Veterans for Peace

Courtesy of Sentencing Law and Policy Blog, the former president of Columbia – a veteran of the so-called War on Drugs – urges the U.S. to decriminalize:

[E]nforcements efforts are important, but when it comes to diluting the demand for drugs, the U.S. is missing the point, says the former President of Colombia, César Gaviria, in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast. A central player in the 1990s drug wars, Gaviria was the leader of a country that supplied the bulk of the planet’s cocaine. Now, he believes the best way to break the world’s thirst for drugs is to decriminalize them — not just the “soft” ones, but all of them....

Gaviria has lived the drug war first-hand, and says fighting it was “a very frustrating experience.” He believes “it is a failure because there are hundreds of thousands of people jailed, while consumption remains basically unchanged in the U.S. and is growing significantly in Europe.” He also points out that it has been “a source of indiscriminate violence and corruption in Latin America, and is weakening our democratic institutions.”

For the 62-year-old Gaviria, the former Secretary General of the Organization of American States, to call for such a radical change as decriminalization is groundbreaking. As president of Colombia from 1990 to 1994, he battled the cartels during some of that country’s most violent years. He led the crackdown that would ultimately bring down the powerful Medellín Cartel and its infamous leader, Pablo Escobar. “The fight against the drug cartels is unavoidable,” Gaviria says. “If you don’t do it, they become too powerful and may even pose a military threat, as we saw in Colombia. But that does not mean that such efforts reduce the flow of drugs.”

"and in some ways undermined"

Seems like those words are doing a lot of work in this article.

This was a war started by Mexico, but supported — and in some ways undermined — by the United States. The template was made in the United States, a counternarcotics strategy originally designed for Colombia....

At the same time, American drug users are fueling demand for the drugs, and American guns are supplying the firepower wielded with such ferocity by Mexico’s cartels — a reality acknowledged by Secretary of State on her trip to Mexico last week.

Good Neighbor

As Mexican cities become increasingly violent, it's long past time that the U.S. take responsibility for the harmful effects that our drug policies have on our neighbors. When Lou Dobbs talks about violence in Mexican border cities spilling over into the U.S., what he leaves out is that that violence largely is the product of American demand for drugs and the fact that those drugs are illegal.

Two Advils

Where the War on Drugs has taken us:

Savana Redding still remembers the clothes she had on – black stretch pants with butterfly patches and a pink T-shirt – the day school officials here forced her to strip six years ago. She was 13 and in eighth grade. An assistant principal, enforcing the school's antidrug policies, suspended her for having brought prescription strength ibuprofen pills to school. One of the pills is as strong as two Advils.

The search by two female school employees was methodical and humiliating.... Ms. Redding, an honors student, had no pills. But she had a furious mother and a lawyer, and now her case has reached the Supreme Court.

Apparently the reason the school came to suspect that Redding was carrying the dangerous drug ibuprofen was because a female friend falsely blamed Redding for giving her the drug. (As Redding put it, the friend "started being embarrassed by me because I was nerdy" so the friend decided to get Redding in trouble.) So what's a school to do? Strip search. Though as the Court of Appeals pointed out, there was no reason for the school to think that Redding had the ibuprofen "insider her undergarments, attached to her nude body, or anywhere else that a strip search would reveal."

The current Supreme Court has pretty much read the Fourth Amendment out of the Constitution. (It much prefers the Sixth and Second.) The Court also seems to lose its mind – and any pretense of constitutional principle – whenever it considers cases that involve school kids and drugs. (See e.g. Morse v. Frederick where the Court upheld a school decision to punish students who made a banner proclaiming "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" while they were at a public event off school grounds. No free speech for you, you DFHs.)

Judge Kim Wardlaw of the Circuit Court wrote about the Redding case, "It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights." Given the current Supreme Court, I'm afraid Judge Wardlaw may be wrong. I suspect the Supremes will rule for the school district.

I'm all for giving school officials some deference. But strip searching a 13-year-old to protect her from ibuprofen is Advil Madness.