I’m not thrilled with this outcome, but I expected it. I understand that police officers shouldn’t be prosecuted for merely making mistakes while on duty. And if a police officer feels his life or the lives of others are in danger, he should be able to respond appropriately. But there was nothing about this incident that made me think that Officer Birk acted with even the minimal level of restraint that we’d expect from a police officer. Dominic re-posted the dash-cam video of the incident (which doesn’t capture the shooting itself) and I have trouble imagining how Birk could have felt his – or anyone else’s – life was in immediate danger because Williams had a carving knife.

At the very least, Birk had better be fired today, yet I find it to be a shame that his firing would be the only semblance of justice that the Williams family sees from this.

UPDATE: As several commenters have pointed out, the Williams family can still bring civil lawsuits against SPD and they’d be more likely to prevail than in their efforts to have criminal charges filed.

UPDATE 2: Mayor McGinn’s statement here.

UPDATE 3: Officer Ian Birk resigns.

– Nate Anderson writes about the uncovered attempt of a smear campaign against Wikileaks and its supporters.

– Anti-regime protests have started up again in Iran. I’ve been following the latest on Twitter using the #25bahman hashtag.

– Bryan Gabriel’s trial started up today in Seattle. The background on his case can be found here.

– Sensible Washington’s initiative this year will be I-1135.

Last week’s contest was won by Milwhcky. The correct answer was Memphis.

This week’s is related to a TV show or a movie, good luck!

I’ve been both nervous and excited to watch the events in Egypt unfold over the past few weeks. After visiting some friends in Cairo in 2007, the nation remains a special place to me. Seeing some of those friends disappear from Facebook from a few days at the end of January gave me an ominous feeling that things wouldn’t turn out well. It seemed for a while that the long-held belief that Mubarak could never be dislodged was being tested to its limits, only to be reinforced with a bloody crackdown.

This victory doesn’t just change the regime in Egypt, it changes the mindset of the Egyptian people and beyond. After the Tunisian revolution, some people in Egypt started to imagine that it could happen there, but many others still didn’t. In fact, the friend I stayed with in Cairo was traveling through Europe for work when the protests started and wasn’t expecting much of anything to come of them. A week later, he was trying to get back into the country to join the chorus of Egyptians who’d despised Mubarak for years but felt powerless to do anything about it. Today Egyptians feel a greater sense of having the power to bring about change on their own. And other long-repressed peoples are starting to believe that they can too.

Eight years ago, as we were preparing to enter Iraq, many supporters of the invasion believed that toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime would be the domino that inspires others to rise up against their own oppressors, but it never happened. Instead, Iraq descended into bloody civil war and authoritarian countries like Iran were able to tighten their grip. It was never well-understood that in order for totalitarianism to give way to democracy, the people of that country have to fight that battle themselves. We can’t make that transition for them. The Egyptian people didn’t – and still don’t – need our help to build a nation with greater freedom and democratic values. They just risked their lives for it. They know what they want – and if left alone, they’ll build it. And that’s more likely to be the impetus that brings greater freedom and democracy to that entire region.

Lots going on in the legislature and elsewhere right now regarding marijuana law reform:

– The medical marijuana bill that would allow dispensaries and licensed growers has advanced to the Ways and Means committee, but not without a series of amendments that concern the Cannabis Defense Coalition. My two biggest concerns – from a pragmatic standpoint – are the reduction in the size of cooperative grows and the extra requirements being imposed on health care professionals, but this bill is still a step forward and would still solve the fundamental access issue. Another issue, however, is the patient registry, which was optional in the original bill, but is now mandatory in order to avoid potentially being arrested. Patients worry that signing up for the registry could make it easier for criminal elements or law enforcement to discover where they live and make them targets for burglaries or harassment.

– You can watch the testimony on the full legalization bill, HB1550, from Tuesday’s session of the House Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness Committee here. It’s not clear that this bill will go any further, so supporters are encouraged to call the committee members and request that this bill receive a vote.

Hurst, Christopher (D) Chair (360) 786-7866
Ladenburg, Connie (D) Vice Chair (360) 786-7906
Pearson, Kirk (R) (360) 786-7816
Klippert, Brad (R) (360) 786-7882
Armstrong, Mike (R) (360) 786-7832
Hope, Mike (R) (360) 786-7892
Kirby, Steve (D) (360) 786-7996
Ross, Charles (R) (360) 786-7856

If you call, you might want to mention that this is an issue that enjoys very strong support throughout the United States.

– Sensible Washington is getting ready to begin their signature gathering effort. They expect to start collecting signatures by the last week in February. If they get the 241,000+ signatures they need, we’ll have an alternative to relying on an incompetent and out-of-touch legislature in order to finally end this ridiculous prohibition.

This morning was the hearing on House Bill 1550, the bill that would remove penalties for adult marijuana use and set up a distribution system similar to hard liquor. I was able to watch part of the hearing on TVW this morning and also heard this part that Eli Sanders recounts:

The question that’s always asked about this idea—How can a state legalize pot when the feds have declared it illegal?—was articulated this morning by Rep. Christopher Hurst (D-Enumclaw), who warned that if Washington starts selling cannabis through the state liquor store system, as the bill proposes, “Our state employees will be going to federal prison and the federal government will seize every penny we bring in.”

It’s a very inventive scenario, but not a realistic one. What’s much more likely to happen is that if Washington passes this bill, the federal government would immediately try to block the implementation of the regulatory aspects through the courts. And if they failed to block it that way, I find it incredibly unrealistic that they’d respond by sending DEA agents into a state liquor store, arresting the cashier and sending him to jail. As I’ve written before about this, there’s a point where interfering with a state’s laws is far too politically radioactive.

Hurst pointed out that people are still getting arrested and jailed, almost certainly referring to this case, but the defendant in that case was believed to be in violation of Colorado’s laws as well. The closest we’ve come to Hurst’s nightmare scenario is probably the case of Charlie Lynch. That case was so egregious that even the judge spoke out about how unjust it was that Lynch would have to serve jail time. But that arrest took place during the Bush Administration. The Obama Administration has since decreed that folks like Lynch – who was following state law – would no longer be prosecuted.

We’re certainly dealing with a lot of unknowns here. It’s not clear what happens to successful legislation that removes the state penalties for marijuana possession and sale but whose regulatory aspects are successfully blocked by the federal government. What you’d end up with is legalized marijuana but no ability to regulate its production and sale. Does the federal government really want to be responsible for that outcome? I doubt it, and that might make the state immune from any attempt by the feds to block the regulatory aspects of this legislation. But that’s a logical analysis, and if there’s anything I’ve learned about the war on marijuana, it’s that you shouldn’t expect drug warriors to act logically.

I think Mason Crosby will win this one for the Packers with a late field goal. Throw out your wild predictions here.

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was Providence, RI.

This week’s location is also random. Good luck!

Whenever Ben Livingston, the founder of the Cannabis Defense Coalition, talks about the mission of the organization, he likes to say that it’s to “bear witness” to the injustices that take place when prosecutors go after authorized medical marijuana patients. While the act of sitting in a courtroom may seem inconsequential, it lets judges and prosecutors know that they’re being watched. During the Bruce Olson trial, the presence of CDC volunteers – and the media coverage that followed – appeared to fluster both the prosecutors and the judge in that case. Olson’s victory in that courtroom might still have happened without those “witnesses”, but Kitsap County’s approach towards prosecuting medical marijuana patients changed after that. They immediately dropped charges against Glenn Musgrove, a quadriplegic who had to be wheeled into the courtroom on a gurney, and have appeared to scale back their attempts to go after patients.

What’s happening in Egypt is happening on a significantly larger scale and with significantly direr consequences, but the same dynamic is in effect. Mass killings of innocent people by a government have happened before, and to some extent, we saw what happened in places like Srebrenica, Tiananmen and Darfur. But unlike those cases, we’re truly “bearing witness” to what’s been going on Egypt over the past 10 days. Technology that allows average citizens to film their surroundings, along with Facebook, Twitter, and an influx of new media outlets able to broadcast this uprising in real time to the whole world, presents an unprecedented challenge to regimes who prefer to operate in the dark.

There’s been a lot of discussion about what role the internet plays in starting these revolutions. But to whatever extent it does, that’s not its most valuable attribute. The more vital role is how it allows the world to bear witness to these events in depth, and to provide the context that encourages more people to stand in solidarity with those who are suffering from the extreme injustices being witnessed. The primary value to the internet is not its ability to allow for greater organization. Even with the internet shut off, millions of Egyptians continued their protests just fine. Its primary value is to provide that window into what’s actually happening – as it’s happening – to the rest of the world.

The latest news out of Cairo is that plain-clothed security forces are now more aggressively rounding up foreign media as they escalate the amount of violence directed at the anti-Mubarak protesters. They fired live ammunition at the unarmed protesters and hurled molotov cocktails from the rooftops of nearby buildings. Aggressors in this battle are being exposed as members of the Mubarak regime’s paid security forces. Others have admitted to having been paid by the regime to suppress the protests. Reports from numerous news outlets have confirmed that the regime is behind the violence, not that it’s even hard to figure out simply by seeing the timing and nature of the attacks.

So what happens next? We watched protests similar to this 18 months ago in Iran, and the crackdown eventually muted the calls for regime change. Even though we were able to bear witness to that, it wasn’t enough to make a difference. But Egypt is not Iran. We have leverage against the Egyptian government that we don’t have against Iran. And as I watch the violence escalate, I wonder when Obama finally starts playing those cards.

The Mubarak regime has taken decades to form itself into an immovable object – along with that necessary dose of hubris that allows them to believe that they can get away with anything. I find it amazing that in just two weeks, Mubarak has gone from being seen as a pro-American ally presiding over a country with good ties to the west, to unleashing his forces against his own people, the press, and foreigners, and using the same tactics and language used by the Iranian government in 2009 and Saddam Hussein in 2003. As we look around the Middle East today, it’s a good reminder that the biggest difference between Hosni Mubarak and Saddam Hussein was never a matter of character. It was a matter of circumstance.

Last week’s contest was a tough one. The winner was Cam, who barely edged out wes.in.wa. It was Diamondback, MS, where Brett Favre’s sister was busted for being involved in the production of meth.

Here’s this week’s, just a random location this time. Good luck!

From Obama’s speech in Cairo, June 2009:

We meet at a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world, tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation but also conflict and religious wars.

More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims and a Cold War in which Muslim majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.

UPDATE: What’s going on in Egypt today is incredible. You can watch the Al-Jazeera English live feed or follow the #jan25 hashtag on Twitter to stay up to date.

Last week, the attention was on an upgrade to the medical marijuana bill. This week, the focus is on legalizing marijuana for adult recreational use:

Marijuana activists are taking another shot at a ballot measure legalizing the drug for adults under state law — but they hope lawmakers beat them to it.

The organization Sensible Washington filed an initiative Wednesday that would remove all state criminal and civil penalties for the possession, use and sale of marijuana in any quantity. But one of the effort’s organizers, Philip Dawdy, said the group would likely be happy to drop it if the Legislature passes a bill introduced this week that would make pot available in state liquor stores.

The initiative filed by Sensible Washington this time includes some language directing the legislature to establish regulations for the newly legalized market. This was a liability that cost the I-1068 campaign support last year. Building on last year’s momentum, they’re more optimistic about getting the 241,000 signatures they need.

On Tuesday, state Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, D-Seattle, filed a bill that would allow the sale of marijuana to people 21 and over through state liquor stores. The Liquor Control Board would issue licenses to commercial growers, and revenue from sales taxes and license fees — possibly hundreds of millions of dollars a year, according to supporters — could help pay for health care and substance-abuse treatment.

Dickerson’s bill is great, but I’m not too optimistic that it could get through the legislature. And even if it did, I doubt Governor Gregoire would have the courage to sign it into law. Either way, the people of this state continue to demand that we look at marijuana law reform as a key component in how we fix our budget problems.

UPDATE: As expected, the top-voted question in Obama’s latest YouTube contest is about drug policy. He’s expected to address the leading questions from the White House this afternoon.

UPDATE 2: LEAP discusses Obama’s response.

I’ve been trying to follow the news out of Egypt over the past 36 hours, but apparently the President gave some speech last night, so the only news is coming from foreign news outlets and the internet. Here’s some chilling audio from a Guardian reporter who was arrested and beaten by security forces.

In an editorial entitled “A Cheech and Chong ‘medical’ marijuana bill“, the Tacoma News-Tribune’s Patrick O’Callahan goes after the medical marijuana bill introduced by Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles and discussed last Thursday at the Capitol. O’Callahan’s editorial is fairly typical of the snide, dismissive editorializing that remains standard within many of our nation’s newspapers, but in the off-chance that anyone is taking this pile of nonsense seriously, I’d like to break it down and provide an informed perspective:

It must have taken some doing, but advocates of “medical” marijuana have come up with a bill that would actually invite more abuse of the drug than straightforward legalization.

Right away, O’Callahan starts with a mistaken premise. By assuming that even straightforward legalization “invites more abuse” of the drug, he ignores a significant amount of research showing that drug laws themselves have no demonstrable bearing on the amount of drug abuse a society encounters. And as has been pointed out numerous times over the years, the amount of marijuana use in Holland, a nation which has tolerated sales of marijuana in coffeeshops for over 35 years, has less marijuana use than the United States, where we arrest over 750,000 people per year just for possessing it.

Even worse, his editorial never fully explains how he came to this conclusion. He’s just spit-balling criticisms, hoping they’ll stick.

The “medical” belongs in quotation marks here, because the measure in Olympia would junk a key rule designed to prevent common drug seekers from getting marijuana on medical pretenses. And once recreational users or addicts got their pseudo-medical authorizations to use the drug, they’d enjoy more privileges than simple legalization would give them.

O’Callahan never specifies what the “key rule” is, so I can only guess at what he’s referring to. But in looking at the bill, and knowing how the system currently works, I can’t imagine any way in which it gets any easier or harder for someone to get a medical marijuana authorization under this bill. My best guess is that he’s referring to the removal of language that specified that a condition couldn’t be alleviated by other medicines in order for the authorization to hold up in court. But that never made a difference to doctors, only judges and prosecutors. And the language was removed precisely for that reason. A judge – or any other government employee – is not your doctor, and shouldn’t be in a position to second-guess doctors over what medicines you should be taking.

They’d be protected, for example, if ex-spouses objected to leaving children in their care; judges would not be permitted to consider marijuana use as a factor in custody arrangements except in extreme cases involving “long-term impairment” – whatever that means.

What that means is that if you get cancer and your doctor authorizes you to use marijuana to deal with the nausea you experience as you go through chemotherapy, your ex-wife or ex-husband can’t use that to prevent you from seeing your kids. That’s just one example, but there are many others that warrant this provision in the bill. If a parent is irresponsible or incapable of being a parent, that’s one thing. But the reality of medical marijuana is that most of the people who use it lead very normal lives and can function perfectly well as parents. They don’t get “high” from the drug and act loopy all day. In fact, if you want to see a good profile of a parent who uses medical marijuana, watch the CNBC documentary “Marijuana Inc”, where they interview a patient’s two sons who tell the reporter that medical marijuana “gave them their father back” because it allowed him to deal with his pain and lead a normal life. If you think that someone like that should be prevented from seeing his kids, your moral compass isn’t pointing north.

The bill would bring down the hammer of discrimination law on companies with anti-drug policies. Employers who refused to hire or employ marijuana users – the drug stays in the body long after use – could be investigated and sanctioned by the state Human Rights Commission.

As I mentioned after the hearing, this is one area where it’s possible the language of the bill will have to be reworked to be compatible with existing anti-discrimination rules (I’m far from an expert on that). But the intent of the clause is clear. Unless a job entails public safety, you shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against someone simply because they’re authorized to use medical marijuana. Of course, if that person is not capable of doing their job because of their medical marijuana use, then companies should be free to either fire them or not hire them in the first place. Getting the proper balance here is difficult, but I thought this bill did a good job trying to find it.

That’s just scratching the surface of this amazing piece of legislation. It would also legalize large-scale commercial marijuana grow operations and wholesaling – no specified limits on quantity. Cities and counties would not be permitted to ban grow operations in their jurisdictions; the measure leaves all control over licensing to the state.

Oddly, this is the exact opposite criticism of Proposition 19, California’s initiative to fully legalize marijuana production. Proposition 19 left this up to the individual counties and cities, and the criticism was “Oh my god! This will create a patchwork of different laws across the state!” In this bill, we have one law for the state, and the criticism now is that cities and counties have no control. Huh? Not to mention that O’Callahan leaves out the fact that under this bill, cities and counties can use zoning laws to ensure that a production facility can only be located in an industrial or commercial area.

Growing, processing and selling could be conducted in secrecy. Call this one the Home-Buyer’s-Surprise Provision.

This is really the dumbest thing in the entire editorial. The reason that this bill is being introduced is precisely because the “growing, processing and selling” is “conducted in secrecy”. By licensing and regulating both growers and dispensaries, you take this industry out of the shadows and allow the cities and counties to establish the proper location for these activities to take place. This bill fixes the problem of having large numbers of grow operations hidden in people’s basements. The fact that O’Callahan thinks that this bill would cause that is the clearest indication that he doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the hell he’s talking about.

There’s more: Police officers would have to check state databases for medical marijuana licenses before responding on probable cause to “cannabis-related incidents” (also known, under federal law, as “crimes”).

I’m having trouble not getting too snarky about this, but this attitude is extraordinary and O’Callahan’s lack of understanding of the law is terrifying. For starters, our local police aren’t supposed to be enforcing federal laws, so the fact that marijuana is illegal under federal law is irrelevant to any law enforcement official in this state. Second, asking that a police officer check a database – before bursting into someone’s home with weapons – to see if the person they’re about to invade might be a law-abiding citizen is not unreasonable. In fact, it should be considered a very basic part of a police officer’s job.

Individual officers could be personally fined or sued for failure to do so. There’s no obvious reason this wouldn’t apply to, say, a cop who spots dope and money changing hands in a dark alley. Odd: The law doesn’t paint a legal bull’s-eye on officers for responding to “alcohol-related incidents.”

As far as I can tell, this is completely untrue. If a police officer sees a transaction between two people in a dark alley, the officer should be able to respond exactly the same way whether it’s alcohol or medical marijuana being purchased. Those transactions should not be occurring outside of licensed establishments.

The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, has been touted as a “clarification” of the legal status of the illegal marijuana dispensaries that Washington cities and counties – including Tacoma – have begun to tolerate.

The measure’s actual reach is far, far more sweeping; it amounts to legalization with privileges.

Again, O’Callahan says this but doesn’t provide any actual evidence to back it up. This bill does not change – in any way – the process by which an individual with one of the qualifying conditions goes to a doctor and gets an authorization. Recreational use is still illegal. The result of this bill won’t be an increase in the amount of medical marijuana users, it will be a better system for ensuring that those individuals can have a safe place to obtain it.

To legitimize the dispensaries, the logical first step would be to impose genuine medical-pharmaceutical rigor on the authorizations that allow people to acquire “medicinal” pot in the first place.

And that would be a wonderful thing that just about every medical marijuana patient would welcome, but sadly the Federal Government makes this impossible so long as marijuana is considered a Schedule I drug.

As things stand, a handful of clinics – often fly-by-night operations – do brief, assembly-line-style “exams” of marijuana seekers and churn out authorizations like factories. They rubber-stamp the documents – often for about $200 a pop – for users with nebulous complaints of “intractable pain.” These mills have been transforming who knows how many garden-variety marijuana smokers into “patients.”

The law permits little effective regulation, and no one has ever been sanctioned for over-authorizing marijuana. The lack of controls blurs the line between legitimate providers and money-hungry enablers.

I have no doubt that this happens. And I have no problem with medical boards coming down on doctors who do it. But this phenomenon has minimal effect on anyone. In some ways, it’s better that recreational users become medical users because then the money they spend on marijuana is more likely to go to a local business rather than a criminal organization. That’s why over half the people in Washington state just want it legalized for both medical and recreational use. But until that point, you’ll likely always find some subset of the medical profession who decide that money is more important than their integrity. Just like journalism.

Instead of tightening the process, Kohl-Welles’ bill would actually loosen it. Under the existing law – an initiative approved by the voters – marijuana is largely treated as a last resort to be used only when legal, conventional treatments and FDA-approved medications fail. Her measure would let it be used as a first resort.

As I mentioned above, this language was taken out because it was putting judges in a position to make medical determinations for the folks in their courtrooms. It’s odd that in a world where we’re so easily terrified of “death panels” and “government getting inbetween you and your doctor”, a newspaper is actually editorializing in favor of giving the government the ability to send you to jail for a health decision that you and your doctor agree upon. That’s stunning.

With this in place, any drug abuser who didn’t get his get-out-of-jail-free card would deserve to be arrested for sheer stupidity.

This is even more stunning. Regardless of how one feels about the language of the bill, believing that “drug abusers” belong in jail is a sign of complete moral bankruptcy. Hardly anyone in our society still believes that the proper way to deal with a drug addict is to send them to prison. Even worse, that’s still quite separate from the reality here. The vast majority of both medical and recreational marijuana users aren’t “abusers”. They aren’t destroying their lives with it. But to believe that the few who do abuse the drug will turn their life around if you send them to jail is beyond stupid. Seeing something that dumb in an editorial from one of the state’s largest newspapers is quite remarkable.

Words fail. This bill could have been written by Cheech and Chong 30 tokes past midnight. Any lawmaker inclined to support it should make a point of reading it first.

I’m not sure what else there is to say. The sad reality is that people this clueless and blindly ideological are still employed by the major newspapers of this state, even as they’ve been under intense pressure to trim budgets. Like O’Callahan, I strongly encourage every lawmaker to read this bill, and if they have as much trouble as O’Callahan did in understanding it, I’d encourage them to do something he didn’t do: talk to someone who’s actually knowledgeable about medical marijuana and the history of how the law has worked in this state.

UDPATE: I was just sent this clarification to the “long-term impairment” part of O’Callahan’s editorial over email:

[T]he “long-term impairment” that confuses Mr. O’Callahan is exactly the same “long-term impairment” already described in the statutory provision allowing judges to preclude or limit visitation based on a parent’s struggles with “drug, alcohol, or substance abuse,” RCW 26.09.191(3)(c). Family law judges and attorneys are quite familiar with it.