since its inception, operated in the ‘Dark Ages.’
The day the U.S. government finally — and properly — recognizes that drug use is a public health problem and not solely a criminal justice issue will be the day that the President appoints a White House ‘Drug Czar’ who possesses a professional background in public health, addiction, and treatment rather than in law enforcement.
But until that day arrives, perhaps the best we reformers can hope for is a cop who appreciates that pot poses less of a danger to the public than alcohol, and who recognizes that from a practical and fiscal standpoint, targeting and arresting adults who engage in the responsible use of cannabis doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. At first glance, Obama’s pick — unlike his predecessor John Walters — appears to possess both of these common sense qualities.
Like the Energizer bunny, Drug Czar John Walters’ lies just keep on coming. It was only one-month ago when the Czar made a fool of himself on cable television — denying the fact the law enforcement arrest 800,000+ individuals on pot charges each year. (The FBI’s 2008 Uniform Crime Report, released just days after Walters’ absurd denial, showed that police made a record 872,721 marijuana arrests in 2007.)
Walters further embarrassed himself by claiming that the likelihood of finding a marijuana smoker in prison or jail for pot possession is like finding a “unicorn” — a claim that is readily rebutted by the US Department of Justice’s own data, as well as by the startling number of former ‘unicorns’ who wrote to NORML here.
You’d think that these two gaffes would fulfill the Czar’s ‘lie quota’ for one day, but Walters was just getting started. At the same press conference, Walters further alleged (read: lied) that marijuana use has fallen dramatically under his watch when, in fact, according to the government’s own data — recently crunched by George Mason University senior fellow Jon Gettman and posted to The Hill.com by MPP’s Bruce Mirken — Americans’ overall pot use rates have remained stable since 2002.
And then there’s this story, just released by ABC News.
Despite investing $1 billion in a massive anti-drug campaign, a controversial new study suggests that the push has failed to help the United States win the war on drugs.
A congressionally mandated study released today concluded that the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign launched in the late 1990s to encourage young people to stay away from drugs “is unlikely to have had favorable effects on youths.”
In fact, the study’s authors assert that anti-drug ads may have unwittingly delivered the message that other kids were doing drugs, inadvertently slowing measured progress that was being made to curb marijuana use among teenagers.
“Youths who saw the campaign ads took from them the message that their peers were using marijuana,” the report suggests as a possible reason for its findings. “In turn, those who came to believe that their peers were using marijuana were more likely to initiate use themselves.”
… “Despite extensive funding, governmental agency support, the employment of professional advertising and public relations firms, and consultation with subject-matter experts, the evidence from the evaluation suggests that the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign had no favorable effects on youths’ behavior and that it may even have had an unintended and undesirable effect on drug cognitions and use,” the report said.
In other words, teens who specifically said they had a lot of exposure to the campaign messages were no less likely to stay away from marijuana than those who did not.
… The evaluation was conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, after Congress called for the study. The study was based on four rounds of interviews conducted between 1999 and 2004, each involving about 5,000 to 8,000 youths between the ages of 9 and 18 years.
Predictably, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy spokesman Tom Riley responded to the data by sticking his head in the sand. “This campaign has been a striking success,” he said — his nose growing significantly longer as he spoke.
Riley also questioned why Annenberg’s findings only assessed the White House’s public service announcements through 2004. ABC News didn’t provide an answer, so I will.
The reason Annenberg abruptly ceased evaluating the (in)effectiveness of the ONDCP’s failed media campaign in 2004 was because the National Institute on Drug Abuse — which by law was instructed to fund an independent, ongoing review of the ads — ceased paying the school’s evaluators to do so. NIDA pulled the plug on the evaluations after preliminary findings by Annenberg’s investigators found the Czar’s ad campaign to be among the least effective in the history of large-scale public communication campaigns. Somebody ought to tell John Walters, who apparently failed to get the memo.
Of course, were the mainstream media to actually do its job, Walters’ bottomless pit of documented lies and delusional fabrications would be headline news, and the reigning Czar would be looking for a new line of work (dogcatcher perhaps). Unfortunately, lying about the war on (some) drugs has become so common and pervasive among police and politicians that the fact that America’s top drug cop is completely full of, ahem, crap isn’t only acceptable, it’s actually compulsory.
Originally published by the Seattle Stranger’sSlog.
Last week White House appointee John Walters claimed on C-SPAN that finding people in jail for “first-time nonviolent possession of marijuana… is like finding a unicorn … because it doesn’t exist.” I had a hunch that some of the 775,138 people arrested for pot possession last year were actually unicorns…
But the drug czar probably assumed that it’s a freebie to call people with criminal convictions anything he wants, because they’re likely to be too ashamed to defend themselves. That’s certainly true, but it didn’t take me long to find credible people willing to vouch for the existence of first-time, non-violent marijuana offenders—excuse me, unicorns.
In just one hour, I’ve found five people who have seen the Drug Czar’s unicorns with their own eyes. Here are Slog’s exclusive unicorn reports:
Well, it’s only been 24 hours, but so far 100+ readers have posted comments to The Hill’s blog telling John Walters to either tell the truth or get out! (I’d be more than happy with the latter.) Keep the feedback coming.
Also, many of you may also wish to stop by the Huffington Post, where my essay has just been re-posted here.
Like The Hill, the Huffington Post is a highly influential political website — and it is one of the most visited sites on the Internet. Yet their reporting is seldom critical of the war on (some) drugs. Please send The Post a message that their readership supports marijuana law reform by commenting on this story, “digging” it, and disseminating it widely. Thanks!
Drug Czar John Walters believes he can lie with impunity.
He’s wrong.
Today NORML responds to the Czar’s outrageous claims that few, if any, people are arrested or incarcerated for marijuana violations — and we do so in John Walters backyard: The Hill’s influential Congress blog.
If denial is the first sign of addiction, then Drug Czar John Walters is hooked to the gills. He’s addicted to targeting and arresting marijuana consumers, and he’ll do and say anything to keep this irrational and punitive policy in place.
The Hill is providing reformers with a valuable service by bringing our message prominently to Capitol Hill, and acting as a mediator in a high profile debate with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. In the past, the Drug Czar’s office has outright refused to debate spokespersons from NORML or other marijuana law reform groups, but the office has felt obligated to respond to our posts on The Hill, which remains the paper of record for members of Congress and their staff.
Because The Hill is widely read by lawmakers and by the national media, it is vital that we demonstrate the popularity of this issue by commenting prolifically. Please post your feedback to The Hill and make a point of disseminating this essay to your friends and colleagues. Previous posts by NORML to The Hill’s blog have received hundreds of readers’ comments — virtually all favorable toward marijuana law reform. Editors at The Hill inform NORML that it’s the highest volume of readers’ response they’ve ever received on any commentary on any topic!
The Hill is getting our message; will Congress or the Drug Czar?
Voters in Massachusetts will decide this November on Question 2, which seeks to replace criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana with a civil fine of no more than $100. Polls show that nearly three-out-of-four voters back the measure.
Law enforcement officials statewide are uniting against a referendum question they fear will increase marijuana use among teenagers and generate more crime across the state.
The state’s 11 district attorneys are unanimously opposing Question 2 and are being joined by police chiefs and some community groups, fearing it will undo years of effort to reduce drug use among teenagers.
… “Nobody goes to jail today for simple possession of marijuana,” said Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett, who is listed as the treasurer for the opponents, who are using the name Coalition for Safe Streets during the campaign.
Just days before the FBI released statistics indicating that police in 2007 arrested over 872,000 Americans — the most ever reported in law enforcement history — for violating pot laws, reigning Drug Czar (and pathological liar) John Walters alleged on C-Span, “We didn’t arrest 800,000 marijuana users. … That’s [a] lie.”
The Czar’s nose grew another six inches when he uncorked this whopper: “The fact is today, people don’t go to jail for the possession of marijuana. Finding somebody in jail or prison for possession of marijuana is like finding a unicorn. It doesn’t exist.”
Pardon me if I’m confused. On the one hand, you have law enforcement claiming that nobody goes to jail for pot possession. On the other hand, you have law enforcement actively opposing any and all efforts to reform America’s marijuana laws so that, in fact, nobody would actually go to jail for pot possession.
Question: Why do cops vehemently oppose measures that seek to comport the law in line with what they claim is already standard prosecutorial practice?
Update!!! Update!!! Update!!! 
Like the Energizer bunny, Drug Czar John Walters’ lies just keep on coming. It was only one-month ago when the Czar made a fool of himself on cable television — 
Voters in Massachusetts will decide this November on 
