Law Enforcement

Government Failure

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Via Avedon I learned that John Perry Barlow is going to court, is doing battle for our freedom:

Apparently, everyone else who has been arrested as a consequences of these inspections, and there have been many, has pled guilty rather than face the cost and trouble of mounting a constitutional defense.
I might have done so myself had it not been for Gilmore’s willingness to support the handsome cost of my defense. That, and the recognition that unconstitutional behavior by the authorities is constrained only by the peoples’ willingness to contest them.
That his defense has a handsome cost, that people plead guilty rather than face the cost and trouble of contesting in court tells me that we no longer have a system of justice for the people of this country. People must be able to challenge the behavior of government, business, and other people in a timely fashion and at a reasonable cost. The backlogged courts and monopoly cost of legal assistance are significant failures of federal, state, and city governments in the US.

Raich v Ashcroft

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This is what you should be paying attention to today! Drug War Rant has a detailed guide on the issues and links to the supporting documents.
Though I do not have high expectations that the Supremes will do the right thing Lawrence v Texas does give me a bit of hope. Heck, maybe they will go just a bit extreme and just whack Commerce Clause legislation back to its foundations: the feds only business in regulating interstate commerce is to make sure the states do not establish laws that discriminate against the citizens of other states.

Making the Drug Thugs Useful

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The DEA is about as useful as an appendix. It and the rest of the thugs participating in the so called war on drugs do much more harm than good to the citizens of the US and its dependent countries.
They could, if we must allow them to continue to exist, make themselves a little more useful if they focused their efforts on a real problem. Something that kills 5 million people a year world wide.

Incarcerating the People

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Undeterred by the success of the war on drugs which led to the arrest of 951,027 people in 2003 with no apparent reduction in drug use or availibility congress and the executive branch stay the course:

President Bush signed a law on Friday banning certain steroid-like drugs, used by some athletes as performance enhancers.
The new law adds 18 substances to the list of banned anabolic steroids,
Ignoring reality senator biden exclaims:
“This new law sends a strong message about andro and other steroid precursors. We are calling them what they really are: drugs, performance enhancing drugs,” the Democrat from Delaware said.
I suspect folks who want to use this stuff will pay just about as much attention to these federal laws as any other drug user.
As Doctor Recommended notes:
It is one thing for a league, competition, team, venue, etc. to ban a set of drugs (such as the Olympics or MLB), as these are organizations that you voluntarily join and can leave if so desired, but the State is an entity which you are required to submit to (i.e., you are not given the opportunity to leave or say �no� � you must comply or else�).
If you want people to respect the law then you must write into law only what is just, necessary, and proper.

Government Failure…

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Radley Balko summarizes a set of statistics about the government’s efforts to suppress the market for recreational drugs:

By nearly every metric — drug use, spending, availability, purity, price — the drug war has failed. Throughly. And that’s before considering the trespasses on our civil liberties our government has undertaken to achieve that failure.
Read the rest. The magnitude of the failure is really quite astounding.
So, who is benefitting from the $60 billion being spent annually by local, state and federal governments?