[via Juan Cole]

Covering items related to the drug war here at HA, I’ve focused mostly on local happenings, but the drug war continues to destroy lives all over. Here are four recent cases from across the United States:

California

In California, where medical marijuana has been legal for 12 years now, a dispensary owner in Morro Bay named Charlie Lynch was convicted yesterday in a federal court and faces a minimum of five years in jail, and a maximum of 85.

During the trial, the jury was not allowed to know that Lynch was providing marijuana to people who were ill and authorized by doctors under state law to use marijuana. The judge even went so far as to try to keep registered patients out of the courtroom in order to deceive the jury as to the true nature of Lynch’s business. As far as they knew, he was just some guy selling drugs to people, and not a legitimate business owner who was warmly welcomed by the mayor of Morro Bay. He had no criminal record but could now receive a longer sentence than if he’d murdered someone.

Reason.tv has covered this case extensively. Drew Carey produced a great video on Lynch and one of his customers, a young man who got bone cancer in high school, lost his leg, and discovered that marijuana was the most effective medicine for the phantom pain that many amputees experience. Nick Gillespie has more here, as does Radley Balko.

Maryland

Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, was raided by a Prince George County SWAT team on the evening of July 29th. After storming into the house, according to Calvo, the officers shot one of his two black Labrador retrievers immediately and shot the second one as it ran away. The reason for the raid was that police intercepted a large package of marijuana addressed to Calvo’s wife.

After first claiming that Calvo, his wife, and his mother-in-law were “persons-of-interest,” the police later figured out that it was a scheme to mail a package to a random person and intercept it. The police also claim that the dogs were threatening them, a claim that Calvo strongly disputes. In addition, the officers didn’t even have a no-knock warrant, so the entire raid was illegal anyway.

Ohio

This January in Lima, Ohio, a SWAT team raided a house occupied by Tarika Wilson and her 6 children. The police were looking for her boyfriend, Anthony Terry, who was suspected of dealing drugs. Wilson was shot and killed by Officer Joe Chavalia as she was on her knees trying to protect her 1-year-old son. The toddler was shot twice but managed to only lose a finger. Terry was arrested during the raid and is now serving a 7-year jail sentence for selling crack and marijuana to police informants. Wilson was never a suspect.

Chavalia was charged with negligent homicide, but at the trial, claimed that he thought he was under attack when he heard his fellow officers shooting Wilson’s two pit bulls during the raid. He was acquitted this week by an all-white jury. Both Wilson and Terry are black.

Black residents of Lima are furious as this is just another in a long line of questionable incidents by local police towards their community. The U.S. Department of Justice is considering civil rights charges. The Lima police department has yet to apologize or even admit that a mistake was made. Anthony Terry was certainly breaking the law (although he was no more than a low-level dealer), and there may even have been reason to think he was potentially dangerous, but raiding a house where six kids are living and shooting wildly is never acceptable in any circumstance.

Florida

Arguably the most moronic story comes from Tallahassee. A 23-year-old graduate of Florida State University named Rachel Hoffman was arrested by police in possession of 5 ounces of marijuana and 6 ecstasy pills. It was her second arrest after being forced into drug treatment once after police had pulled her over with marijuana in her car a year before. According to her friends, she was a bit of a hippie who just supplied her college friends with recreational drugs.

At this point, she was potentially facing some real prison time, so she decided (without the knowledge of her attorney) to become an informant and help Tallahassee police bust some suspected gang members in order to avoid going to jail. The police set Hoffman up on a sting to try to purchase a large amount of drugs and a gun from Deneilo Bradshaw and Andrea Green. The two men, likely smelling the idiotic sting attempt from a mile away, lured Hoffman to a different location and killed her. Bradshaw and Green have been arrested and face murder charges.

This case has gotten the most media attention so far, including a report on ABC’s 20/20 which contains a long interview with the unbelievably clueless Tallahassee Police Chief. Hoffman’s parents are angry as hell and are now worried that the judge in Bradshaw and Green’s murder case is trying to keep them from criticizing local officials over what happened.

Over at EffU, I conducted a reality check on the Washington Policy Center.

Some items of interest in the world of energy research…

There was a major breakthrough this week that could revolutionize solar power technology. Researchers at MIT came up with a way to cheaply and efficiently split water molecules using a catalyst consisting of cobalt and potassium phosphate. Paired with a second electrode that converts the resultant hydrogen ions into hydrogen gas, it opens the possibility for having solar panels that can store energy – in the form of hydrogen gas – for when the sun isn’t shining.

Also this week, my father-in-law (who maintains an alternative energy website) sent me this video of the prospect of using algae as a source of biofuel. One of the benefits of using algae is that it can be grown and harnessed in any type of structure, and in the video, the closed bio-reactor system there can produce significantly more biofuel than what can be produced through conventional farming methods and just needs sunlight and carbon dioxide. There are still some cost barriers to doing this on a large scale, but the improvements in the reactor technology and the price of oil is making that investment seem more and more worthwhile.

Earlier this week, Postman wrote again about Dino Rossi’s Forward Washington organization and the corresponding “Idea Bank.”

The foundation didn’t accomplish much. There was the Idea Bank that Rossi heralded as a bipartisan effort to solicit and vet ideas from citizens on how to improve state government. (The Democrat who made the project “bipartisan” thinks FDR was a Socialist and still complains “that traitorous scamp, Jane Fonda” caused America to lose the Vietnam War.)

That “Democrat” was Lou Guzzo. At EffU, I’ve posted up a challenge to see if you can distinguish between things recently written by Dino Rossi’s “Idea Man,” and things recently written by Stranger Public Editor and OSHA Board of Governors Member A. Birch Steen. Good luck.

Dominic Holden has the latest on the Lifevine case. Last Friday, the DEA, at the direction of U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan, took the stolen medicine from the Seattle Police Department and now plans to destroy it. There are still no plans to charge anyone because, as everyone already knows, the person who possessed the marijuana wasn’t in violation of any laws. Curiously, the amount the DEA claims SPD turned over to them is over 3 times as much as what Martin claims was stolen. I’ll post up a follow-up if I find out more.

UPDATE: More here. The reason for the discrepancy in the amount that was seized by the DEA comes from the fact that they’re also counting the non-medicinal plant materials that were seized.

UDPATE 2: Via e-mail, Geov pointed me to a Seattle Weekly story from back when they were relevant, where U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan was quoted:

Jeff Sullivan, chief of the criminal division of the Western Washington U.S. attorney’s office, says that not one federal case has been brought against a medical marijuana operation since the law’s passage. “With limited resources, we are looking at large-scale trafficking and not medical marijuana,” Sullivan says.

As Dominic had already pointed out, this was not standard procedure for our local U.S. Attorney’s office. They acted on this in response to the attention it was getting from a public that is increasingly upset about how much the Federal government’s archaic and unfounded views on marijuana interfere with sensible local laws.

This house for sale in Shoreline is way smaller than it seems (see picture #7).

UPDATE: Looks like they removed the picture…

Joel Connelly has been fairly sensitive about the criticism he’s been receiving over his opposition to I-1000, the Death with Dignity Initiative. I’ve certainly been contributing to his agitation, so I want to take the time to go through his latest column with a little less snark. There are a lot of important life-and-death issues involved here, but I don’t see them being addressed by Connelly. Instead, he gives us contrived ‘gotchas’ that have little relation to why this initiative is happening and why it’s so important.

The overall theme of his column is similar to what he’s tried to claim in the past, that I-1000 is something being foisted upon Washington State by an advocacy group. He writes:

If you read the 2007 report of the Death With Dignity National Center, however, what emerges is that the Evergreen State was carefully chosen, as it were, to revive a movement lately on life support.

It is a tale of behind-thescenes manipulation, candidly laid out by the manipulators:

“We have spent the last year actively researching and collecting data to determine the state which is most likely to adopt a Death with Dignity law,” said the annual report.

“Through these efforts we have identified Washington as the state most likely … We, at the Death with Dignity National Center, are proud to provide our political experience and expertise to these talented and committed people of Washington.”

This is neither unusual nor alarming. Nationally-based advocacy groups with limited funds are always making decisions like this. They rely mostly on donations from individual citizens and don’t have any interest in throwing their limited resources away for a cause they can’t win. Every state in the country has people advocating for laws like this. The Death with Dignity National Center judged (justifiably) that Washington is a state where they are most likely to succeed. If that’s “manipulation,” then so is every political donation in the country.

In our modern political climate, issues like Death with Dignity, which don’t find themselves allied with corporate interests, struggle to influence legislatures directly. Despite its faults, the initiative process is geared towards issues like this, issues that are strictly in the interest of individual citizens who find that government isn’t responsive to them.

Connelly cynically dismisses how the campaign has been putting the local media in touch with signature gatherers with a personal stake in this, as if they are merely puppets of special interests and not individuals with powerful and reasonable interests in changing the law. He couldn’t be more disingenuous. Or more hypocritical. He writes:

I will vote against I-1000. My reasons stem from personal experience, as well as my understanding of an underpinning of our democratic society: Its purpose must be to safeguard and enhance life, especially among the youngest, the weakest and the suffering.

When I first encountered Connelly’s opposition to this initiative, my initial thought was that I had incorrectly assumed that he was pro-choice. I hadn’t. The man who believes that the underpinning of our democratic society is “to safeguard and enhance life, especially among the youngest, the weakest and the suffering,” apparently also believes that the underpinning of our democratic society is something completely different when it comes to abortion.

This is the danger in trying to oversimplify the issue. Trying to come up with these kinds of absolutes about the value of life almost inevitably leads to irreconcilable contradictions. How many millions of people in this country believe that abortion should be illegal, but also believe that the death penalty is just dandy? How many people who fought tooth and nail to keep Terry Schiavo alive barely flinched when we went to war in Iraq?

This realization lacks the ability to be shrunk to a bumper sticker, but the value of “life” can never be the simple absolute that so many wish it to be, and demanding that government try to define it as such is a genuine mistake. Telling a terminally-ill person with a painful or debilitating illness that their own life is so in need of protection that it overrides their own wishes is not much different from telling a date-rape victim that the fetus she’s carrying is a life in need of protection that overrides her wishes as well. In both cases, difficult moral choices are being made by the government, rather than the individual, and this is what has motivated so many signature gatherers around the state this year.

It’s been nearly two weeks since Seattle Police raided the Lifevine offices in the University District. The return of the medical records for several hundred patients resolved the most egregious error made that day, but the police continue to hold onto 12 ounces of medicine which was also confiscated. The medicine belongs to Martin Martinez, a registered medical marijuana patient. The police recognize that Martinez is a registered patient, was allowed to be in possession of the marijuana, but for unclear reasons, they are refusing to give it back.

(Just to provide some perspective, I have no idea who provides medicine for Martin, but if he were forced to replace what was taken through the black market, it would cost him a couple thousand dollars)

I briefly spoke with Leo Poort, an attorney working for the Seattle Police Department, who was vague about why the police were doing what they were doing and referred me to Martinez’s attorney, Douglas Hiatt. At the Cascadia NORML website, the following explanation of the relevant law is provided:

There is no justification for police to seize medical marijuana from a legal marijuana patient. WA State law is very specific on that point. RCW; 69.51A 040 reads: “If a law enforcement officer determines that marijuana is being possessed lawfully under the medical marijuana law, the officer may document the amount of marijuana, take a representative sample that is large enough to test, but not seize the marijuana”.

Police authorities have misconstrued that sentence to mean that officers may or may not confiscate the medicine at their discretion, but as any student of the English language can plainly see, that interpretation is completely incorrect. The word “may” in that sentence clearly applies to the last section of that sentence, not the entire subject of the sentence. We believe an educated jury will agree that WA statute 69.51A 040 means: “officers may take samples of the medicine, but they may not seize the marijuana when they have determined that marijuana is possessed legally by a patient.”

Seattle Police continue to stonewall Lifevine Attorney Douglas Hiatt who has made several verbal requests for the return of the 12 ounces seized on July 15, 2008.

On Saturday, I was at a BBQ with some friends. I’m at that age where a lot of my friends have young kids, and one of the older kids (around 5 years old) was playing with his toy phaser. The adults were playing along, pretending to get shot and falling down. Eventually, a slightly older boy saw the fun, wanted the phaser for himself, and just took it right out of his hands. His mother had to explain to him that you can’t just take something from someone for no reason. This is a lesson I expect to see being taught to kindergarten-age kids. The adults in the Seattle Police Department who we trust to serve and protect us shouldn’t need it too.

This week, former State Department counter-narcotics official Thomas Schweich wrote a bitter piece in the New York Times Magazine about how his attempts at fighting the opium trade in Afghanistan were undermined by everyone. I did my best to unravel this man’s grand delusions.

Former Governor Booth Gardner’s Death with Dignity Initiative (I-1000) officially qualified for the November ballot this week. Carla Axtman from Blue Oregon reflects on the campaign to bring the original Death with Dignity law to Oregon ten years ago.

This video (via The Agitator) thoroughly documents John McCain’s long trail of cluelessness when it comes to Iraq.

Now that we know that Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki supports Obama’s troop withdrawal timetable, it’s pretty clear which of the two major candidates is more in tune with what’s happening in the region. McCain continues to claim that the surge has worked, but that’s taking a very loose definition of “worked.” If the surge worked, the Iraqi leaders would have made political breakthroughs that would have allowed the Iraqis to begin shouldering the load of providing security. That hasn’t happened. And in fact, the occupation continues to cost us more and more money the longer we’re there. If the goal here is to make Iraq self-sufficient, the surge did the opposite of that. It got us further entrenched in a country where the populace has been demanding we scale back our presence for several years now.

McCain is stuck now, asking the American people for their vote just as the evidence of his spectacularly poor understanding of Iraq is being laid out in front of him. Here’s an interview he did back in 2004 at the Council on Foreign Relations:

PETERSON: Let me give you a hypothetical, senator. What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there? I understand it’s a hypothetical, but it’s at least possible.

McCAIN: Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because— if it was an elected government of Iraq— and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government, then I think we would have other challenges, but I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.

PETERSON: A second and final question from me. As you know—

McCAIN: By the way, could I— if we do it right, that’s not going to happen, but we will be there militarily for a long, long, long time.

Obviously, we didn’t do it right. The decision to invade Iraq was based upon the willingness of those in the Bush Administration to believe what they wanted to believe, rather than to objectively look at the situation and take a rational course of action. But anyone with half a brain knew this by 2004. Somehow John McCain did not. He continued to believe even then that we’d never get to a situation where an elected Iraqi government would be asking us to leave.

We’ve already suffered through two terms with a President that clueless. We can’t afford another.