Executive Branch

According to the Associated Press, President Bush issued 16 pardons yesterday, including one sentence commutation. Six of them including the commutation were for drug offenses. (For those of you who are not familiar with this, a pardon can simply mean that an old offense is wiped off of one's record -- feels good, may help with employment and other matters, but the individual was already finished with any incarceration that was part of the sentence.) A commutation is when someone actually gets out early or finishes parole or probation early. According to the AP:

Bush also granted a commutation of sentence to Phillip Anthony Emmert of Washington, Iowa, whose case involved conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine. He was sentenced Dec. 23, 1992, to 262 months’ imprisonment (reduced on Feb. 21, 1996) and five years’ supervised release. Bush directed that Emmert’s sentence expire on this coming Jan. 20, but left the supervised release intact.

Please contact the White House to let them know that: 1) We're glad he's releasing Phillip Emmert; 2) One commutation is nowhere near good enough. The president should release more nonviolent drug offenders this year! Just a few of the more well known ones: Weldon Angelos, Clarence Aaron, Lawrence & Lamont Garrison.

Now it seems that one of the officers involved in the deadly "drug raid" in Atlanta last week previously lied about an incident in which he caused a head-on car crash. Yet the Atlanta police kept him on the force, and his "credibility" was good enough to get a no-knock warrant to break down someone's door. Also, the confidential informant is no longer confidential, somehow. But why? Read Radley Balko's analysis in The Agitator.

Spurred by the federal government's crackdown on prescription drug abuse, doctors around the country are resorting to "pain contracts" with patients in an attempt to protect themselves from charges they are Dr. Feelgoods. Such contracts typically require the patient to agree that "lost, stolen, or misplaced" drugs are not to be replaced and that the patient agree to be drug tested. Patients who refuse to sign such an agreement or who test positive for non-prescribed drugs--i.e. marijuana--are likely to be cut off.

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

JALALABAD, Afghanistan -- With profits from this spring's record opium crop fueling a broad Taliban offensive, Afghan authorities say they are considering a once unthinkable way to deal with the scourge: spraying poppy fields with herbicide.

I really dislike crossing international borders. I've been doing a lot of it lately in the past few years, particularly since my partner and I got a summer place outside Nelson, BC. Even when I was spending a few weeks or months in Nelson, I was often off to the US—for a meth conference in Salt Lake, the NORML annual conference in San Francisco, to score cheap cigarettes on the Indian reservation in Washington state—or crossing into the US to get to the nearest big time airport to fly off to more exotic locales.