Where is the crime? Where are the votes? Where are the ads?

Paul Krugman writes June 9 that Senator Obama's nomination indicates that America has changed enormously. In 1966 and 1968, fear about crime -- and "the associated fear that fair housing laws would let dangerous blacks move into white neighborhoods," says Krugman -- was a winning issue for the Republicans. Krugman adds, " I don’t think a politician today could get away with running the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad."

Krugman may be just too optimistic:
A conservative activist is attacking Obama as soft on crime, reports Richard B. Schmitt of the Los Angeles Times. Floyd Brown, the creator of the Willie Horton ad of 1988, has created exposeobama.com.

On June 9, the FBI released preliminary Uniform Crime Reports for 2007 that show violent crime was down 1.4 percent overall. But murder is up in small and mid-sized cities.

Some very disturbing research in Memphis, TN suggests that the strategy to free poor Blacks from the crime and dysfunction of housing projects is spreading crime to the formerly safe neighborhoods to which they move, according to reporting by Hannah Rosin in The Atlantic Monthly for July-August.

Ted Gest at Criminal Justice Journalists reports on the June 9 FBI release.

Violent, Property Crimes Down In 2007: FBI Preliminary Totals

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Reports of both violent and property crimes in the U.S. declined in 2007 from the previous year, the FBI said today. In a preliminary report, the bureau said the number of violent crimes declined by 1.4 percent from 2006, reversing two years of rising violent crime numbers. Property crimes were down 2.1 percent last year from the previous year. The largest declines were in vehicle theft, down 8.9 percent and in rape, down 4.3 percent and murder, down 2.7 percent, the Associated Press reports.

Murders were down in cities of more than 250,000, including a sharp 9.8 percent drop in cities of more than a million residents. Murders were up 3.7 percent in cities of 50,000 to 100,000, up 1.9 percent in cities of 100,000 to 250,000, and up 1.8 percent in cities under 10,000. Historically, murder trends began in the largest cities and moved over several years to smaller ones.

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Sphere: Related Content

Troop 1500: Girl Scouts Beyond Bars

Troop 1500: Girl Scouts Beyond Bars is an excellent documentary about women in prison and their daughters.

Once a month the troop drives to the Hilltop Unit, a women's prison about an hour from Austin, TX, where the girls get to spend the afternoon with their mothers, assisted by the troop leaders/social workers. The Girl Scouts are equipped with camera, and one of their major projects is to interview their mothers, and record other aspects of their lives.

Troop 1500 is a real Girl Scout troop designed as "an intervention" for girls whose mothers are imprisoned in Texas for typical crimes: drug dealing, drug possession, aggravated assault, robbery. The troop has to address the intense emotions that surround prison visits. The joy and the anger.

Some mothers have been to prison several times. Over time, the parole hearings for the mothers get closer and closer, and the intense question is which moms will be released. And if released, will they be able to stay clean and out of trouble. One mother, in her interview with her daughter, notes that with her record, if she screws up, she is sure to go back to prison with a life sentence. You see her daughter's face as she says this.

The girls learn that one mother has been kicked out of the program, even though her daughter stays in it. We learned the mother is writing a book about her life. But she has asked volunteers for money to buy a typewriter and supplies. The institution examines her prison account which shows that she used the money to buy candy and they charge her with extortion. She gets two more years added to her sentence.

In another case, a daughter's caregiver has got a job in Colorado, and she is leaving her mom in prison and her friends in the troop behind.

One mother is not realistically going to see parole any time soon. She was a nurse, married with three children. She admits that she euthanized an elderly patient which she thought was a kindness at the time. She was sentenced to 50 years. She won't be eligible for parole until 25 years have passed. Yet her daughter keeps visiting her. At one point, the daughter brings a DVD with home movies of the mom as a child and speaking as her school valedictorian, and other movies of the girl and her siblings as infants and toddlers. She is not a drug user, a robber, but a healer who made a tragic mistake of compassion.

Some of the mothers talk about their lives -- drinking and using drugs at a very early age, or having children when they are very young. One mom was a crack dealer. She wonders what her life can be like after release if she is only earning a few hundred dollars a week, when that sum was her earnings for a few minutes during her criminal career. Another mom graduated from shoplifting to armed robbery to buy drugs.

The warden of the prison has reservations about the Girl Scouts. She fears that the girls will not see prison as the horror that it is. She talks about the selfish choices the mothers made.

The interviews and the prison visits are interspersed with the ordinary activities of the daughters as Girl Scouts -- going to camp, canoeing, making projects, playing, singing Girl Scout songs. These are lovely girls.

Very powerfully the movie makes clear that some of the mothers were profoundly self-centered. One mother took her young daughter along on her drug deals. One mother notes how every mother worries that others might hurt their children and observes how her crimes and her imprisonment have hurt her children far more than anyone else ever did or could.

My daughter is in Girl Scout Troop 4334. I've escorted her on her cookie sales for three winters. Last year, I helped to lead a canoe trip for the troop, teaching paddling techniques. Two days ago, on June 2, I led a hike for Troop 4334. We walked from their school into Rock Creek Park's urban forest and then along the creek. We were on our way to the troops' Flying Up ceremony in which Brownies become junior Girl Scouts at "Candy Cane City."

We stopped along the creek bank so the girls could throw rocks across the stream and into the water. At one point, I answered a question about what a sandbar was and how a sandbar is formed. We heard birds singing to mark their territory. Of course, we were on the lookout for poison ivy. The girls are just like the girls in Troop 1500, except that the girls in Troop 1500 are uniformly poor.

On Monday, our troop leader made a lovely speech marking the Flying Up, and noting how she could see one of our girls as a U.S. Senator or another girl as Member of Congress (goals you get when you live 7 miles from the Capitol).

The girls in Troop 1500 are great kids -- wise for their years, playful, compassionate. You see them brimming with potential and responding to love and nurture. And as you watch the girls and their mothers, you have to wonder, does our society have the right ideas about what to do about crime? Are the right ideas being applied in our prisons? Does our correctional system make sense for American families? Who is benefiting from our correctional system, and in what ways?

Sphere: Related Content

Crack cocaine injustice and failed policy

Sunday's The Washington Post Magazine (June 1, 2008) has an excellent article by Vanessa Gezari about Michael Short. Short received a rare presidential commutation of sentence in December 2007 from President Bush. His 19 year prison sentence was cut to 15 years, 8 months for his minor role in a crack cocaine organization in Washington, DC.

Sphere: Related Content

Summoning Satan?

"Try Legal Weed," say the bottle caps on a beer from a microbrewery in Weed, CA.
The Feds want that stopped.

The Government keeps reminding us that their view of drugs has all the rationality of the fear of witches in Massachusetts Bay Colony as the Puritans were being challenged by Quakers, Jews, Unitarians, free thinkers and the like.

They are in a panic over what are essentially "magic words."

Federal anti-drug agents have more in common with a cult than public servants of a 21st century democracy.

They react as though these words are a black magic incantation summoning Satan to despoil the maidens of Seventeenth century Salem.

"Drug references" on beer bottles. Oh my God! Literally, stop the presses.

To paraphrase one of Timothy Leary's apocryphal statements, "Marijuana is so potent and dangerous, it causes delirium in those who haven't even tried it!"

Sphere: Related Content

Medical Marijuana in California -- Questions

I am intellectually satisfied that marijuana has a wide range of medical values. I have been reading medical reports since 1976 when I met Robert Randall. I worked for a Congressman who co-sponsored medical marijuana legislation over 25 years ago. I followed the DEA administrative law judge's hearings in the 1980s, and read his findings of fact in 1988. In 1999 I read the report of the Institute of Medicine.

Therefore I believe marijuana should be available to patients who need it. So how do I understand what is happening in California?

Today, Joel Stein writes in the LA Times about his experience getting a physician's medical recommendation and buying marijuana at a dispensary. He implies that his medical complaint is , if not bogus, a commonplace complaint that few would consider a serious medical condition.

Bottom line, he satisfied the letter of California law to obtain marijuana which he is now essentially free to use socially, which seems contrary to the spirit of the law. He concludes,

I always wondered what would happen if marijuana were legalized for anyone over 18. It seems it already has been, and nothing happened.

I presume that doctors generally examine and treat their patients in good faith. I recognize that there are some doctors who are lazy, incompetent, dishonest or greedy, or all of the above. Is the California situation simply one that has created an opportunity for a class of unambitious physician to prosper?

Being in Washington, D.C., I think about all this playing out on the international stage. Yesterday I met with 7 top officials of Afghanistan's counter-narcotics police for a private conversation about drug policy, especially in Afghanistan. Of course, as guests of the United States I knew they had previously met with ONDCP.

In February, the White House issued the National Drug Control Strategy 2008 Annual Report . Brushing up on the government line, I saw that Afghanistan which supplies more than 90% of the heroin to Europe merits a page, and a map, on the next to last page of the report.

Thumbing through the report yesterday before my meeting, I came across the expose, "The Medical Marijuana Movement: Manipulation, Not Medicine." This White House gives medical marijuana in California priority coverage over the number one global source of heroin -- a country in which we are in a real war against the forces that attacked the Pentagon and destroyed the World Trade Center in New York; an enemy financed by the sale of ...that heroin.

Thinking about Joel Stein's column, today I went back to ONDCP expose. The White House reports on page 19 that "an analysis" of the patient records seized at "several dispensaries in San Diego" showed that half the customers were between the ages of 17 and 30. Only 2.05 percent of customers had recommendations for medical conditions such as glaucoma or cancer.

Given Joel Stein's report and others, this is not shocking.

But as one who believed that legal medical marijuana laws would primarily benefit and be taken advantage of by seriously ill people, I am confused and upset.

On one hand, I don't like scams and pretense. and the way this law is being "followed" looks like a scam. The scams of drug prohibition are a feature of our current drug policy that I abhor, so it troubles me that a reform I have worked for seems to have evolved into a scam.

To digress briefly, the economic premise of drug prohibition is a scam (as it drives up the price, it increases profits and attracts more suppliers). The moral basis of drug prohibition is a scam (there is no moral authority for the state to punish drug users for the act of using a drug because drug use is not wrongful -- by itself it does not hurt another nor negate a duty such as paying taxes). The scientific basis of drug prohibition is a scam (the harms from drug use are exaggerated, are not greater than numerous legal activities, and do not justify a prohibition on use). The fundamental tool of drug enforcement is a scam (create a false persona and earn the trust of someone in order to betray them by getting them to provide you with drugs that you have no interest in using for the purposes you claimed, use them only as evidence to send them to jail).

Because I see drug prohibition as a cruel scam, I think that it ought to be legal to buy and use drugs. But recognizing that drug use is risky behavior -- like skiing, mountaineering, white water rafting, sky diving, etc. -- a wide variety of harm reduction practices (which include legal controls) are appropriate. So, on one level I should be pleased with the situation that Joel Stein's observed,

I always wondered what would happen if marijuana were legalized for anyone over 18. It seems it already has been, and nothing happened.

But The White House Drug Strategy 2008 Annual Report says on p. 18 that, typical of the California medical marijuana situation, the San Diego police have

"received numerous citizen complaints regarding every dispensary operating in San Diego County. Typical complaints include:
* High levels of traffic to and from the dispensaries.
* People loitering in the parking lot of the dispensaries.
* People smoking marijuana in the parking lot of the dispensaries.
* Vandalism near the dispensaries.
* Threats made by dispensary employees to employees of other businesses."

This does not comport with Joel Stein's brief foray into the world of dispensaries.

The first four complaints are probably made by neighbors about the majority of convenience stores (except that the smoking complained of is typically juveniles smoking tobacco). No doubt aware of the perception of such problems at convenience stores, the 7-Eleven chain has an anti-crime and community relations program.

This type of neighborhood disorder is a legitimate challenge and responsibility for local government regulation.

Ironically, the DEA's wasteful interference in state medical marijuana laws has obstructed what could be effective local policing. Local police lured perhaps, by DEA money, Byrne Grant money or a share of federal asset forfeitures, or encouraged by DEA ideology, are taking the traditional enforcement approach to the dispensaries of raiding them to close them.

This has engendered a backlash. The California Assembly Committee on Public Safety recently approved AB 2743 to

make it the policy of state and local law enforcement agencies not to cooperate with the DEA or other federal law enforcement agencies in their attacks on sick and dying medical marijuana patients and their providers,

according to the Drug Policy Alliance California update.

Don't most of us want reasonable, effective, and humane oversight of the dispensaries?

There is a large experiment underway in California yet there probably is no consensus on what the experiment actually is about. Is it an experiment in medical marijuana? Or is it an experiment as Joel Stein says, in legalized marijuana for adults over 18. Certainly it will be hard to evaluate because the experiment is not being controlled or designed.

There are important questions: What is the actual role of the physicians who are issuing the recommendations? Are they facilitating the proper treatment of serious medical conditions that have been resistant to conventional medical treatment? Are they serving to block improper juvenile use of marijuana? Does their "gatekeeper" role help mitigate the abuse of marijuana?

It is time to ask the academic world to step forward to begin to seriously evaluate this experiment.

Sphere: Related Content