The War on Drugs is not just in America. Around the world, people are dying in pain because doctors won't prescribe pain medication. Why? The War on Drugs. Narcotics have become the equivalent of a dirty word.

Like millions of others in the world’s poorest countries, she is destined to die in pain. She cannot get the drug she needs — one that is cheap, effective, perfectly legal for medical uses under treaties signed by virtually every country, made in large quantities, and has been around since Hippocrates praised its source, the opium poppy. She cannot get morphine.

That is not merely because of her poverty, or that of Sierra Leone. Narcotics incite fear: doctors fear addicting patients, and law enforcement officials fear drug crime. Often, the government elite who can afford medicine for themselves are indifferent to the sufferings of the poor.

If someone is dying in pain, addiction is the last thing they care about or we should be concerned about. Opium, heroin and morphine are not dirty words. They relieve pain. They should be readily available to those who need them.

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An appeals court in Tennessee has ruled the state's tax on illegal drugs unconstitutional calling it "arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable."

More like this please.

The law allows the state to go after the belongings of people who are caught with illegal drugs or alcohol that don't bear the special tax stamps, regardless of the outcome of their criminal cases.

..."Because it seeks to levy a tax on the privilege to engage in an activity that the Legislature has previously declared to be a crime, not a privilege, we must necessarily conclude that the drug tax is arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable, and therefore, invalid under the constitution of this state," Judge Sharon G. Lee wrote.

Unwisely yet predictably, Connecticut legislators are considering enacting a three-strikes law in response to a gruesome multiple murder last month by two inmates with lengthy records.

The New York Times has an editorial today in opposition.

The appeal of a “three strikes and you’re out” law is understandable, but these laws have proven to be blunt instruments that cause more injustice than they prevent. In California, which has a particularly draconian law, a man who shoplifted $153.54 worth of videotapes was sent to jail for 50 years. These laws are not only overly harsh. They are enormously expensive, because of all of the prison cells that are needed to warehouse minor criminals who pose little threat to society, many of whom are elderly by the end of their sentence.

....adopting a one-size-fits-all sentencing system makes no more sense than releasing criminals without adequate information.

So many of our worst and most draconian laws stem from reaction to a single crime. As I've written repeatedly,

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Now that everyone has had a chance to twitter at Sen. Larry Craig's misfortune of being popped for toe-tapping in the men's bathroom at the airport, I'm glad to see some liberal blogs take note of the underlying issue....why are we paying police to hang out in airport bathrooms in the first place?

Arianna writes:

There clearly are very serious potential threats to our safety to be found in airports -- outside of bathroom stalls. Is sending Sgt. Karsnia into the men's room to spend all day trying to get other men to look at him and tap his foot really the best way to use our limited law enforcement resources?

....Since the news about Craig broke, the media focus has been on his sexual perversions -- it's time to turn the spotlight on the perverted priorities of America's law enforcement community.

HuffPo is asking for your help in gathering numbers:

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Woe is me, cries the Justice Department, according to the Wall St. Journal.

In the past few years, U.S. attorneys' offices around the country have been unable to fill vacancies. Lawyers sometimes can't travel to interview witnesses. Even funds for basic office needs such as photocopying documents and obtaining deposition transcripts have been cut, according to current and former officials.

Apparently,

Department of Justice data show the impact. Prosecutions are down overall, with large drops in categories such as drugs, violent crime and white-collar offenses.

Could have fooled me. But assuming that's true, what's the reason? How about the war in Iraq?

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, federal priorities shifted to terrorism from routine crime fighting. The cost of the Iraq war also prompted Congress and the White House to slow the growth of many types of domestic spending.

....[M]ore than 100 lawyers and administrative personnel from U.S. attorneys' offices have gone to Iraq to help the fledgling government there. The offices generally pay the salaries of the seconded attorneys, which would typically be about $120,000 a year plus an additional 25% in combat pay.

Easy answer: Shift the priorities back to crime-fighting, bring the prosecutors home from Iraq.

There is one group of prosecutions that have increased: Immigration cases.

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A few faces of past clients flashed in front of me as I read the letter the ABA has sent to the U.S. Sentencing Commission (available here) urging that their planned reduction of crack cocaine penalties be made retroactive.

While the planned reductions are tiny compared to what they should be, I'm sure any relief would be appreciated by the thousands of inmates who are languishing in our prisons serving draconian sentences for non-violent crack crimes.

In 2002, the Sentencing Commission recommended a greater reduction but it never happened. It recommended:

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Drug War Rant reports Bill Richardson refuses to be bullied by the D.E.A. and has been actively trying to implement New Mexico's medical marijuana law. (Background here.)

He's directed state officials to continue to work toward finding a way to implement the law, and has written a letter to the President urging him to end the "White House Office of National Drug Control Policy's misguided priority and wasted resources spent to intimidate states trying to implement medical marijuana programs."

From Richardson's letter to Bush, which he posted on his website.

I am writing to raise my deep concern about the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy's misguided priority and wasted resources spent to intimidate states trying to implement medical marijuana programs that provide relief to citizens suffering from the pain of severe illness or injury.

"At a time when the scourge of meth is coming across the border, and cocaine and heroin use continues to ravage our communities, the federal government should be cracking down on real criminals---not people who are trying to help those in pain."

If you've always wanted to work for the FBI but had a little problem because you couldn't swear you never smoked pot or tried other controlled substances, relief is at hand.

Old guidelines barred FBI employment to anyone who had used marijuana more than 15 times in their lives or who had tried other illegal narcotics more than five times.

But those strict numbers no longer apply. Applicants for jobs such as analysts, programmers or special agents must still swear that they have not used any illegal substances recently -- three years for marijuana and 10 years for other drugs -- but they are no longer ruled out of consideration because of more frequent drug use in the past.

The explanation is that the FBI has to face reality.

But FBI officials say the move is simply an acknowledgment of reality in a country where, according to some estimates, up to a third of the population has tried marijuana at some point.

Turns out the intelligence agencies and law enforcement communities relaxed their standards some time ago.

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Here's a Catch-22 for you: Laws regulating where former sex offenders may live are so restrictive that, in urban areas, former offenders can find no housing (forcing them, in this famous example, to live under a bridge). But former sex offenders have to register their addresses, and the homeless have no address to register. So if they find a home, they're breaking the law by living too close to (for instance) a park or school; if they remain homeless, they're breaking the law by not registering.

It should be obvious that due process is violated when the government makes it impossible to obey the law and then punishes an individual for violating it, but that hasn't stopped Georgia from prosecuting Larry Moore for failing to register, or from seeking a life sentence against him, all because Moore was homeless.

At least 15 sex offenders have been arrested because of homelessness since the law took effect in July 2006, according to documents gathered through pretrial proceedings in a lawsuit brought by the Southern Center for Human Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Jeralyn is traveling, but I think she would want to highlight this Richard Moran Op-Ed on bad faith prosecution:

My recently completed study of the 124 exonerations of death row inmates in America from 1973 to 2007 indicated that 80, or about two-thirds, of their so-called wrongful convictions resulted not from good-faith mistakes or errors but from intentional, willful, malicious prosecutions by criminal justice personnel. (There were four cases in which a determination could not be made one way or another.)

Yet too often this behavior is not singled out and identified for what it is. When a prosecutor puts a witness on the stand whom he knows to be lying, or fails to turn over evidence favorable to the defense, or when a police officer manufactures or destroys evidence to further the likelihood of a conviction, then it is deceptive to term these conscious violations of the law — all of which I found in my research — as merely mistakes or errors.

Mistakes are good-faith errors — like taking the wrong exit off the highway, or dialing the wrong telephone number. There is no malice behind them. However, when officers of the court conspire to convict a defendant of first-degree murder and send him to death row, they are doing much more than making an innocent mistake or error. They are breaking the law.

Via Stop the Drug War, an employee of the San Francisco Health Department has sent a letter to a marijuana dispensary warning them not to skimp on the amount pot it places in its ounce baggies.

Seems like the dispensary was rounding out an ounce to 28 grams when it's really 28.35 grams. From the letter:

It has come to my attention that some MCD's [medical cannabis dispensaries] are using the incorrect equivalent conversion between grams and ounces. You must use 28.35 grams/ounce, not 28 grams/ounce for all cannabis sold by weight. The law behind this is in the State Business and Professions Code, which is typically enforced by Weights and Measures (State Dept of Agriculture). As they currently are not addressing weights and measures issues regarding cannabis clubs, the City's MCD Inspection Program will enforce this requirement.

Please feel free to share this with any club operator (I do not have email for most operators).

Bottom line: More bud for the buck.

Too funny. The D.E.A. has hired a company to improve its website and may include a blog.

[DEA] has also asked Adfero to create an interactive Web site that will include blogs and virtual tours of the museum. Right now, the only Web site that exists is a page about the museum on the DEA Web site. Plans to include a blog and a speaker's bureau are also under discussion.

If the Museum is news to you, here's more about it. If you want to see for yourself, go here.