Federal Appellate Judge Andre Davis has penned an op-ed about mandatory minimum sentences.  Here’s an excerpt:

As a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, I learn of many personal narratives. Tony Gregg’s bears retelling.

Mr. Gregg was a user, a seller, a “snitch” for the FBI. His early life was marked by abuse and instability, suicide attempts, jails and prison stays. As a drug user, Mr. Gregg resorted to selling crack cocaine — not kilos, but several grams at a time out of a hotel room in a run-down section of Richmond, Va.

Not unexpectedly, he was arrested and convicted. A district judge sentenced Mr. Gregg to the mandatory term of life imprisonment, required by statute, at the discretion of the prosecutor, for a third conviction of a felony drug offense.

When Mr. Gregg’s case came before me and my colleagues on appeal, there was nothing we could do but uphold the sentence of life in prison. The appellate court, like the disapproving trial court, found its hands were tied.

I do not believe Mr. Gregg deserves life in prison — the kind of sentence often imposed on convicted murderers — but I am handicapped by mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, set by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986.

And Mr. Gregg’s is far from the only story that underscores the kind of handcuffing by mandatory minimums that U.S. judges habitually face.

After 25 years of watching countless Tony Greggs serve out impossibly long sentences for transgressions that would be better served by drug treatment and social safety nets, I say with certainty that mandatory minimums are unfair and unjust. They cost taxpayers too much money and make very little sense.

For more information, vist the FAMM web site.

Mandatory Minimum Sentences is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

When a war is not going well, one response is to escalate.  There has been a lot of escalation in the drug war.  Here are two recent examples:

1.  Federal agent loses his job for questioning the wisdom of the drug war.  Some government officials do not like the fact that the group “Law Enforcement Against Prohibition” (LEAP) has a growing membership.

2.  Police agents tell judge in a warrant application that DVDs that educate citizens about their constitutional rights make certain organizations  suspicious.   Really.  Since the film in question, “10 Rules for Dealing with the Police” premiered at Cato, maybe undercover officers are now attending our events.  Neill Franklin, executive director of LEAP, spoke at Cato about the 10 Rules educational DVD and he says that film ought to be used in police training–to show agents how to respect the constitutional rights of people in the community.

Ethan Nadelmann recently spoke at Cato on the prospects for drug policy reform.  And the NYT had a good piece on the militarization of police tactics yesterday.

For more Cato work on drug policy, go here.

Drug War Update is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Challenges to Florida’s unconstitutional drug laws continue to gain momentum. Following a successful federal district court challenge to the constitutionality of state statutes lacking a mens rea requirement (mental culpability, rather than, for example, incidental possession), people convicted under them have come forward en masse to ask Florida courts to reexamine their convictions.

As described in the background to a previous brief in the case of Florida Dept. of Corrections v. Shelton, the district court held that these sorts of laws offend the constitutional guarantee of due process. Florida’s Supreme Court has now consolidated over 40 appeals resulting from that federal court decision (which itself is now on appeal). Cato has once again joined the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, ACLU, Drug Policy Alliance, Calvert Institute for Policy Research, Libertarian Law Council, and 38 law professors on a brief supporting the rights of persons convicted under the “strict liability” statutes.

We urge the Florida Supreme Court to follow the federal district court’s lead and strike down laws prohibiting the sale, possession, or delivery of illicit substances without requiring mental culpability. That court now has the opportunity to reverse these unwarranted convictions and purge a nationally singular stain on civil liberties.

The name of the case is Florida v. Adkins.

Thanks to legal associate Paul Jossey for his assistance with this brief and blogpost.

More on the Constitution’s Lack of a Drug-War Exception is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Beckley Foundation has just launched an important initiative in Great Britain and their new website has a gold mine of research related to drug policy.

On Tuesday, Cato hosted a conference on Ending the Global Drug War (those talks coming online soon).

Related Cato work here and here.  Still more here.

A Global Initiative for Drug Policy Reform is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday, Juan Carlos Hidalgo pointed out that Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos became the latest world leader to recognize the need to rethink the prohibitionist policies that allow powerful drug traffickers to flourish. Santos called for a new approach to “take away the violent profit that comes with drug trafficking” and that governments around the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, need to debate legalizing select drugs, such as cocaine.

From Colombia to Mexico, the drug war rages on. Despite two decades of U.S.-aided efforts to eradicate drug-related violence in Colombia, the problem persists. Indeed, the trickle-down effects from Mexico southward now threaten to engulf Guatemala. Costa Rica, Honduras, and El Salvador are all experiencing alarming homicide rates at least partially related to drug trafficking. To address these spikes in violence and stem the flow of drugs, the United States has spent billions of dollars in Mexico and throughout Latin America. Sadly, there is little evidence that this policy has been successful, and the evidence mounts that it has been an outright failure.

A new policy is needed to stem the violence and consequences of the Mexican drug cartels pervasive power. In a new study released today, Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow, argues that the only lasting, effective strategy for dealing with Mexico’s drug violence is to defund the Mexican drug cartels. “The United States could substantially defund these cartels,” says Carpenter, “through the full legalization (including manufacture and sale) of currently illegal drugs.”

The new study, “Undermining Mexico’s Dangerous Drug Cartels,” is available here.

New Study on Mexico’s Drug Cartels and the Global War on Drugs is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Best-selling author Glenn Greenwald debated former drug czar John Walters at Brown University last night before 300 students and faculty.  Glenn authored Cato’s landmark study on the decriminalization of drugs in Portugal and he will be speaking at our drug conference next week.

Legalize Drugs? Greenwald v. Walters is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Florida is so zealous in pursuing the war on drugs that its laws classify the possession, sale, and delivery of controlled substances as crimes not requiring the state to prove that the defendant knew he had possessed, sold, or delivered those substances.

In Florida Dept. of Corrections v. Shelton, state prosecutors convicted Mackie Shelton of transporting cocaine under one of these “strict liability” statutes, the trial judge having instructed the jury that the state only needed to prove that Shelton delivered a substance and that the substance was cocaine. Shelton successfully challenged the constitutionality of that state law in federal court, where the district judge overturned the conviction and noted that “Florida stands alone in its express elimination of mens rea as an element of a drug offense.”

Florida appealed that ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Cato has joined the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, ACLU, Drug Policy Alliance, Calvert Institute for Policy Research, and 38 law professors on an amicus brief supporting Shelton’s position.

The Supreme Court has recognized only limited exceptions to the general rule that criminal culpability requires mens rea (a guilty mind). These “strict liability” crimes fall under the rubric of “public welfare offenses” and are typically what most people would not consider “serious,” such as traffic violations and selling alcohol to minors. Policymakers justify dispensing with mens rea requirements in such contexts by citing the need to deter businesses from imposing costs on society at large, or the burden that having to prove mens rea in these sorts of cases would overwhelm courts, or that the penalties are relatively small and carry little social stigma.

Florida’s legislature, however, went well beyond the normal boundaries of public welfare offenses in imposing strict liability for drug crimes that can carry significant prison terms — and thus violated the due process of law and traditional notions of fundamental fairness. As an alternative argument purporting to save its drug laws, Florida points to the availability of affirmative defenses, that these defenses (e.g., “I didn’t know it was cocaine”) to a presumption of guilty intent take the statute out of the (constitutionally dubious) strict liability category.

But a state may not simply presume the mens rea element of a crime: In Patterson v. New York (1977), for example, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors cannot reallocate the burden of proof by forcing a defendant to prove an affirmative defense. In requiring defendants to prove that they are “blameless” in these sorts of drug crimes, Florida’s statutes fail constitutional muster.

We urge the Eleventh Circuit to affirm the district court’s ruling that the offending state law unconstitutional.

There’s No Drug War Exception to the Constitution is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

An op-ed in the Washington Post discusses why federal farm subsidies don’t even make sense from an activist government point of view. Most farm subsidies go for animal-feed crops, which can be viewed as a subsidy for meat production. At the same time, the government propagandizes the public to follow healthy habits and eat lots of fruit and vegetables, but not so much meat.

At www.DownsizingGovernment.org, we’ve come across many federal policies that are contradictory. The government tells the public that X is good, but then it takes actions to do the opposite. Here are some examples:

• Government health experts tell new moms to breastfeed, but the government spends billions of dollars a year on the WIC program, which subsidizes baby formula for moms.
• The government imposes strict rules on property owners to protect wetlands, but the government’s Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation have destroyed vast amounts of wetlands.
• The government enforces strict anti-pollution laws, but the Department of Energy and other federal agencies have been notorious polluters.
• The Corps of Engineers has spent billions of dollars building levees to protect against flooding, but its own infrastructure has worsened the damage caused by hurricanes.
• The government imposes tight rules to ensure proper funding and to prevent abuse in private pension plans, but its own “pension plan”—Social Security—is a Ponzi scheme.
• The Constitution says that the federal government is created to “insure domestic tranquility,” but the government has spurred violence with alcohol prohibition and now the drug war.

My Cato colleagues are probably aware of many other contradictions, and it seems that the more the government intervenes in society, the more it will work against both the people and itself.

Government at War With Itself is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The New York Times has an article today about how city officials take children away from parents because of marijuana use.  Here is an excerpt:

Hundreds of New Yorkers who have been caught with small amounts of marijuana, or who have simply admitted to using it, have become ensnared in civil child neglect cases in recent years, though they did not face even the least of criminal charges, according to city records and defense lawyers. A small number of parents in these cases have even lost custody of their children.

The article explains that even if a child is not immediately removed a “neglect finding” can kill prospects for certain jobs involving kids, such as a daycare assistant, and will make it easier for judges to order a removal down the road.  Even though marijuana use is very common among whites, the neglect and removal cases are mostly brought against minorities.

When drug warriors are challenged about criminalizing marijuana use, they typically deflect the question by saying, “we’re not locking up nonviolent marijuana users.”  Well that’s only because our prisons are overflowing already and they can’t convince enough lawmakers to build enough prison space to escalate the war further.  Second, below the prison numbers a low scale war continues apace–tens of thousands of arrests and court appointments and, as this article shows, child removal proceedings.

New York should follow California’s approach to this issue–if the state can demonstrate actual harm to children from marijuana use, then a neglect case can be brought.  Reporters should ask Mayor Michael Bloomberg whether his past drug use makes him unfit to be a parent or grandparent or to be in an occupation affecting the well-being of kids.

When the State Takes the Children is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Cory Maye was in his home one evening minding his own business when his front door came crashing down.  Frightened that criminals were going to harm him and his child, Maye quickly retrieved a gun.  When his bedroom door came crashing down next, Maye fired.  When the lights came on, it turned out that the intruders were police officers and that Maye had killed one of them.  The nightmare had only just begun for Maye.  Police and prosecutors twisted a case of self-defense into a “murder” charge and they sought the death penalty.  Cato fellow Radley Balko read about the case when he was researching a paper concerning the militarization of police tactics and no-knock raids.  Radley then wrote about the injustice of Maye’s situation and word spread via the internet.  A new legal team took up the case and appeals followed.  When a court ordered a new trial for Maye, prosecutors offered a deal–plead guilty to a lesser charge and Maye would be set free because he had already served years in a Mississippi prison.  Maye took the deal even though many thought he should not have any criminal conviction on his record for what happened that night.  Still, it is hard to blame a guy for wanting to get out of prison to see his children just as fast as he possibly could.  Maye was released a few days ago and here’s a snap of him playing around with his son. 

Congrats to Maye.  Congrats to Radley.  And congrats to Maye’s lawyers at Covington and Burling.

Previous coverage here and here.

From Hell to Heaven is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Ten years ago this month, Portugal rejected the conventional approach to drug policy–more laws, stiffer prison sentences, more police–and went the other way by decriminalizing all drugs, even cocaine and heroin.  The drug warriors predicted a disaster.  They said drug use would spike and there would be a public health crisis.  That did not happen.  As Glenn Greenwald showed in a 2009 Cato report, Portugal is doing better than before and in many respects is doing better than other countries in the European Union that take the hard-line, criminal approach to drug use.  The buzzword in Washington these days is “evidence-based research.”  Well, there you have it.

More here and here.   Thanks to the Huffington Post for the pointer.

10 Years of Drug Decriminalization in Portugal is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

…that’s what former Cato policy analyst, Reason senior editor and now Huffington Post reporter Radley Balko reports:

I’m in Monticello, Mississippi, this morning, where Circuit Court Judge Prentiss Harrell has just signed a plea agreement between Cory Maye and the state. Maye has plead guilty to a reduced charged of manslaughter, and has been resentenced to 10 years in prison, time he has already served. He’ll be sent to Rankin County for processing. He should be released and home with his family in a matter of days.

Cory Maye’s is a story about a paramilitary-style drug raid gone grotesquely wrong, a cautionary tale about the human costs of the War on Drugs, and a lesson in how a dedicated investigative reporter can throw a wrench in the ever-grinding wheels of injustice. If you’re unfamiliar with the case, and Radley’s role in it, watch the terrific Reason.tv video, “Mississippi Drug War Blues” below, and read this blogpost I wrote a couple of years ago, when Radley’s work first started drawing attention to the case: “The Cato Policy Analyst Who (May Have) Saved a Man’s Life.” We can remove the “may have” now.

And here’s Radley’s update at the Huffington Post.

“Cory Maye Will Soon Be Free” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It was 40 years ago today that President Richard Nixon said the “drug menace” had reached the dimensions of a “national emergency.”  Nixon asked Congress to allocate $155 million to fight drug abuse and requested a new central office in the White House to coordinate governmental efforts on the problem.  Thus began the modern drug war.  It’s true that criminal laws were already in place in many jurisdictions, but it was Nixon’s call for a “new, all-out offensive” that really started to ramp things up.  Each year brought calls for more money–and that  meant more police, more raids, more wiretaps, more arrests, and more prisons.  And more foreign intervention.

The Associated Press ran a good article that examined the 40 year policy and the trillion dollars that went into the policy.   Here’s an excerpt:

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where [all the] money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:

— $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.

— $33 billion in marketing “Just Say No”-style messages to America’s youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have “risen steadily” since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.

— $49 billion for law enforcement along America’s borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.

— $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.

— $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.

Read the whole thing.

I hosted a debate this week to mark this unfortunate policy milestone.  Cato senior fellow Jeff Miron squared off against Dr. Robert DuPont, who was one of the key policy staffers in the Nixon White House in 1971.  Dr. DuPont remains convinced that the present policy approach is essentially correct.   Watch the event and decide for yourself.

In my 2000 book, After Prohibition, Milton Friedman noted that America’s drug war policy had dozens of negative consequences.  One consequence that he believed received too little attention was the policy’s effect on other people around the world.  Friedman said the policy was responsible for the deaths of “hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad by fighting a war that should never have been started.”   The violence in Mexico confirms Friedman’s analysis.  The Los Angeles Times recently reported that more than 34,000 people have been killed during the government’s crackdown over just the past four years.

Ending the drug war is one of the signature issues for the Cato Institute.  The other think tanks in Washington, DC–Brookings, AEI, and Heritage–support the drug war.  We believe the drug war will eventually be widely recognized as a tragic mistake in much the same way as we presently look back upon the days of alcohol prohibition.

For additional Cato work related to drug policy, go here.

40 Years of Drug Prohibition is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This morning the Supreme Court issued a remarkable ruling [pdf] concerning California’s prison system.   Because of years of pervasive overcrowding, there have been systemic violations of the Constitution’s ban on Cruel and Unusual Punishments.  To remedy those violations, the Court affirmed a lower court order to reduce the prison population.  I was not surprised to learn that Justice Anthony Kennedy authored the majority opinion in this case, Brown v. Plata. In a 2003 speech to the American Bar Association (reprinted in my book In the Name of Justice), Kennedy tried to raise more awareness about America’s prison system.  He made the point that every citizen ought to take an interest in the prison system–it is not just the realm of correctional personnel.  Here’s an excerpt from Kennedy’s speech:

The subject [of prisons] is the concern and responsibility of every member of [the legal] profession and of every citizen.  This is your justice system; these are your prisons. … [W]e should know what happens after the prisoner is taken away.  To be sure, the prisoner has violated the social contract; to be sure he must be punished to vindicate the law, to acknowledge the suffering of the victim, and to deter future crimes.  Still, the prisoner is a person; still, he or she is part of the family of humankind.

Were we to enter the hidden world of punishment, we should be startled by what we see. Consider its remarkable scale.  The nationwide inmate population today is about 2.1 million people.  In California … this state alone keeps over 160,000 persons behind bars.  In countries such as England, Italy, France, and Germany, the incarceration rate is about 1 in 1,000 persons.  In the United States it is about 1 in 143.

The numbers are only the beginning of the story.  Do not assume that the government has the facilities to house the prisoners that are sentenced.  California is housing far beyond the design capacity of its prisons–double. That is, it has designed a system for 80,000 but has stuffed 160,000 into the buildings.  The sheer number of inmates has overwhelmed the facilities and staff. Kennedy’s opinion details the abysmal conditions, but I will mention a few:

• In one prison, 54 men share one toilet
• medical staff sometimes use closets and storage rooms for ill patients-rooms without adequate ventalition.
• exam tables are not disinfected after use by prisoners with communicable diseases
• men held for hours and hours in telephone booth sized cages with no toilet
• California’s prison system averages one suicide a week (80% higher than the national average)
• Men with medical problems go untreated and die.  These are not cancer patients.  These are preventable deaths.  For example, a man with stomach pain goes five weeks without medical treatment and dies.

A corrections official from Texas toured California’s facilities and he testified that he has been in the field 35 years and was just appalled.  He’d “seen nothing like it.”

Four conservative justices–Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito–dissented from the ruling.  Scalia said the outcome was “absurd” — “perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our Nation’s history.”  Justice Alito said the Constitution “imposes an important–but limited–restraint on state authority in [the prison] field.  The Eighth Amendment prohibits prison officials from depriving inmates of ‘the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities.’”  The conservatives concede, as they must, that the California prison system is really bad, but they argue that it is not yet so awful so as to warrant judicial intervention and a population reduction order.  Kennedy and the liberals in the majority (Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan) make a persuasive case that California’s elected officials have had ample opportunity to address the systemic problems, but have let them fester year after year.

For related Cato work, go here and here.

The Supreme Court and the California Prison System is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Michael Gerson’s predictable, reflexive attack on Rep. Ron Paul in his May 10 op-ed in the WaPo for Paul’s sensible stand in favor of ending the futile crusade called the War on Drugs, makes a curious argument.  He asserts that there is a “de facto decriminalization of drugs” in Washington, D.C.  Curious, because there are few places in the nation where the drug war is waged more vigorously.  Doesn’t seem to be working, does it?

Yet Gerson would expand the effort.  Never mind that the social pathologies in the District for which Gerson’s compassionate conservative heart bleeds are mainly a result of making drugs illegal:  Turf wars with innocents caught in the crossfire; children quitting school to sell drugs because of the artificially high prices prohibition creates; disrespect for the law due to a massive criminal subculture.

Gerson, one of the chief architects of the disastrous Bush II administration, should step away from his obsessive disdain for libertarianism and consider the nationwide decriminalization of drugs undertaken in Portugal in 2001.  Drugs use is down, particularly among young people, and drug-related crimes have dropped precipitously.  There is a reason hundreds of thousands of Mexicans have taken to the streets to call for the end to the war on drugs there that is tearing apart the fabric of Mexican society.  On top of the social aspects of the drug war dystopia, Cato senior fellow and Harvard economist Jeffery Miron estimates that ending the drug war in the U.S. would save $41.3 billion annually.  As usual, Ron Paul has it right.

Gerson Gets It Wrong Again is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As Ted Carpenter notes below, President Obama is departing on an important trip to Latin America. The countries that he will visit exemplify the macroeconomic stability and advancement of democratic institutions now found in much of the region.

Brazil, by far the largest Latin American economy, has enjoyed almost a decade of sound growth and poverty reduction. Chile is the most developed country in the region thanks to decades of economic liberalization, a process that has also made it Latin America’s most mature democracy. And El Salvador is undergoing a delicate period in its transition to becoming a full-fledged democracy with its first left-of-center president since the end of the civil war in 1992.

In an era when most Latin American nations are moving in the right direction—albeit at different speeds, with some setbacks, and with notable exceptions—the United States can serve as a catalyst of change by contributing to more economic integration and the consolidation of the rule of law in the region.

Unfortunately, despite President Obama’s assurances that he’s interested in strengthening economic ties with Latin America, his administration is still delaying the ratification of two important free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama. President Obama also continues to support a failed war on drugs that significantly exacerbates violence and institutional frailty in the region, particularly in Mexico and Central America.

It’s good that President Obama’s trip will highlight significant progress in Latin America, but his administration’s policy actions still don’t match the U.S. goals of encouraging economic growth and sound institutional development in the region.

Obama’s Trip to Latin America is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama’s trip to Latin America is likely to focus on economic topics, but two security issues deserve scrutiny during his stops in Brazil and El Salvador. 

Washington’s diplomatic relationship with Brazil has become somewhat frosty, especially over the past year.  U.S. leaders did not appreciate Brazil’s joint effort with Turkey to craft a compromise policy toward Iran’s nuclear program.  The Obama administration regarded that diplomatic initiative as unhelpful freelancing.  And when Brazil joined Turkey in voting against a UN Security Council resolution imposing stronger sanctions on Tehran, the administration’s resentment deepened.  Obama should not only try to soothe tensions, he should shift Washington’s policy, express appreciation for Brazil’s innovative efforts to end the impasse on the Iranian nuclear issue, and consider whether the milder approach that the Turkish and Brazilian governments advocate has merit.

In El Salvador, worries about Mexico’s spreading drug-related violence into Central America are likely to come up.  El Salvador and other Central American countries are seeking a bigger slice of Washington’s anti-drug aid in the multi-billion-dollar, multiyear Merida Initiative.  President Obama should not only resist such blandishments, he should use the visit to announce a policy shift away from a strict prohibitionist strategy that has filled the coffers of the Mexican drug cartels and sowed so much violence in Mexico, and now increasingly in Central America as well.  Prohibition didn’t work with alcohol and it’s not working any better with currently illegal drugs.

Obama’s Latin America Trip is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Here is a new publication from Cato, “How the War on Drugs Is Destroying Black America,”  (pdf) by John McWhorter, who is a lecturer in linguistics and American Studies at Columbia University and a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and The New Republic.  Here is his conclusion:

If we truly want to get past race in this country, we must be aware that it will never happen until the futile War on Drugs so familiar to us now is a memory. … The time to end the War on Drugs, therefore, is yesterday.

Read the whole thing.  You can also listen to McWhorter’s speech by clicking here.

For additional Cato work related to drug policy, go here.

The Drug War and Black America is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

From a press release by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition:

[A] U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent… was fired for saying in a casual conversation that legalizing and regulating drugs would help stop cartel violence along the southern border with Mexico. After sharing his views with a colleague, the fired agent, Bryan Gonzalez, received a letter of termination stating that his comments are “contrary to the core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication, and espirit [sic] de corps.” Last week, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, Gonzalez filed a lawsuit seeking damages.

I know very little about employment law and have no idea whether the agent has a case. But just consider that even some Border Patrol agents are questioning the War on Drugs — and even when it can cost them their jobs.

If it costs you less to speak out, then please, consider doing so. American patriotism is about speaking one’s mind. Dedication to a failed policy isn’t a virtue. And will the firings continue until the esprit de corps improves?

Patriotism, Dedication, and Esprit de Corps is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I wrote an op-ed for National Review (Online) last week showing how conservative exploitation of the Supreme Court’s broad misreading of the Commerce Clause to reach intrastate medical marijuana facilitated liberal exploitation of the same to create the individual mandate in Obamacare.

A principled stand on the limits of federal power does not begin and end with health care. The Commerce Clause is a double-edged sword: Conservatives cannot wield it in the drug war without making it a useful tool for advancing progressive visions of federal power.

I’m happy to see Barton Hinkle, winner of the 2008 Bastiat Prize for Journalism, pick up on my writing and drive the point home in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch:

So far, many conservatives outraged over Obamacare do not seem to have reconsidered their enthusiasm for national drug prohibition. Whether they do so could provide a good indication as to whether they’re standing up for a principle — or merely against the president.

Hinkle points to a recent Heritage Foundation paper opposing Prop. 19, California’s referendum on marijuana legalization. The Commerce Clause makes a prominent appearance:

In 2006, the Supreme Court held in Gonzales vs. Raich that the Commerce Clause confers on Congress the authority to ban the use of marijuana, even when a state approves it for “medical purposes” and it is produced in small quantities for personal consumption. Many legal scholars criticize the Court’s extremely broad reading of the Commerce Clause as inconsistent with its original meaning, but the Court’s decision nonetheless stands.

Yes, the decision “nonetheless stands.” That doesn’t make it right. Several prominent conservative drug warriors signed on to an amicus brief in Raich endorsing an expansive use of the Commerce Clause. Copy, paste, and replace the word “marijuana” with “health insurance,” and you just wrote a Department of Justice brief for any of the suits defending Obamacare across the nation.

Or, for a good laugh, go read former Oklahoma congressman Ernest Istook, now working for Heritage, who frames the health care debate as “Obamacare vs. Limited Government.” As he puts it: “Straining to find a constitutional basis for mandating that everyone must buy health insurance, Obama’s lawyers resorted to the all-purpose Interstate Commerce Clause.” Istook signed on to the drug warrior brief in Raich.

There’s no good reason for this inconsistency. State attorneys general from both sides of the aisle opposed the federal intrusion in Raich. Deep red Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana touted their drug warrior prowess but argued against an overly broad Commerce Clause reading on federalism grounds. True blue California, Maryland, and Washington argued that the Controlled Substances Act did not bar states from regulating intrastate markets.

I make many of these points in a Cato Podcast, Conservatives, Obamacare, and the Commerce Clause. For some more Cato work on the drug war, check out how Portugal decriminalized drugs without the social ills that conservatives forecast, and how ending the war on drugs would save billions annually.

Obamacare and the Drug War is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog