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McClellan: Bush Partied So Much, He Couldn't Remember Whether He Tried Cocaine

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's new book is pissing off the Bush Administration for a dozen reasons, most of them irrelevant to this blog. This passage, however, ought to replace "I didn't inhale," as the most infamous pseudo-acknowledgement of drug use in presidential history:

McClellan tracks Bush's penchant for self-deception back to an overheard incident on the campaign trail in 1999 when the then-governor was dogged by reports of possible cocaine use in his younger days.

The book recounts an evening in a hotel suite "somewhere in the Midwest." Bush was on the phone with a supporter and motioned for McClellan to have a seat.

"'The media won't let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,' I heard Bush say. 'You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don't remember.'" [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]

I'm almost prepared to give Bush the benefit of the doubt on this, seeing as he was speaking off the record with a supporter. It's not a context in which one would be inclined to lie. Nor is "I don't remember" a particularly flattering portrayal of one's own drug history. Really, one begins to wonder what else Bush doesnât remember doing at these "wild parties." Let's all just pause for a moment to picture George W. Bush on acid. Yikes, nevermind.

Anyhow, in case you're wondering where I'm going with this, I'm not going to argue that you can do cocaine, party until you forget all about it, and then grow up to be just as smart and great as George Bush. A lot of people would find that argument unimpressive for a variety of reasons.

My point, rather, is that as we inevitably subject future presidential hopefuls to the usual and predictable inquisitions over their past drug use, we now have a new bottom line against which to compare their answers. From now on, all we should ask is that candidates for the job of president be able to accurately and confidently tell us what drugs they did in college. As long as you have some vague idea what you put in your body and why, you can pass the newly revised presidential drug use questionnaire.

Don't Snort the Pink Cocaine

The hysteria surrounding candy-flavored drugs continues to provide a full-scale model for the rank stupidity of our press and policy-makers:

Federal drug agents have seized cocaine in a variety of designer flavors and arrested three men in Modesto after a 10-month undercover investigation, authorities reported Monday.

The cocaine, in strawberry, lemon, coconut and cinnamon flavors, may be aimed at women and a younger, club-going clientele, said Gordon Taylor, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Sacramento. [Modesto Bee]

So cocaine that tastes like strawberries or cinnamon must be for the ladies? This is the sophisticated analysis you get when you call the DEA for insight on the latest drug scare. Strawberries = chicks. Genius.

Fortunately, the Modesto Bee at least concedes an important point I've been hammering since this whole candy-flavored drug scare emerged:

It costs about twice as much and is less potent, he said, but dealers bank on its novelty and taste to sell the product.

Senators Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Charles Grassley (R-IA) went so far as to introduce legislation to increase penalties for candy-flavored meth, claiming that these products target children. Yet, flavored drugs are more expensive and therefore less appealing to young people, who don't have any money. The flavoring also reduces potency considerably, making candy flavored meth and cocaine much safer than their unadulterated forms.

So for those of you with a sweet tooth in your nose, be forewarned: Candy-flavored drugs are weak and overpriced. If you're trying to get high on cocaine, you might wanna stick with the good old-fashioned bitter-tasting white-colored stuff. And if you're looking for a sugar fix, I recommend Hershey's Cookies & Creamâ¢ bars, which cost $1.39 and taste better than cocaine feels. And, finally, if you're trying to protect children, I recommend taxing and regulating drugs so we can better control who sells them, who buys them, and what their ingredients are.

Heading Down Mexico Way

On Friday, once this week's Chronicle has been put to bed, I hop in the pick-up and head for Mexico for a month or so of on-the-scene reporting on the drug war south of the border. If all goes according to plan, I'll be spending a week in Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Matamoros, the major Rio Grande Valley border towns on the Mexican side, where the Mexican government sent in the army a couple of weeks ago. After that, it's a week in Mexico City to talk to politicians, marijuana activists, academics, drug treatment workers, and others in the Mexican capital. Then, I'll head to the beaches of Oaxaca for a weekend, then up the Pacific Coast, stopping in the mountains above Acapulco to talk to poppy farmers, human rights observers, and whoever else I can find. A few hundred miles further north, in Sinaloa, I'll be trying to make contact with pot farmers, as well as seeing what the impact of the Sinaloa Cartel is on the ground in its home state. I will also, of course, be making a pilgrimage to the shrine of San Juan Malverde, patron saint of drug traffickers, on the outskirts of Culicacan. And then it's back toward Gringolandia, with a few days on the Tijuana side of the border, provided I have any money left by then. In the meantime, I'd like to share with you something that appeared last week but that got little attention. It's an analysis of drug situation in Mexico from Austin-based Strategic Forecasting, Inc, and it's pretty grim. Titled The Geopolitics of Dope, the analysis is a steadfastly realistic look at what drug warrior can hope to accomplish fighting the cartels. You should read the whole thing--it's very, very chewy--but here are the last few paragraphs:

The cartelâs supply chain is embedded in the huge legal bilateral trade between the United States and Mexico. Remember that Mexico exports $198 billion to the United States and â according to the Mexican Economy Ministry â $1.6 billion to Japan and $1.7 billion to China, its next biggest markets. Mexico is just behind Canada as a U.S. trading partner and is a huge market running both ways. Disrupting the drug trade cannot be done without disrupting this other trade. With that much trade going on, you are not going to find the drugs. It isnât going to happen. Police action, or action within each countryâs legal procedures and protections, will not succeed. The cartelsâ ability to evade, corrupt and absorb the losses is simply too great. Another solution is to allow easy access to the drug market for other producers, flooding the market, reducing the cost and eliminating the economic incentive and technical advantage of the cartel. That would mean legalizing drugs. That is simply not going to happen in the United States. It is a political impossibility. This leaves the option of treating the issue as a military rather than police action. That would mean attacking the cartels as if they were a military force rather than a criminal group. It would mean that procedural rules would not be in place, and that the cartels would be treated as an enemy army. Leaving aside the complexities of U.S.-Mexican relations, cartels flourish by being hard to distinguish from the general population. This strategy not only would turn the cartels into a guerrilla force, it would treat northern Mexico as hostile occupied territory. Donât even think of that possibility, absent a draft under which college-age Americans from upper-middle-class families would be sent to patrol Mexico â and be killed and wounded. The United States does not need a Gaza Strip on its southern border, so this wonât happen. The current efforts by the Mexican government might impede the various gangs, but they wonât break the cartel system. The supply chain along the border is simply too diffuse and too plastic. It shifts too easily under pressure. The border canât be sealed, and the level of economic activity shields smuggling too well. Farmers in Mexico canât be persuaded to stop growing illegal drugs for the same reason that Bolivians and Afghans canât. Market demand is too high and alternatives too bleak. The Mexican supply chain is too robust â and too profitable â to break easily. The likely course is a multigenerational pattern of instability along the border. More important, there will be a substantial transfer of wealth from the United States to Mexico in return for an intrinsically low-cost consumable product â drugs. This will be one of the sources of capital that will build the Mexican economy, which today is 14th largest in the world. The accumulation of drug money is and will continue finding its way into the Mexican economy, creating a pool of investment capital. The children and grandchildren of the Zetas will be running banks, running for president, building art museums and telling amusing anecdotes about how grandpa made his money running blow into Nuevo Laredo. It will also destabilize the U.S. Southwest while grandpa makes his pile. As is frequently the case, it is a problem for which there are no good solutions, or for which the solution is one without real support.

This is the situation the Bush administration wants to throw $1.4 billion at in the next couple of years. Maybe it and Congress should be reading Strategic Forecasting analyses, too.

The Drug Czar's Awesome Plan to Blame Hugo Chavez for Everything

Drug Czar John Walters went off the rails this week, suggesting that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was somehow involved in the drug trade. According to Walters, the best evidence of this is the lack of any evidence. Read it, it's hilarious:

"Where are the big seizures, where are the big arrests of individuals who are at least logistical coordinators? When it's being launched from controlled airports and seaports, where are the arrests of corrupt officials? At some point here, this is tantamount to collusion," Walters said in an interview. [Los Angeles Times]

Indeed, the Drug Czar is so confounded by the ongoing failure of international drug prohibition, he can only assume that entire nations are conspiring to undermine him.

The whole thing is just so crazy, The Los Angeles Times was forced to qualify his statements by pointing out that he couldnât back them up with facts (emphasis mine):

Walters said the volume of Colombian cocaine moving through Venezuela, believed to represent at least one-third of Colombia's production, continues to increase with no discernible effort by Chavez government to impede it. He provided no statistics to back up his assertion.

Awesome. I nominate this reporter for a Pulitzer. You could add that sentence to the end of every paragraph ever written about the wild nonsense that spews forth out of John Walters mouth like a broken water main.

As Pete Guither points out, Walters's bizarre assertions are probably an attempt to blame someone -- anyone he can find -â for this:

MIAMI -- U.S.-directed seizures and disruptions of cocaine shipments from Latin America dropped sharply in 2007 from the year before, reflecting in part a successful shift in tactics by drug traffickers to avoid detection at sea, senior American officials disclosed Monday in releasing new figures. [News Tribune]

Walters can blame Hugo Chavez as much as he wants. But the failure of international drug prohibition will never have anything to do with Venezuela's refusal to fight a futile drug war at the behest of bullying bureaucrats from Washington D.C. The drug war is failing because that is the only thing it knows how to do.

Journalism 101: Everything the Drug Czar Says is Wrong

Josh Burnett at NPR has a strong article debunking the absurd cocaine shortage rumor started by the Drug Czar's office. Burnett explains that increased cocaine prices are temporary and that the Drug Czar's claims of "unprecedented" progress are just false.

Burnett reached these conclusions through an increasingly rare journalism technique known as "research." Rather than mindlessly regurgitating the government's claims of drug war success, he called police chiefs in cities with supposed cocaine shortages and asked them if anything had changed. He also spoke with ONDCP veteran John Carnevale, who, despite his extensive drug warrior credentials, conceded that the real trend in cocaine prices is a downward spiral.

Of course, the inevitable consequence of researching the Drug Czar's ridiculous claims is that the Drug Czar will accuse you of bad research:

When asked about the conflicting information found by NPR, Drug Czar John Walters dismissed it. He said his information is drawn from nationwide data collected by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is based on undercover buys, wiretaps, informants, and local police reports.

"Now we can do it that way or we can do it where you call somebody somewhere and they say something else," Walters said. "That's not data. That's a guy."

It's cute how pissed he gets when someone starts fact-checking his outrageous statements. And it's just priceless to hear the master of argument-by-anecdote accuse someone else of missing the big picture.

The results of Burnett's investigation are inevitable anytime a reporter deliberately researches claims from the Drug Czar's office. The information disseminated by that organization is always false, usually to a dramatic extent, so subjecting them to even minimal scrutiny will reveal that they are wrong 100% of the time.

Reporters need to learn this. It must be understood that press releases from the Office of National Drug Control Policy are a true or false quiz and the correct answer is always "F." If you simply cut and paste their claims into a story you fail the test.

Plan Mexico: The Right Name for the Wrong Idea

Architects of a new plan to subsidize Mexico's brutal drug war with U.S. tax dollars are trying to avoid the name Plan Mexico. Obviously they don't want to invite the comparison to our disastrous Plan Colombia, even though a few desperate drug warriors are still calling it a success. The refusal to name anything after it might be the closest they'll come to admitting that Plan Colombia is widely â and justly â viewed as an utter failure.

As Pete Guither notes, journalists and bloggers alike have already named the program Plan Mexico. So while the details remain to be announced, the stigma of our previous and continuing failures in this area will inevitably haunt any effort to expand our destructive drug war diplomacy.

Although Plan Mexico will surely prioritize scorched-earth drug war demolition tactics, The New Republic notes the bizarre possibility that some funding will be directed towards drug prevention:

One element of that aid package is likely to be funding for drug-use prevention, according to Luis Astorga, a drug policy expert at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City. This is a strange new twist in the complex partnership between the U.S. and Mexico to fight drugs. And the U.S. isn't in much of a position to tell anyone how to prevent drug use.

Damn straight. Gosh, if we knew anything about drug prevention, these bloody wars over who gets to sell drugs to us wouldnât be such a mind-bending crisis in the first place. The irony is just staggering:

When the U.S. cracked down on domestic meth production early this decade, Mexican cartels adept in trafficking cocaine and marijuana jumped at the chance to supply a new product.
â¦

The drug has traveled south, and is now available in every major city.

"Mexico's market is not big, but it has grown, mostly in urban zones," said Jorge Chabat, a crime and security expert at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico City. "Availability has certainly contributed to consumption now that meth is produced in Mexico."

Let me get this straight. The U.S. banned pseudo-ephedrine-based cold medicines, and domestic meth production declined. Mexican cartels stepped in to fill the void, resulting in increased availability and use of meth in Mexico. Now the U.S. is poised to give drug prevention funding to Mexico due in part to a meth problem that didnât even exist before we essentially exported our meth manufacturing problem to that country. Wow. Just wow.

At the end of the day, it is and always has been the massive drug consumption of U.S. citizens that fuels violence and instability throughout Mexico, Colombia, and beyond. We could spend every dollar we have bribing foreigners to stop selling us drugs and it wouldnât make a difference. We could hire every man woman and child in these countries to help stop us from getting high, and they would just laugh all the way to the bank.

Too many American drug users are already sending their paychecks to Mexico. It is sheer idiocy to suggest that we send our tax-dollars there as well.

What's a gram of cocaine go for where you live?

Drug czar John Walters is making noise this week about how a decline in cocaine availability is causing price increases. Walters always jumps on these price blips to tout the success of US eradication and interdiction policies...then the prices go down again. We will see what happens this time. In the meantime, I wonder what cocaine prices are in your neighborhood. I lived in Austin in the 1980s, and a gram of cocaine (usually obtained from a Nicaraguan college student...go figure) went for between $120 and $150. Just last night I was on the phone with folks in Austin, and they report that a gram can now be had for $40. Gee, maybe it's up from $35 last month; I don't know. But the long-term trend is undeniable: Down in price by about two-thirds since the '80s. What are cocaine prices like in your neighborhood? Historically and currently. Let's get us a little unscientific survey going.

ONDCP's "Cocaine Shortage" Announcement is Pure Fiction

This week, the drug czar's office has tricked several newspapers into reporting on a so-called "cocaine shortage":

EL PASO â White House drug czar John Walters said wholesale prices of cocaine have risen in more than a dozen major U.S. cities as supplies of the powerful drug have shrunk, including in high-volume markets like Los Angeles and New York. [AP]

The irony, of course, is that there's no such thing as a cocaine shortage. Really, cocaine is probably the last thing we'll ever run out of in America, and if you think otherwise, maybe it's because people aren't telling you how much cocaine they've got.

Fortunately, Associated Press at least had the commonsense to ask an actual expert about the supposed shortage:

Peter Reuter, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland who studies illicit drugs and organized crime, said prices of cocaine have long been declining and that brief price surges are not uncommon. He said gauging the future of the cocaine trade after just a few months is difficult.

"We see short term (price) increases that go on for three, or six months even," Reuter said. "They don't tend to be too long, and then the downward trend continues."

One could praise AP for including Reuter's comments, but I won't. If AP's Alicia Caldwell actually listened to what he said, she'd understand that the story isnât accurate enough to be worth writing. Moreover, Reuter's revealing analysis -- which renders the entire report meaningless â- is relegated to the bowels of the article. The fact that cocaine prices have continually gone down for decades is treated as an afterthought, a mere side note, in a story that otherwise regurgitates ONDCP's claims about the effectiveness of its own work.

Distinguished members of the press, I beg you once again: whenever the Office of National Drug Control Policy approaches you and offers to describe how well the drug war is going, just look around. Has anything changed? It shouldnât even be necessary to ask Peter Reuter if their claims make sense. The idea that we're experiencing a cocaine shortage is so plainly ridiculous, I don't see how anyone could report such a thing with a straight face.

I'm reminded of real journalist Ken Silverstein's recent comment about his colleagues in the press:

As a class, they honor politeness over honesty and believe that being "balanced" means giving the same weight to a lie as you give to the truth.

How true -- and depressing â that is.

Giuliani's Cocaine Connection

This post is a little more sympathetic than the title might seem to suggest. One of the big news stories today was the indictment of Rudy Giuliani's now-former South Carolina campaign chairman Thomas Ravenel, the state's now-suspended Treasurer, on federal cocaine distribution charges. Drug policy academic Mark Kleiman points out that Ravenel does not appear to have been a drug dealer:

The other guy indicted in the case seems to be the dealer. Ravenel seems to have been one of his customers, who bought cocaine in quantity to share with friends. Under federal law, there's no crime of selling drugs; the crime is "distribution," which includes giving the stuff away.

(Talking Points Memo, linking to Kleiman, observes that Ravenel would have been buying for "what was probably going to be a pretty big bash".) Ravenel should be considered innocent until proven guilty, of course, and Kleiman points out what I think is a pretty good reason why:

The most likely scenario here: The state cops nailed the dealer (he was already in custody on state charges when the indictment was handed up yesterday), and the dealer gave them a prominent customer in order to buy himself some consideration at sentencing time.

As a legalizer, I have to have some sympathy for anyone caught up in the drug war's headlights. Still, Ravenel was a political official at the highest levels in a state that has some real "tough on drugs" policies in place. Unless he was actively involved in working for serious drug policy reform -- and I'm not aware that he was -- and assuming the accusations made against him are accurate, there's a hypocrisy angle here. Furthermore, the candidate he was involved in trying to elect as president, Rudy Giuliani, is a drug warrior who increased arrests in New York when he was mayor, who tried to shut down methadone maintenance in the city, and who opposes needle exchange and medical marijuana. It's especially hypocritical for a drug user to chair a state campaign for a drug warrior trying to be president, who would presumably continue to be a drug warrior if elected president. Then again, maybe Ravenel intended to quietly lobby Giuliani to shift his views/policies on drugs. I tend to doubt it, but I don't know the guy so I can't say for sure. As for Giuliani, did he have no idea about his friend's (alleged) drug proclivities, or no one who could inform him about them? I've heard from a knowledgeable source that when Giuliani was the US Attorney in New York, the safest place to sell drugs was in front of City Hall. Bottom line: If you're a top-level state official, it's probably not a good idea to organize all-out (all night?) cocaine fests. But if you are in the habit of organizing cocaine fests, speak out against the war on drugs too, so at least people won't think you're a hypocrite if you get caught. Actually, speak out against the drug war in any case.

Bruce Willis Finally Figures it Out

Last year, Bruce Willis was advocating scorched-earth warfare against the cocaine trade:

"I'm talking also about going to Colombia and doing whatever it takes to end the cocaine trade. It's killing this country. It's killing all the countries that coke goes intoâ¦And I think that's a form of terrorism as well." [UGO]

Yikes! Fortunately, Bruce has been reading some books or something, because he's come all the way around on this:

Bruce Willis has hit out at America's war on drugs, insisting it would be more productive for politicians to tackle the social problems that lead people to take narcotics in the first place.
â¦

"We fight it the wrong way. The war on drugs is a joke." [Star Pulse News]

Maybe he could start Celebrities for Sensible Drug Policy. Of course, CSDP is already taken.

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