Last November, Phil Mocek (who does a lot of work with the CDC and for other civil liberties causes here in Seattle) was arrested at the Albuquerque airport after refusing to show his ID to get through security. He left at the end of last week (by train) for New Mexico for his trial, but it was postponed to January. Here’s a news report from Albuquerque on the case:

This story is just appalling:

Questions about entrapment have dogged counter-terrorism cases for some time, most recently in the case of the Oregon man charged with trying to blow up a Christmas-tree lighting ceremony. Now, from The Washington Post, comes the story of Craig Monteilh, a self-proclaimed FBI informant who was so aggressive in his quest to find potential terrorists at a California mosque that the community got a restraining order against him.

Unless there’s a known group of aspiring terrorists to infiltrate, fishing expeditions like this are pointless exercises in entrapment. They never catch the kinds of highly motivated terrorists who plan and execute dangerous attacks. They merely target easily-led individuals who are susceptible to this type of coercion, of which there are inexhaustible supplies of – in every race, religion, and nationality.

I think I’ve pointed this out before at this site, but a charismatic undercover FBI agent could easily walk into any number of Christian churches in this country and find a poor sap or two to go along with his imaginary plot to blow up a Planned Parenthood office. That would do nothing to make us safer. The same holds true for our local mosques.

Today was Repeal Day, the anniversary of the official end of America’s brief experiment with alcohol prohibition. On December 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, and it once again became legal in the United States to manufacture and sell alcoholic beverages.

I’ve just finished reading Daniel Okrent’s incredibly well-researched book on the subject, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. The history of alcohol prohibition has unmistakeably strong parallels to our current prohibition on marijuana. And that begs the question, will it come crashing down in much the same way?

The end of alcohol prohibition came much quicker than mostly everyone expected at the time. By amending the Constitution to outlaw the production and distribution of alcohol (or, more specifically, “intoxicating liquors”), many people thought – even right up to the end – that it would be nearly impossible to undo. But just as overwhelming popular support for getting rid of the saloon in the 1910s ushered in huge majorities of dry-voting legislatures across the country, the experience of alcohol prohibition – with organized crime, political corruption, and overzealous enforcement – led to similarly overwhelming support for repeal less than two decades later.

In some ways, marijuana prohibition is quite similar to its ancestor. Each prohibition led to significant levels of organized crime and to corruption among government officials and law enforcement. In each case, the attempts to keep adults from engaging in an activity strictly on moral grounds backfired and led to less moderation and riskier behaviors. And even earnest law enforcement efforts were helpless to do anything to prevent black markets from arising, often leading them to more extreme tactics that often put the citizenry at far more risk than the intoxicating substances themselves.

But there are some major differences. One is that much of the organized crime and corruption caused by the current prohibition is based outside of the United States. The rampant official corruption that accompanied the astronomical profits from bootlegging liquor has its strongest parallel today to the drug trafficking organizations of Mexico, who’ve been able to subvert Mexico’s justice system to an amazing extent. I cringe when I hear people claim that Mexico’s corruption problem is a function of Mexico’s culture. That’s bullshit. As Okrent explains, America’s law enforcement mechanisms were just as corrupted during alcohol prohibition as Mexico’s are today. The problem is the policy, not the people.

Another striking difference about the respective eras is how tame the police abuses were that caused widespread outrage during alcohol prohibition. Part of this stems from the fact that the average alcohol consumer was mostly left alone under the legal framework set forth by the Volstead Act. This is very different from today, where hundreds of thousands of mere marijuana users are arrested every year. The fact that even well-liked celebrities are not immune from its enforcement represents a fairly significant difference between then and now. One example given by Okrent was of a Chicago-area woman who was shot to death because her husband was believed to be a bootlegger. As a result, the Chicago Tribune used the incident to rail against prohibition. In today’s prohibition, wrong-door raids and innocent bystanders being killed are not seen as the extraordinary aberrations they were at that time, and are often completely ignored by our media.

But the main difference – and the one that has allowed marijuana prohibition to continue to such an absurd point – is that unlike alcohol prohibition, there’s no “before” for people to draw comparisons to. With alcohol prohibition, people were able to compare the world of alcohol prohibition to what it was like before it was outlawed. People could see the organized crime, violence, and corruption that existed in 1930 and they knew that all of that didn’t exist in 1918. We don’t have that 20/20 hindsight today. When marijuana was outlawed at the federal level in 1937, very few Americans used it or even knew what it was. The tremendous growth in its popularity occurred entirely within the confines of prohibition, so the negative effects of that policy seem far more “normal”.

So today, we face a battle with some historical parallels, but also some fairly significant differences. Al Smith, the losing Presidential candidate of 1928, was against prohibition. He lost handily to the Republican Herbert Hoover, but the fact that he took that position in the first place shows how different the two prohibitions were from a political standpoint. Not a single U.S. Senator of either party has come out in support of ending marijuana prohibition, and only a handful of House members have. For an issue that polls at over 40% support nationwide (and over 50% along the west coast), this is an extraordinary disconnect between the people and our politicians.

So how will it end? If Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-36) is reading the political climate correctly, it will end right here in Washington this year:

State Representative Mary Lou Dickerson (D-36, Queen Anne and Ballard) wants to go all the way—RIGHT NOW.

According to a bill she intends to pre-file this month for the 2011 legislative session, “We would legalize it, regulate it, and tax it,” she says. “I am serious. We have been wasting scores of millions of dollars on arresting and jailing people who have done nothing more than smoke marijuana recreationally. That has ended up harming people and costing taxpayers tremendously. So it’s a very high cost to individuals and to taxpayers—it’s a wrongheaded policy that simply needs to be changed. People need to stick their neck out and say enough already and people are starting to do that. You will see that we will have a very good sponsor [for a companion bill to legalize marijuana] in the senate, someone who is very well respected. I am dead serious about this.”

Dickerson expects the bill will pass—she was unflinching when faced with my skepticism based on the failure of less aggressive pot bills—because polling this year showed 54 percent support to legalize marijuana in Washington, she says. She’s working with the ACLU and she plans another round of polling before the session begins in January. “If we don’t pass it this year, there’s a possibility we will take our case to the people in the initiative process in 2012,” she says.

We’ll find out if Dickerson’s optimism is warranted. There have been a number of signs recently that do point in this direction. California’s initiative was the first statewide initiative on ending marijuana prohibition that failed not because of general opposition to the idea, but to the specifics of the proposal. We’re now at the point where state legislators are understanding that this is a reality, and that either they regulate it, or an initiative will regulate it for them, perhaps not in a way the legislature would consider ideal.

And that leads to what might end up being the most interesting parallel in how both prohibitions end. What likely accelerated the demise of alcohol prohibition the most was the state of the economy. As the boom of the 1920s led to the Depression of the 1930s, that revenue that had been lost by enacting the 18th Amendment loomed much larger. Today, the parallel is obvious, and the precarious economic situation that Washington state finds itself in may bring about a political sea change on a issue that was once thought untouchable.

Last week’s news-related contest was won by wes.in.wa. Two in a row for wes. The location was Tallahassee, Florida, the home in the middle the location of a grisly murder scene last month.

Here’s this week’s, which is just a random location somewhere on Earth. Good luck!

I’m hoping to get a chance on my day off tomorrow to look through the leaked documents from Wikileaks about the Mexican drug war, but in the meantime this quote made me laugh:

Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, likened Assange to an al-Qaida propagandist and accused him, without offering any proof, of having “blood on his hands.”

“Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders?” she asked in a message posted on her Facebook page.

Probably because they want to catch him.

And if they do catch Assange, we might want to look through those cables on the Mexican drug war to understand why someone else from within Wikileaks will just assume his leadership role (or a different group of folks will open a competing website). That’s what happens when organizations exist out of popular demand for a service or product. Cutting off the head doesn’t kill it. It just causes it to grow a new head.

On the morning of Saturday June 19, 2010, two Snoqualmie police officers showed up at the home of Jeff Roetter, a 33-year-old medical marijuana patient. The officers were expecting Roetter to help them in their attempts to prosecute a man who claims he was Roetter’s designated provider, a former Snoqualmie business owner named Bryan Gabriel. Instead, the police and Roetter’s housemate discovered him dead in his room. Roetter, an epileptic, had a violent seizure overnight, banged his head and died.

Even though the case involving Roetter and Gabriel had previously generated some local media attention, Roetter’s death went unreported. Roetter’s family and friends believe that the pressure being put on him by Snoqualmie Police led to his seizure and death, but their attempts to contact various media outlets led nowhere. Months later, they remain angry and frustrated about what happened to him, and they blame Snoqualmie Police.

[Read more…]

Michael Lind has an interesting post on why we need to have both Big Government and Big Business as they’re absolutely necessary for our economy to function properly. I don’t have much to add to his overall points (which I mostly agree with), but I was taken aback by this claim:

It is true that 99 percent of Americans work for small businesses. But this is only because the federal government defines a small business as one with fewer than 500 employees. How many ordinary people think of a company with 499 employees as small?

Even with that loose definition, I had trouble believing that only 1% of the American workforce works for a company with more than 500 employees. The total American workforce is roughly 150 million. That would mean that only 1.5 million would work for large companies. From Wal-Mart’s website:

At the end of fiscal year 2010, Walmart and its subsidiaries employed over 2 million associates worldwide, with approximately 1.4 million associates in the United States.

Maybe those subsidiaries are considered “small businesses” and therefore not all of the 1.4 million count towards that figure. But McDonald’s still employs over 500,000. Doing some more searching, I found this census page which says that 56 million people worked for businesses with 500 people or more, so I’m at a complete loss as to where that figure comes from.

UDPATE: As was pointed out in the comments, each McDonald’s franchise is counted as a “small business”, so it’s not clear if all of those employees count in the 1%, although I’d question defining it that way. Either way, the census figures certainly don’t match up, and if the difference comes from how franchises are counted, that doesn’t really square with the perception of companies like Starbucks and McDonald’s, which few would exclude from the definition of big business.

UPDATE 2: Well, it looks like Lind corrected his post:

It is true that 99 percent of American firms are defined as small businesses. But this is only because the federal government defines a small business as one with fewer than 500 employees. How many ordinary people think of a company with 499 employees as small?

Quite a difference. And my earlier update appears to be incorrect. A McDonald’s franchise isn’t considered a small business in this record-keeping.

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was Edmonds.

This week’s is the site of a news story from November. Good luck!

Just dumb:

OLYMPIA – A judge fined a wheelchair-bound Olympia man $4,000 Wednesday for growing 42 marijuana plants in his home, but he imposed no jail time.

A jury convicted William Kurtz, 58, in October of felony counts of possession of marijuana over 40 grams and manufacture of marijuana. He has no prior felony criminal history and uses the wheelchair because of a medical condition.

Before trial, Kurtz’s attorneys fought to be allowed to present a medicinal-marijuana defense to the jury, but Thurston County Superior Court Judge Carol Murphy did not allow it. Prosecutor Scott Jackson argued that Kurtz did not have a medicinal-marijuana card in March, when Thurston County Narcotics Task Force detectives found the plants, as well as more than 15 ounces of packaged marijuana, in his home in the 11800 block of Champion Drive Southwest.

…

At trial, Hiatt tried to introduce to the jury a letter from Kurtz’s doctor that describes Kurtz’s “hereditary spastic paraplegia” and his medical benefit from using marijuana.

The letter from the Olympia physician, Peter Taylor, was not allowed as evidence. It reads it part that Kurtz “has had progressive loss of function related to this familial neurologic condition which has left him wheelchair-bound and with severe tremors. Unfortunately, there is no treatment to prevent or cure this condition, and we are left to manage his symptoms, including chronic daily pain which is severe.”

Kurtz’s avoidance of jail time was the only silver lining in this mess. One Olympia-based medical marijuana activist I spoke to a few weeks back was fearing for Kurtz’s life if he were to be sent to jail.

Prosecutors really need to exercise better discretion on who we put through the criminal justice system. If Kurtz was caught selling his marijuana, that’s one thing, but he was quite obviously a medical marijuana patient. The proper course of action should have been to confiscate whatever plants were over the state limit and to give him a window of time to get a doctor’s authorization. Let’s reserve the court system for actual criminals.

Last week’s contest was won by Liberal Scientist. It was the futuristic house from the movie Sleeper, located just west of Denver along I-70. It was sold at a foreclosure auction last week.

From now on the third Sunday of every month will be specific to Washington, so this week’s photo is a random location somewhere in this state, good luck!

If we’re looking for some good ways to trim the budget, maybe we can cut out re-enacting episodes of the A-Team:

Marijuana activists are criticizing — and at least partly laughing off — a counter-terrorism exercise carried out Wednesday in California that featured marijuana growers setting off bombs and seizing a dam.

Organized by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the exercise involved 20 government agencies and some 250 personnel, according to a report from the Redding Record-Searchlight. In the scenario, marijuana growers blew up a bus and car and seized control of northern California’s Shasta Dam in a bid to free an imprisoned colleague.

How did Hannibal, B.A. and the boys handle this one?

The team drives up to the compound in the terrorists’ truck, with the Frank Stallone guy as their hostage. Then there’s a funny montage, where Ramon is talking about some attack they’re going to launch while the team launches basically the same attack on his guards! Hannibal and B.A. pick up some needed supplies, and Hannibal tells the rest of the team all the trouble is behind them: “from here on out, it’s open road.” Not two seconds later B.A. walks around a corner and finds the giant beard guy, ready for another 38 minutes of fighting! The look on B.A.’s face is priceless. “Not again!” he says.

Luckily not everything is going wrong; Hannibal, Murdock and Face storm the terrorists’ interminable planning meeting and run off with Marcus and the briefcase full of money (though B.A. and the beard guy do crash through a window at one point). Ramon again promises the team “will not get away this time,” and to show he’s serious he lets his soldiers actually chase after them instead of calling another planning meeting. The dudes all run toward the front gate, only the team is being sneaky and escaping by rappelling off a treacherous cliff. Is anyone worried about escaping via an imposing rock cliff? Nah. “Piece of cake,” as Face, B.A. and Murdock all deadpan. The mountaineering actually goes pretty well, or at least until Ramon and company show up and shoot the rappelling ropes before Hannibal can lower himself down. So he just jumps. The jazz, man. But then they shoot the inflatable raft the team was going to use for their getaway. So the team is trapped! No, Ramon, who has REPEATEDLY SAID THEY WON’T GET AWAY lets them get away because it’s time to go blow up a dam.

The team is back at the van, so the mission’s over, right? Face sums up just how good the team is: “We lost our wheels, B.A. did fifteen rounds with Godzilla, Hannibal did a twenty story high dive, we had our raft blown out from under us, and we still managed to save the girl, her boyfriend and… retrieve the money.” “Now all you’ve gotta do is stop them from blowing up the dam,” says Marcus. Dam? Murdock: “I wanna cry.”

The terrorists show up at the dam, and they actually shoot the elderly security guy – that’s what, 40 million bullets on this show and he’s like the third guy who actually got hit? On the other hand, the guard saw a bunch of armed guys dressed in black bodysuits and ski masks and waved them through without a second thought, so maybe he shouldn’t be on the job anyway. Their red van is apparently a clown van, because about 40 guys pile out once they’re inside the dam area. Two of them have an explosive device. Ah, the security guard was Hannibal in disguise! “I’m beginning to love this bulletproof vest!” he says. He lets the team know the terrorists are inside the dam. Murdock and Face are already inside, so they subdue a few of the thieves and disarm a few others. Then Hannibal and B.A. come in to get the guys working on the explosives. Everybody’s accounted for, but Almost Brigitte says, in a halting, I-can-barely-remember-these-lines voice, “You forgot about this. It’s set and you can’t stop it. You’ve got less than 90 seconds. You’re too late.” Hannibal and B.A. race off with the bomb… and run right into the giant beard guy! But even he doesn’t want to fight when he realizes what they’re carrying and runs off. I was going to make a “Goldfinger” joke about Hannibal and B.A. disabling the thing with 007 seconds to spare, but they actually heaved the bomb into the nearby water with 007 seconds to spare! The bomb explodes and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have taken out the whole dam – maybe chipped some of the paint in the boiler room, but then I’m being picky again. Thumbs up from B.A. and Hannibal.

It’s a good thing the terrorists in the A-Team episode weren’t pot growers or that dam would’ve been a goner.

Standing in the security line at Sea-Tac around the time Obama was elected in 2008, I thought that it would be a good indication of how much actual “hope and change” we’d be getting if the Obama Administration made some common sense changes to TSA procedures upon assuming office. It’s fairly well known that things like removing shoes and taking liquid items away doesn’t make much sense in any risk mitigation sense, and a new regime that billed itself as being more wedded to sound science than its predecessor would theoretically consider such changes to be no-brainers. Instead, we’ve continued to slide backwards in this respect, to the point of complete absurdity.

Our supposed national inclination towards personal liberty is nothing more than a mirage. What makes me even more convinced of this is that over 80% of the American public supports these body scans, while only 44% (Nate Silver estimates it’s far less than that) of Americans have even flown on an airplane in the past year. That means that there’s a significant number of Americans who never even face the miniscule risk of terrorism on an airplane who still insist that people’s naked images should be viewed by a government employee (or be sexually molested by one) before one can board a plane.

As Silver also points out in this post, people who travel most often are the most dissatisfied with airport security, and that was long before the porno-scanners were put into use. This seems perfectly normal to us, but it shouldn’t be. The people who should be most satisfied with a system of protecting air travelers are those most at risk from the security threats to air travelers. In a country where personal liberty is valued at some level, the people who aren’t at risk should be the least likely to go along with draconian security measures. Instead, they appear to be the most likely.

The brewing backlash against this insanity is good news, but the fact that it devolved to this point before people got this angry says a lot about how much we actually value freedom and how willing we’ve been to have blind faith in our government’s ability to “protect” us.

– Vivian McPeak on cannabis and cancer.

– Glenn Greenwald on Obama’s 180 on trying Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in Federal court.

– Adam Serwer explains how Eric Cantor is accusing himself of committing a felony.

– Steve Elliott writes about an unscrupulous medical marijuana dispensary owner in Tacoma. This man was in the audience at the CDC’s forum with 36th LD Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles and when given a chance to ask a question of the Senator, he ranted a bit about how government regulation would doom his business. No kidding.

Last week’s contest was won by uptown. It was the center of Colchester, England.

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