Ten years ago U.S. District Court Judge Ronald R. Lagueux reluctantly sentenced Denise Dallaire to 15 years in prison for selling crack cocaine; one of the more invidious initiatives in the war on drugs — mandatory sentencing guidelines — left him no choice. The New York Times reports that last month Judge Lagueux had an opportunity to make the last five years of that sentence disappear and jumped on it.

“I felt bound by those mandatory guidelines and I hated them,” Judge Lagueux (pronounced la-GUEUR) said from the bench as Ms. Dallaire sobbed quietly and the room froze with amazement. “I’m sorry I sent you away for 15 years.”

Not only did Judge Lagueux apologize, but he had helped create this re-sentencing opportunity by pointing out a technical flaw in his own original sentence. (Read the article to understand the entire travel of the case; there’s more than one hero in this story.)

Mandatory sentencing was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005 (two years after Dallaire’s 15-year sentence was imposed) and Congress has twice reduced sentences for inmates involved with crack cocaine, but thousands still languish in prisons hoping for their own day of redemption.

For decades judges across the country were forced to look countless defendants in the eye and impose tragically excessive sentences. That has got to take a toll; these judges must also be considered victims of our failed, flawed war on drugs.

Kudos to Judge Lagueux, and let’s hope this story starts repeating itself across the nation. Here was his final thought.

“This was a miscarriage of justice,” Judge Lagueux said in his living room in East Providence one recent afternoon. “It stayed in my mind to an unusual degree and I thought justice should be done.”

That’s what President Obama promised in his State of the Union address. And what exactly will these boots be doing? According to a recent CBS News report we’ll be needing lots of new boots to help investigate all the old boots. (See “Over the line: Fighting corruption on the border”.)

More than 40,000 U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents guard the nation’s borders, and the vast majority are honest. But drug cartels are working harder than ever to infiltrate their ranks.

“They’re using Cold War-style tactics: Money, sex, drugs to convince officers to work with them, and to help get their products and their people across the border,” said Special Agent Terry Reed, part of the FBI’s ever-expanding operation working to root out corruption.

Reed said that in 2007 there were only six border corruption task forces. Today there are 24.

Twenty-four federal law enforcement task forces devoted entirely to investigating our own Customs and Border Patrol agents. As to that fence, people are just driving right over it . . . except for these particular geniuses who didn’t get the geometry quite right. Fitting metaphor for our war on drugs.

For more information go to Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) for whom I am a speaker.

(2.26) Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance will be the featured speaker at “Drug Policy Reform in the Americas: A Remarkable Turn of Events” Tuesday at the Watson Institute.

The multi-decade drug war consensus is crumbling.  Latin American presidents are talking openly about decriminalization and even legal regulation of illegal drugs.  Voters in Colorado and Washington State recently approved historic ballot measures to legally regulate marijuana like alcohol.  The rapid pace of reform is catching everyone by surprise.  Why is this happening? And where is this going?

Noon, Tuesday, February 26, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street

Oh Patrick, how can we miss you if you won’t go away?  Former Rhode Island Rep Patrick Kennedy has come out against the legalization of marijuana. From the Reuters report;

Kennedy, who was married for the first time in 2011, said he worries his 8-month-old son might be predisposed to drug abuse – due to a kind of genetic “trigger” – and that is part of his fight against legalization.

He also said he wants to “reduce the environmental factors that pull that trigger,” such as marijuana use being commonly accepted.

No doubt the Kennedys have an unfortunate genetic load, but Patrick admits his problems were with alcohol and Oxycontin, both legal drugs. So Patrick, you are going to need a more nuanced message for your son than “Don’t use illegal drugs.” and I’d start the conversation early. And by the way, he will definitely be bumping into marijuana and noticing that it is already “commonly accepted” — legal or not — or will you be home schooling him from kindergarten through college?

One more thing Patrick, how many years in prison did you spend as a result of your run-ins with airport security, the Coast Guard, and the Capitol police? Or were you given other options?

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin is asking for an increase of 8% in his budget for the next fiscal year. Governor Chafee wants him to find 7% in cuts.  Providence Journal staff writer Tracy Breton reports on the staffing woes at the A.G.’s office in today’s paper, “Stretched to the limit, prosecutors plead case.” Kilmartin insists he needs to increase his staff by eight, including four additional prosecutors, and provides convincing statistics and analysis to support that claim.

Breton follows Terence M. Coyne, a prosecutor in the A.G.’s Domestic Violence/Sexual Assault Unit, as he goes through a typical day — “He doesn’t always work 12-hour days, but Coyne and the other lawyers in his unit have 80 to 100 cases assigned to them at any one time.” — that is an insane caseload.

Nowhere in this article does anyone suggest taking a huge step back and reevaluating whether our current policy of arresting and charging an endless stream of nonviolent drug offenders might be contributing to this problem, and to what end. (It is noted that since Kilmartin took office, the Drug Court has been increased to four days a week.) Over the past 40 years the United States has spent well over $1 trillion and made 39 million arrests of nonviolent drug users.

Perhaps, instead of more prosecutors, we need fewer crimes.

(Beth Comery is a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) an international organization of criminal justice professionals who bear personal witness to the wasteful futility and harms of our current drug policies. LEAP membership includes many former/retired judges and prosecutors.)

And why not? Let’s get on the gravy train. British Bank HSBC has apparently established that money-laundering for Mexican drug cartels (and terrorists) will now be considered a civil offense. According to the New York Times,

Federal and state authorities secured a record $1.92 billion payment from HSBC on Tuesday to settle charges that the banking giant transferred billions of dollars for nations under United States sanctions, enabled Mexican drug cartels to launder tainted money through the American financial system, and worked closely with Saudi Arabian banks linked to terrorist organizations.

So we are in the loop now. Our government is in the revenue stream and we seem to be on our way to taxing the drug economy without actually legalizing it. (If $1.92 billion sounds like a lot, it has been estimated that over the years in question HSBC handled hundreds of trillions of dollars; so this is just chump change, the cost of doing business.) The New York Times editorial board points out that we have yet to correct the basic problem with our banking system in “Too Big to Indict.”

In today’s ProJo, Bob Kerr reminds us that the lower-level drug dealers who can not significantly help the U.S. government balance its budget can count on some hard time in prison for engaging in what HSBC refers to as “mistakes.”

(More at the Providence Journal (12.11.12) on how drug money corrupted the Providence Police Force, “Drug Unit in Recovery.” It’s getting difficult to even keep up with this.)

In a noble but misguided effort to assist troubled neighborhoods, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras is going with the Whack-a-Mole approach to our war on drugs; why he thinks this method will succeed is not known. Over the last several decades, as a result of various combined law enforcement efforts, cartels have been moving their smuggling activities in and out of the Caribbean, over to Mexico, and up and down Central and South America. The cocaine industry, which started in Peru and Bolivia, moved to Colombia; then pressure on the Colombian cocaine cartels pushed the business back into Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. We learned last summer that military offensives in Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras (where DEA agents participated in lethal drug operations with a Honduran police squad, oops) have now squeezed drug traffickers into Costa Rica (HuffPo: “Costa Rica Drug Trafficking Threatens Country’s National Parks”). In other words, success is just around the corner . . . always. Perhaps the solution lies in Africa; let’s spend money there. The New York Times reported in July,

. . . the United States has begun training an elite unit of counternarcotics police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American cartels that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe.

Sadly, this same short-sighted approach is playing itself out right here in Providence, where the Mayor and the City Council have revamped a city ordinance — City Solicitor Jeffrey Padwa is calling it “the drug house ordinance” — with an unbelievably cumbersome enforcement regime that promises to clog up the court system with hearings and appeals, and more appeals (ProJo 11.30.12). The American Civil Liberties Union correctly suggests

. . . that the city would stigmatize alleged nuisance properties, trample on the civil rights of landlords and tenants and punish them for activities beyond their control. City officials’ actions, they complained in part, will push landlords into illegal discrimination against tenants or potential tenants.

We can move the users and dealers around and around, but it will never put a dent in the drug market. Let’s hope that Mayor Taveras and the other elected officials will someday soon take a step back and look at the big picture and come up with a more enlightened approach to this problem. Landlords? Really? (For more information go to Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) an organization of which I am a member.)

In light of recent progress being made on the national front regarding marijuana reform, this documentary about the failed war on drugs could hardly have come at a better time. Let’s broaden the discussion and keep the momentum going on this topic.

As America remains embroiled in conflict overseas, a less visible war is taking place at home, costing countless lives, destroying families, and inflicting untold damage on future generations of Americans. Over the last forty years, the War on Drugs has cost $1 trillion, accounted for more than 45 million arrests, made America the world’s largest jailer, and damaged poor communities at home and abroad. Yet for all that, drugs are cheaper, purer, and more available today than ever before. Filmed in more than twenty states, “The House I Live In”, captures heart-wrenching stories from individuals at all levels of America’s War on Drugs.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Eugene Jarecki.

Held over through Wednesday, November 21, Cable Car Cinema, 204 South Main Street, 272.3970

Attitudes are changing across the country regarding marijuana reform. A piece at HuffPo —  “Colorado, Washington Pot Legalization Deals Drug War Major Blow” — has a great quote from my LEAP cohort Tom Angell.

“To put this into historical context, there is no historical context,” said Tom Angell, spokesperson for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “It’s the first time any state has ever voted to legalize marijuana — and two of them did it.”

Tom is also the founder of Marijuana Majority a website where people of note (a real mixed bag of pols, celebs, religious leaders, etc.) have thrown in with the movement. It’s real fun to scroll through.

Mr. Angell helped local reformers immensely with the testimony at the Rhode Island state house that finally  resulted in the new marijuana decriminalization legislation (takes effect next April 1st). When facing the committees, we all cited recent polls to the legislators that we felt indicated there would be no political price to pay for backing marijuana reform. Were we right?

Answer after the jump.

more »

Look familiar? Haven’t we been down this road before?

The headline in today’s Providence Journal reads “Record heroin seizure in R.I.” as if this were a big win in our war on drugs, when in fact it means just the opposite. If we were winning this war after 40 years the hauls would be getting smaller and smaller, and much harder to find. But once again Rhode Island law enforcement officials, U.S. Attorney Peter Neronha, the Mayor, and the DEA have held a news conference to announce the “largest heroin seizure in Rhode Island history.”  But the ProJo article notes right at the top,

It was more than three times, by weight, the size of the largest previous heroin seizure in Rhode Island, in 2004. Investigators then grabbed 13.2 pounds, also in Providence.

And the largest cocaine bust in Rhode Island took place just last year when authorities found 143 pounds of the stuff in a North Kingstown storage unit. By what strange calculus could this possibly be called progress?

The Jim Taricani report on Channel 10 identifies the two men arrested as “high-level drug dealers.” But how high-level can they be if it only took two weeks for police to get from the initial street purchase to the big stash. There may be a lot more where that came from. And these two guys will soon be replaced, although we may have to endure another violent turf war for that to happen.

This in no way diminishes the dangerous nature of this police work and the sincerity of the officers involved. But many members of the law enforcement community have come to believe that the war on drugs is an expensive failure that is tearing apart families and neighborhoods. Let’s try treating drug addiction as the public health problem it is. For more information please go to Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization of which I am a member.

Coming to the Cable Car in November “The House I Live In” may be the film that will finally get this topic traction with the general public. Directed and written by Eugene Jarecki, and winner of the Grand Jury documentary prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, this film takes on the failed war on drugs. (Disclosure: I am a speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) an organization of former law enforcement officers, judges, sheriffs, DEA agents, and others, who believe that drug abuse is bad, but the war on drugs is worse.)

The movie is being widely praised, from Forbes “The Most Important Drug War film You’ll Ever See,” to the New York Times where Manohla Dargis calls it “urgently persuasive” adding,

Mr. Jarecki smoothly folds these images in with dizzying statistics and a cavalcade of talking-head interviews with a range of sympathetic experts, including Michelle Alexander, the author of “The New Jim Crow.” He also checks in with a psychologist, as well as with historians, legal professionals, prisoner advocates and inmates. Among the most important collaborators he taps for explanatory duties is the journalist turned pop-culture god David Simon, the creator of “The Wire.” Receiving what seems to be more screen time than any interviewee, Mr. Simon makes at once a fine, friendly narrative guide; a restrained voice of moral outrage; and, as the movie builds to its sweeping conclusions, a conspicuous stand-in for Mr. Jarecki.

LEAP executive director Neill Franklin and board chair Jack Cole had the opportunity to attend advance screenings of the film, and both believe it to be an extraordinary exposé on the damage done by drug prohibition and urge everyone to see it. (And yes, that is a Providence Police car in the trailer, so apparently we are in this.)

In its discussion of the recent elections in Mexico and why the National Action Party may have been voted out, the Providence Journal editorial board has recognized our role in the Mexican drug violence and suggests a possible alternative to our government’s current drug policy.

Though voting the PRI back into power was not what we would have recommended, we can understand the frustration of Mexicans caught up in horrific cartel violence and a sick economy. America can help. Our apparent bottomless demand for drugs should be sated — and treated — by means other than enriching the drug lords in Mexico. Legalizing or at least decriminalizing drugs in this country would be a serious step toward putting the cartels out of business. The unappetizing alternative would be for Mr. Nieto to reach an understanding with the drug cartels to maintain some sort of peace, though the president-elect has said he won’t cut deals with criminals.

To get a clear idea of what we are up against read Patrick Radden Keefe’s exposé of the Mexican drug cartels in ‘Cocaine Incorporated’ (NYT 6.15.12). The amounts of money involved are so staggering that, in addition to container ships and a fleet of 747’s, the Sinaloa cartel is also transporting drugs in $1-million submarines . . . which are considered disposable . . . just the cost of doing business. And the continued building of border fences seems a little silly in light of the 100+ tunnels that have been discovered in the last thirty years.

At this point, ending the failed war on drugs has to be seriously considered; we may no longer have a choice. For more information go to Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).

Illustration by Steve McNiven for ‘Cocaine Incorporated.’ NYT.

Law professor Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, a book about the invidious effects of our decades-old war on drugs and our exploding (and disproportionately black) prison population. The paperback has been on The New York Times nonfiction* bestseller list for many weeks. In March they wrote,

“The New Jim Crow” arrives at a receptive moment, when declining crime rates and exploding prison budgets have made conservatives and liberals alike more ready to question the wisdom of keeping nearly 1 in 100 Americans behind bars. But Professor Alexander, who teaches at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University, said in an interview that the more provocative claims of her book did not come easily to her. When she first encountered the “New Jim Crow” metaphor on a protest sign in Oakland, Calif., a decade ago, she was a civil rights lawyer with an impeccable résumé — Stanford Law School, a Supreme Court clerkship — and was leery of embracing arguments that might be considered, as she put it, “crazy.”

And the discussion on ending the war on drugs will sound less and less crazy the more we talk about it. (I am a speaker for LEAP — Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.) If you can’t get behind this as a social justice issue then at least consider what a colossal waste of your tax dollars the prosecution and incarceration of non-violent drug offenders has become. The prison industry has lobbyists in Washington making sure everything stays nice and illegal. Make sure your representatives know that a more enlightened approach to drug abuse is needed. (Watch Michelle Alexander’s recent interview on The Colbert Report.)

Perfect Mother’s Day gift!

*The integrity of this nonfiction list is somewhat compromised by the inclusion at number one of Heaven is for Real: A Boy’s Encounter with Jesus and the Angels.

As a speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) I have testified at the state house in favor of liberalizing our marijuana laws, and I have written in this space before advocating an end to the “War on Drugs” altogether. So I keep an eye on related events and news from around the country. But the current campaign by President Obama and the Justice Department against the California marijuana dispensaries — culminating in the recent raid by IRS and DEA officers on Oaksterdam University in Oakland — have left me baffled. Turns out I’m in good company as the assembled talking heads on last week’s Real Time with Bill Maher were also unable to discern the President’s thinking or possible motivation in all this. Never mind that Obama is going back on his promise not to use federal resources for this purpose, but from a political point of view this is insanity. Why is he going so far out of his way to alienate his political base? It’s just baffling.

To learn more about what drug legalization might look like, check out this article from Forbes Magazine, “Ten Years After Decriminalization, Drug Abuse Down By Half in Portugal.”

Drug abuse is bad, the War on Drugs is worse.

. . . while Rome burns. I am shocked, shocked to discover that the recent President’s video question contest was merely a cynical ploy by Google and YouTube to increase traffic to their sites. Apparently Google pulled the top vote-getting question (posted below) regarding marijuana legalization. Here is a portion of a LEAP statement posted last night,

Today YouTube ignored a question advocating marijuana legalization from a retired LAPD deputy chief of police that won twice as many votes as any other video question in the White House’s “Your Interview with the President” competition on the Google-owned site. They did, however, find the time to get the president on record about late night snacking, singing and dancing, celebrating wedding anniversaries and playing tennis.

The reaction from retired LAPD Chief Stephen Downing, the LEAP board member who posted the question, was reported at Reuters,

“It’s worse than silly that YouTube and Google would waste the time of the president and of the American people discussing things like midnight snacks and playing tennis when there is a much more pressing question on the minds of the people who took the time to participate in voting on submissions. A majority of Americans now support legalizing marijuana to de-fund cartels and gangs, lower incarceration and arrest rates and save scarce public resources, all while generating new much-needed tax revenue. The time to discuss this issue is now. We’re tired of this serious public policy crisis being pushed aside or laughed off.”

Anybody on Google Plus should be leaving today, right now. Why would anyone want to be a part of something this lame? Weddings? Tennis? It’s embarrassing.

Medical marijuana advocates rejoice! Maybe Santa can bring a little Christmas Kush to Rhode Islanders in pain and distress. Governor Chafee has joined with Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire in asking federal authorities to reclassify marijuana. The reaction over at NORML,

NORML began the entire legal and political debate about ‘medical marijuana’ in 1972 when it launched a 24-year re-scheduling effort, that is still laboring on all these years.

Therefore to finally witness governors so frustrated with the absurdly mis-scheduled cannabis plant as being dangerous, addictive and possessing no medical utility (wrongly grouped with heroin and LSD) that they are reaching out to the president to fix this clear injustice and warping of science is a clear demonstration that the friction between the federal government’s recalcitrance on accepting medical cannabis (or for that matter ending Cannabis Prohibition in total) and state politicians who can no longer justify towing the fed’s ridiculous ban on physician-prescribed cannabis to sick, dying and sense-threatened medical patients is coming to a dramatic conclusion in a government showdown, one that may bode well for the larger Cannabis Prohibition reforms needed, festering just below the surface of the public’s mass acceptance of medical access to cannabis.

Marijuana — currently on Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act — is regarded as more dangerous than Schedule II drugs such as methamphetamine, oxycodone and cocaine. Make sense? The New York Times suggests that the move has “injected new political muscle into the long-running debate on the status of marijuana.” Muscle! Chafee! (Full disclosure: I am a LEAP speaker advocating an end of the war on drugs, all drugs.) Chafee and Gregoire hope to bypass congressional gridlock on this matter with an administrative decision.

Well done Governor Chafee. Stay the course.