Lisa Pryor | SMH | 11 September 2012
Parenthood has made Lisa Pryor more certain our drug laws need to be reformed. When a child gets in trouble with drugs, help is a lot more effective than a criminal record.
"Surely having children of your own has made you think twice about decriminalising drugs?" This is a question I get asked a lot, as someone who advocates for drug law reform while being the mother of two young munchkins.
The implication is that your views should change once you become an upstanding and responsible parent whose drug of choice is caffeine, and whose social life revolves around rhyme time at the local library. As if parenthood should soften you with regard to your own flesh and blood, while hardening you towards the rest of the world, especially towards illicit drug users.
My answer to this question is "no, quite the opposite". Having responsibility for young children who will one day be young adults has made me more certain that our drug laws must be reformed and I'd like to explain why.
As a parent I would love to see Australia adopt the model of decriminalisation which has been working so well in Portugal for more than 10 years now.
Let me tell you a little bit about how it works. In July 2001 Portugal abolished all criminal penalties for using and possessing small quantities of drugs. When the police catch someone with a zip lock bag of pills or powder folded in tin foil, there are still consequences. The drug user may be required to attend a "dissuasion tribunal" where the seriousness of their habit is assessed. If the tribunal finds the person before them is an addict, they can then be referred to rehabilitation. And that's another key thing about the reforms in Portugal. They improved funding for drug treatment and made it more accessible.
What I love most about this model is that it empowers families to work with the authorities if a child gets into serious trouble with drugs, confident that they would be given help rather than a criminal record.
In other words the Portuguese system appeals to me as a dobbing mum. If a young person in my life was abusing drugs, I would feel confident working with the police to get help. This is exactly the opposite of what I would do with the system as it stands in Australia. I would never recommend a parent dob a child with a drug problem into the police as it is likely to make matters worse.
Australian parents are in a terrible bind if they feel a child is developing an addiction to illicit drugs. They may want to intervene, but most know that dobbing a child into the police is not the answer. Motivating a pot head teen to go out and get a job will be even harder if that teen has a criminal record which means they will be rejected out of hand by many employers. As for young adults who try to escape emotional difficulties by taking too many drugs, they will be haunted by even greater troubles if they are forced to spend time in prison with its accompanying traumas.
The Portuguese model is one of the alternatives to prohibition – along with the systems operating in Switzerland and the Netherlands – which is canvassed in an Australia21 report which was released on Sunday.
The report explains some of the improvements Portugal has enjoyed as a result of their bold reforms. Problematic drug use has decreased. There are fewer overdoses. Fewer injecting drug users are contracting HIV. Drug related crime has dropped too.
For these reasons and many more, parents like me support decriminalisation. This is not contradictory, nor is it new. A black and white photograph, reproduced on the back of the Australia21 report, shows just how long mothers have been fighting against prohibition. Taken in the United States in 1932, the photograph shows mothers and children campaigning against alcohol prohibition. In earnest uniforms they stand beside a car painted in slogans: "Protect our youth", "stamp out prohibition", "save our children".
The campaign to end alcohol prohibition was supported by mothers because they felt that when the trade in alcohol was pushed underground, it made it easier for young people to access alcohol. Legal saloons risked having their licences revoked if they served alcohol to the underage. But the illegal speakeasies which came with prohibition had no such qualms about underage drinking.
Alcohol prohibition was repealed the year after this photograph was taken. It is time for parents to speak out again.
Showing posts with label Drug Policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Drug Policy. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Friday, August 17, 2012
Uruguay ponders making government legal pot dealer
Pablo Fernandez | Associated Press | 9 August 2012
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay —
A plan by Uruguay's leaders to turn the government into the nation's marijuana dealer has been presented to Congress, where the idea faces an uncertain fate.
President Jose Mujica's entire Cabinet signed onto the proposed law, which aims to take over an illegal marijuana trafficking business estimated to be worth $30 million to $40 million a year.
The law would have government control marijuana imports, production, sale and distribution, creating a legal market for people to get pot without turning to riskier illegal drugs. The text submitted to Congress on Wednesday declares that the drug war is a failure and that marijuana is only mildly addictive, unlike "cocaine, alcohol, tobacco and psychotropic drugs."
But lawmakers are divided on the idea, even within Mujica's Broad Front coalition of leftist parties and social groups.
Mujica has said he'll push the plan only if it gets at least 60 percent support in polls. An official in the president's press office, speaking on condition of anonymity according to department policy, said the bill isn't expected to advance quickly.
The text says the project's goals include "the normalization and full social acceptance of marijuana use" so that consumers aren't "stigmatized, nor treated as criminals." Instead, it proposes education about the risks of marijuana use. The presidency's website said Thursday that a National Drug Council would organize meetings to "facilitate reflection" on this point.
The text sent to Congress added that "marijuana has been for many years the most-consumed illegal substance" in Uruguay, and "has an important level of legitimacy in Uruguayan society." It also cited precedents for various levels of decriminalization of marijuana possession in the Netherlands, Australia, Spain and several U.S. states.
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay —
A plan by Uruguay's leaders to turn the government into the nation's marijuana dealer has been presented to Congress, where the idea faces an uncertain fate.
President Jose Mujica's entire Cabinet signed onto the proposed law, which aims to take over an illegal marijuana trafficking business estimated to be worth $30 million to $40 million a year.
The law would have government control marijuana imports, production, sale and distribution, creating a legal market for people to get pot without turning to riskier illegal drugs. The text submitted to Congress on Wednesday declares that the drug war is a failure and that marijuana is only mildly addictive, unlike "cocaine, alcohol, tobacco and psychotropic drugs."
But lawmakers are divided on the idea, even within Mujica's Broad Front coalition of leftist parties and social groups.
Mujica has said he'll push the plan only if it gets at least 60 percent support in polls. An official in the president's press office, speaking on condition of anonymity according to department policy, said the bill isn't expected to advance quickly.
The text says the project's goals include "the normalization and full social acceptance of marijuana use" so that consumers aren't "stigmatized, nor treated as criminals." Instead, it proposes education about the risks of marijuana use. The presidency's website said Thursday that a National Drug Council would organize meetings to "facilitate reflection" on this point.
The text sent to Congress added that "marijuana has been for many years the most-consumed illegal substance" in Uruguay, and "has an important level of legitimacy in Uruguayan society." It also cited precedents for various levels of decriminalization of marijuana possession in the Netherlands, Australia, Spain and several U.S. states.
Friday, June 8, 2012
On drugs
Andrew Elder | Politically Homeless | 7 June 2012
The series of articles on drug laws and the need for reform in The Sydney Morning Herald has been positive, arising from the Australia21 report on the issue. The SMH have much to show their News Ltd colleagues about fostering a debate rather than running a campaign. While it's telling that so many major figures have come out against prohibition, with Mick Palmer not the least of them, this has been a debate that's been part of our lives more broadly. Drug law reform can't and shouldn't succeed until its scope is broadened; it is a shame that both Australia21, and the SMH, have overlooked that.
There's more to the drug debate than just prohibition vs decriminalisation. You can see that in the debates going on elsewhere that both Australia21 and the SMH has rigorously quarantined from its coverage of drug law reform. Perhaps they have done this in an attempt to bring clarity to what everyone agrees is a complex issue. I disagree that it will be effective or desirable in either securing drug decriminalisation, or in mapping out what might or should happen once drugs that are now illicit become legalised.
People want drug addiction to be seen as a public health issue. Let's do that, and in so doing let's look at a public health campaign that has been hard-fought and almost won, and which is not at all unrelated to the debate on other drugs: tobacco.
The first thing to remember is that tobacco is a more serious health problem for Australians, in themselves and in terms of costs to taxpayers and the economy more broadly, than illicit drugs. The cost of prohibition should take account of the averted costs of its alternative, rather than simply being written off as some sort of dead loss.
The second is that, just as the tobacco industry faces the prospect of sinking to its knees under the weight of plain packaging, it faces the prospect that decriminalisation will not just throw it a lifeline but open a cornucopia of commercial opportunities. All of those charges levelled at tobacco and alcohol companies about marketing to minors will come back with a vengeance when tobacco growers get a licence to grow cannabis, and when smaller companies that form part of the tobacco distribution network see the opportunities in now-illicit drugs as compensation over the government's war against tobacco. Big companies will sneak their special-treatments in with the smaller ones, and government will give them. Those hoping for additional funds to be spent on healthcare can only watch the money flow away from them as "incentives" for those who have waged war on public health campaigns.
You may think that your local neighbourhood drug dealer sidling up to the kids after school with a collection of little baggies is A Threat To Our Children, if not to Our Way Of Life. Wait until the perfectly legal, expensive and sophisticated marketing campaigns hit full stride. Look at the success that junk food has had over a younger generation, and imagine how successful similar campaigns for illicit drugs would be. Now contrast that against the odd junkie scuttling into the shadows for their hit in terms of the length and breadth of a real social problem, and ask yourself whether you are really making things better.
The series of articles on drug laws and the need for reform in The Sydney Morning Herald has been positive, arising from the Australia21 report on the issue. The SMH have much to show their News Ltd colleagues about fostering a debate rather than running a campaign. While it's telling that so many major figures have come out against prohibition, with Mick Palmer not the least of them, this has been a debate that's been part of our lives more broadly. Drug law reform can't and shouldn't succeed until its scope is broadened; it is a shame that both Australia21, and the SMH, have overlooked that.
There's more to the drug debate than just prohibition vs decriminalisation. You can see that in the debates going on elsewhere that both Australia21 and the SMH has rigorously quarantined from its coverage of drug law reform. Perhaps they have done this in an attempt to bring clarity to what everyone agrees is a complex issue. I disagree that it will be effective or desirable in either securing drug decriminalisation, or in mapping out what might or should happen once drugs that are now illicit become legalised.
People want drug addiction to be seen as a public health issue. Let's do that, and in so doing let's look at a public health campaign that has been hard-fought and almost won, and which is not at all unrelated to the debate on other drugs: tobacco.
The first thing to remember is that tobacco is a more serious health problem for Australians, in themselves and in terms of costs to taxpayers and the economy more broadly, than illicit drugs. The cost of prohibition should take account of the averted costs of its alternative, rather than simply being written off as some sort of dead loss.
The second is that, just as the tobacco industry faces the prospect of sinking to its knees under the weight of plain packaging, it faces the prospect that decriminalisation will not just throw it a lifeline but open a cornucopia of commercial opportunities. All of those charges levelled at tobacco and alcohol companies about marketing to minors will come back with a vengeance when tobacco growers get a licence to grow cannabis, and when smaller companies that form part of the tobacco distribution network see the opportunities in now-illicit drugs as compensation over the government's war against tobacco. Big companies will sneak their special-treatments in with the smaller ones, and government will give them. Those hoping for additional funds to be spent on healthcare can only watch the money flow away from them as "incentives" for those who have waged war on public health campaigns.
You may think that your local neighbourhood drug dealer sidling up to the kids after school with a collection of little baggies is A Threat To Our Children, if not to Our Way Of Life. Wait until the perfectly legal, expensive and sophisticated marketing campaigns hit full stride. Look at the success that junk food has had over a younger generation, and imagine how successful similar campaigns for illicit drugs would be. Now contrast that against the odd junkie scuttling into the shadows for their hit in terms of the length and breadth of a real social problem, and ask yourself whether you are really making things better.
Monday, April 2, 2012
Time for national debate on evil drug trade
Eddie McGuire | Sunday Herald Sun | April 01, 2012
THE APPALLING HUMAN COST OF ILLICIT DRUGS IS TOO HIGH AND WE NEED TO CONSIDER OTHER SOLUTIONS INCLUDING DECRIMINALISING THE TRADE, ARGUES EDDIE MCGUIRE.
I HATE drugs. I hate their guts. I hate the human misery that the illicit drug industry thrives on.
How could you not be devastated by the situation in which Ben Cousins and his family find themselves?
How do two beautiful girls I went to primary school with have their lives brutally ended being bashed to death while working the streets of St Kilda to feed a habit?
But what to do?
Well, clearly something different. It is time for Australia to look at so many of our social and economic needs and plan a course not built on tradition and religion and moral mumbo jumbo, but on reality and innovation. Time for some politicians to boldly lead.
It's time for Australia to look seriously at decriminalising drugs.
The war on drugs is over. We lost. If the definition of madness is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result, then surely we are all mad to think anything is going to get better in the future.
It's only getting worse and those profiting out of the sale and manufacturing of drugs, organised crime cartels, are only getting bigger, badder and richer.
THE APPALLING HUMAN COST OF ILLICIT DRUGS IS TOO HIGH AND WE NEED TO CONSIDER OTHER SOLUTIONS INCLUDING DECRIMINALISING THE TRADE, ARGUES EDDIE MCGUIRE.
I HATE drugs. I hate their guts. I hate the human misery that the illicit drug industry thrives on.
How could you not be devastated by the situation in which Ben Cousins and his family find themselves?
How do two beautiful girls I went to primary school with have their lives brutally ended being bashed to death while working the streets of St Kilda to feed a habit?
But what to do?
Well, clearly something different. It is time for Australia to look at so many of our social and economic needs and plan a course not built on tradition and religion and moral mumbo jumbo, but on reality and innovation. Time for some politicians to boldly lead.
It's time for Australia to look seriously at decriminalising drugs.
The war on drugs is over. We lost. If the definition of madness is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result, then surely we are all mad to think anything is going to get better in the future.
It's only getting worse and those profiting out of the sale and manufacturing of drugs, organised crime cartels, are only getting bigger, badder and richer.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Legalization Debate Takes Off in Latin America
Ethan Nadelmann | The Huffington Post | Mar 10, 2012
Comments (336)
Something incredible is happening right now in Latin America.
After decades of being brutalized by the U.S. government's failed prohibitionist drug policies, Latin American leaders, including not just distinguished former presidents but also current presidents, are saying "enough is enough." They're demanding that the range of policy options be expanded to include alternatives that help reduce the crime, violence and corruption in their own countries -- and insisting that decriminalization and legal regulation of currently illicit drug markets be considered.
Guatemala's new president, Otto Perez Molina, is providing important leadership. As a political conservative and former general, he has credibility that others lack. When he started speaking out publicly last month about the need to consider new drug policy options including legalization, many observers thought it was just a ploy to secure greater economic and military aid from the United States. But he's demonstrated a commitment and engagement over the past month that have persuaded fellow presidents that he's serious about this. Within Guatemala, his initiative has been praised by diverse voices including prominent business leaders, Archbishop Oscar Julio Vian and the head of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), Francisco Dall'Anese.
Comments (336)
Something incredible is happening right now in Latin America.
After decades of being brutalized by the U.S. government's failed prohibitionist drug policies, Latin American leaders, including not just distinguished former presidents but also current presidents, are saying "enough is enough." They're demanding that the range of policy options be expanded to include alternatives that help reduce the crime, violence and corruption in their own countries -- and insisting that decriminalization and legal regulation of currently illicit drug markets be considered.
Guatemala's new president, Otto Perez Molina, is providing important leadership. As a political conservative and former general, he has credibility that others lack. When he started speaking out publicly last month about the need to consider new drug policy options including legalization, many observers thought it was just a ploy to secure greater economic and military aid from the United States. But he's demonstrated a commitment and engagement over the past month that have persuaded fellow presidents that he's serious about this. Within Guatemala, his initiative has been praised by diverse voices including prominent business leaders, Archbishop Oscar Julio Vian and the head of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), Francisco Dall'Anese.
Pat Robertson Says Marijuana Use Should be Legal
Jesse McKinley | The New York Times | March 7, 2012
Of the many roles Pat Robertson has assumed over his five-decade-long career as an evangelical leader — including presidential candidate and provocative voice of the right wing — his newest guise may perhaps surprise his followers the most: marijuana legalization advocate.
“I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol,” Mr. Robertson said in an interview on Wednesday. “I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.”
Mr. Robertson’s remarks echoed statements he made last week on “The 700 Club,” the signature program of his Christian Broadcasting Network, and other comments he made in 2010. While those earlier remarks were largely dismissed by his followers, Mr. Robertson has now apparently fully embraced the idea of legalizing marijuana, arguing that it is a way to bring down soaring rates of incarceration and reduce the social and financial costs.
“I believe in working with the hearts of people, and not locking them up,” he said.
Mr. Robertson’s remarks were hailed by pro-legalization groups, who called them a potentially important endorsement in their efforts to roll back marijuana penalties and prohibitions, which residents of Colorado and Washington will vote on this fall.
Of the many roles Pat Robertson has assumed over his five-decade-long career as an evangelical leader — including presidential candidate and provocative voice of the right wing — his newest guise may perhaps surprise his followers the most: marijuana legalization advocate.
“I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol,” Mr. Robertson said in an interview on Wednesday. “I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.”
Mr. Robertson’s remarks echoed statements he made last week on “The 700 Club,” the signature program of his Christian Broadcasting Network, and other comments he made in 2010. While those earlier remarks were largely dismissed by his followers, Mr. Robertson has now apparently fully embraced the idea of legalizing marijuana, arguing that it is a way to bring down soaring rates of incarceration and reduce the social and financial costs.
“I believe in working with the hearts of people, and not locking them up,” he said.
Mr. Robertson’s remarks were hailed by pro-legalization groups, who called them a potentially important endorsement in their efforts to roll back marijuana penalties and prohibitions, which residents of Colorado and Washington will vote on this fall.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
The Prisoner as a Human Being
Jon Stanhope | Right Now | 16 February 2012
This article is part of our February theme, which focuses on one of the great silences in the human rights conversation in Australia: Prisoners’ Rights. Read our Editorial for more on this theme.
In 2004 the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Legislative Assembly enacted the Human Rights Act, the first Bill of Rights to be passed into law in Australia. In passing the Act, the ACT Government made an overt and very public commitment to the universality and inalienability of human rights.
In essence the Act provides that no one may be treated or punished in a cruel, inhumane or degrading way: that even the worst among us have human rights that should be respected even if we have been convicted of the most heinous crimes.
In 2009 the Alexander Maconochie Centre, the ACT’s first prison, became operational. The Government was motivated, when taking the decision to build the prison, by the opportunity to learn from the experience of other prisons in operation in Australia and to avoid the temptation, as politically enticing as it is, to employ the practice and language of retribution, punishment and demonisation.
The prison was the first in Australia to be built and operated in accordance with human rights legislation and principles. The fact it is named in honour of Alexander Maconochie, superintendent of the Norfolk Island penal colony from 1840 to 1844, a prison reformer unmatched in Australia before or since, was to be a constant reminder of the prison’s aims as a reforming institution, one which reflects a commitment to human rights and a belief in the possibility of rehabilitation and redemption.
The most recent Productivity Commission Report on Government Services, released on 31 January 2012 gives a first glimpse of some of the outcomes of the operational approach employed at the Alexander Maconochie Centre (AMC).
It reveals that the percentage of eligible prisoners employed at the AMC was 92.3 percent against a national average of 76.1 percent; the number of AMC prisoners enrolled in education and training is 92.0 percent as opposed to 34.8 percent nationally; and AMC prisoners spend an average of 14.1 hours out of cells while nationally prisoners are out of cells for 11.4 hours a day. Prisoners at AMC may also receive visitors six days a week including up until 8 pm and the crude imprisonment rate in the ACT is 68 per 100,000 while nationally it is 169 per 100,000. It is not surprising that the cost per prisoner of providing corrective services in the ACT is also the highest in Australia.
Prisoners are perhaps the last discrete group of human beings who are, in a general way, publically vilified, dehumanised and demonised within Australia without fear of censure.
This article is part of our February theme, which focuses on one of the great silences in the human rights conversation in Australia: Prisoners’ Rights. Read our Editorial for more on this theme.
In 2004 the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Legislative Assembly enacted the Human Rights Act, the first Bill of Rights to be passed into law in Australia. In passing the Act, the ACT Government made an overt and very public commitment to the universality and inalienability of human rights.
In essence the Act provides that no one may be treated or punished in a cruel, inhumane or degrading way: that even the worst among us have human rights that should be respected even if we have been convicted of the most heinous crimes.
In 2009 the Alexander Maconochie Centre, the ACT’s first prison, became operational. The Government was motivated, when taking the decision to build the prison, by the opportunity to learn from the experience of other prisons in operation in Australia and to avoid the temptation, as politically enticing as it is, to employ the practice and language of retribution, punishment and demonisation.
The prison was the first in Australia to be built and operated in accordance with human rights legislation and principles. The fact it is named in honour of Alexander Maconochie, superintendent of the Norfolk Island penal colony from 1840 to 1844, a prison reformer unmatched in Australia before or since, was to be a constant reminder of the prison’s aims as a reforming institution, one which reflects a commitment to human rights and a belief in the possibility of rehabilitation and redemption.
The most recent Productivity Commission Report on Government Services, released on 31 January 2012 gives a first glimpse of some of the outcomes of the operational approach employed at the Alexander Maconochie Centre (AMC).
It reveals that the percentage of eligible prisoners employed at the AMC was 92.3 percent against a national average of 76.1 percent; the number of AMC prisoners enrolled in education and training is 92.0 percent as opposed to 34.8 percent nationally; and AMC prisoners spend an average of 14.1 hours out of cells while nationally prisoners are out of cells for 11.4 hours a day. Prisoners at AMC may also receive visitors six days a week including up until 8 pm and the crude imprisonment rate in the ACT is 68 per 100,000 while nationally it is 169 per 100,000. It is not surprising that the cost per prisoner of providing corrective services in the ACT is also the highest in Australia.
Prisoners are perhaps the last discrete group of human beings who are, in a general way, publically vilified, dehumanised and demonised within Australia without fear of censure.
Anger after acid tripper off hook
Meagan Dillon | The NT News | 12 March 2012
A TERRITORY magistrate has been accused of opening "Pandora's box" after dismissing an assault case because the man was on his first "acid" trip and wasn't responsible for his actions.
James Kidd, 22, had assault charges against him dismissed in Darwin Magistrates Court because he was incoherent and not criminally responsible.
Magistrate John Lowndes used a unique part of the NT Criminal Code to find Kidd did not "act with the necessary mental elements" to be held accountable for his crime.
"In order to be criminally responsible there needs to be a marriage between the physical elements and the mental elements," he said.
Dr Lowndes found that Kidd - who was on his first LSD trip and couldn't remember attacking June Moffatt in her front yard - was not in his right mind.
Ms Moffatt, 52, said she fears this will become a precedent for future offenders to escape prosecution.
"It's opened Pandora's box," she said. She said her attacker took the acid of his own free will and should have to take responsibility for what happened.
On November 26, 2010, Ms Moffatt was punched in the head at least three times before being picked up and thrown to the ground where she lost consciousness.
The violent attack was sparked by Ms Moffatt's threats to call police if Kidd did not leave the front yard of her Millner home. "He had enough wits about him to react when I said the word cops," she said.
Prosecutor Sam Burke said: "His behaviour went from extremely violent and agitated to confused, apologetic and scared.
"He hit her deliberately, in response to her words, hard, and it was undoubtedly intentional."
But Dr Lowndes said Kidd had to "foresee" the possible consequences of his conduct to be criminally responsible - but couldn't when experimenting with drugs for the first time.
He said Kidd would not have known the drugs would "predispose him to violent behaviour".
Ms Moffatt said she was "devastated' the charges were thrown out of court simply because her attacker was oblivious to his crime.
A TERRITORY magistrate has been accused of opening "Pandora's box" after dismissing an assault case because the man was on his first "acid" trip and wasn't responsible for his actions.
James Kidd, 22, had assault charges against him dismissed in Darwin Magistrates Court because he was incoherent and not criminally responsible.
Magistrate John Lowndes used a unique part of the NT Criminal Code to find Kidd did not "act with the necessary mental elements" to be held accountable for his crime.
"In order to be criminally responsible there needs to be a marriage between the physical elements and the mental elements," he said.
Dr Lowndes found that Kidd - who was on his first LSD trip and couldn't remember attacking June Moffatt in her front yard - was not in his right mind.
Ms Moffatt, 52, said she fears this will become a precedent for future offenders to escape prosecution.
YOUR SAY
"So let me get this straight! You can get off your face on any drug or drink and cause grief to any one without any worries of prosecution? What has happened to our justice system?"
Concerned citisen
"It's opened Pandora's box," she said. She said her attacker took the acid of his own free will and should have to take responsibility for what happened.
On November 26, 2010, Ms Moffatt was punched in the head at least three times before being picked up and thrown to the ground where she lost consciousness.
The violent attack was sparked by Ms Moffatt's threats to call police if Kidd did not leave the front yard of her Millner home. "He had enough wits about him to react when I said the word cops," she said.
Prosecutor Sam Burke said: "His behaviour went from extremely violent and agitated to confused, apologetic and scared.
"He hit her deliberately, in response to her words, hard, and it was undoubtedly intentional."
But Dr Lowndes said Kidd had to "foresee" the possible consequences of his conduct to be criminally responsible - but couldn't when experimenting with drugs for the first time.
He said Kidd would not have known the drugs would "predispose him to violent behaviour".
Ms Moffatt said she was "devastated' the charges were thrown out of court simply because her attacker was oblivious to his crime.
Monday, February 20, 2012
New Jersey Governor Calls for Mandatory Treatment for Low-Level Drug Offenders
By Join Together Staff | drugfree.org | January 20, 2012
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie this week called for mandatory treatment for all low-level drug offenders. The Wall Street Journal calls it “the most sweeping criminal-justice proposal of his tenure.”
In his State of the State address, Christie said, “”Every one of God’s creations can be redeemed. Everyone deserves a second chance.” He also called for a revision of bail laws to keep violent drug dealers in prison. He said the state’s bail system should mirror the federal courts, where judges decide whether violent offenders should remain in jail while they await trial if they are considered to be a threat to society or a flight risk.
According to the article, drug treatment advocates say the state’s residential drug treatment facilities are already overcrowded. “There are waiting lists of people begging to get into drug treatment. We should fund and expand it for the people who want it,” said Roseanne Scotti, Director of the Drug Policy Alliance in New Jersey.
In 2010, there were 51,985 people admitted into substance-abuse programs in New Jersey, compared with 47,442 in 2008. An estimated 62 percent of New Jersey prison inmates have a moderate to severe drug addiction, the article states.
Christie once served on the board of a Daytop Village treatment program, and his wife volunteers with former convicts, including at drug treatment centers, the newspaper notes.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie this week called for mandatory treatment for all low-level drug offenders. The Wall Street Journal calls it “the most sweeping criminal-justice proposal of his tenure.”
In his State of the State address, Christie said, “”Every one of God’s creations can be redeemed. Everyone deserves a second chance.” He also called for a revision of bail laws to keep violent drug dealers in prison. He said the state’s bail system should mirror the federal courts, where judges decide whether violent offenders should remain in jail while they await trial if they are considered to be a threat to society or a flight risk.
According to the article, drug treatment advocates say the state’s residential drug treatment facilities are already overcrowded. “There are waiting lists of people begging to get into drug treatment. We should fund and expand it for the people who want it,” said Roseanne Scotti, Director of the Drug Policy Alliance in New Jersey.
In 2010, there were 51,985 people admitted into substance-abuse programs in New Jersey, compared with 47,442 in 2008. An estimated 62 percent of New Jersey prison inmates have a moderate to severe drug addiction, the article states.
Christie once served on the board of a Daytop Village treatment program, and his wife volunteers with former convicts, including at drug treatment centers, the newspaper notes.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Despair grips the children of the Dreaming
Russell Skelton | The Age | February 11, 2012
IT WAS a seemingly routine day in a thriving Arnhem Land township located on a bay facing the sparkling Arafura Sea. Northern Territory MP Marion Scrymgour had flown to the unnamed Aboriginal and islander community of 2000 to meet constituents, listen to grievances, and relay them to the powers that be in Darwin. ''I was walking from the council office to the health clinic when I saw all these people running, screaming and calling out.''
She stopped a panicked passer-by to ask what had happened and was answered by a swift gesture: a hand passing across the neck. ''It did not dawn on me at first what that gesture meant. Then somebody from the clinic said a girl had hanged herself. When I heard that she was 11, I thought, what is happening to our people and families? What is it that leads a young person to give up all hope and see no alternative in life but to leave?''
Flown by air ambulance to Darwin, the girl died in hospital after life support was turned off.
The circumstances of her death remain a mystery for most. Police requested that details not be publicised and the Coroner is yet to publish a finding - he may never do so, because not all suicides in the territory are subject to coronial investigation. Police reports are often accepted at face value and passed onto grieving families.
Scrymgour, who says she was told that the girl's desperate final act had had something to do with bullying, believes there is an urgent need for much more research into the territory's horrendous number of indigenous suicides. ''There had been a lot of bullying at school, but there is nothing cultural about a kid being bullied. That is an issue that can and should be dealt with.''
The shocking fact remains that more young girls are killing themselves than ever before in the Northern Territory. It is almost impossible to put an accurate figure on the precise number suiciding because of a time lag in reporting the deaths, but no one disputes figures complied in the NT Child Death and Prevention Committee annual report, showing that territory Aboriginal children are 3.5 times more likely to die during childhood than non-Aboriginal children.
IT WAS a seemingly routine day in a thriving Arnhem Land township located on a bay facing the sparkling Arafura Sea. Northern Territory MP Marion Scrymgour had flown to the unnamed Aboriginal and islander community of 2000 to meet constituents, listen to grievances, and relay them to the powers that be in Darwin. ''I was walking from the council office to the health clinic when I saw all these people running, screaming and calling out.''
She stopped a panicked passer-by to ask what had happened and was answered by a swift gesture: a hand passing across the neck. ''It did not dawn on me at first what that gesture meant. Then somebody from the clinic said a girl had hanged herself. When I heard that she was 11, I thought, what is happening to our people and families? What is it that leads a young person to give up all hope and see no alternative in life but to leave?''
Flown by air ambulance to Darwin, the girl died in hospital after life support was turned off.
The circumstances of her death remain a mystery for most. Police requested that details not be publicised and the Coroner is yet to publish a finding - he may never do so, because not all suicides in the territory are subject to coronial investigation. Police reports are often accepted at face value and passed onto grieving families.
Scrymgour, who says she was told that the girl's desperate final act had had something to do with bullying, believes there is an urgent need for much more research into the territory's horrendous number of indigenous suicides. ''There had been a lot of bullying at school, but there is nothing cultural about a kid being bullied. That is an issue that can and should be dealt with.''
The shocking fact remains that more young girls are killing themselves than ever before in the Northern Territory. It is almost impossible to put an accurate figure on the precise number suiciding because of a time lag in reporting the deaths, but no one disputes figures complied in the NT Child Death and Prevention Committee annual report, showing that territory Aboriginal children are 3.5 times more likely to die during childhood than non-Aboriginal children.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Labor fuzzy to the core
Mark Latham | AFR | 9 February 2012
Recently The Australian newspaper has had a lot of fun with Labor’s fuzzy embrace of the concept of social inclusion. In particular, it has highlighted the haplessness of the new Minister for Social Inclusion, Mark Butler. When asked what the concept meant, Butler fell back on the cliché of “social inclusion meaning different things to different people”.
When pressed for greater detail, the best he could say was: “Social inclusion is about government delivering services and supports to people experiencing social exclusion in different ways.”
Behind the Monty Pythonesque humour of a minister defining social inclusion as the opposite of social exclusion, rests a sad political truth.
Labour-leaning parties no longer have anything worthwhile to contribute to the egalitarianism of society. The class war has ended. People who grew up working class now aspire to the ownership of capital. After two decades of robust economic growth, Australia has entered an age of affluence and social mobility.
The losers left behind in this process, however, are forever falling further behind. They are part of an entrenched underclass, just 5 per cent of the population – easily ignored by the political system. The Liberal Party assumes they vote Labor, while the ALP takes them for granted. Their closest contact with Labor politicians is through ethnic branch-stacking.
In no part of the Western world have left-of-centre parties found a solution to the problems of the underclass. Their fallback position has been to establish publicly funded committees such as social inclusion boards, thereby giving the appearance of caring about the disadvantaged, while in practice achieving very little. This is the modern version of the warm inner glow.
Recently The Australian newspaper has had a lot of fun with Labor’s fuzzy embrace of the concept of social inclusion. In particular, it has highlighted the haplessness of the new Minister for Social Inclusion, Mark Butler. When asked what the concept meant, Butler fell back on the cliché of “social inclusion meaning different things to different people”.
When pressed for greater detail, the best he could say was: “Social inclusion is about government delivering services and supports to people experiencing social exclusion in different ways.”
Behind the Monty Pythonesque humour of a minister defining social inclusion as the opposite of social exclusion, rests a sad political truth.
Labour-leaning parties no longer have anything worthwhile to contribute to the egalitarianism of society. The class war has ended. People who grew up working class now aspire to the ownership of capital. After two decades of robust economic growth, Australia has entered an age of affluence and social mobility.
The losers left behind in this process, however, are forever falling further behind. They are part of an entrenched underclass, just 5 per cent of the population – easily ignored by the political system. The Liberal Party assumes they vote Labor, while the ALP takes them for granted. Their closest contact with Labor politicians is through ethnic branch-stacking.
In no part of the Western world have left-of-centre parties found a solution to the problems of the underclass. Their fallback position has been to establish publicly funded committees such as social inclusion boards, thereby giving the appearance of caring about the disadvantaged, while in practice achieving very little. This is the modern version of the warm inner glow.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Hardline A-G hits back at his critics
Anna Patty | SMH | February 3, 2012
It didn't take long for the vitriol over the state government's approach to law and order to start.
Ten months after the NSW election, the opposition and tabloid media have been dishing it out to the Attorney-General, Greg Smith, accusing him of being soft on crime.
One radio talk-back host recently accused Smith of being a step away from the Greens, saying he had failed to earn his stripes as a conservative Attorney-General.
When it comes to the rehabilitation of non-violent offenders, Smith would agree.
He says he is "more left-wing on issues like dealing with prisoners and rehabilitation than any other Attorney-General in the country".
But Smith, reputed as a tough public prosecutor when he worked for the DPP - having put away murderers including those who killed policeman David Carty - is hardline when it comes to serious violence.
In response to a recent spate of drive-by shootings in Sydney's south-west, the opposition and some commentators have confused the distinction Smith has made between his different approaches to sentencing and rehabilitation.
He believes in non-custodial sentences for less serious offenders and rehabilitation for people with drug and alcohol addiction or mental health problems.
When it comes to people guilty of serious violent crime, including the "buffoons" responsible for the shootings, repeat offenders and those guilty of child sex offences, Smith wants to toughen punishments.
Smith recently asked the Supreme Court to look at how judgments against people convicted of sex offences against children could be strengthened.
It didn't take long for the vitriol over the state government's approach to law and order to start.
Ten months after the NSW election, the opposition and tabloid media have been dishing it out to the Attorney-General, Greg Smith, accusing him of being soft on crime.
One radio talk-back host recently accused Smith of being a step away from the Greens, saying he had failed to earn his stripes as a conservative Attorney-General.
When it comes to the rehabilitation of non-violent offenders, Smith would agree.
He says he is "more left-wing on issues like dealing with prisoners and rehabilitation than any other Attorney-General in the country".
But Smith, reputed as a tough public prosecutor when he worked for the DPP - having put away murderers including those who killed policeman David Carty - is hardline when it comes to serious violence.
In response to a recent spate of drive-by shootings in Sydney's south-west, the opposition and some commentators have confused the distinction Smith has made between his different approaches to sentencing and rehabilitation.
He believes in non-custodial sentences for less serious offenders and rehabilitation for people with drug and alcohol addiction or mental health problems.
When it comes to people guilty of serious violent crime, including the "buffoons" responsible for the shootings, repeat offenders and those guilty of child sex offences, Smith wants to toughen punishments.
Smith recently asked the Supreme Court to look at how judgments against people convicted of sex offences against children could be strengthened.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people?
Adam Gopnik | The New Yorker | January 30, 2012
A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.
That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.
For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact 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. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.
A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.
That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.
For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact 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. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Judge Williams steps down
Ira Glass | This Amercian Life | 20 December 2011
Judge Amanda Williams, who was the subject of our episode "Very Tough Love" has announced that she'll resign from the bench as of January 2nd. Because she's stepping down, ethics charges brought against her by the state's Judicial Qualifications Commission will be dropped.
Earlier this month, the Commission added two charges to the original 12 counts it filed in November. One of those counts accused Judge Williams of allowing her lawyer in the case, John Ossick, to represent litigants in cases she was still presiding over from the bench. The other accused her of putting a man into drug court even though there were no drug charges against him, because he was the nephew of attorney Jim Bishop. When a drug court staffer questioned the decision, according to the charges, Judge Williams replied "Jim Bishop has been there for me for years and years and years. He has never asked me for anything, ever, in the entire time I have been on the bench, to use my power in any case to do anything for anybody and he's asked me to do this. ... And it's that damn simple." She also said, according to the filing: "It's called being a Bishop. And I don't want to have any more conversations about it. I know I'm doing the wrong thing, "
Jim Bishop has denied asking for any favors from Judge Williams.
Judge Williams will be stepping down after 21 years on the bench. In a consent order, she agreed not to seek other judicial offices.
The JQC's jurisdiction is limited to removing judges from the bench. Judge Williams can still face criminal charges for some of the JQC's allegations.
Here's the AP story about Williams' resignation.
Judge Amanda Williams, who was the subject of our episode "Very Tough Love" has announced that she'll resign from the bench as of January 2nd. Because she's stepping down, ethics charges brought against her by the state's Judicial Qualifications Commission will be dropped.
Earlier this month, the Commission added two charges to the original 12 counts it filed in November. One of those counts accused Judge Williams of allowing her lawyer in the case, John Ossick, to represent litigants in cases she was still presiding over from the bench. The other accused her of putting a man into drug court even though there were no drug charges against him, because he was the nephew of attorney Jim Bishop. When a drug court staffer questioned the decision, according to the charges, Judge Williams replied "Jim Bishop has been there for me for years and years and years. He has never asked me for anything, ever, in the entire time I have been on the bench, to use my power in any case to do anything for anybody and he's asked me to do this. ... And it's that damn simple." She also said, according to the filing: "It's called being a Bishop. And I don't want to have any more conversations about it. I know I'm doing the wrong thing, "
Jim Bishop has denied asking for any favors from Judge Williams.
Judge Williams will be stepping down after 21 years on the bench. In a consent order, she agreed not to seek other judicial offices.
The JQC's jurisdiction is limited to removing judges from the bench. Judge Williams can still face criminal charges for some of the JQC's allegations.
Here's the AP story about Williams' resignation.
Link to the original podcast of "Very Tough Love"
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Interrupting Violence With The Message 'Don't Shoot'
NPR Fresh Air | November 1, 2011
Listen to the Interview [31 min 14 sec]
Don't Shoot One Man, A Street Fellowship, And The End of Violence in Inner-City America
by David M. Kennedy
In 1985, David M. Kennedy visited Nickerson Gardens, a public housing complex in south-central Los Angeles. It was the beginning of the crack epidemic, and Nickerson Gardens was located in what was then one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America.
"It was like watching time-lapse photography of the end of the world," he says. "There were drug crews on the corner, there were crack monsters and heroin addicts wandering around. ... It was fantastically, almost-impossibly-to-take-in awful."
Kennedy, a self-taught criminologist, had a visceral reaction to Nickerson Gardens. In his memoir Don't Shoot, he writes that he thought: "This is not OK. People should not have to live like this. This is wrong. Somebody needs to do something."
Kennedy has devoted his career to reducing gang and drug-related inner-city violence. He started going to drug markets all over the United States, met with police officials and attorney generals, and developed a program — first piloted in Boston — that dramatically reduced youth homicide rates by as much as 66 percent. That program, nicknamed the "Boston Miracle," has been implemented in more than 70 cities nationwide.
Today, Kennedy directs the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, but he still regularly goes out into the field. The drug world he works in now, he says, is a little better than the one in which he worked in 1985 — but not by much.
"Still, it's almost inconceivably awful in almost all of its dimensions," he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "And no one likes to say this stuff out loud, because it's impolitic, but the facts are the facts. You get this kind of drug activity and violence only in historically distressed, minority neighborhoods. And it is far worse in poor, distressed African-American neighborhoods."
Those neighborhoods are also more likely to be deadly for African-American men — and they're getting worse, says Kennedy, citing grim statistics: Between 2000 and 2007, the gun homicide rate for black men between the ages of 14-17 increased by 40 percent. The rate for men over the age of 25 increased by 27 percent. In some neighborhoods, 1 in 200 black men are murdered every year.
"This is where the worst open-air drug markets are all concentrated," he says. "And quite naturally, law enforcement pays an awful lot of attention to those neighborhoods. ... And the shorthand that you get from cops when you look at these communities is that they look at you and say, 'There is no community left.' "
But there are plenty of law-abiding residents in these neighborhoods that have been overtaken by drugs, says Kennedy. They outnumber the gang members and drug dealers by significant percentages.
Listen to the Interview [31 min 14 sec]
Don't Shoot One Man, A Street Fellowship, And The End of Violence in Inner-City America
by David M. Kennedy
In 1985, David M. Kennedy visited Nickerson Gardens, a public housing complex in south-central Los Angeles. It was the beginning of the crack epidemic, and Nickerson Gardens was located in what was then one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America.
"It was like watching time-lapse photography of the end of the world," he says. "There were drug crews on the corner, there were crack monsters and heroin addicts wandering around. ... It was fantastically, almost-impossibly-to-take-in awful."
Kennedy, a self-taught criminologist, had a visceral reaction to Nickerson Gardens. In his memoir Don't Shoot, he writes that he thought: "This is not OK. People should not have to live like this. This is wrong. Somebody needs to do something."
Kennedy has devoted his career to reducing gang and drug-related inner-city violence. He started going to drug markets all over the United States, met with police officials and attorney generals, and developed a program — first piloted in Boston — that dramatically reduced youth homicide rates by as much as 66 percent. That program, nicknamed the "Boston Miracle," has been implemented in more than 70 cities nationwide.
Today, Kennedy directs the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, but he still regularly goes out into the field. The drug world he works in now, he says, is a little better than the one in which he worked in 1985 — but not by much.
"Still, it's almost inconceivably awful in almost all of its dimensions," he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "And no one likes to say this stuff out loud, because it's impolitic, but the facts are the facts. You get this kind of drug activity and violence only in historically distressed, minority neighborhoods. And it is far worse in poor, distressed African-American neighborhoods."
Those neighborhoods are also more likely to be deadly for African-American men — and they're getting worse, says Kennedy, citing grim statistics: Between 2000 and 2007, the gun homicide rate for black men between the ages of 14-17 increased by 40 percent. The rate for men over the age of 25 increased by 27 percent. In some neighborhoods, 1 in 200 black men are murdered every year.
"This is where the worst open-air drug markets are all concentrated," he says. "And quite naturally, law enforcement pays an awful lot of attention to those neighborhoods. ... And the shorthand that you get from cops when you look at these communities is that they look at you and say, 'There is no community left.' "
But there are plenty of law-abiding residents in these neighborhoods that have been overtaken by drugs, says Kennedy. They outnumber the gang members and drug dealers by significant percentages.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Mexican and Colombian drug lords look to make a killing on our suburban streets
Stephen Lunn | The Australian | 24 September 2011
A KILOGRAM of cocaine bought wholesale in Colombia will set a drug dealer back $US2438 ($2446). In Mexico it will cost $US12,000; across the border in the US, $US32,000.
In Australia a kilo of cocaine wholesales for $US191,000. As Australian Crime Commission boss John Lawler says, the return on investment for illegally importing cocaine is extraordinary, particularly given a new class of user is emerging here.
"We're seeing a marked change in the market for cocaine from those typical of its use in the 80s and 90s, the well-educated middle class to lower socioeconomic status users who are more likely to be injecting cocaine," Lawler says.
He believes Mexican and Colombian crime gangs, which to date haven't pushed too deeply into Australia because of the lack of a local network, will be looking to cash in on the higher prices given the increase in demand in recent years.
"There is increasing collaboration between organised criminals involved in large-scale drug supply, Chinese with Mexican with outlaw motorcycle gangs," he says. "There is no concern about ethnic purity in these drug gangs; it's all about making the most money in the shortest possible time.
"Here in Australia there are already signs of increased Mexican infiltration, and if they get more of a foothold here, then watch out."
Earlier this month a shipment of ride-on lawnmowers from Brazil was used as cover in an unsuccessful attempt to smuggle 271kg of cocaine, with an estimated street value of $200 million, into Australia.
A growing domestic cocaine market is just one of several trends that have emerged since the turn of the century, trends that will help authorities develop strategies for drug prevention in coming years. Some of the trends tell a positive story, experts say, with use of the legal drugs in particular, cigarettes and alcohol, in serious decline.
A KILOGRAM of cocaine bought wholesale in Colombia will set a drug dealer back $US2438 ($2446). In Mexico it will cost $US12,000; across the border in the US, $US32,000.
In Australia a kilo of cocaine wholesales for $US191,000. As Australian Crime Commission boss John Lawler says, the return on investment for illegally importing cocaine is extraordinary, particularly given a new class of user is emerging here.
"We're seeing a marked change in the market for cocaine from those typical of its use in the 80s and 90s, the well-educated middle class to lower socioeconomic status users who are more likely to be injecting cocaine," Lawler says.
He believes Mexican and Colombian crime gangs, which to date haven't pushed too deeply into Australia because of the lack of a local network, will be looking to cash in on the higher prices given the increase in demand in recent years.
"There is increasing collaboration between organised criminals involved in large-scale drug supply, Chinese with Mexican with outlaw motorcycle gangs," he says. "There is no concern about ethnic purity in these drug gangs; it's all about making the most money in the shortest possible time.
"Here in Australia there are already signs of increased Mexican infiltration, and if they get more of a foothold here, then watch out."
Earlier this month a shipment of ride-on lawnmowers from Brazil was used as cover in an unsuccessful attempt to smuggle 271kg of cocaine, with an estimated street value of $200 million, into Australia.
A growing domestic cocaine market is just one of several trends that have emerged since the turn of the century, trends that will help authorities develop strategies for drug prevention in coming years. Some of the trends tell a positive story, experts say, with use of the legal drugs in particular, cigarettes and alcohol, in serious decline.
Score, Chop, Snort: Sydney's cocaine blizzard
Joel Meares | SMH | 26 October 2011
Once the choice of inner-city hipsters and the city’s wealthy elite, cocaine is now almost as easy to buy in Parramatta and Penrith as it is in Paddington. Joel Meares looks at the blizzard enveloping Sydney and the price users are paying – to both their bank balance and their health – for their indulgence.
Mike* called them “freaky Fridays”, those regular ends to a busy week when he and his mate would “get on it” at work.
His friend might roll in at nine, twitchy after a big night and still armed with a healthy bag of cocaine, and the pair would set to work chopping it up, setting it out and sucking it up their noses.
They’d do their job, and do it well, and pause for a cheeky beer at lunch to calm the buzz.
When work finished, it was almost always back to the pub and on to a coke-fuelled bender that wouldn’t end until Mike’s head hit the pillow on Sunday night.
Such a blitz is pretty standard stuff at the pointy end of town, where the cogs of power and money that keep the city running thrive on little dashes of white powder. But 27-year-old Mike is not a suit; he’s a car detailer.
His pillow does not rest on a bed in Elizabeth Bay but in a modest home near Liverpool. An occasional cocaine user, Mike says the drug helps him work. “You’re there rubbing down, you’re working hard labour. You have some coke and if it’s good, you’re boosted for at least an hour. You’re charging.”
In a frank conversation about his habits, Mike says he buys his coke from friends, his nose is his best quality tester — “If it stinks, it’s going to give you a good buzz” — and that he prefers to sniff his stash at home. “It’s pretty dirty when you have to do it in a bathroom,” he says. Not even at Ivy? “Ugh,” he grunts, after a long, sober Monday at work. “Too many heroes.”
When rumours of coke dealer Richard Buttrose’s “little black book” emerged after his arrest in early 2009, it wasn’t the likes of Mike who had the press all a-twitter.
Headlines homed in on whispers of a “well-known fashion designer”, an MP and the usual lawyers, bankers and entertainers often linked with the glamour drug; the same set that eastern suburbs-based Buttrose nodded to when he told a court that among his “circle of friends” taking cocaine “was much like having a glass of wine”.
Use of cocaine up 55 per cent
But as the city’s coke lust has grown — with use in NSW climbing steadily since 2003 and jumping 55 per cent between 2008 and 2010 — cocaine has become everybody’s drug. Like our cockroaches, the drug is everywhere, if mostly unseen, as much at home in Buttrose’s blue Benz as in the paint-flecked pocket of the bloke detailing your car. And the consequences of this ubiquity – on our bodies and our borders – are just starting to be seen.
There’s certainly plenty to go around. The most objective measures of use — the number of cocaine overdoses and arrests for possession — are rising.
The past few years have seen more overdoses than ever in NSW and in 2010 there were 688 records of possession compared with 549 the year before and just 182 back in 2000. All this is happening as the use of other “party drugs”, such as methamphetamine and ecstasy, declines.
“In the beginning, I was willing to believe it might have been increased law enforcement but more and more data [is] coming to suggest that there is an increase in consumption,” Don Weatherburn, the director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, said last year.
Nick Bingham, head of the NSW Police drug squad, says these numbers don’t take into account the many users who fly under the radar.
“There is a hidden and more affluent group that you just don’t see, we won’t come into contact with, and therefore we’re not detecting,” he says. “They do it in the privacy of their own home and though we can’t count them, we’re sure that their numbers are significant.”
Once the choice of inner-city hipsters and the city’s wealthy elite, cocaine is now almost as easy to buy in Parramatta and Penrith as it is in Paddington. Joel Meares looks at the blizzard enveloping Sydney and the price users are paying – to both their bank balance and their health – for their indulgence.
Mike* called them “freaky Fridays”, those regular ends to a busy week when he and his mate would “get on it” at work.
His friend might roll in at nine, twitchy after a big night and still armed with a healthy bag of cocaine, and the pair would set to work chopping it up, setting it out and sucking it up their noses.
They’d do their job, and do it well, and pause for a cheeky beer at lunch to calm the buzz.
When work finished, it was almost always back to the pub and on to a coke-fuelled bender that wouldn’t end until Mike’s head hit the pillow on Sunday night.
Such a blitz is pretty standard stuff at the pointy end of town, where the cogs of power and money that keep the city running thrive on little dashes of white powder. But 27-year-old Mike is not a suit; he’s a car detailer.
His pillow does not rest on a bed in Elizabeth Bay but in a modest home near Liverpool. An occasional cocaine user, Mike says the drug helps him work. “You’re there rubbing down, you’re working hard labour. You have some coke and if it’s good, you’re boosted for at least an hour. You’re charging.”
In a frank conversation about his habits, Mike says he buys his coke from friends, his nose is his best quality tester — “If it stinks, it’s going to give you a good buzz” — and that he prefers to sniff his stash at home. “It’s pretty dirty when you have to do it in a bathroom,” he says. Not even at Ivy? “Ugh,” he grunts, after a long, sober Monday at work. “Too many heroes.”
When rumours of coke dealer Richard Buttrose’s “little black book” emerged after his arrest in early 2009, it wasn’t the likes of Mike who had the press all a-twitter.
Headlines homed in on whispers of a “well-known fashion designer”, an MP and the usual lawyers, bankers and entertainers often linked with the glamour drug; the same set that eastern suburbs-based Buttrose nodded to when he told a court that among his “circle of friends” taking cocaine “was much like having a glass of wine”.
Use of cocaine up 55 per cent
But as the city’s coke lust has grown — with use in NSW climbing steadily since 2003 and jumping 55 per cent between 2008 and 2010 — cocaine has become everybody’s drug. Like our cockroaches, the drug is everywhere, if mostly unseen, as much at home in Buttrose’s blue Benz as in the paint-flecked pocket of the bloke detailing your car. And the consequences of this ubiquity – on our bodies and our borders – are just starting to be seen.
There’s certainly plenty to go around. The most objective measures of use — the number of cocaine overdoses and arrests for possession — are rising.
The past few years have seen more overdoses than ever in NSW and in 2010 there were 688 records of possession compared with 549 the year before and just 182 back in 2000. All this is happening as the use of other “party drugs”, such as methamphetamine and ecstasy, declines.
“In the beginning, I was willing to believe it might have been increased law enforcement but more and more data [is] coming to suggest that there is an increase in consumption,” Don Weatherburn, the director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, said last year.
Nick Bingham, head of the NSW Police drug squad, says these numbers don’t take into account the many users who fly under the radar.
“There is a hidden and more affluent group that you just don’t see, we won’t come into contact with, and therefore we’re not detecting,” he says. “They do it in the privacy of their own home and though we can’t count them, we’re sure that their numbers are significant.”
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Study backs substance abuse services
Ashley Hall | ABC The World Today | 20 October 2011
Listen to audio here
ELEANOR HALL: Some of the world's leading drug and alcohol researchers are calling on governments to carefully rethink their policy responses in light of new research. Eight scientific papers published today, have smashed some myths and confirmed others on what drives the behaviour of drug users - particularly during an economic downturn.
The researchers say this provides sound evidence on which to base government responses, as Ashley Hall reports.
ASHLEY HALL: Since the global financial crisis hit in late 2007, governments worldwide have been under pressure to balance their books. Many of them have taken the axe to programs that support people with drug and alcohol problems. But at what cost?
Rosalie Liccardo Pacula is the co-director of the Rand Corporation's drug research centre. She's been reviewing eight new studies into the effect of an economic downturn on drug and alcohol consumption, and on the services designed to help with substance abuse problems. And she's found some long held myths simply don't stack up.
ROSALIE LICCARDO PACULA: The myth regarding the impact of recession leading to higher binge drinking hasn't been supported by the economic research.
ASHLEY HALL: Although the research did find more people than usual drink small amounts of alcohol during a downturn. But that pattern for alcohol doesn't apply to drug use.
ROSALIE LICCARDO PACULA: It's a population that's far more marginalised in the general population so surveys which are used generally to reflect or to understand what’s happening in general with alcohol consumption or national statistics represent the whole spectrum of society.
In the case of illicit drugs, those surveys, the same surveys don't always represent the key targeted marginalised population that is indicative of hardcore drug use.
ASHLEY HALL: So what does the broader economic circumstance mean for that population - is there enough data available to make some strong conclusions about that?
ROSALIE LICCARDO PACULA: There's a couple of interesting findings but we are definitely in the preliminary stages of understanding the data. We just haven't invested the amount of time that has been invested in alcohol research.
This international drug policy is the first composite group of papers that's focused specifically on this question and as such it's opened a lot of interesting ideas in the sense that the research from both the US and Australia showed that periods of unemployment as experienced in the past not the current recession, but previous recessions, are actually associated with increased cannabis use but it's focused among the youth population.
ASHLEY HALL: Rosalie Liccardo Pacula says it's all to do with the relative cost of the drugs compared to the income the user might have, which makes a policy focus on youth unemployment all the more important.
Especially in places like the US, where fewer than half of all young people have a job, and in Ireland, where the youth unemployment rate is more than 27 per cent.
ROSALIE LICCARDO PACULA: Youth are also a lot more likely to report selling drugs illegally. So there's this question because youth unemployment is high relative to adult unemployment and gets worse during periods recession, the attractiveness of income from the black market becomes harder to resist.
ASHLEY HALL: Of course another way to tackle that problem is to do away with the black market by decriminalising drug use, the way Portugal did a decade ago.
The Portugese drug czar, Joao Goulão, says that led to a dramatic decrease in drug use by young people, and in HIV infections among drug users. But he fears those gains will be reversed as the government's austerity measures bite.
JOAO GOULÃO: In our culture, what we fear is alcohol consumption, the increase of alcohol consumption. Problematic, the alcohol consumption. But also illicit drugs and the return of the public enemy number one, which is heroin.
ASHLEY HALL: Looking at drug and alcohol policy through the prism of economics is unusual. But Rosalie Liccardo Pacula says it's a useful tool.
ROSALIE LICCARDO PACULA: Yes there is economic mechanisms that do work in changing behaviour but no, they're not the only mechanism. They are important to consider but they are not, clearly not, homogeneous across all segments of society.
ASHLEY HALL: Although the research was based on smaller downturns than the current global economic malaise. So she says what happens next is anyone's guess.
ROSALIE LICCARDO PACULA: Clearly, long-term downturns of the intensity of what we're seeing right now could have a very different effect. Other mechanisms will come into play and the economic mechanisms may not dominate.
ASHLEY HALL: The research papers were launched in London overnight as part of a special issue of the International Journal of Drug Policy.
ELEANOR HALL: Ashley Hall reporting.
Listen to audio here
ELEANOR HALL: Some of the world's leading drug and alcohol researchers are calling on governments to carefully rethink their policy responses in light of new research. Eight scientific papers published today, have smashed some myths and confirmed others on what drives the behaviour of drug users - particularly during an economic downturn.
The researchers say this provides sound evidence on which to base government responses, as Ashley Hall reports.
ASHLEY HALL: Since the global financial crisis hit in late 2007, governments worldwide have been under pressure to balance their books. Many of them have taken the axe to programs that support people with drug and alcohol problems. But at what cost?
Rosalie Liccardo Pacula is the co-director of the Rand Corporation's drug research centre. She's been reviewing eight new studies into the effect of an economic downturn on drug and alcohol consumption, and on the services designed to help with substance abuse problems. And she's found some long held myths simply don't stack up.
ROSALIE LICCARDO PACULA: The myth regarding the impact of recession leading to higher binge drinking hasn't been supported by the economic research.
ASHLEY HALL: Although the research did find more people than usual drink small amounts of alcohol during a downturn. But that pattern for alcohol doesn't apply to drug use.
ROSALIE LICCARDO PACULA: It's a population that's far more marginalised in the general population so surveys which are used generally to reflect or to understand what’s happening in general with alcohol consumption or national statistics represent the whole spectrum of society.
In the case of illicit drugs, those surveys, the same surveys don't always represent the key targeted marginalised population that is indicative of hardcore drug use.
ASHLEY HALL: So what does the broader economic circumstance mean for that population - is there enough data available to make some strong conclusions about that?
ROSALIE LICCARDO PACULA: There's a couple of interesting findings but we are definitely in the preliminary stages of understanding the data. We just haven't invested the amount of time that has been invested in alcohol research.
This international drug policy is the first composite group of papers that's focused specifically on this question and as such it's opened a lot of interesting ideas in the sense that the research from both the US and Australia showed that periods of unemployment as experienced in the past not the current recession, but previous recessions, are actually associated with increased cannabis use but it's focused among the youth population.
ASHLEY HALL: Rosalie Liccardo Pacula says it's all to do with the relative cost of the drugs compared to the income the user might have, which makes a policy focus on youth unemployment all the more important.
Especially in places like the US, where fewer than half of all young people have a job, and in Ireland, where the youth unemployment rate is more than 27 per cent.
ROSALIE LICCARDO PACULA: Youth are also a lot more likely to report selling drugs illegally. So there's this question because youth unemployment is high relative to adult unemployment and gets worse during periods recession, the attractiveness of income from the black market becomes harder to resist.
ASHLEY HALL: Of course another way to tackle that problem is to do away with the black market by decriminalising drug use, the way Portugal did a decade ago.
The Portugese drug czar, Joao Goulão, says that led to a dramatic decrease in drug use by young people, and in HIV infections among drug users. But he fears those gains will be reversed as the government's austerity measures bite.
JOAO GOULÃO: In our culture, what we fear is alcohol consumption, the increase of alcohol consumption. Problematic, the alcohol consumption. But also illicit drugs and the return of the public enemy number one, which is heroin.
ASHLEY HALL: Looking at drug and alcohol policy through the prism of economics is unusual. But Rosalie Liccardo Pacula says it's a useful tool.
ROSALIE LICCARDO PACULA: Yes there is economic mechanisms that do work in changing behaviour but no, they're not the only mechanism. They are important to consider but they are not, clearly not, homogeneous across all segments of society.
ASHLEY HALL: Although the research was based on smaller downturns than the current global economic malaise. So she says what happens next is anyone's guess.
ROSALIE LICCARDO PACULA: Clearly, long-term downturns of the intensity of what we're seeing right now could have a very different effect. Other mechanisms will come into play and the economic mechanisms may not dominate.
ASHLEY HALL: The research papers were launched in London overnight as part of a special issue of the International Journal of Drug Policy.
ELEANOR HALL: Ashley Hall reporting.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Steve Jobs and drug policy
Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com | 9 October 2011
(updated below)
It’s fascinating to juxtapose America’s reverence for Steve Jobs’ accomplishments and its draconian drug policy with this, from the New York Times‘ obituary of Jobs:
In short, the deceit at the heart of America’s barbaric drug policy — that these substances are such unadulterated evils that adults should be put in cages for voluntarily using them — is more glaring than ever. In light of his comments about LSD, it’s rather difficult to reconcile America’s adoration for Steve Jobs with its ongoing obsession with prosecuting and imprisoning millions of citizens (mostly poor and minorities) for doing what Jobs, Obama, George W. Bush, Michael Phelps and millions of others have done. Obviously, most of these banned substances — like alcohol, gambling, sex, junk food consumption, prescription drug use and a litany of other legal activities — can create harm to the individual and to others when abused (though America’s solution for drug users — prison — also creates rather substantial harm to the drug user and to others, including their spouses, parents and children: at least as much harm as, and usually substantially more than, the banned drugs themselves). But no rational person can doubt that these substances can also be used responsibly and constructively; just study Steve Jobs’ life if you doubt that.
Jobs’ praise for his LSD use is what I kept returning to as I read about the Obama DOJ’s heinous new policy to use the full force of criminal prosecutions against medical marijuana dispensaries in California. In October, 2009, I enthusiastically praised Eric Holder and the DOJ for appearing to fulfill Obama’s campaign promise by refraining from prosecuting medical marijuana dispensaries in compliance with state law (a “rare instance of unadulterated good news from Washington,” I gushed). As I wrote:
Progressives love to point out the hypocrisy of social conservatives who righteously rail against (and demand legal sanction for) the very same sexually sinful behavior in which they enthusiastically engage — and rightly so. But what about a society that continues to imprison millions of human beings for using substances that vast numbers of people in the nation have secretly used and enjoyed, or which empowers people with the Oval Office, or reveres people like Steve Jobs, who have done the same? The DOJ claims dispensaries are now masking non-medical marijuana sales, leading to this question: even leaving aside the rather significant (and shameful) fact that drug laws are enforced with overwhelming disproportionality against racial minorites, what possible justification is there for putting someone in a cage for using a substance they choose to use without any evidence that they’ve harmed anyone else or even risked harm to anyone else?
All of this becomes even more incomprehensible when one considers the never-ending preaching about the need for “austerity,” which means: depriving poor and middle class citizens of services and financial security. In this environment, how can it possibly be justified to expend substantial sums of money investigating, arresting, prosecuting and then imprisoning large numbers of people for doing nothing more than consuming marijuana or selling it in states where it is legal to sell it to other consenting adults? That makes about as much sense as deploying a State Department army of 16,000 for a permanent presence in Iraq at the same time political and financial elites plot cuts to Social Security and Medicare. I genuinely don’t understand why a policy that single-handedly sustains America’s status as World’s Largest Jailer — and that consigns huge numbers of minorities and America’s poor to prison and permanent criminal status for no good reason, in the process breaking up families at astonishing rates (to say nothing of the inexorable erosion of civil liberties) — isn’t a higher priority for progressives.
But just like the senseless and monumentally wasteful Endless military War, America’s Drug War feeds the pockets of a powerful private industry: the growing privatized prison industry, which needs more and more prisoners for profits, gets many from drug convictions, and thus vehemently opposes and lobbies against any reform to the nation’s drug laws as well as reform of harsh criminal sentencing. That, combined with self-righteous, deeply hypocritical anti-drug moralizing and complete obliviousness to evidence, has ensured not only that the Drug War and its prison obsession endures, but that it remains outside the scope of what can even be discussed in mainstream political circles. And as the Obama DOJ’s newly intensified attacks on marijuana demonstrate, the problem is, in many respects, getting worse, even as most of the world moves toward a much more restrained and health-based (rather than crime-based) approach to dealing with drug usage.
* * * * *
In 2009, I produced a study on the overwhelming success of drug decriminalization in Portugal, published by the CATO Institute. That study has been widely cited and discussed in numerous places, including receiving acritical response from the White House Drug Control Policy Office. I’m now working on an update to that report which I will present at this excellent Conference on Ending the Drug War, to take place on November 15, in Washington D.C., featuring former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former Mexican Foreign Affairs Minister Jorge Castañeda, the Speaker of the Uruguayan House of Deputies Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou and several others. The Conference is open to the public and tickets can be obtained at the above link.
UPDATE: In The Los Angeles Times today, a former Deputy Chief of the L.A.P.D. details how drug prohibition “has cost our country more than $1 trillion in cash and much more in immeasurable social harm”; “the damage that came from the prohibition of alcohol pales in comparison to the harm wrought by drug prohibition“; and “that ending today’s prohibition on drugs — starting with marijuana — would do more to hurt the [drug] cartels than any level of law enforcement skill or dedication ever can.” In sum:
Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald.
(updated below)
It’s fascinating to juxtapose America’s reverence for Steve Jobs’ accomplishments and its draconian drug policy with this, from the New York Times‘ obituary of Jobs:
[Jobs] told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand.Unlike many people who have enjoyed success, Jobs is not saying that he was able to succeed despite his illegal drug use; he’s saying his success is in part — in substantial part — because of those illegal drugs (he added that Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once”). These quotes (first published by a New York Times reporter) have been around for some time but have been only rarely discussed in the recent hagiographies of Jobs: a notable omission given that he himself praised those experiences as an integral part of his identity and one of the most important things he ever did. A surprisingly good Time Magazine article elaborates on this Jobs-LSD connection further:
The paradoxes of love have perhaps never been clearer than in our relationships with Apple products — the warm, fleshy desire we feel for such cold, hard, glassy objects. But Jobs knew how to inspire material lust. He knew that consumers want something that not only sparkles and awes, but also feels accessible, easy to use, an object with which we want to merge and to feel one and the same. . . .
Not coincidentally, that’s how people describe the experience of taking psychedelic drugs. It feels profoundly artificial yet deeply real, both high-tech and earthy-crunchy, human and mystically divine — in a word, transcendent. Jobs had this experience. . . . As attested by the nearly spiritual devotion so many consumers have to Jobs’ creations, the former Apple chief (and indeed many other top technology pioneers) appeared to have found enduring inspiration in LSD. Research shows that the psychedelic experience is, in fact, long lasting: a new study published last week found that people who took magic mushrooms (psilocybin) had long-term personality changes, becoming more open, more curious, more intellectually engaged and more creative. These personality shifts persisted more than a year after taking the drugs.America’s harsh prohibitionist drug policies are grounded in the premise that the prohibited substances have little or no redeeming value and cannot be used without life-destroying consequences. Yet the evidence of its falsity is undeniable. Here is one of the most admired men in America, its greatest contemporary industrialist, hailing one of the most scorned of these substances as integral to his success and intellectual and personal growth. The current President commendably acknowledged cocaine and marijuana use while there is evidence suggesting the prior President also used those substances. One of America’s most accomplished athletes was caught using marijuana at the peak of his athletic achievements. And millions upon millions of American adults have consumed some or many of those criminally prohibited substances, and themselves will say (like Jobs) that they had important and constructive experiences with those drugs or know someone who did.
In short, the deceit at the heart of America’s barbaric drug policy — that these substances are such unadulterated evils that adults should be put in cages for voluntarily using them — is more glaring than ever. In light of his comments about LSD, it’s rather difficult to reconcile America’s adoration for Steve Jobs with its ongoing obsession with prosecuting and imprisoning millions of citizens (mostly poor and minorities) for doing what Jobs, Obama, George W. Bush, Michael Phelps and millions of others have done. Obviously, most of these banned substances — like alcohol, gambling, sex, junk food consumption, prescription drug use and a litany of other legal activities — can create harm to the individual and to others when abused (though America’s solution for drug users — prison — also creates rather substantial harm to the drug user and to others, including their spouses, parents and children: at least as much harm as, and usually substantially more than, the banned drugs themselves). But no rational person can doubt that these substances can also be used responsibly and constructively; just study Steve Jobs’ life if you doubt that.
Jobs’ praise for his LSD use is what I kept returning to as I read about the Obama DOJ’s heinous new policy to use the full force of criminal prosecutions against medical marijuana dispensaries in California. In October, 2009, I enthusiastically praised Eric Holder and the DOJ for appearing to fulfill Obama’s campaign promise by refraining from prosecuting medical marijuana dispensaries in compliance with state law (a “rare instance of unadulterated good news from Washington,” I gushed). As I wrote:
Criminalizing cancer and AIDS patients for using a substance that is (a) prescribed by their doctors and (b) legal under the laws of their state has always been abominable. The Obama administration deserves major credit not only for ceasing this practice, but for memorializing it formally in writing.Yet now, U.S. Attorneys in California will expend substantial law enforcement resources to persecute medical marijuana dispensaries that sell to consenting adults even though those transactions have been legalized by the voters of California and 16 other states (to see what a complete reversal this is of everything Obama and Holder previously said on this subject, see here).
Progressives love to point out the hypocrisy of social conservatives who righteously rail against (and demand legal sanction for) the very same sexually sinful behavior in which they enthusiastically engage — and rightly so. But what about a society that continues to imprison millions of human beings for using substances that vast numbers of people in the nation have secretly used and enjoyed, or which empowers people with the Oval Office, or reveres people like Steve Jobs, who have done the same? The DOJ claims dispensaries are now masking non-medical marijuana sales, leading to this question: even leaving aside the rather significant (and shameful) fact that drug laws are enforced with overwhelming disproportionality against racial minorites, what possible justification is there for putting someone in a cage for using a substance they choose to use without any evidence that they’ve harmed anyone else or even risked harm to anyone else?
All of this becomes even more incomprehensible when one considers the never-ending preaching about the need for “austerity,” which means: depriving poor and middle class citizens of services and financial security. In this environment, how can it possibly be justified to expend substantial sums of money investigating, arresting, prosecuting and then imprisoning large numbers of people for doing nothing more than consuming marijuana or selling it in states where it is legal to sell it to other consenting adults? That makes about as much sense as deploying a State Department army of 16,000 for a permanent presence in Iraq at the same time political and financial elites plot cuts to Social Security and Medicare. I genuinely don’t understand why a policy that single-handedly sustains America’s status as World’s Largest Jailer — and that consigns huge numbers of minorities and America’s poor to prison and permanent criminal status for no good reason, in the process breaking up families at astonishing rates (to say nothing of the inexorable erosion of civil liberties) — isn’t a higher priority for progressives.
But just like the senseless and monumentally wasteful Endless military War, America’s Drug War feeds the pockets of a powerful private industry: the growing privatized prison industry, which needs more and more prisoners for profits, gets many from drug convictions, and thus vehemently opposes and lobbies against any reform to the nation’s drug laws as well as reform of harsh criminal sentencing. That, combined with self-righteous, deeply hypocritical anti-drug moralizing and complete obliviousness to evidence, has ensured not only that the Drug War and its prison obsession endures, but that it remains outside the scope of what can even be discussed in mainstream political circles. And as the Obama DOJ’s newly intensified attacks on marijuana demonstrate, the problem is, in many respects, getting worse, even as most of the world moves toward a much more restrained and health-based (rather than crime-based) approach to dealing with drug usage.
* * * * *
In 2009, I produced a study on the overwhelming success of drug decriminalization in Portugal, published by the CATO Institute. That study has been widely cited and discussed in numerous places, including receiving acritical response from the White House Drug Control Policy Office. I’m now working on an update to that report which I will present at this excellent Conference on Ending the Drug War, to take place on November 15, in Washington D.C., featuring former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former Mexican Foreign Affairs Minister Jorge Castañeda, the Speaker of the Uruguayan House of Deputies Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou and several others. The Conference is open to the public and tickets can be obtained at the above link.
UPDATE: In The Los Angeles Times today, a former Deputy Chief of the L.A.P.D. details how drug prohibition “has cost our country more than $1 trillion in cash and much more in immeasurable social harm”; “the damage that came from the prohibition of alcohol pales in comparison to the harm wrought by drug prohibition“; and “that ending today’s prohibition on drugs — starting with marijuana — would do more to hurt the [drug] cartels than any level of law enforcement skill or dedication ever can.” In sum:
There’s no doubt that the violence, the growth of cartels and gangs, the overpopulation of our prisons and the squandering of our police resources would not occur if we eliminated illegal drug profits and implemented a non-criminal approach to regulating drugs. We did this once with alcohol, and there’s no reason we can’t do it with other drugs today.There may be no reason we can’t do it, but there are plenty of reasons we don’t do it, beginning with the large number of government and private factions that benefit in countless ways from this ongoing war.
Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Interview with Dr Alex Wodak
Lidija Bujanovic | Right Now | 1 September 2011
On Friday 22 July 2011, Monash University’s Castan Centre for Human Rights Law Annual Conference was held in Melbourne. Dr Alex Wodak AM, President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation and Director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney addressed the topic “A Human Rights Approach to Drugs”. Following the speech Right Now’s Lidija Bujanovic spoke with Dr Wodak about drug policy, the failure of current drug policy and the need for reform both internationally and in Australia.
RN: What drove you to form your views on drugs policy and law reform?
AW: The start for me was when I was working in St Vincent’s Hospital in the early 1980s and we realized that about 3500 gay men had become infected with HIV within 10 minutes walk from the hospital. Here lived the largest concentration of gay men in the country and the same neighborhood has the largest population of injecting drug users in the country. I figured that if 3500 gay men had become infected, some of those men would be injecting drugs, some of those who injected drugs would share needles with non-gay men and women. And some of these non-gay injecting drug users who had HIV would then have sex with non-drug injecting men and women. So I could just see this cascade of HIV going out to the wider population. How could it be stopped?
The first needle syringe programme was started in Amsterdam. I knew we needed something like that here, that my arguments were very compelling and that the arguments against a needle syringe programme were very weak. Yet I couldn’t get permission to start a needle exchange programme. I wrote 13 submissions to the NSW Department of Health seeking permission to start a pilot and each submission was either rejected or ignored.
I went through purgatory: I knew I was right. Yet my colleagues and I ended up having to commit civil disobedience to make it happen. Here was a real need to prevent a health, social and economic catastrophe and I wanted to do something which clearly was logical.
I then started reading about the history of drug prohibition and realized the evidence of it working didn’t exist. My ideas crystallized over time through a long process of research. I started that needle exchange on 12 November 1986 and trying to convince people we must reform our drug laws is now a big part of my work. When I first started saying what I now say, 25 years ago, I was vilified for it. I’m still criticized for supporting drug law reform but most people these days tend to agree.
So how do you react when government claims its policy is evidence based?
Well, I challenge it, tooth and nail, line by line. I point out what they’re saying is nonsense and what they say privately is different to what they say publically. It’s interesting when you look at the kinds of comments made in private or in confidential documents that somehow emerge into public view, compared to comments made during election campaigns. It is a very difficult issue for politicians to openly and honestly deliberate about.
I point out what [the government is] saying is nonsense and what they say privately is different to what they say publically.
Does the current system hinder the realization of certain human rights? In your presentation you mention freedom of association, to health care, equality rights…
The list goes on and on and I’m not really well placed to give an analysis of the exact infringements of rights due to drug laws. Whenever I looked as a layman at the different definitions I felt that most of the criteria used to define human were significantly breached. These are major and significant breaches. For the first time ever in 2009 or 2010 there was international consideration of the human rights of injecting drug users in the UN.
On Friday 22 July 2011, Monash University’s Castan Centre for Human Rights Law Annual Conference was held in Melbourne. Dr Alex Wodak AM, President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation and Director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney addressed the topic “A Human Rights Approach to Drugs”. Following the speech Right Now’s Lidija Bujanovic spoke with Dr Wodak about drug policy, the failure of current drug policy and the need for reform both internationally and in Australia.
RN: What drove you to form your views on drugs policy and law reform?
AW: The start for me was when I was working in St Vincent’s Hospital in the early 1980s and we realized that about 3500 gay men had become infected with HIV within 10 minutes walk from the hospital. Here lived the largest concentration of gay men in the country and the same neighborhood has the largest population of injecting drug users in the country. I figured that if 3500 gay men had become infected, some of those men would be injecting drugs, some of those who injected drugs would share needles with non-gay men and women. And some of these non-gay injecting drug users who had HIV would then have sex with non-drug injecting men and women. So I could just see this cascade of HIV going out to the wider population. How could it be stopped?
The first needle syringe programme was started in Amsterdam. I knew we needed something like that here, that my arguments were very compelling and that the arguments against a needle syringe programme were very weak. Yet I couldn’t get permission to start a needle exchange programme. I wrote 13 submissions to the NSW Department of Health seeking permission to start a pilot and each submission was either rejected or ignored.
I went through purgatory: I knew I was right. Yet my colleagues and I ended up having to commit civil disobedience to make it happen. Here was a real need to prevent a health, social and economic catastrophe and I wanted to do something which clearly was logical.
I then started reading about the history of drug prohibition and realized the evidence of it working didn’t exist. My ideas crystallized over time through a long process of research. I started that needle exchange on 12 November 1986 and trying to convince people we must reform our drug laws is now a big part of my work. When I first started saying what I now say, 25 years ago, I was vilified for it. I’m still criticized for supporting drug law reform but most people these days tend to agree.
So how do you react when government claims its policy is evidence based?
Well, I challenge it, tooth and nail, line by line. I point out what they’re saying is nonsense and what they say privately is different to what they say publically. It’s interesting when you look at the kinds of comments made in private or in confidential documents that somehow emerge into public view, compared to comments made during election campaigns. It is a very difficult issue for politicians to openly and honestly deliberate about.
I point out what [the government is] saying is nonsense and what they say privately is different to what they say publically.
Does the current system hinder the realization of certain human rights? In your presentation you mention freedom of association, to health care, equality rights…
The list goes on and on and I’m not really well placed to give an analysis of the exact infringements of rights due to drug laws. Whenever I looked as a layman at the different definitions I felt that most of the criteria used to define human were significantly breached. These are major and significant breaches. For the first time ever in 2009 or 2010 there was international consideration of the human rights of injecting drug users in the UN.
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