Six months after derailing a very well-crafted medical marijuana bill, Governor Gregoire joins Governor Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island to ask the DEA to reschedule marijuana as a Schedule II drug. Leaving aside the argument that marijuana probably shouldn’t be a Schedule II drug either (the same as cocaine and certain forms of methamphetamine), this is clearly the most progressive position on marijuana we’ve seen from the Governor. But I also agree with the Drug Policy Alliance’s Ethan Nadelmann here:

“The governors’ call for rescheduling marijuana so that it can be prescribed for medical purposes is an important step forward in challenging the federal government’s intransigence in this area,” said Nadelmann. “But their call should not serve as an excuse for these two governors to fail to move forward on responsible regulation of medical marijuana in their own states. Governors in states ranging from New Jersey and Vermont to Colorado and New Mexico have not allowed the federal government’s ban on medical marijuana to prevent them from approving and implementing statewide regulation of medical marijuana. Govs. Gregoire and Chafee should do likewise.”

As the federal pressure on medical marijuana grew over the summer, Gregoire and Chafee were the two governors who balked and scrapped sensible regulations supported by the people of their state and passed by the legislature. This happened even as both Republican Chris Christie (NJ) and Democrat Peter Shumlin (VT) moved forward with their states’ programs despite the threats. It’s good to see Gregoire have the courage to stand up to the DEA (many still won’t), but there’s certainly more she can and should do.

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was Grandview, WA.

This week’s contest is related to something in the news from November, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by tomas (who correctly identified it as Tony Soprano’s house in The Soprano’s) and Liberal Scientist, who found the actual location in North Caldwell, NJ.

Here’s this week’s contest, a location somewhere in Washington. Good luck!

Tuesday’s DEA raids against medical marijuana providers in the Puget Sound area shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. Similar raids had occurred in Spokane earlier this year, and many were well aware that the U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, Jenny Durkan, was investigating the activities of local medical marijuana providers. In the spring and summer, as the partially-vetoed new law took effect, many former dispensary owners scrambled to figure out how to comply with the confusing new regulations. But the only thing that was clear about the new law was that absolutely nothing was clear about it.

According to Durkan, only medical marijuana providers who were blatantly in violation of state law were targeted. In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll get a chance to see how true that really is. Those of us who’ve been following these cases for a while have seen many a medical marijuana provider accused of various misdeeds only to have the case fall apart when it turns out the confidential informant wasn’t reliable. But many of those earlier cases had a common denominator: Roy Alloway – the one-time head honcho of the federally-funded WestNET Drug Task Force who now awaits a prison sentence for illegal gun sales and tax evasion. I’d imagine that many local progressives who were elated to see Durkan in that office would be shocked if we uncovered the same level of reckless arrogance Alloway became famous for. We’ll find out over time.

For all the outrage that this has kicked up (and at a certain level, everything that happens within the drug war is an outrage), it certainly could have been worse. What happened in Montana earlier this year was disgraceful and clearly went against the promises made by the Obama Administration at the beginning of his term not to go after those following state law. By comparison, if local providers are still being profiled in the Weekly, we’re clearly not back to full speakeasy mode and there does appear to be some attempt to only go after those who were violating state law. But that’s not to say there aren’t a lot of concerns with what happened.

For starters, I find it obnoxious when those who enforce these laws say they’re not going after patients. That’s not true. Any time you shut down a provider and confiscate their plants, you’re automatically going after patients. And with the changes to the law this year, it’s even more so. Those in this state who are authorized to get medical marijuana have no way of knowing if a member of their garden is doing something else illegal on the side. And now that we’re forced to have a collective gardens model, patients are now forced to have an economic stake in the dispensaries. It’s not clear from any of the articles I’ve read whether or not plants were seized, but that’s generally what happens during a raid. So according to the way the law is set up, any seized medicine might have been “owned” by some patient out there who isn’t capable of growing their own and probably did nothing illegal. And with all the various places that were raided yesterday, I’d be surprised if that didn’t happen to some patients.

Second, with the current environment that medical marijuana dispensary operators have had to operate in, charging them with money laundering looks a lot like entrapment. The Department of Justice has been aggressively targeting banks and other financial institutions that openly deal with the medical marijuana industry. In this environment, it would seem that this makes money laundering an unavoidable aspect of doing business. As is the automatic disclaimer with any of my posts, IANAL and I encourage our lawyer friends to share their thoughts in the comments.

But that leads me to the last – and probably the biggest – thing I’m bothered by. It’s a quote from a DEA Agent:

DEA Special Agent Matthew G. Barnes released a statement that said the raids were conducted in part because these businesses were in violation of federal laws “for cultivating, selling or distributing marijuana under the guise of state medical marijuana laws and exploiting such activities to satisfy their own personal greed.”

What strikes me about this quote is that it borrows almost exactly from the rhetoric that the DEA has always used when it comes to drugs themselves. Historically, drug use has been the supreme threat to self-control and societal stability that requires these extreme and drastic measures from the state. But as the attitudes towards drug use – especially medical marijuana use – have changed in the past two decades, the rhetoric now focuses on those who make money from providing it. In this new construct, the desire for money is now the force that’s so overpowering that it threatens to destabilize society, just as they once claimed the desire for the drugs themselves would.

But just as it’s always been with drugs, the outrage towards greed by our government’s law enforcement community is pretty bad at identifying the appropriate targets. With an economy that has suffered at the hands of Wall Street firms whose truly reckless greed has cost us significantly, it seems more than a little odd to be focused on how much money people are making providing plants to those who want them – and in many cases, need them for medical reasons. In fact, it makes one look completely crazy.

Jenny Durkan’s two predecessors as U.S. Attorney for Western Washington both support legalizing marijuana for adults. Many people speculate that Durkan herself supports it as well, but can’t say so. Saying it while serving as a federal prosecutor would require a lot of courage, a virtue that folks at all levels of government often suppress for job security or simply lack in the first place. Until that changes, the war on (some) drugs – and it’s mutant spawn, the war on (some) greed – will continue to plow a path of destruction through this country.

Today wasn’t a good day for me to stay on top of a big news item, so for the latest news on the federal raids that occurred today across the Puget Sound region, check out these links:

Gene Johnson – Police in W. Washington target medical pot shops
Curtis Cartier – DEA Raiding Medical-Marijuana Dispensaries in Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia
Dominic Holden – Why Today’s Pot Raids?
Jonathan Martin – Authorities raid Puget Sound medical-pot shops
Jeremy Pawloski – 17 arrested in raids on five Thurston County pot dispensaries
Russ Belville – DEA Raids Washington Dispensaries In Cities That Often Won’t Prosecute Marijuana Crimes
Stacia Glenn – 18 people arrested in three-county medical pot raids

The Cannabis Defense Coalition has information about the raids here.

UPDATE: Steve Elliott at Toke of the Town has a post up with info about today’s protest in downtown Seattle.

Glenn Greenwald is following the situation in New York, where a violent, late night raid removed OWS protestors from their encampment, and now NYPD and Mayor Bloomberg are defying a court order in an attempt to keep them out.

Last week’s contest was won very quickly by Nick Anderson (not sure how quickly because the timestamps for posts and comments aren’t in sync for some reason). It was in Youngstown, OH.

This week’s contest is related to a TV show or a movie. Good luck!

In a shock to no one, Bill O’Reilly’s latest book on Abraham Lincoln has a few errors:

On Friday I wrote about the decision of Ford’s Theatre not to offer Bill O’Reilly’s bestsetlling new book on the Lincoln assassination at its bookstore because an expert National Park Service reviewer found the work to be riddled with factual errors.

Now, in a review in a leading Civil War magazine, a second expert has flunked O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln,” calling it “somewhere between an authoritative account and strange fiction.”

The review (which is not online) appears in the November issue of North & South, the official magazine of the Civil War Society.

“The narrative contains numerous errors of people, place, and events,” writes reviewer Edward Steers Jr., author of more than five books on the Lincoln assassination. He goes on to list about 10 errors of fact in “Killing Lincoln,” which O’Reilly co-authored with Martin Dugard and which has been atop bestseller lists for weeks.

I’ve started up a hashtag on Twitter, #oreillyfactsaboutlincoln, for people to add their own creative “facts” about our 16th President…

– The situation at Penn State is still a huge shock to me. Before all of this news broke, it was hard to imagine the kind of scenario that could lead to Joe Paterno being fired. My sister is an alum, and I’ve been there a number of times. People not familiar with the school and the town of State College have trouble understanding the level of reverence that community has for “JoePa”. It’s intense to the point of being creepy. I’m not even remotely surprised by the reaction. Or that the story itself was largely buried until after Paterno broke the all-time wins record last month.

– There’s so much irony here, it’s hard to know where to start.

– Tim Fernholz has a good overview of the latest in the Obama Administration’s medical marijuana crackdown.

– It would probably shock us to know exactly how many people are arrested like this by corrupt cops.

– Can anyone explain how this man was actually elected governor of a state?

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was Hilo, Hawaii.

This week’s is another random location somewhere in the world, good luck!

I’m a little late in commenting on this, but I’m going to risk being called naive and say that I believe this is 100% true:

U.S. attorneys have a message for California’s medical marijuana advocates: Don’t blame Barack Obama. After it was announced that the crackdown on medical pot establishments in the Golden State was a collective decision by the four U.S. attorneys in California and not the result of any directive from Washington, spokeswoman Lauren Horwood emphasized that the administration never even green-lighted the ramped-up enforcement actions.

The only D.C.-based official with whom California U.S. attorneys coordinated, Horwood said, was Deputy Attorney General James Cole, who was chosen by Attorney General Eric Holder, an Obama appointee.

“He’s the one who provided the quote for our press release, and he’s chosen by Eric Holder,” Horwood told HuffPost in an interview. “But we didn’t have direct talks with Eric Holder — not that we wouldn’t, he’s been out and visited — but just the way the Department of Justice works, he’s not that hands-on on these kinds of details.”

After the crackdown was announced, fingers were immediately pointed at Obama. The Young Turks saw this as Obama doing the bidding of the pharmaceutical industry. I’ve heard others theorize that this is happening to prevent medical marijuana profits from funding legalization initiatives in 2012. But if this article is accurate, the reality seems to be far more mundane than that (and I suggested that possibility about a month ago).

Much of the overreaching federal drug law enforcement we see comes from the simple fact that law enforcement bureaucracies across the nation are still filled with people who’ve become ideologically wedded to the failed mentality of prohibition. They continue to see the use of marijuana (whether it’s recreational or medicinal) as a phenomenon driven by those who sell it, rather than by those who buy it. As long as they live in that up-is-down-black-is-white world – and the government still gives them the power to act on their insanity – they’re going to do things as spectacularly stupid as what they’re about to do in California.

This isn’t to say that Obama is off the hook. He’s still the President, and it’s very clear that his U.S. Attorneys are getting ready to make him into a gigantic liar over his promise not to interfere with state medical marijuana laws. Even if he wasn’t the originator of this boondoggle, he has the power to stop it. And a lot of folks on the west coast are going to remember how he handles this when next November rolls around.

Last week’s contest was won by Brian. It was the location of the Occupy protest in Melbourne, Australia. Here’s their homepage.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere in the world, good luck!

From Oakland, where police shot tear gas and rubber pellets at Occupy Oakland protestors.

UDPATE: Some aerial footage of the tear gas being shot into the crowd.

UPDATE: I spoke to some folks at Fuse today and they’ve now updated their guide and removed the reference to the study in question. I have to commend them for responding to this the way organizations should.

Original post follows…..

Last night on Twitter, I saw that Fuse Washington was promoting their Progressive Voters Guide. Concerning the liquor initiative, I-1183, they wrote [emphasis mine]:

Big grocery chains and liquor distributors are back with another dangerous initiative to deregulate liquor sales in our communities. Based on an initiative that voters solidly rejected last year, I-1183 would authorize as many as five times as many retailers to sell hard liquor. As a result, our communities would see a 48 percent increase in liquor consumption and an even larger increase in problem drinking.

That’s quite a statistic, and one that I had trouble believing, so I asked them for the source. It turns out that it comes from an independent task force set up by the CDC called the “Community Guide”. And thankfully, I didn’t have to do a lot of work to demonstrate the many problems with this study, because Erik Smith at the Washington State Wire already took care of that:

The task force released a three-page report earlier this year that recommended against privatization. It wasn’t a study. It was a “finding” based on a review of 21 studies.

The finding was “based on strong evidence that privatization results in increased per-capita alcohol consumption,” the report said.

And it contained a striking statistic. In those studies, alcohol sales jumped by a whopping median figure of 48 percent after privatization.

The thing is, most of those studies had nothing to do with hard liquor. Fifteen dealt with the privatization of wine sales in the U.S. and Canada, a big push in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Two of them had to do with beer sales in Scandinavia. Only four dealt with hard liquor. And the results were all over the map, ranging from an 8 percent decrease to a 305 percent increase – never mind the type of alcohol.

The way that 48 percent figure was calculated was by lumping everything together, as if all forms of alcohol are the same, in all countries, in all time periods.

The better way to try to understand the likely consequences of moving from a state-run model for selling hard liquor to a private model is to look at other states that have done just that. As Smith writes:

There’s an easier way of looking at the question – by looking at actual government statistics. For instance, you can compare alcohol consumption in Washington with that of California, where sales are wide-open and there are eight times the number of liquor outlets per capita.

According to the National Institutes of Health, in 2007 the average Washington resident consumed 2.35 gallons of alcohol and the average Californian 2.34. No real difference at all.

There’s also the experience of Iowa and West Virginia, the two most recent states to privatize hard liquor, in 1988 and 1990. Liquor consumption remained flat after booze showed up in supermarkets. Lately it has been on the increase, just as it has been across the country. But privatization didn’t drive the states to drink.

I don’t even have that strong of an opinion on this measure. I’m voting for it, but there are definitely some good reasons not to. But it really annoys me to see an organization like Fuse – that arose in big part to counter bullshit propaganda from the right – deciding that it’s ok for them to throw out their own transparent bullshit as well.