Back from a week out on the east coast and catching up on the news:

– Has there been a more entertainingly bizarre story than what’s been happening in Hardin, Montana? The town builds a jail in 2007 believing that building the jail is the road towards economic prosperity and more jobs. The jail stays empty for the next year and a half as the bonds issued to pay for the jail go into default. As desperation sets in, the economic development arm who initially built the jail volunteer to house Guantanamo detainees, but aren’t successful. As desperation increases, they then sign an agreement with a con-man from California named Michael Hilton (who has a long criminal record mostly involving fraud) and his private security force – named the American Police Force – to run the jail. Hilton also intended to set up a military training facility and perform law enforcement duties in the town. Without any formal announcement, black Mercedes SUV’s start rolling through the town with official-looking City of Hardin Police insignias (based on a Serbian coat-of-arms) that no one seemed to be expecting. Then, the Billings Gazette reporter who’d been covering the jail saga is hired away by the American Police Force to be their spokesperson. As the story explodes and the Montana Attorney General ponders an investigation, Hilton (a native of Montenegro who refers to himself as “Captain”) claims that an executive with a security firm named Michael Cohen has accepted the job of running the operation. Cohen says there’s no such deal and calls Hilton a liar. Finally, the economic development arm is finally forced to scrap the whole deal after it fully dawns on them that they just signed an agreement with a career criminal with a bogus company to run their jail and patrol their town. Holy fucking shit.

– This Wednesday morning, the Massachusetts Legislature will debate a bill to fully regulate and tax marijuana. The fight to create more sensible laws for marijuana may still take some time, but when the Today Show can have level-headed segments like this on the topic, we’re getting there.

– Two men are trying to open up a medical marijuana dispensary in Mountlake Terrace. In Spokane, the Gonzaga chapter of the ACLU is planning a demonstration in support of the medical marijuana law after the recent arrests there have again made it difficult for authorized patients to obtain medicine.

Update [Darryl]: And here is some political multimedia fun for the weekend.

A representative from MAPS, an organization devoted to studying the effects of psychedelics, recently sent me a press release about upcoming research being done in Vancouver to study the use of MDMA (more commonly known as ecstasy) to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. While a lot of people will snicker at the idea of using what’s more commonly known as a recreational drug for rave attendees to treat people who suffer trauma from serving in war, previous research has shown some serious promise.

MAPS’ goal is to demonstrate that MDMA has valid medical use so that the FDA and other international health agencies will allow it to be prescribed by doctors. Currently, MDMA is illegal in the United States, but has rather unsurprisingly seen a large spike in use since its distribution was handed to criminal organizations back in the 1980s. Internationally, MDMA is illegal in most countries, but researchers in Israel and Switzerland are also studying the effects of the drug.

One aspect of this story that caught my attention is the fact that this latest study in Vancouver, which could potentially benefit hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who have been diagnosed with PTSD, is being funded entirely by charitable donations. You’d think that a treatment that has shown such serious potential and has such a large potential base of customers would be something that American pharmaceutical companies would be interested in. Unfortunately, MDMA is off-patent and the drug itself doesn’t need to be taken every day for the overall treatment to be effective. As a result, there isn’t much money to be made when compared to giving old people boners.

No Bird’s Eye View Contest today. They’ll resume next weekend.

Here are some things that I’ve been too busy working on my fantasy football website to write about:

– Marc Emery is now in a Canadian jail awaiting extradition to the United States. Ian Mulgrew in the Vancouver Sun writes about how this is a monumental travesty that shows how Canada (like Mexico) lacks the courage to stand up to America’s policy makers when it comes to the drug war.

– While Marc Emery is expected to spend five years behind bars for selling marijuana seeds to Americans, the more extraordinary tragedy is that Dick Cheney is still a free man.

– The King County Deputy who was caught on a holding cell camera beating a 15-year-old girl was fired by Sheriff Sue Rahr.

– Rhode Island is preparing to set up its first state-sanctioned medical marijuana dispensary, hoping to learn from what has worked – and what hasn’t – in the two other states that allow them (California and New Mexico). Hopefully, Washington will be the fourth state to allow them. The Obama Administration’s hands-off approach is something that should allow for states to set up systems that have stronger regulations than what California has, where the Bush Administration’s no-tolerance approach discouraged transparency and led to a lot of shady characters getting involved.

Last week’s contest was won by Murgen in only 28 minutes. The correct answer was Abraham Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

AP reporter Gene Johnson has an article on the conflict brewing over Washington’s medical marijuana law:

Unlike some states, Washington requires patients to grow marijuana themselves or designate a caregiver to grow it for them. For many, that’s unrealistic: They’re too sick to grow cannabis themselves and don’t have the thousands of dollars it can cost for a caregiver to set up a proper growing operation.

So they’ve devised their own schemes, claiming to meet the letter of the law in establishing collective grows or storefront dispensaries – methods that are making police and prosecutors increasingly uncomfortable.

If one wants to take a conspiratorial stance about what happened in 2008, he or she could easily conclude that the police (through a willing legislature) intentionally fought for an overly restrictive law that was too difficult for patients to comply with in order to keep arresting authorized patients and those trying to establish ways to provide them with marijuana. In fact, I’ve heard a number of activists and patients claim this both during and after the process.

I’m not sure what the real motivations were, but the outcome is clearly a failure. When I got a chance to ask Governor Gregoire a question at Drinking Liberally last fall, I asked what she’d do if authorized patients and caregivers continued to get arrested. She said that if it happened, she’d work with the local police chiefs to address it. It doesn’t appear that she had any interest in keeping that promise, and I’d be surprised if she even remembers saying it. Police and prosecutors across the state continue to haul authorized patients and providers into court, and outside of the very progressive King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg and a few other county prosecutors, the emphasis remains on finding ways to prosecute people rather than finding ways to respect the spirit of the 1998 voter initiative that initially legalized medical marijuana use in this state.

One problem right now with the law remains the fact that patients either have to grow for themselves (which for most people who have cancer or multiple sclerosis – or are confined to a wheelchair – is a challenge) or find a provider. An even bigger problem is that, according to the law, the provider cannot be someone who already provides for other patients. Because it’s much easier for someone who is already a provider to take on another patient than for a completely new person to learn how, the law is often violated. This is what happened in Spokane, as Johnson explains:

Washington’s law says that a caregiver can only provide marijuana to one patient at any one time. In Spokane this year, medical marijuana activists focused on that language in setting up a for-profit dispensary called Change.

Lawyer Frank Cikutovich said the business met legal requirements: A lone patient would enter the store, sign a document designating the shop as his or her caregiver, and buy marijuana. The agreement expired when the patient left and the next customer came in.

The business, raided on Sept. 10, rendered the “one patient, one caregiver” rule meaningless, Spokane police spokeswoman Jennifer DeRuwe said. She said there was peripheral crime associated with the dispensary, including robberies at grow sites and street sales from people who had purchased pot there.

“They’re dispensing to hundreds and thousands of people,” DeRuwe said. “The police department’s stand is, we want to get some guidance on this. We know it’s going to be up to the court system to provide us with that.”

Sadly, it should have been the legislature that provided that guidance. In last year’s attempts at revising the law, it could have been clarified to allow for patient co-ops or even dispensaries. DeRuwe’s concern about “peripheral crime” is nothing short of an absurdity, but it was one that appears to have influenced the debate in the legislature and led to the shortfalls we have today. Robberies at grow sites don’t happen because dispensaries exist. They happen because marijuana is illegal for recreational use. If DeRuwe was really concerned about the problem of grow site robberies – instead of just using it as a red herring for political cover – she’d be demanding that we establish regulations for the production and sale of marijuana for all adults who want to use it, not just the ones for whom a doctor has certified a medical need.

The failure of this state’s supposedly progressive majority to address what should have been a rather easy problem is a good warning to progressives about what could happen at the national level. Instead of using these majorities to enact real progressive legislation, the leaders in Olympia, from Frank Chopp to Governor Gregoire, have continuously pandered to special interests (in this case, the police unions) and dared the voters to kick them out for it. And they’ve generally been successful because outside of a few outliers like Toby Nixon and Dan Satterberg, most of the Republicans in this state are still too batshit to be taken seriously.

Vice President Joe Biden is starting to rattle some cages over the 2010 midterms. The Obama Administration and our Democratic Congress have a number of difficult tasks where the interests of the general public are pitted against more powerful interests – from health care to the environment to the regulation of our financial sector. I’m finding myself conflicted between the belief that many of the Republicans we still have in Congress are simply not in the fight for the general public at all and need to be defeated, and the worry that a growing Democratic majority will start acting like the complacent, useless one we have here in the other Washington and simply shy away from those difficult tasks.

Last week’s contest was won by Dave in Seattle. It was the Warner Brothers Studio in Burbank, California.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

In an article in New York magazine, a man operating a small business in New York City made this startlingly honest confession:

I hate to say it, but there’s no way I’m hiring a black guy to work for me.

Is this a good indication of how racism still significantly affects our society and continues to create artificial barriers to success for minorities? Absolutely, but not in the way you think. The business owner who made that statement isn’t a racist at all. He runs one of New York’s marijuana delivery services, and he knows that if he hires a black man to be a delivery person, that person is significantly more likely to get arrested on his route. He then tells reporter Mark Jacobson:

Fact is, pot is legal for white people but not for black people, which is total bullshit.

Recent arrest statistics compiled by Queens College Professor Harry Levine back up this observation:

In this way, the NYPD has arrested tens of thousands of New Yorkers every year for possessing small amounts of marijuana. These arrests are expensive, costing nearly $90 million a year. And there are other costs: an arrest record can result in severe collateral consequences, like loss of employment, or the chance at a college scholarship. Spending the night in one of the City’s overcrowded holding pens or in Riker’s can itself be traumatic.

The most alarming component of these arrests, however, are the racial disparities. Nearly 90% of all those arrested for possession of marijuana are Black and Latino. Whites comprise 35% of the City population, but make up less than 10% of all those arrested for possession of marijuana. These disparities are not indicators of who uses marijuana–over 1/3 of all adults U.S. have tried marijuana, and anyone on a casual weekend stroll through the Upper West Side or Prospect Park will find a number of white people puffing away.

As Gabriel Sayegh also points out in that same post, the number of arrests for low-level marijuana possession have risen from 900 in 1993 to 40,000 in 2008. With nearly 90% of those arrests being of minorities (and most of them young), those arrests tend to erase the kinds of opportunities that would otherwise be available. This trend hasn’t just been with marijuana either. All forms of drug enforcement – especially the long disparity between crack and cocaine sentencing guidelines – have created a gigantic divide between how the drug war affects white communities and how it affects minority communities.

It’s become fashionable to claim that racism in America is largely over and that the folks who claim it isn’t are attempting to exploit the gullible. The numbers from America’s drug war emphasize how false that belief is. Wherever one goes in America, the racial disparity in drug arrests is only becoming more extreme. In California, blacks are only 7% of the population, but make up 33% of marijuana felony arrests. There are six times as many whites and blacks in the state, but more black men are picked up for marijuana felony offenses than whites, even though whites and blacks use marijuana in equal percentages and there are six times as many whites in the state. From coast to coast this occurs, giving us a massive disparity in our prison population and creating a huge wealth gap between white and minority communities.

What’s interesting to note about this phenomenon is that throughout the criminal justice system, from prosecutors to police officers to judges, the individuals within the system will be adamant that they’re not racists themselves. And I think most of them are telling the truth. The system itself really isn’t the root of the racism. The racism tends to come from what the community expects of this system and pushes politicians to do with it. When it’s understood that way, as the manifestation of lingering American eliminationism, the results we have start to make more sense.

A perfect illustration of this phenomenon occurred a few years back in an exchange I had with a blog commenter from the Bay Area. She first left a comment agreeing with me that marijuana prohibition is stupid and that people shouldn’t be arrested for using it. Then, when I mentioned the racial disparity, her attitude changed. She became defensive of law enforcement and falsely claimed that blacks get arrested because they commit more drug crimes (they don’t). Finally, I posted a video of an old episode of COPS, where several black men where being tackled and arrested after buying small bags of weed from an informant. She quickly went from being against marijuana prohibition to expressing gratitude to the police for getting these dangerous people off the streets. To this day, I guarantee you that she doesn’t think of herself as a racist, and if you ever accused her of it, she’d flip out just as she did in the comments of that post.

This is the difficulty in understanding the real level of racism that infects our political debates today, and more specifically, the extent to which racism drives the “teabagger” movement. I sympathize with genuine small government conservatives who have been consistent in their opposition to both Republicans and Democrats. But I also get the sense that they don’t recognize how miniscule they are within the ranks of those who are waving tea bags and calling Obama a Communist.

On the other hand, I think Jimmy Carter is wrong when he says that the reason for such heated opposition is because Obama is black. It’s not simply because Obama is black (one could easily see the same protests if Hillary Clinton was President), it’s because Obama is a Democrat, and the Democrats are seen as the party that represents the interests of black America. The reason we’re seeing such an intense backlash to government spending all of a sudden is not because government is being more irresponsible with its spending than it was during the Bush era, it’s because the perception is that the money is being spent on the undesirables within our society, the same people who always seem to bear the brunt of our nation’s drug war.

As Glenn Greenwald points out in this post, it makes absolutely no sense to be more concerned about the tiny sums of money that we dish out to ACORN for the relatively minor scandal that they’ve been caught up in after years of being disinterested in the vast sums of money that we’ve given to war profiteers like Blackwater, or various war-crime-committing nations, or to the financial services companies that drove our economy into the ground. The only explanation is that ACORN is representative of black America, and therefore is seen as a threat disproportionate to their actual influence. But don’t dare call that phenomenon racist.

A few updates from around the area:

– As the extradition date for Canadian seed-seller Marc Emery approaches (he’s expected to be sentenced here in Seattle on Monday, September 28), a rally to protest his looming incarceration is being organized for this Saturday, September 19 at 10am, starting at the Space Needle.

– Medical marijuana patients protested the raids on Spokane’s dispensaries.

– The Tri-City Herald investigates an incident that shows that storylines from The Wire can happen even out in rural Eastern Washington as well. Wherever you go, the drug war inevitably leads to corruption.

– What’s wrong with Tom Carr? If you care about making sure he’s no longer our City Attorney after this year, his opponent in November, Pete Holmes, is having a fundraiser tomorrow (Wednesday) in downtown Seattle.

It looks like this is going to be a busy week for me. There are a number of drug war related stories happening across the state that I want to follow, but I definitely want to address this editorial that appeared on the Tacoma News-Tribune editorial page last week. Specifically this part:

California was already becoming notorious for effectively legalizing recreational dope-smoking through its extremely lax medical marijuana law. Washingtonians were offered their own loophole-riddled marijuana initiative in 1997, and they resoundingly rejected it.

The one they did pass the next year, Initiative 692, was explicitly designed to forbid the California-style dispensaries that operate like commercial marijuana shops. Its sponsors touted its safeguards, including a provision that let a “primary caregiver” provide limited amounts of marijuana to a patient under conditions that precluded drug-dealing.

The key language required a caregiver to “possess no more marijuana that is necessary for the patient’s personal, medical use” and “be the primary caregiver to only one patient at any one time.”

The meaning seems crystal clear: No multi-customer operations. But McCrea and other dispensary advocates have seized on those last four words. In their view, it sounds like, “any one time” means any time a buyer walks through the door.

Accept that logic, and Washington takes a long step toward the wide-open drug-dealing now rampant in California, where some compliant doctors hang out their shingles near dispensaries and pass out marijuana cards to anyone with a vaguely plausible physical complaint.

There’s one point I can’t argue. Marijuana is essentially legal in California right now. The list of qualifying conditions that a person can obtain it for in that state is long enough that any recreational user can become a medical user. Depression, insomnia, whatever, there are doctors throughout the state that will – for a fee, of course! – certify you as a medical marijuana patient. And just about anyone who has used marijuana recreationally discovers that it has some side medical benefits as well, so it’s not hard to tell a doctor, “Yeah, it helps me sleep”, or “Man, it really gets rid of my stomach aches”.

People can complain all they want that this full-scale legalization happened under the guise of ensuring that sick people can have access to a medicinal plant that they find extremely valuable, but that’s irrelevant now. What we see now is that nothing really changed. All of the reasons that were given for not simply legalizing it for recreational use in the first place weren’t valid. Marijuana is legal there, and it has made no difference in how that state functions (or malfunctions). We haven’t seen any huge spikes in use, and in fact the percentages of teenagers who use marijuana in California have been dropping sharply since the medical marijuana laws were put in place.

That point aside, the major flaw with the News-Tribune editorial is that it just assumes that implementing a dispensary system in Washington will turn us into California. There’s no basis for that observation. Washington has a far more limited set of ailments that allow a person to become an authorized patient. I could easily become a medical marijuana cardholder in California, but would not be able to here. Without that long list of accepted ailments, recreational users in Washington would still have to obtain marijuana from criminal organizations. And for reasons that make absolutely no sense to anyone, this appears to be the way that the idiots at the Tacoma News-Tribune want it.

In all of the arguing over the law and hyperbole about what’s happening in California, it’s the folks who use medical marijuana for truly serious ailments who are once again forgotten. Today, I spoke on the phone with the woman at the center of the Grant County case, Rosa Dossett. Living in a very rural part of the state, obtaining supplies of marijuana is not a trivial task, so she relied on her son to grow for her. Her son, David Hagar (who Dossett says does not even use marijuana himself), has been raided twice by Grant County police (he’s also accused of theft). Grant County police also allegedly told Dossett that even with her authorization, she’s still not allowed to use marijuana. If that happened as she said, the police simply lied to her.

Dossett is a cancer survivor and suffers from osteo-arthritis. Her main medical use for the drug now is to manage the constant pain from osteo-arthritis. Unlike a lot of other drugs, the effectiveness of a pain reliever is pretty clear to people. If a pain reliever doesn’t work, you know damn well that it doesn’t work. That’s why I’m always amazed when I see people questioning the efficacy of this drug. Dossett has found that she prefers marijuana to drugs like Hydrocodone because it’s natural, more effective, less chemically addictive, and it can be grown for far less money than what prescription pharmaceuticals cost. Unfortunately, the language of the medical marijuana law allows a judge to decide whether pain patients can use marijuana instead of a pharmaceutical alternative.

It shouldn’t be up to judges or the police to decide which medicines we choose to use. That should be left up to doctors and patients. Some of the leading researchers when it comes to using marijuana for medicinal purposes are based right here at the University of Washington. Here’s a recent study from the Journal of Opioid Management by six UW researchers on the numerous studies showing the efficacy of marijuana. The question of whether or not people in this state with a legitimate medical need should have access to this plant for medical uses has been settled in the minds of the electorate for over ten years. It’s the responsibility of both the Legislature and the Governor to finally translate that legitimacy into a system that works.

UPDATE: It appears that SeattleJew decided to check in from his land of merry make-believe in an attempt to discredit the authors of the Journal of Opioid Management report linked above. One of the researchers, Dr. Sunil Aggarwal has responded with a comment here listing out references to 33 separate clinical trials that have demonstrated the value of marijuana as medicine.

UPDATE 2: Attorney Douglas Hiatt emails me to say that the law does not allow a judge to substitute their medical opinion for a doctor’s, and he expects the court ruling I linked to above to be overturned.

Back in June, I wrote about Change – a medical marijuana dispensary operating in Spokane. Last week they were busted and the dispensary was shut down. A group called the Spokane Regional Dispensary Coalition is planning a protest at the Spokane County Courthouse this morning.

The situation in Spokane is just another exhibit in the case of how our legislature dropped the ball when they had a chance to put together a set of regulations that allowed for qualifying patients to obtain medical marijuana. Patients in Spokane once again have to rely on street dealers.

The dispensary owners are challenging the part of the law that states that a caregiver can only have one patient at a time. I don’t see them succeeding on this point in court. It’s the law that needs to change.

I have the power to make stupid people say stupid things.

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was Bucharest, Romania. Wes also found this Wikipedia page for the pictured monastery.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

– Blogger Andrew Sullivan appears to have gotten some very favorable treatment from prosecutors after being busted for pot possession in Cape Cod. Sullivan is particularly enlightened on the drug war and certainly understands how lucky he was to escape more serious consequences. Hopefully, he’ll share some thoughts soon at his place.

– Grits For Breakfast has a roundup of links on Cameron Todd Willingham, a man who was executed in Texas for arson, but may have been innocent.

– A man in West Virginia was busted with a sophisticated marijuana grow room (over 100 plants) in his attic. What makes this pot bust story different than the dozens of other busted grows every month around the country? The man tending the plants had been appearing in commercials and on YouTube promoting his labor union’s drug free policies.

– The Drug War Chronicle took a week off from compiling their corrupt cop roundup and wound up with a pretty big list this week.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZEofSOQYJU[/youtube]

[via Scott Morgan]

Still waiting for updates on the court cases happening this week in Washington.