DEA

One of the stories we've reported on in Drug War Chronicle is the request of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst that one of its professors, Lyle Craker, be granted the necessary licenses to allow him to legally grow research grade marijuana for research on marijuana as a medicine. The DEA always says "there's no research supporting medical marijuana" and "it needs to go through the FDA like any other drug." Actually there is research supporting medical marijuana, quite a bit of it in fact. But the specific research that needs to be done to get marijuana through the remainder of the FDA process can only be done if the DEA allows researchers the legal right to have the marijuana around to do the research. And DEA usually says no. Not surprisingly, DEA has obstructed Craker's efforts, which led to litigation This week DEA administrative law judge Mary Ellen Bittner ruled that DEA should issue the licenses and allow UMass to proceed with its plans. The ruling is not binding, and DEA officials have the power to simply decide otherwise if they so choose. This is what happened in 1988 after Judge Francis Young issued an historic and oft-cited pro-medical marijuana ruling. We'll see what happens this time. Visit the web site of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies for more information and extensive background on this issue.

Dustin Costa, whose case we've discussed here and here, received a 13-year sentence in federal court today (sorry, no link).

We're told that the judge wasn't thrilled about the sentence. Unfortunately, even judges become helpless bystanders when the Justice Department uses federal law to target medical providers operating legally under California's Proposition 215.

Costa's prosecution signals a return to the Justice Department's controversial practice of lying to jurors and painting medical providers as common street dealers.

Are you watching this, Dennis Kucinich?

The Columbia Tribune reports on the ongoing challenges faced by North Dakota farmers seeking to grow industrial hemp. Though the state of North Dakota has passed legislation authorizing hemp cultivation, farmers must obtain approval from DEA, which isn't exactly fast-tracking this.

Monson plans to raise hemp on only 10 acres at first, a demonstration crop, but under federal regulations, the acreage still must be completely fenced and reported by GPS coordinates. All hemp sales also must be reported.

"That’s a per-acre cost of about $400, and that would be prohibitive," Monson said.

So basically the DEA hasn't decided for sure, but in case they do allow hemp cultivation, they've created roadblocks to make it unprofitable.

Here's ONDCP's Tom Riley explaining the logic of this:

Growers could hide pot plants in hemp fields, complicating agents’ efforts to find them, said Tom Riley, of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy.

"You have legitimate farmers who want to experiment with a new crop," Riley said. "But you have another group, very enthusiastic, who want to allow cultivation of hemp because they believe it will lead to a de facto legalization of marijuana.
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"The last thing law enforcement people need is for the cultivation of marijuana-looking plants to spread," he said. "Are we going to ask them to go through row by row, field by field, to distinguish between legal hemp and marijuana?"

After being humiliated in The New York Times, it's impressive that they still have the nerve to raise this backwards argument. Cross-pollination would decimate any commercial marijuana in proximity to a hemp field. You can't mix them, Tom Riley. Stop saying that. Seriously, stop.

For a period of time, I assumed that they were simply ignorant of the cross-pollination issue. Perhaps upon coming to understand it, they would endorse hemp cultivation, which more or less ensures the absence of commercial marijuana growing in its vicinity. But now that this issue has been exposed in The Times, it seems much more likely that they're willfully ignoring it and proceeding with their usual nonsense.

The question, therefore, is why? They have one argument against industrial hemp, and it makes absolutely no sense. It's been proven to be comically wrong, and they have no other anti-hemp talking points to fall back on. When legitimate farmers with no interest in the drug culture ask for permission to grow hemp as an agricultural commodity, why do ONDCP and DEA grasp in desperation for even the most pitiful justifications to oppose them?

The answer is that for decades they've arbitrarily denied American farmers the right to participate in a multi-billion dollar industry. They are drug warriors waging battle against economic activities over which they hold no constitutional authority. As with so many other colossal drug war errors, to stop now would be to acknowledge the childish stubbornness and rank incompetance that have motivated their actions from the beginning.

Just another thing we shouldn't even be arguing about. It's not even a goddamn drug.

It might be time for all you hippies to stop worrying and learn to love the War in Iraq. Via Time.com:

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which annually loses some 3% of its 5,000 agents to attrition, has a two-year hiring freeze because of budget cuts to U.S. programs. DEA bean counters say they would need an additional $12 million to maintain current agent levels. The DEA's overseas funding has increased, but overall, DEA chief financial officer Frank Kalder admits, "there will be less drug enforcement going on. There's no getting around that."

Ironically, the same foreign policies that have necessitated DEA cutbacks have also caused this:

The White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that opium production in Afghanistan, which not only provides 90% of the heroin consumed globally but also funds Taliban activities, rose 61% last year over 2005. Some 670 tons of heroin are expected to flood the market, and that should slash the street price of a kilo of Southwest Asian heroin, now about $90,000 in Los Angeles.

Roll up your sleeves, folks. It's about to get crazy up in here.

Seriously though, faithful readers, please stay away from the Afghani heroin. We're primarily a web-based organization and I've heard that stuff can make you sell your computer. We need you to respond to our action alerts, write LTE's, and hopefully donate when you can.

Instead of getting jacked up on junk from Jalalabad, let's celebrate the DEA's hiring freeze by sending them job applications.

Here's the Drug Czar's blog gloating over the DEA's raid of the Local Patient's Cooperative in Hayward, CA:

The DEA took down another illegal marijuana dispensary in California. The owners were selling pot for profit under the guise of "medicinal use." Police seized pot cookies and expensive cars. More here (with video).

Notice the careful language used here. We're told that this was an "illegal marijuana dispensary" that used medical use as a "guise" to make money. As dispensary raids have increased in recent months, DEA has claimed each time that they're targeting clubs that engage in recreational sales. Similarly, ONDCP's blog post clearly implies that LPC was uniquely criminal in its conduct.

In other words, DEA and now ONDCP are tacitly condoning dispensaries that only sell to patients!

The DEA has been found guilty of retaliating against an agent who exposed misconduct. Basically they committed a crime in order to send a message to their employees about not exposing their other crimes.

From MiamiHerald.com:

A federal jury in Miami found the Drug Enforcement Administration discriminated against Sandalio Gonzalez, the former second-in-command of the DEA's South Florida field office, by retaliating against him with a transfer to another job in Texas in 2001.

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For Gonzalez -- who stirred controversy in 2000 when he blew the whistle on a Miami drug bust in which 10 kilos of cocaine went missing -- the court triumph was sweet vindication. He had stood up for not only himself, but also other Hispanic and black DEA agents in the Miami field office over issues of discrimination, his lawyers said.

But wait…that name sounds familiar. Isn't Sandalio Gonzalez the same DEA agent who was forced into early retirement after exposing DOJ culpability in the "House of Death" murders in Mexico? Apparently yes.

So as I understand it, Gonzalez first blew the whistle in Miami when his colleagues stole 10 kilos of cocaine and tried to cover it up. He was then involuntarily transferred to Texas, where he blew the whistle when his colleagues allowed a government informant to commit multiple gruesome murders in Mexico. Having had about enough of him, the DEA again retaliated, forcing Gonzalez into early retirement.

One of the nice things about coming to Washington is more stimulating dinner discussions than I'm accustomed to out in the boondocks. Last night, I had the chance to have dinner with a couple very well-versed in both drug policy reform and mass protests agitating. As conversation turned to what can be done about the drug war, one of them suggested it was time to crank it up a bit, and he had a very concrete suggestion: a direction action protest to surround and shut down DEA headquarters in suburban Arlington, Virginia.

No, not the Colombian cartels and not the Mexican cartels. Last week, law enforcement officials in two different federal drug cases on different ends of the country used the word "cartel" to describe local drug trafficking organizations. I'm not aware of previous usages of the word to describe such domestic groups, and I have to wonder if we're not seeing the orchestrated emergence of new meme from the drug warriors.

Scott Burns, deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota's largest city, on Friday. The only apparent reason for his presence was to try to defeat the medical marijuana initiative on the November 7 ballot.

I am sure many of you recognize the name of Dr. Wm. Hurwitz. Dr. Hurwitz was a nationally known very prominent pain management physician. He was known for his very aggressive pain treatment and had patients from almost every state in the country. These were the patients that nobody else would take, they were too complicated, needed doses that were too high for other doctors. I was one of these patients and Dr. H saved my life. He is the most caring and compassionate dr I have ever known. In his younger years he served with Doctors Without Borders in Brazil. He was known never to turn away people who couldn't pay.