Johann Hari takes an extraordinarily eye-opening look at Dubai.

Last week’s contest was won by Milwhcky in 14 minutes. It was Hagerstown, MD. WyWyWa provided the link. Here’s this week’s, good luck!

UPDATE from Geov

Lee had absolutely no way of knowing this, but in my day job (running Peace Action of Washington) I helped make this video possible. A coalition we helped found – and that I’m on the Steering Committee of – approached Rick about a year ago with the idea, and when he jumped on it, helped line up the necessary permits and visas. An Iranian-American friend and local filmmaker, Abdi Sami, accompanied Rick to Iran as associate producer and set up his itinerary.

I mention this because we have these videos for sale, at the insanely low price of $5. They’re available through Rick’s web site, too, because he really wants people to see this video; he’s very proud of it. And it will amaze and mpress you, just as it did Lee.

[end update]

= = =

If you haven’t already seen it, Rick Steves’ special on Iran is amazing. The whole thing is available on YouTube, so expand this post if you’d like to watch it (there are 6 parts):

[Read more…]

I’ve written quite a bit recently about Afghanistan and the opium issue. There’s definitely a real danger of creating the same situation in Pakistan that we’ve already created in Mexico, with terrorist groups reaping massive profits from an illegal trade that we can’t stop. I’m hoping that this article on newly appointed Ambassador Richard Holbrooke is a sign that our policy is going to finally deal with reality over there:

So here Holbrooke was acknowledging the significance of the corruption issue, somewhat eloquently and candidly, yet he could not say how it might be addressed. As for Karzai’s government being “detached,” he didn’t go there.

Holbrooke is a wonderfully engaging character—an old-school power player. He schmoozes reporters, coming across as intelligent, crafty, and concerned. He is a charmer who knows his stuff. He won’t no-comment a tough question; he will compliment the reporter on posing an insightful query, show he fully understands the issue at hand (which he does), and then explain he can’t answer it—in a manner that can be convincing, not annoying.

But at the end of the briefing, Holbrooke did speak somewhat candidly about a vexing part of the Afghanistan problem: drugs. What to do about the opium flowing out of Afghanistan has always been a knotty element of US policy regarding Afghanistan. How much of a priority should it be? (Simply put, if you attack the the opium trade, warlords and locals get pissed off and join or support the other side.) Asked about the priority of drug fighting in the Afghanistan review, Holbrooke, as he was leaving the briefing, said “We’re going to have to rethink the drug problem.” That was interesting. He went on: “a complete rethink.” He noted that the policymakers who had worked on the Afghanistan review “didn’t come to a firm, final conclusion” on the opium question. “It’s just so damn complicated,” Holbrooke explained. Did that mean that the opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan should be canned? “You can’t eliminate the whole eradication program,” he exclaimed. But that remark did make it seem that he backed an easing up of some sort. “You have to put more emphasis on the agricultural sector,” he added.

I don’t envy Holbrooke at all. He has one of the toughest jobs of anyone Obama has appointed so far. Even if he succeeds at helping to rebuild Afghanistan (an extraordinary feat in itself), he could still end up with a major headache just across the border in Pakistan as a result.

For several years, groups like the Senlis Council have been advocating allowing Afghan farmers to contribute to a legal market for opiate-based medicines. If we do go that route, and it works to keep Afghan farmers from contributing to the black market, it doesn’t mean that the illegal market for heroin will just dry up. It will just move elsewhere. The most logical place for it to move to would be just south of the border. This is the root of why this situation is so complicated. If we succeed, we could still end up creating a situation that becomes far more dangerous to us.

This conundrum is just one more reason that we need to get more serious about the kinds of harm reduction techniques that can reduce the demand for illegal heroin in the first place.

Last week’s contest was as tough as I thought it was. No one was able to get it. The correct answer was the Jardin du Thabor in Rennes, France. This week’s should be a bit easier, good luck!

Matt Taibbi explains to AIG employee Jake DeSantis exactly how he can cry him a fucking river.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy9d47VG4t8[/youtube]

UPDATE: Just awful

Yesterday morning, Bruce Olson was acquitted of all charges against him. I’ve been following his case (and his wife’s case) for almost a year, and seeing a jury rule in his favor was extremely satisfying. I’ve never met Bruce personally, but I know several people who have, and each of them were certain of his innocence. Yesterday’s verdict makes it abundantly clear that there were no hidden surprises about what he was doing. Bruce and Pamela Olson were the couple that everyone knew them to be, law abiding citizens growing plants that both of them (and their doctor) had discovered to have medicinal value.

When the Olsons were raided back in 2007, the WestNET drug task force initially threw poisoned meat into their yard, presumably to ensure that their dogs wouldn’t be a hindrance to their invasion. Their two puppies required roughly $2000 in vet bills. At the time of the invasion, the Olsons had no plants that were harvestable (it was their first attempt at growing), yet they were being threatened by Kitsap County prosecutors with very serious drug distribution charges. In the effort to fight these bogus charges, they wound up having to sell their home and move into an RV.

The Kitsap County Prosecutor’s motivations in this case remain largely a mystery. There hasn’t been any information provided about their one “witness,” a longtime drug user named Steven Kenney, who was flown up from Oklahoma for the trial and whose story was clearly not believed by jurors. Where did he actually come from? Did he stand to gain anything from his testimony? The prosecutor explained his discredited testimony by saying that he was “nervous.” Hell, I’d be nervous too if I were perjuring myself.

Considering how Pamela Olson’s case unfolded, there should be even more concern about the behavior of Russ Hauge and the Kitsap County Prosecutor’s Office. Pamela was threatened with jail time if she didn’t take a plea bargain. She feared having to go to prison, so she took the deal, even though the verdict this week makes it clear that she was innocent all along (both Bruce and Pamela were tried separately for the same offense stemming from the same raid). Now she has a criminal record and is still unable to use medical marijuana according to the State Department of Corrections’ policy for those on probation. And since this trial has started getting attention, we’ve been learning of even more Kitsap County patients who have ended up in the same boat.

As I’ve written about in the past, this kind of heavy-handed behavior from prosecutors and drug task forces is not that uncommon, although some of the more alarming incidents we’ve seen across the country have generally involved a racial component. A new movie coming out soon called American Violet is based on the story of Regina Kelly, a black woman arrested along with 28 others in Hearne, Texas. Most, if not all, of those arrested were innocent, but many of them took plea deals to get reduced sentences. Kelly didn’t, and was ultimately successful in exposing the corruption.

What’s happening in Kitsap County right now isn’t quite that pernicious, but Hauge is using the same kinds of scare tactics in order to force plea deals that keep the people he’s targeting out of the courtroom – where a jury might discover that they don’t belong there. One of those people, a quadriplegic named Glenn Musgrove, is scheduled to be wheeled into a courtroom in Port Orchard on Friday.

For a while now, activists and patients within the medical marijuana community have been referring to Kitsap County as “Kidnap County.” Now we have a better idea why. The state’s medical marijuana laws are not being honored by the Prosecutor’s office. Patients who try to grow their own plants have been arrested, presumed to be drug dealers, and forced to prove otherwise to a jury – often at great personal expense. This is not how the law is supposed to work, and I hope that Kitsap County residents remember that the next time they vote for their county prosecutor.

Finally, it’s important to look at the actions of the WestNET drug task force. These sorts of drug task forces exist on the premise that rural areas don’t have the resources to adequately enforce drug laws. Unfortunately, these drug task forces tend to be very common places for overzealous policing and outright corruption. Even worse, the Obama Administration has decided to increase funding for these units in the stimulus bill.

Why the WestNET drug task force is being used to bust medical marijuana patients (and finds nothing wrong with poisoning their dogs) rather than trying to go after real criminals is a question that they – and Prosecutor Hauge – need to answer.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky in an impressive 12 minutes. It was in Lees Summit, Missouri. This week’s is a tough one (I think). Good luck!

Fox 13 News at 10 just did a story on the continuing outrage over Obama’s Special Olympics joke. And for the duration of the segment, I had more confidence that a mentally disabled person being interviewed would point out how stupid this story is than I had that one of the news anchors would.

Charlie Bermant writes in the Port Orchard Independent about the Bruce Olson trial and the attention it’s finally drawing to what’s been happening in Kitsap County. Olson is an authorized medical marijuana patient who was raided by the WestNET drug task force in 2007. Prosecutors claim that Olson and his wife were selling marijuana as well as using it medicinally, but the prosecution’s only witness is a longtime drug addict who they flew up from Oklahoma for the trial who claims he bought marijuana from the Olsons. The Olsons, and others who know them, maintain that they were not growing plants to sell on the black market.

I’ve written about this case a couple of times already, but Bermant’s article illustrates why this case has elicited so much anger from the medical marijuana community:

Both Olson and his wife are medical marijuana patients, but have faced the same distribution charge. The law about acceptable quantities of medical marijuana has been more strictly defined since Pamela Olson’s trial.

Pamela Olson is now serving probation, having pleaded out to avoid jail time. As part of her sentence, she is not using the medical marijuana that she claims is necessary to ease her pain.

The case has become a flashpoint for medical marijuana advocates, or what Kitsap County Prosecutor Russ Hauge characterizes as “a well-organized lobby whose purpose is to see the laws changed.”

Hauge is a major focus of the anger in this case. A lot of us who are trying to call more media attention to the Olson trial certainly want more changes to our current drug laws. No argument there. But the problem with what Russ Hauge is doing is that he’s openly trying to undermine the current medical marijuana law in the state of Washington.

The original medical marijuana law that was passed by voters in 1998 contained only an affirmative defense for authorized patients. What that meant was that law enforcement officials were still able to arrest patients, who were then faced with the burden of proving their innocence in court. More progressive prosecutors like King County’s Dan Satterberg recognized that hauling patients into court like that was a waste of both time and taxpayer money as well as being immoral and didn’t do it. But not Russ Hauge.

Even worse, the usual tactic from Hauge’s office has been to arrest patients, then threaten them with long prison terms into taking plea deals. This is what happened to Pamela Olson. And because of Department of Correction rules that don’t recognize medical marijuana, she’s not allowed to take medicine that her doctor has authorized for her while she’s home on probation. A second patient from Kitsap County named Jason Norbut has also found himself in this same situation. According to Norbut, the judge even promised him when he was offered the plea deal that he’d still be able to use his medicine while on probation, but was later told after he was sentenced that it was not allowed by the DOC.

Access to medical marijuana is rarely, if ever, a matter of life and death to patients. For most, it’s a quality of life issue (pain management, stimulating hunger during chemotherapy, etc), but that still doesn’t give any law enforcement official the right to overrule the judgment of doctors. Despite what Russ Hauge may believe he’s doing, what he’s really doing is undermining an existing voter-approved law and violating the human rights of the citizens of Kitsap County.

As medical marijuana supporters have been congregating in Port Orchard to oversee this trial, they’re slowly finding more and more victims of Russ Hauge’s crusade, including a quadriplegic by the name of Glenn Musgrove, who was recently wheeled into court on a gurney. Musgrove has a hearing scheduled for next Friday, March 27th. If anyone is curious about why Kitsap County is spending taxpayer money to prosecute a quadriplegic, the case number is 08-1-00937-6.