Cops Play Wii During Drug Raid

Survillence video from a Florida home shows police playing Wii bowling during a drug raid.

As investigators searched the home for drugs, some drug task force members found other ways to occupy their time. Within 20 minutes of entering Difalco's house, some of the investigators found a Wii video bowling game and began bowling frame after frame.

To be fair - Wii is pretty addictive. So I can understand why the officers spent a good hour of the drug raid glued to the TV. Isn't it ironic?

"Well, we were really bored" explained Det. Scruff McGruff, who was present during the raid. "Drug raids can take hours, but in this case, we finished up pretty quickly and just didn't feel like going back to work. Before we found the Wii, we were planning on snorting some of meth we confiscated and playing Duck Hunt with our real guns - thank God we found the Wii."

Amendment Withdrawn!

In short - we won the battle. Rep. Mark Souder withdrew his amendment to bar financial aid from students with drug possession convictions. He said " I was probably going to lose today."

This war ain't over though. A compromise to the amendment will be made in conference committee and it is expected that students convicted of felony drug crimes will still be unable to get aid for college. Still, this is a huge victory for us and we can expect significantly less students to be forced to drop out of school because a man from Indiana thinks they should be punished twice for the same crime.

You rock SSDP. You did this. It was your calls to congress. Your grassroots action. Your dedication to this organization and its mission for a fair and sensible drug policy. Look around on your campus. How many other student groups have been able to change federal law?

If you're feeling inspired, make a donation today to help us keep this momentum going!

Tell Your Rep: "Vote No on Souder's Amendment"

That's right! We have a chance to change one of the most destructive drug policies ever created. The HEA Aid Elimination Penalty has denied financial aid for college to more than 200,000 students with drug convictions. However, the 2009 SAFRA would make it so that this law would only apply to those convicted of selling drugs. Considering that nearly 90% of marijuana arrests are for possession only - this is a huge victory! Sadly, Rep. Mark "sneaky snake" Souder (R-IN), who created the penalty in 1998, has introduced an amendment to strike out that reform. But we can stop it.

Here is what you need to do:

1) MAKE THE CALL: Dial the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Ask for your representative's office if you know his/her name. If you don't, simply give the operator your address. (Please be patient for an answer, as it sometimes takes several rings to get through. And be sure to leave a voice message if the staff is out for the day.)

2) SPEAK YOUR MIND: When the receptionist in your representative’s office answers the phone, politely say: “My name is ________ and I’d like my representative to vote against Representative Souder's Amendment to the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which denies educational opportunities to students with minor drug possession convictions. Blocking access to education causes more drug problems and hurts the economy. Thank you.”

3) SPREAD THE WORD: Forward this message to everyone you know! CLICK HERE TO SHARE ON FACEBOOK. Twitter this URL: http://ssdp.org/urgent

This is so easy folks. Anyone can do it. Don't believe me? Watch me do it!

A look inside a medical cannabis dispensary

Check out this video from our friends at Harborside Health Center:



I don't know how anyone can watch this and say that cannabis should continue to be prohibited and sold on the illicit black market.

Latin America and Reform

Check out this great piece on the move to decriminalize drugs in Latin America.

Bruno Avangera, a 40-year-old web designer from Tucumán in Argentina, pauses to relight a half-smoked joint of cannabis. Then he speaks approvingly of "progress and the right decision" by the country's seven supreme court judges, who decided last week that prosecuting people for the private consumption of small amounts of narcotics was unconstitutional.

"Last year three of my friends were caught smoking a spliff in a park and were treated like traffickers," he said. "They went to court, which took six months. One went to jail alongside murderers. The others were sent to rehab, where they were treated for an addiction they didn't have, alongside serious heroin and crack users. It was pointless and destroyed their lives."

Boy, that sure does sound familiar doesn't it? When I was working as a youth counselor that's exactly how I felt. I loved working with young people and helping them to better themselves but it was incredibly frustrating to see teenagers told they are addicts, and that they'll always be addicts, when the truth is - most were just kids experimenting with cannabis and were coerced into treatment because they got caught.

Its time for Latin America to stand up to U.S. drug war politicking. Countries are being torn apart by our demand for drugs - which will never go away. We have a clear choice: embrace harm reduction and legalization or continue to fund drug cartels and ignore real drug abuse problems in the U.S.

Former President of Brazil Calls for Global Cannabis Decrim

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former President of Brazil, is calling the war on drugs a failure and advocating for global cannabis decriminalization and the implementation of harm reduction policies.

"After decades of overflights, interdictions, spraying and raids on jungle drug factories, Latin America remains the world's largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana," Cardoso writes. "It is producing more and more opium and heroin. It is developing the capacity to mass produce synthetic drugs. Continuing the drugs war with more of the same is ludicrous."

Cardoso, a sociologist, said Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador had all now taken steps towards drug law liberalisation and that change was "imminent" in Brazil. The way forward worldwide would involve a "strategy of reaching out, patiently and persistently, to the users and not the continued waging of a misguided and counterproductive war that makes the users, rather than the drug lords, the primary victims," he added.

The Drug War Gets Worse

Drug cartel members burst into a Juarez drug rehabilation clinic yesterday, lining up patients and executing 17 of them. On the same day, newly appointed ( 2 weeks ago ) deputy police chief Jose Manuel Revueltas, was killed in President Calderon's home state of Michoacan in western Mexico by heavily armed men in two vehicles just a few blocks from police headquarters.

How many Saint Valentine's Day Massacres do we need to witness before we end drug prohibition? I'm not feeling like ranting so here are some current highlights from the drug war:

• 13,000 people have been killed since late 2006
• Obama plans to give $1.4 billion to aid fighting drug cartels (aka, wasting tax dollars and increasing violence)
  
• Ciudad Juarez has become the most violent city on earth.
• In 2009 there have been 4,736 murders in Mexico
• There have been 24,000 arrests in 2009 and the violence still continues
  

SSDP on the radio

UMD SSDP President Irina Alexander and I spoke on Midday with Dan Rodricks on WYPR radio (Baltimore's NPR affilliate - 88.1 FM) last Tuesday, August 25th.

The hour long segment covered the Higher Education Act Drug Penalty, zero tolerance policies, 911 Good Samaritan policies, and the Amethyst initiative.

Listen to us and let us know what you think of our performance!

As the school year begins, your local NPR stations might be interested to hear about your chapter's plans for the year. This could be a great opportunity to raise awareness and build local support for a campus change campaign or one of our national campaigns. You might also inspire sister chapters! Contact your outreach director for help on how to reach out to local media.

Josh Flynn at Towson University near Baltimore listened to us and is now starting a chapter there!

It's time for the children used to justify this Drug War speak up about its failure.

Argentina Decriminalizes Marijuana

I didn't realize it when I left for the first Latin American Conference on Drug Policy in Argentina a few weeks ago (scroll down a couple of posts for more), but the country was on its way to setting a historical precedent in creation of sensible drug policy. While it may not be Portugal or Mexico, the new law is undoubtedly the first step in a new approach for the South American nation.

The Supreme Court announced a UNANIMOUS ruling today that allows for personal use and possession of marijuana by adults in private situations without affecting third parties. It has deemed the current system invasive and corrupt, and a literal violation of constitutional privacy rights.

Of course, most of us realize that any government intervention regarding what we put into our own bodies is a violation of personal privacy. But isn't it nice to see formidable heads of government agreeing?

The court goes on to suggest that (gasp!) treatment for drug addiction is a more viable alternative to incarceration and that resources are better used fighting violent drug traffickers than low-level offenders.

The Chief Cabinet Minister Aníbal Fernández suggested the ruling signifies an "end of the repressive policies of the government against users."

A good day, indeed.

Students for "Sensible" Drug Policy

So we stumbled across this opinion piece on proposed reform of the HEA that would restore financial aid to students with drug possession convictions. The author is in favor of barring aid students with drug convictions.

Here's a breakdown and commentary of my favorite parts of this brilliant piece:

Remember the gigantic bust of students selling drugs this last spring? 75 students were busted selling marijuana, cocaine, and heroin out of several dorms and 5 Frat houses at San Diego State University.

I remember. That was the big drug bust that finally won the drug war wasn't it? Go on, go on...

How many former users, are now to be allowed student loans again, (eligible again because of the progressive Democrat majority)? How many will begin to use drugs while in college? How many convicted users will “relapse” due to the stress of college and grades? Are drug users stable and reliable in the first place? Is it right to make loans to former users going to school when they didn’t care about the importance of keeping a good record in the first place?

Those damn progressives! How dare those "convicted users" get a second chance? Are drug users stable enough to go to school? I can't believe this guy is serious. If I have a few beers with my dinner, am I not "stable" enough to go to work the next day? As you'll see in the new book, Marijuana is SAFER, alcohol causes many more problems to society and to a persons health than marijuana. So you should also support removing aid from those that drink alcohol. And if you can find me one person that isn't technically a drug user, we'll end this whole thing right now... Ok then, I'll keep going.

We have Democrat California Congressman George Miller, and 45 different cosponsors to thank for H.R. 3221; it overturns / reverses sections of the bill passed back in 1998 those sections were intended to keep drug use and drug dealers out of colleges. One has to wonder how the parents will feel about their children sharing a dorm room with a user or dealer.

Here's a newsflash: the bill didn't work! The HEA Aid Elimination Penalty did not work to keep drug dealers out of colleges, drugs off our streets or out of children's hands. If it did, students wouldn't be buying drugs or using them at the rate that you quoted: "Of 18 – 22 year old college students illicit drug use was at 37.5% - while non-student use for the same age group was 38.4%" And really, if this prohibition thing works so well, and we've been doing it for decades, why are drug use rates so high? Oh that's right... blame the progressives!

Kris Krane, (executive director) of Students for “Sensible” Drug Policy, (a pro-drug group) called the old law requiring the student to qualify by keeping clean, ”unfair because of double jeopardy” – and that it impacted students of color and low income more than others.

Other than users and legalizers, Adam Wolf, staff attorney for the ACLU and parents whose children began using drugs and lost their student loans over the last decade, would probably support reform.

So now SSDP is a "pro-drug group" and the Sensible in SSDP is in quotations. Gimme a break. I doubt he even read our mission statement. He couldn't have read it before calling us pro-drug. Calling us pro drug is about as ignorant as calling someone that is against the war in Iraq a terrorist.

This guy didn't do ANY research before writing this! Its really kind of funny! I mean, a simple google search of Aid Elimination Penalty bring ups CHEAR - The Coalition for Higher Education Act Reform which, aside from "users and legalizers" includes some of these organizations:

American Bar Association
American Council on Education
United States Student Association
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
United Church of Christ
Building Better Lives for Our Communities and Kids (Building BLOCK)
Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice
Center for Women Policy Studies
Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice

Oh and about 390 other organizations and 115 student governments including:

Yale University (also has a scholarship program for students that have lost aid)
Brown University (also has a scholarship program for students that have lost aid)
Franklin Pierce University
Columbia University
Dartmouth College
George Washington University

He ends it all with a fine piece of advice for learning about drug policy:

If you’re interested, there’s numbers of others … just go to the DEA website and search university students and drugs …

Brilliant! Why didn't I think of that?

That's all I've got for now.