Which amendment was it again that says you can talk about stuff and have opinions on things?

A former Mountlake Terrace police sergeant whose views supporting the decriminalization of marijuana led to his dismissal in 2005 has won his job back and an $815,000 settlement from the city and Snohomish County.
…
Wender had publicly challenged and criticized the department and its commanders over the years on a number of issues. He is affiliated with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a Massachusetts organization of police officers who oppose the current tactics used by police to fight drug crimes. Among its other members are former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper. [Seattle Times]

Wow, watching LEAP take the law-enforcement community by storm is a glorious thing to behold. It’s only going to get better.

The Supreme Court handed down yet another bad 4th Amendment ruling today. I've got a post over at Flex Your Rights explaining, as I often do, that the 4th Amendment isn't dead yet.

The Obama Transition Team's website at www.change.cov has started a "Citizen's Briefing Book", giving us one more chance to make it clear that Drug War Reform is an issue important to Americans.

Merely discussing alternatives to drug prohibition is enough to incite threats from state and federal legislators:

After hours of discussion and almost 40 speakers from the public signed up to give their two cents, City Council members near-unanimously said they supported the resolution upon which they voted last week, but were swayed by threats from the El Paso legislative delegation and U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes.
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The five Texas House members of the El Paso delegation and Reyes had sent letters to El Paso City Council claiming that the resolution would be used against the city's efforts to secure funding. [Newpapertree.com]

The council finally and reluctantly surrendered, even though all they’d ever done was endorse "an honest, open national debate on ending the prohibition of narcotics." It’s really an incredibly instructive moment in drug policy reform, as I can scarcely recall a moment in which our opponents have appeared so desperate and intimidated by the prospect of discussing changes in our drug policy.

They’ve attacked not only the legalization viewpoint, but our right to be heard. They’ve condemned the fundamental notion that there is a conversation to be had about whether our policies are working. And they’ve done so with righteous hostility, directly threatening to withhold funding from an entire city (from children?) in order to prevent our drug laws from facing scrutiny.

Really, you’ve got to wonder about the health of an idea that can only be defended through threats and distractions such as these. Drug prohibition has had plenty of time to prove itself. Having failed to do so, the drug war’s survival now depends on the ability of its adherents to silence criticism and obstruct dialogue preemptively. It’s an ugly thing to behold.

But let me be perfectly clear about this: I don’t believe for one second that this week’s events in El Paso are indicative of any barrier or threshold that we cannot cross. If our opponents think today’s council vote is a victory for drug prohibition, they are out of their minds. They look like idiots. This whole resolution was nothing before the mayor vetoed it, triggering a weeklong exhibit in the mindblowing intellectual cowardice that underscores opposition to reform at every turn.   

Telling us to shut up isn’t going to work, I promise.

Obama’s transition team responded to the second round of Change.gov questions on Friday, proving yet again that they’d sooner defeat the purpose of the site than actually discuss drug policy.

Last time, a question about marijuana legalization got the most votes from the public, resulting in a one sentence "no" response. This time, the questions were broken into categories, and this question came in first in the "national security" section:

"Our current war on drugs is failing America. Billions of dollars are spent on a losing campaign. Our prisons are overflowing with people that don't deserve to be there. What is the government going to do in an effort to fix this major problem?"

But it wasn’t answered. It was the only leading question to receive no acknowledgement, thus the national security category was ignored entirely. Obama’s team claimed that some leading questions were put aside to make room for new ones:

Since there were so many popular questions in so many categories, we tried to pull out some of them that had been addressed previously by the President-elect or Vice President-elect in order to focus the video portion on questions that haven’t been as specifically addressed during the Transition.

The questions that fall into this category appear at the bottom of the post, except when you scroll down, you find the marijuana question from the first round, but not the new drug war question that won in the second installment. It’s sort of a bait and switch, the idea being that by referencing the old marijuana question, we’ll forget that a totally different drug policy question won in the second round and Obama refused to touch it.

All of this is perfectly predictable, and I won’t meet with much success trying to make a controversy out of it. Still, it serves as yet another obnoxious reminder of the desperate avoidance of any meaningful discussion of our drug policy in mainstream politics.