– Jim McDermott has added his name to the small but growing list of Congressmen who are finally speaking up about the need to legalize marijuana as part of the response to our nation’s economic mess. Mary Ann Akers at the Washington Post writes about Howard Woolridge, the lobbyist for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. The conventional wisdom has long been that there’s a danger for politicians to embrace McDermott’s position because of the voters, but for some reason, Ron Paul keeps getting re-elected by wide margins in one of the most conservative parts of the country. The problem is not that voters will reject it. It’s that politicians and special interests (law enforcement agencies, prison lobbies, and pharmaceutical firms) have a strong interest in holding it back.

– A major bust in Belltown brought charges against 32 individuals for drug dealing. The answer to the PI’s question is No. Arresting people does not fix an area’s crack problem. Here’s my question: How many more decades will this approach have to fail before we finally recognize that it always fails?

– I’m having a lot of trouble understanding the logic inside Obama’s Justice Department. This week, they recommended that Charles Lynch, the medical marijuana dispensary owner who was raided by the Bush Justice Department, be sentenced to 5 years in prison. This is only weeks after Eric Holder said that Obama would no longer target those in medical marijuana states like Lynch who follow state law. The Times article quotes U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien as saying that Lynch was violating state law, which is clearly bullshit. Not only did Lynch have the mayor of the town at his side when he opened his dispensary, but during the trial, the Federal Prosecutors went out of their way to prevent the jury from knowing that he was following state law.

So to sum up the Obama Administration’s DOJ stances: We won’t prosecute people for torture because that’s looking towards the past, but we will honor previously-imposed mandatory minimum sentences for things that we no longer think should be enforced. I’m sorry, but that’s every bit as bad as the Bush Administration was. On issues of civil liberties, Obama and his fellow Democrats need to start getting serious or they’ll start bleeding independent voters before 2010.

– PubliCola writes about how Civil Liberties legislation fared in Olympia this session.

Earlier this week, this post at Eschaton about a girl being prosecuted for “sexting” made me recall an event that used to take place every year at this time – the Ann Arbor Naked Mile.

As a freshman at the University of Michigan in 1993-94, my roommate was a junior on the crew team. According to his version of events, the crew team started the Naked Mile in the late 80s by streaking across campus at midnight after the last night of class. In the years following, the event grew significantly larger. Throughout the school year, my roommate tried convincing everyone in our hall to run with him. I had a pretty strong anti-authoritarian streak in me by then, but it still took a little bit of coaxing to get me on board.

On the night of the event, there were four of us assembled in our room downing shots (my roommate was over 21 by then, so that was only partially against dorm rules) and drinking Mountain Dews. The route of the Naked Mile went across campus from east to west, basically taking us back to our dorms. Despite it only being in the 40s, I headed across campus wearing only a pair of soccer shorts and sneakers. When I got to the starting area, though, much of the nervousness about doing this was going away. There were hundreds of people there milling about naked, waiting for midnight. It was like a giant co-ed locker room outside in the cold. I took off my shorts and waited for everyone to start running.

The weird thing about the run is that you don’t get to do it as a herd. Because of the massive amounts of people who were now showing up for the event, the runners end up doing much of the race in a single-file line through the crowd on the main part of campus. The run began somewhat uneventfully at first, but as we approached the arch that separates the shops on South University from the campus diag, the route got blocked by the crowd. My roommate, cool as a fucking cucumber, yells out “anybody got a cigarette!” Someone in the crowd hands him a cigarette. He yells out “anybody got a light!” An outstretched hand held a lighter. He smoked it as we all stood around waiting for the path to clear.

We weren’t at the very end of the runners, but we were pretty close. My roommate’s smoke break separated us from the rest of the runners enough so that people in the crowd ahead thought that the run was over. As we finally made our way through the arch and into the diag, we were even more enmeshed in the crowd. By the time we got across the diag to State Street, we were way off course. In order to get to where we knew the end point was, we decided to cut through a small landscaped area just across State Street. After we jumped in, though, we realized that the ground inside that area was lower than the sidewalk we’d just jumped from. After we’d climbed up through a tall hedge to get back onto the sidewalk, I still vividly remember hearing my friend behind me saying, “Damn, I think I scratched my scrotum.” Still makes me laugh to this day.

When we arrived at the Cube sculpture where the “Mile” (it’s not even close to an actual mile) ends, we met up with some of the clothed members of our co-ed hall. And despite the fact that the run was over and I was hanging out with the girls from the room next door, I didn’t even feel the need to get dressed again. It’s something that you’d never expect, but once you’re naked in public with a good excuse, you can begin to feel very comfortable with your nakedness very quickly.

I wound up running it all four years I was in Ann Arbor, but I never had as much fun as I did that first year. In subsequent years, I began to notice the things that would eventually bring an end to the city’s and the University’s tolerance of the event. The major problem was that despite there being about 8 to 10 male runners for every female one, the event brought out the perverts in full force. Even in that first year, the size of the crowds amazed me. Then, with each year, the amount of video cameras just multiplied. One year (I believe my junior year), I let my drunkenness get the best of me and got thrown to the ground by a man whose very expensive video camera I’d just broken.

In my senior year run, some runners around me ran while also chanting “PER-VERTS” to the assembled gawkers. Unfortunately, gawking wasn’t the only thing going on. My girlfriend ran with me that year and said that she nearly got groped by some guys along the way. Several other girls who ran said the same thing, and some had actually been grabbed and pulled to the ground. We tried to find a police officer (Ann Arbor police tolerated the event and even did crowd control), but couldn’t find one interested in helping. Within a few years after that, the University tried to shut the whole event down.

I was thinking back on this history when I read the original post above, where a young girl who’d taken revealing pictures of herself with her phone found herself in a courtroom where a bunch of old men were planning to review the evidence and potentially punish her for doing so. On the one hand, I recognize the desire to keep teenage girls from doing this, as many of them have no fucking clue how populated this country is with sexually repressed and psychologically disturbed individuals who might do them harm. On the other hand, though, attempting to charge them with a crime is arguably the dumbest possible way to dissuade them from doing so. As the girl in the article realized, the biggest punishment that could occur is for creepy old men to see her naked.

It’s been tempting to conclude that the overeager prosecutor in this case, George Skumanick Jr., is focusing on these cases simply because of his own perverted desire to see revealing pictures of teenage girls. It’s certainly possible. But it’s also possible that he’s just another product of a justice system that far too often sees its role as moral nanny, and refuses to acknowledge the dangers of taking a heavy handed approach to getting teens not to make risky personal choices. It’s also kind of interesting that this case is happening so close to where the recent scandal over funneling young people to jail for money took place.

Another major concern here is that unless we clearly push back against the idea that anyone who doesn’t guard their own nakedness with sufficient zeal as a child pornographer, we’ll continue to expand the ranks of “sex offenders” beyond the point where it makes sense. The term sex offender should refer to actual dangerous people, who have victimized other people in a sexual way (like the perverts who grabbed and assaulted female runners at the Naked Mile). When we start trying to label people as sex offenders who make moral choices that sexually repressed members of our justice system are offended by, we completely undermine the purpose of having that distinction in the first place.

A few years after the Naked Mile was shut down, they made an American Pie movie that was based on the tradition. Not surprisingly, it was the same kind of idiotic overly-sexualized view of the event that wound up bringing hundreds of perverts out of the woodwork to line the streets of Ann Arbor every April. Back in the early-to-mid 90s, pictures posted from the Naked Mile on University of Michigan student websites were some of the first instances of web porn out there (which probably didn’t stay up for very long). On today’s internet, it probably wouldn’t even pass for porn, just blurry pictures of naked people running.

Today, the trend of “sexting” is the new thing, and a lot of kids simply haven’t been smart enough to realize that when they send a photo to their friends, it’s a short journey to the internet where the whole world can see it. As cases like that become more and more common, more and more kids will be smarter about not doing it. It doesn’t require that law enforcement officials spy on our teenagers’ phone traffic. It doesn’t require that District Attorneys threaten them with a “sex offender” tag that would haunt them their whole lives. It just requires explaining that there are a lot of freaking weirdos out there and expecting kids to be smarter.

A photographer sneaks into North Korea and takes pictures of the 1984-like nightmare they have going on over there.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI8eWEG2c4M[/youtube]

There was no winner in last week’s contest. The correct answer was Tucson, AZ. This one should be more solvable, good luck!

Earlier this week, Josh Marshall at TPM posted up some thoughts on Mexico:

Clearly, there’s a lot of violence in Mexico tied to the Mexican government’s attempted crackdown on its drug cartels. And the Mexicans are quite legitimately pressuring us to limit the number of guns being smuggled from the US into Mexico, which are fueling the fire. And if Mexico degenerates to the level of Colombia where for many years the key cartels have operated as rivals to the government — clearly beyond the legitimate government’s ability to bring them to heel — then that’s a big problem for us, given our proximity and long border, etc. But I keep hearing these stories about violence spilling over into the US, questions from whether we may need to deploy the US army to our own border, vague stories about death squads in the US. I’m not saying there’s nothing to it. But a lot of this has the feel to me of one of those stories ginned up by politicians and restless news outlets where there ends up being much much less there than meets the eye. Part of me wonders whether it’s a recrudescence of the illegal immigration hysteria of last two years.

There are three separate points being addressed here: (1) The issue of guns being smuggled into Mexico from the U.S. (2) The issue of Mexico’s inability to defeat the drug traffickers and (3) The issue of violence spilling over into the U.S.

Josh looks at these three issues and concludes that the third issue is being “ginned up by politicians and restless news outlets.” He’s right about that, and he later posts a link to a good piece in the Texas Observer about how the media is over-hyping the level of violence on the American side of the border. But the reality is that it’s both the first and third points that are being “ginned up by politicians and restless news outlets.”

Recently, a number of politicians and news outlets have been claiming that 90 percent of the guns that get used by Mexican drug traffickers come from the U.S. In actuality, that figure is wildly inaccurate. And Obama repeated the mythical percentage this week when meeting with Mexican President Calderon.

A certain amount of guns do cross the border from the U.S. into Mexico, and it’s possible that the amount of high-powered weapons bought on the illegal black market from the U.S. is higher than we can accurately measure, but to say that the flow of guns is “fueling the fire” in Mexico’s drug war is buying into a large amount of spin. What’s fueling the fire in Mexico is not the weaponry itself, but the money that the drug traffickers are making that allows them to spend so much money on weapons.

Radley Balko, in a column this week in The Daily Beast, gets to the heart of what’s going wrong in Mexico:

When Barack Obama visits Mexico today, the drug war, and the violence it has spawned south of the border, is expected to dominate the agenda. Since 2006, more than 10,000 people have been murdered in Mexico as a direct consequence of the drug trade. This bloody outbreak began when, with the blessing of and funding from the U.S. government, Mexican President Felipe Calderon ordered the Mexican military to aggressively crack down on the drug cartels. Such crackdowns often ratchet up the level of violence, as the elimination of one major drug distributor provokes those who remain to war over his territory. That’s a pattern as old and predictable as Prohibition itself, yet politicians never seem to learn.

Last month, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Mexico, she expressed gave concern over the escalating violence… and then heaped praise on Calderon’s crackdown, promising to support it with more funding and more military hardware. Obama appears poised to say much the same thing. According to a recent preview of his trip in The Washington Post, the president is expected to promise swifter delivery of drug-war aid and increased efforts by the U.S. to stop the flow of American weapons to Mexico. But the best solution to what’s plaguing Mexico right now is the one topic that will almost assuredly be off the table: legalizing marijuana. Marijuana makes up 60 to 70 percent of the Mexican drug trade. Lifting prohibitions on it in the United States would eradicate a major source of funds for the cartels.

I’m not saying that the first and third issues mentioned above – guns traveling across south of the border and increased violence north of the border – aren’t happening at all. What’s happening is that politicians and media outlets are using both of these issues as distractions in order to avoid dealing with the central issue that Balko is discussing right there. This is a problem of organized crime, and the fuel for that fire is the billions of dollars (I’ve seen various estimates of between $10 billion to $100 billion per year) that Americans spend on drugs. It’s not going to be solved by stricter gun control measures. And sending law enforcement to secure the border would only escalate the amount of violence in our border communities. The only way to solve this problem is to cut off the drug trafficker’s income. But that’s something that Obama and a large part of the news media still can’t bring themselves to regard as a serious issue.

There’s definitely change in the air around Washington state regarding the prosecutions of medical marijuana patients. Three more cases being tracked by the Cannabis Defense Coalition were dropped this week, one in Kitsap County, one in Pierce County, and one in King County.

In Kitsap County, charges against Monte Levine and Marc Derenzy, who have been fighting Kitsap County authorities for nearly a decade, were dropped. According to Levine:

Yesterday my partner Marc and I went into Kitsap Superior Court. I had been scheduled for an Omnibus Hearing on the charge of Manufacturing Marijuana. Instead we picked up the Order of Dismissal. We stood in front of newly elected judge Olson, who smiled broadly as she signed our orders.

The prosecution stated that it was not in the best interest of justice to pursue this case. We were told that the Kitsap Prosecutors will meet and confer before moving forward with any manufacturing case that involves marijuana.

In Pierce County, charges against Michael Byers have been dropped. Byers has been raided three times in the past five years by Pierce County authorities despite being an authorized medical marijuana patient.

The case in King County that was dropped this week was a little different, as the defendant, Gaura Kish, did not have a medical marijuana authorization at the time of his arrest for being in possession of a small amount of marijuana. However, when the prosecutor noticed that there were over a dozen observers in the courtroom, he reviewed the defendant’s medical records and decided that the case was not in line with King County’s policies for trying medical marijuana patients.

A fourth case in Mason County, that I mentioned here, had a hearing yesterday in front of a group of courtroom observers. According to one person via email, the prosecutor seemed very agitated during the entire proceeding. The next court date for that case is on May 4th in Shelton. If you’d like to be an observer, please contact the folks at the CDC.

I’m not sure what to make of this trend other than to see these dismissals as a recognition from our public officials that the general public is fed up with our marijuana laws and that there’s now a real price to pay politically from continuing to waste taxpayer money like this. In the recent online question and answer forum set up by the state’s Senate Democrats, the top question was about arresting non-violent drug offenders. And the short infomercial on our marijuana laws filmed by Rick Steves (that KOMO TV refused to air) has just been nominated for a Northwest Emmy. Times are changing quickly, folks. Let’s see if the clown car in Olympia can keep up.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cr89xbl26g[/youtube]

– Individuals in some rural parts of Washington are having difficulty finding doctors willing to certify patients and write prescriptions for the new Death With Dignity law. This was somewhat expected as there was never any intention to force doctors to participate, but if a person is forced to travel across the state to exercise what should now be a basic right, the law really isn’t working. I’m still confident that doctors in those areas will begin to step up and start working with the individuals who are seeking out this option without requiring the state to get involved (a la Plan B). Thursday is National Healthcare Decisions Day, and Compassion and Choices is using this opportunity to encourage health care providers to honor people’s end-of-life decisions.

– The Cannabis Defense Coalition is following a case involving two medical marijuana patients in Mason County. Prosecutors are claiming that the couple (John Reed, 48, and Karen Mower, 44) had more marijuana than they were authorized by a doctor to have. I don’t have a lot of information about the case other than what’s in the sheriff’s office’s press release (which appears to overestimate how much pot a single plant can produce). Some observers will be in the courtroom in Shelton this Friday.

– This Friday is the opening night for American Violet, a movie that chronicles the true story of an African-American single mother who was falsely arrested on drug charges and was able to fight the very corrupt justice system in her rural Texas town. Unfortunately, the movie is only being released in some markets, so we’ll have to wait to see it here in Seattle. If this review from Rex Reed is any indication, we’ll get a chance to see it before too long:

It’s rare, I’ll admit, but occasionally a good movie raises its head through the muck and mire and leaves me grateful but shocked with disbelief. Such a movie is American Violet, a harrowing, compelling and profoundly true story that dares to tackle an important but too rarely exposed issue of the abuse of power in the American criminal justice system.

…

At a time when almost every movie I see is about nothing at all, American Violet rattles a few cages with its story of personal courage against overwhelming odds. Sensational, nerve-racking stuff that leaves you shattered while it teaches you something.

The movie is based upon a real life drug task force sweep in Hearne, Texas. In the review, Reed seems stunned that what he was watching in the film is a true story. I’m not sure the average American is aware of the extent of corruption that happened in towns like Hearne and Tulia (which also has a movie in the works with Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry). As I was reading the book that the upcoming Tulia movie will be based on, I remember thinking how the story would shock people as a Hollywood movie.

[Via Drug WarRant]

As some folks close to this blog already know, I became a father last week. In the months leading up to the big event, I did a lot of thinking about how different a world my son will be growing up in than what I grew up in. Admittedly, I was mostly intrigued by the superficial, like the kinds of pop culture icons that will seem totally ancient to him: Cheers will seem as old to him as I Love Lucy seemed to me. Nirvana will seem as old to him as the Beatles seemed to me. And E.T. will look as dated to him as movies like Inherit The Wind seemed to me.

But beyond the superficial, there’s a major technological gap between even those of us born in the 1970s and those being born today. Even with a father who worked in the early high-tech industry, I didn’t grow up in a world of gadgets. My son is likely to be using high-tech toys and playing with high-tech games that I couldn’t even conceive of as a youngster. But there are even starker divides among the living that I began to think about as I held my day-old son in the hospital while Willard Scott was on TV wishing people a Happy 100th Birthday.

Someone born in 1909 was raised in a radically different world than what we have now. If someone wanted to send a birth announcement across the country, the letter would’ve taken weeks to get there. If someone in Seattle wanted their relatives on the East Coast to hear their son’s voice, they’d have to wait until at least 1915 when transcontinental phone service was first set up. If a family wanted to take that newborn child to Japan and back, it would take them weeks or even months. And if that family wanted to be informed about events in the world that their son was growing up in, they relied on printed newspapers, often produced by well-heeled interests who would allow their personal biases to strongly influence how they presented the news to their readership.

It’s odd that with all of the technological progress we’ve made in 100 years, we still seem a little surprised to see this massively outdated way of keeping people informed going away. Even with TV and radio, newspapers still provided an advantage in that the consumer could easily skip over things they weren’t interested in, but all three of those media suffered from the same problem, that only a limited number of people had influence over the content. If a news outlet had an interest in hiding the truth or manufacturing a separate reality, it often had the means to do so. Taking that possibility to an extreme can lead to overly conspiratorial thinking, but it certainly was the reality sometimes. And alternate perspectives could often be sidelined.

The internet, of course, has blown the lid off of this. In 1909, if someone – or a group of people – could prove that something in the daily newspaper was intentionally misleading or false, most people would never find out. Today, liars in print journalism are quickly exposed. Fraudulent reporting is frequently called out. The internet has allowed us to fill in the gaps where the traditional media of newspapers, magazines, and television have failed us. The first major illustration of this was the Iraq War. People began to understand the extent to which they weren’t being properly informed by the outmoded media outlets of the 20th century, and we began to rely more on better avenues for keeping ourselves informed.

I remember telling people back in 2006 or so that the internet was about 2 years ahead of traditional media outlets when it comes to framing the issues in more truthful and more realistic ways. This has been true for issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where Americans are now far more aware that this is a conflict where Israeli aggression shares as much blame as Palestinian terrorism for the deadlock. This has been true for gay marriage, where public opinion has shifted significantly as more and more people are exposed to the human reality of in-born homosexuality. And this has been true for universal health care, as the fiscal and functional superiority of socialist-minded European systems has become more understood (and Michael Moore’s movie arguably played a big part in that too). At the time, I predicted that a drug policy shift would be coming, and sure enough, it has now exploded onto the national scene, primarily because the internet community has been forcing the traditional media to catch up to its level of understanding.

In each of these cases, the traditional media has either ignored reality or actively tried to hide it. Why? It’s been done for a number of reasons – historically strong sympathies with Israel, concerns over alienating a large conservative Christian news consumer base, wealthy special interests, and sometimes just general inertia and a fear to challenge conventional wisdom. But whenever media interests are controlled by a small number of extremely wealthy individuals as they are now, it’s unrealistic to expect them to truly be the voice of the people or to take our perspective into account. Of course, as the tea-baggers are now demonstrating, not all of us have the ability to figure out when the wealthy are convincing us to believe in stupid shit in order to further their own interests.

Last week on the Colbert Report, Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle gave a familiar response concerning the death of newspapers, warning that it cost the Boston Globe over a million dollars to investigate the Catholic Church pedophile scandal, and therefore things like that won’t get uncovered if newspapers go away. Of course, Microsoft once believed that since they spent millions of dollars developing operating systems, office productivity software, web servers, and databases that no one could do those things for free too.

But Bronstein isn’t completely wrong. There needs to be some new form of revenue for people who provide good journalism. The best opinion and area expert bloggers out there rely on good reporting and are just as lost as the rest of us without it. And I think it falls to us – opinion and area expert bloggers – to decide how much value we place on being informed, and to come up with a way to preserve and promote good journalism before it goes away. But I also think we have the technology and the resources to develop a system that’s far superior to what we ever got from the top-down controlled media empires we’ve all grown up with.

It seems extremely unlikely at this point that any pay-per-view model will ever take shape on the internet. Putting new content behind a subscription firewall doesn’t bring in revenue as much as it decreases the amount of traffic, which is arguably the more important commodity for sustaining a journalistic enterprise today. Today, there are still tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of paid journalists across the globe putting their content online for free. But as newspapers cut back and fold, how much of that will we start to lose? I think it’s a very real possibility to get to Phil Bronstein’s worst case scenario, where big news stories simply have no one covering them.

I’m throwing out an idea here that I’ve begun to formulate, but haven’t shared with anyone yet. I want to encourage people to send me feedback on it. The idea is for a monthly “subscription” portfolio. (I put the word subscription in quotes because it’s actually more like a donation than a subscription) For instance, a standard portfolio would be like $20 a month, and you would set each dollar of that portfolio to go to a journalist that you rely on for good, accurate reporting. Or maybe it could go towards a group of journalists at a legacy outfit.

What I see this doing is two-fold. First, it creates a bottom-up way of rewarding good journalism. Second, it separates the legacy newspaper function that bloggers have trouble replacing (report journalism) with the one that they’re often significantly better at (opinion and analysis). Some journalists, if they choose, could provide perks for that $1 “subscription”, like a daily email or the ability to have specific questions answered and investigated. For instance, let’s say I want to “subscribe” to an Olympia reporter. Because I subscribe to that reporter, I may be able to have them pop into Frank Chopp’s office and get the answer to a specific question for me (as I’ve learned from experience, I will not get an answer if I email that clown directly). Maybe that privilege costs $5 a month. Who knows?

Again, these are just some preliminary ideas that I’m throwing out for discussion and feedback. I’ve been hearing a lot about catastrophic consequences to the death of print journalism. I don’t think this is an area where we need a government bailout or anything, but it may end up being entirely up to us in order to figure out how to sustain an industry that we’ve relied on in order to reach a new plateau in keeping us all better informed. It’s a beautiful thing to have right now and something I want to preserve for the next generation.

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was the north end of the CNN complex in downtown Atlanta. Here’s this week’s, good luck!

It looks like the Bush Administration’s war on terror continues.

UPDATE: I want to congratulate commenter Rick D, who has officially broken the world record for stupidity in the comment thread down below. When claiming that Obama hasn’t released his birth certificate is only the 3rd or 4th stupidest thing you’ve said in a comment thread, you’ve accomplished something special.

I think Jon Stewart had a pretty good take on these nutballs.

Dean Becker of the Drug Truth Network interviewed State Representative Roger Goodman (Kirkland).

Dean Becker: It wasn’t that long ago that there were just a handful of elected officials, willing to even talk about this drug war; to talk about regulation control or legalization. But I think, if I dare say, there are several score, perhaps even a hundred now, nationwide that are like you, willing to address this issue and if I remember right, your opponent, in this last election cycle, had a lot of similar thoughts. It’s not that rare anymore, is it?

Rep. Roger Goodman: Yeah. Let me tell you the timeline here. OK. So, three years ago I ran for office. I was the sort of renegade, grenade thrower, unpredictable, radical guy. Because if you ’Google’ Roger Goodman or Roger Goodman drugs, you’ll find all the things I talk about. ‘The fact that prohibition doesn’t work.’ ‘We need to assert regulatory control.’ People were sort of translating it to like… we’re going to legalize drugs and hand it out to kids in school yard or something.

But anyway, when my opponent, in my first election, hit me on that, my poll numbers went up. I got more votes after people found out what I’m working on to find this exit strategy for the war on drugs and so that backfired, for sure. The people get it, you know?

Now, just last year, I had an opponent who agrees with me that the war on drugs is a failure. He’s on the republican side but he’s also strongly libertarian and so he actually criticized me, in public, for not being aggressive enough… {laughter} … on drug policy reform.

So in a two year period, we had a switch all the way from one side to the other, where first of all I’m going to end civilization as we know it and then on the other side, I’m not doing enough. So again, the people get, the politicians are a little bit less afraid.

We still have a long way to go inside of the chambers of the legislature, but to a person, when I talk to them confidentially, my colleague’s in the legislature and other public officials all agree, that the policy’s broken and we need to change it.

I’ve talked to Roger about this same thing myself and I still have trouble understanding why this has so long to go inside the legislature. If being in favor of legalizing marijuana helped Roger get votes in a suburban area like Kirkland, what exactly is the political risk any more? Why is the legislature still dragging its feet on this? Don’t we have a “progressive” in the Governor’s mansion? Don’t we have “progressive majorities” in the Senate and House? Don’t we have massive budget problems that can be partially ameliorated by having a system of regulation and taxation for marijuana?

UPDATE: In the comments, Mark1 provides an excellent link demonstrating the kind of violence and gang activity that would disappear if the legislature removed its collective head from its ass and set up a legal system for producing and selling marijuana. Thanks Mark!

Here are some news updates and other links:

– Prosecutors in Kitsap County have dropped charges against Glenn Musgrove, the 56-year-old quadriplegic and medical marijuana patient who the WestNET drug task force initially claimed was selling marijuana for profit. Musgrove won a large settlement for a medical malpractice suit and his attorney believes that Kitsap County went after him in order to get their hands on some of that money. His two caregivers were also facing prosecution, but those charges have also been dropped. It appears that the acquittal of Bruce Olson and the increased media attention on Kitsap Prosecutor Russ Hauge’s behavior is finally starting to yield some positive outcomes. Unfortunately, situations like this are not isolated to Kitsap County. The Cannabis Defense Coalition is also looking into cases in Mason and Pierce Counties as well.

– Glenn Greenwald’s report for the Cato Institute on drug decriminalization in Portugal can be read here. He adds in this post at his regular Salon blog that we’re at the point now that even longtime skeptics of decriminalization are being forced to admit that it works to decrease both drug abuse and its collateral effects. Although there are still some entertainingly obstinate holdouts.

– Washington State’s Senate Democrats have created an online forum similar to the one that the Obama Administration set up for their virtual town hall. I’ve posted a question about regulating and taxing marijuana.

– I’m a bit more pessimistic than Pete Guither here that Attorney General Holder really is on the verge of a spectacularly boneheaded attempt to arrest even more people for simple marijuana possession. At all levels of government, we already arrest around 3/4 of a million people every year for marijuana possession. If Holder actually thinks that increasing those arrest totals will lower the amount of money being made by Mexican cartels, he needs to sit down and read Greenwald’s report on Portugal.

– Finally, the Injustice in Seattle blog is a good local blog that’s flown under my radar for a little while now. I need to get them in my regular reading rotation. I’m not on the Twitter bandwagon yet, but if you are, they have a feed.