Drug War Roundup

– That News Tribune piece on Roy Alloway and the WestNET drug task force is absolutely incredible. Their outrageous behavior was one of the major reasons the Cannabis Defense Coalition exists today. There was always somewhat of an understanding that Alloway and his associates weren’t playing by the rules, but Sean Robinson does an outstanding job going back through their history and providing more detail on exactly how often and how blatantly they either cut corners or simply broke the law. Most damning is the fact that they even fabricated their statistics in order to continue qualifying for federal funds.

– Sorry, but if you want to be a police officer, you’re not allowed to have independent thoughts or opinions.

– Also from the New York Times, the DEA has participated in money laundering and other normally-illegal behavior involving drug proceeds as way to build cases against drug lords. None of this is news to people who’ve been following the drug war, but it’s now being lumped into the greater witch hunt over Fast and Furious. Folks on the right are trying to paint this as something unique to the Obama Administration, but that’s quite a stretch. In fact, nothing in Fast and Furious is even close to as bad as the Juarez House of Death case, where ICE and the DOJ were aware that a paid government informant was killing people in Mexico, but did nothing about it. That, of course, happened during the Bush Administration. And not surprisingly, no one in Congress demanded that anyone resign over it.

– Maia Szalavitz writes about the new study showing that states with medical marijuana laws have seen larger decreases in drunk driving fatalities than states that don’t have them. My first reaction to the study was skepticism, primarily because I’ve never been a big believer in the substitution theory, that when marijuana is sold through legal channels people will replace their alcohol consumption with marijuana use. But if that’s what’s happening, it should be pretty obvious that it will lower the number of traffic fatalities.