Sen. Patrick Leahy, skeptical of a State Department report glossing over Mexico's human rights violations with respect to the war on drugs, has delayed U.S plans to send big bucks there to aid in Mexico's fight against traffickers.

The State Department intended to send the favorable report on Mexico's human rights record to Congress in advance of President Obama's visit to Guadalajara for a summit of North American leaders this weekend, U.S. officials familiar with the report said.

That plan was scrapped after aides to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, told State Department officials that the findings contradicted reports of human rights violations in Mexico, including torture and forced disappearances, in connection with the drug war.

Maybe we can get some Senators to scrap the funding permanently. The money could be used so much better at home, for health care, education and starting the transition from over-incarceration to greater reliance on alternatives like drug and mental health treatment and vocational training for inmates, to help reduce the risk of recidivism.

Attorney General Eric Holder gave a speech today at the American Bar Association convention. He acknowledged we cannot jail ourselves out of our crime problems.

“We will not focus exclusively on incarceration as the most effective means of protecting public safety,” Holder told the American Bar Association delegates meeting here for their annual convention. “Since 2003, spending on incarceration has continued to rise, but crime rates have flattened.”

“Today, one out of every 100 adults in America is incarcerated — the highest incarceration rate in the world,” he said. But the country has reached a point of diminishing returns at which putting even greater percentages of America’s citizens behind bars won’t cut the crime rate.

Prison terms result in increased recidivism. And, he said, drug treatment works: [More...]

A Los Angeles Times editorial makes this dubious observation:

The distrust and anger toward the police felt by many African Americans, spotlighted by the recent controversy over the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., is partly the result of blatantly discriminatory laws such as the crack disparity.

The crack disparity is the fault of Congress, not the police. Still, the editorial correctly observes that Congress enacted crack cocaine penalties that, in practice if not intent, are blatantly discriminatory. More to the point, federal crack penalties are nonsensical and just plain unfair. That's why TalkLeft has often made the point that Congress should remedy the problem -- and that's why TalkLeft agrees with the editorial that a bill working its way through Congress to do just that should be given a high priority.

Richard Cortes at Vanity Fair has an illustrated history of U.S. Drug Czars in the War on Drugs. It begins:

The United States spends nearly $50 billion each year on the war on drugs, to little avail: illegal drugs remain prevalent, and drug-funded groups continue to spread violence from Mexico to Afghanistan. The new White House drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, says he wants to end the drug war, but other men in his position have tried and failed to do just that. In this illustrated history, Ricardo Cortes shows how science, politics, ego, and scandal transformed a public-health initiative into a century-long military campaign.

He begins in 1914 with the Harrison Act, but the first sketch is of Henry Anslinger, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, who led a public campaign against marijauana. [More...]

It's probably an overstatement to assert that "every year, thousands of upstanding, responsible Americans run afoul of some incomprehensible federal law and end up serving time in federal prison," but the key underlying point of this article is sound:

Congress needs to begin fixing the damage it has done by starting to restore a more reasonable, limited and just federal criminal law.

Unfortunately, the article comes to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. [more ...]

President Obama has a Border Czar named Alan Bersin. His official title is "special representative for border affairs." In an interview with the Associated Press , he discusses the increased number of border agents along the Canadian border to fight the war on drugs.

The U.S. Border Patrol has tripled the number of agents along the 5,500-mile border in recent years, with hundreds more soon to be deployed. Unmanned U.S. surveillance aircraft are being tested for use over the frontier, and video surveillance towers are going up around Buffalo and Detroit. Multi-agency, binational law enforcement teams operate in 15 regions from coast to coast.

...."Technology necessarily will play a more important role," he said. "You'll want more extensive use of surveillance systems, coupled with communications channels. And partnerships become a very important part of the strategy - federal, state, local and cross-border."

[More...]

Maybe President Obama's new drug czar Gil Kerlikowske was high on some bad drug when he said this in Fresno Wednesday?

[T]he federal government views marijuana as a harmful and addictive drug, he said. "Marijuana is dangerous and has no medicinal benefit."

NORML responds:[More...]

President Obama said the police acted "stupidly" in arresting his friend, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

As for the rest of the press conference, I was not happy with Obama's answers to the questions. At least two reporters (Chip Reid and someone else) asked questions I very much wanted to hear him answer, and he rambled and deflected. Why couldn't he be as sure-footed and direct about health care as he was Professor Gates? I now have some skepticism about his health care plan I didn't have before.

Via Huffington Post and Mashable, Apple has approved a medical marijuana app for iPhones:

Apple has approved a new $2.99 iPhone app, aptly named Cannabis [iTunes link]. It’s made by the also appropriately-named Ajnag.com. The purpose of the app is to help locate legal medical marijuana in states and locations where it can be found. Will this app lead thousands of iPhone users to cannabis, or is it a tool of a movement in favor of marijuana legalization? The answer, surprisingly, is both:

Tanya Eiserer has an interesting post in the Dallas Morning News crime blog. The post relates to a story she wrote about a Dallas police officer who pepper sprayed a man and a second officer who lied about it to internal affairs investigators. The two officers cooked up a story to explain the use of the pepper spray. A rookie officer who was also present failed to report the incident immediately because he feared retaliation. He eventually told investigators that he saw an officer pepper spray the man without provocation.

The officer who wielded the pepper spray explained why the rookie's account matched the victim's:

"Rookie officers interpret and see things differently than more mature veteran officers."

In other words, rookies in the Dallas Police Department haven't learned to lie to protect other officers. [more ...]

A sensible policy of drug regulation would treat drug use and abuse as a medical issue rather than burdening the criminal justice system with endless arrests, prosecutions, and incarcerations for conduct that primarily hurts those who voluntary engage in it. Sensible drug policy reform is fiercely resisted by unions representing prison guards and police officers whose jobs depend on continuing the ineffective status quo.

To justify the war's continuation in the face of mounting casualties and no possibility of victory, proponents of the drug war routinely claim that legalization or decriminalization of illicit drugs would encourage kids to experiment with them. The argument is based on faith, not research. A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that "tough policing of the illegal drugs market may have the perverse effect of making drugs more affordable and thereby encouraging people to use them."

[more ...]

I used all my time writing the ridculously long post below on the fight over the request to release documents related to Dick Cheney's FBI interview about the leak of Valerie Plame's identity.

I'm off to check out the TL kid's new apartment, he just got the keys. It's next door to his old apartment, but it's still an exciting move for him.

So I'm not going to get to the DEA jumping into the Michael Jackson death investigation (ridiculous) or Norm Stamper's latest on progressives joining the call for an end to the War on Drugs at Huffington Post, but I hope you do.

Best show of the season so far: Weeds. You can watch the episodes free online if you don't get Showtime.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.