Lawyers, Guns and Money

Is the title of the song and as the song goes, the shit has hit the fan, at least for John Hammar, an ex-Marine from Ft. Pierce, Florida, a town just a few miles north of me.  I'm sure you've heard that he's been jailed under one of Mexico's tough and comically ineffective gun control laws.  Of course your sense of comedy may differ on this point.

Seems Hammer and his friend had planned to drive across the Mexican border near Matamoros in a Winnebago filled with surfboards and camping gear -- and an old shotgun he'd inherited from his great grandfather which, as purchased from Sears, has a 24" barrel -- an inch too short for Mexico, although just fine in Florida.  US officials  told him that all he had to do was to file some papers with the Mexican authorities and it would be legal, but they were wrong and Mr. Hammar now sits chained to a cot in a Mexican jail cell hoping at least for Lawyers and money.  No more guns please.

Fox News of course is running around screaming and yelling about "trumped up charges" which seems strange, US laws about barrel length being just as arbitrary as Mexico's and carry punishments at least as severe.  In fact US laws require gun owners to know more than you'd expect the average lawyer knows and are just as arbitrary as concerns lengths and dates of manufacture and type of stock. It's possible in fact for a gun to be quite legal to send through the mail and an identical one with a one digit serial number difference to be felonious.  It's possible to own a handgun to which fitting a folding stock can put you in jail for being below a certain arbitrary barrel length.  Mexican law, unbeknownst to Hammar and his advisors, classifies a nearly antique relic from Sears Roebuck as a military weapon, a practice quite akin to the US classification of an ordinary rifle as being an assault rifle because of the shape of the stock or the country of manufacture.

But I digress.  Our Republican friends and faithful defenders of chaotic reasoning are hinting that this is all Obama's doing and that were he a real 100% American President like John Wayne, he'd be down in Matamoros waving a pair of six guns and displaying a pair of something even less attractive.  Life being somewhat less of a vintage cowboy movie than Fox would like us to think, he isn't.  He's in Washington being the president; a task that requires him to deal with more serious things like North Korea playing with ICBMs and trying to prevent the Middle East from once again dragging us into a war. Traducing Obama --  that's what Fox does.  That's what Fox is for.

I'm sure that if we still carry enough clout with Mexico, we might, or rather the Executive branch might be able to get the man released, even though pleas from Mexico to have mercy on their citizens have been rudely and routinely snubbed.  We are as you know, God's own chosen "leaders of the Free World" and fuck you very much.  I do hope we can because it looks like the man never intended to break any laws, just as so many Americans run afoul of so many counter-intuitive legal niceties of our crazy quilt of emotionally driven crime bills, bans and statutes.

Mexico, as I said, is a nice example of the failure to prevent people from  causing  problems by controlling and banning objects or substances.  That, low tax, business friendly, country with a weak government has become a slaughterhouse despite it's tough, restrictive gun laws and the even tougher gun laws in China have produced a flood of  mass school stabbings and that country is now considering registering kitchen knives and cleavers.  Meanwhile, despite stringent gun control measures, and because of its drug laws, the drug cartels have made Matamoros one of the most dangerous places in the hemisphere. The jail in question recently lost 20 inmates  in a single gang related fight despite the illegality of weapons in a prison.

Is there a lesson we even need to consider thinking about?  Is tough talk and tough law the best solution to systemic failures of a society, or are such policies the result of  parsimony and a distaste for looking for the roots of problems?  Is the prohibition of  Marijuana and "get tough" drug laws the root failure here? Oh but we're Americans so why consider what happens abroad as being a lesson?  We're unique!

Pot calling the kettle black

So, in the last few months, at least five clinics that dispensed medical marijuana, which is allowed under California law, have been forced to close because of a campaign by the federal Justice Department. And someone is finally calling them out on it.

The San Francisco Democratic Party adopted a resolution yesterday demanding that President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag "cease all Federal actions in San Francisco immediately, respect State and local laws, and stop the closure of City-permitted medical cannabis facilities"...

At least 5 permitted San Francisco dispensaries have been forced to close in the last few months as a result of the Obama administration's heightened attack in California. The operators and landlords of these and several more dispensaries were threatened with federal criminal prosecution and asset forfeiture in an effort to shut down access points for the city's tens of thousands of qualified patients. San Francisco has been especially hard hit since October, when California's four U.S. Attorneys escalated an already vigorous federal campaign against medical marijuana.

The DCCC argues that, "the U. S. Attorneys in California are not targeting individuals and organizations that are operating outside of the law, but instead are aggressively persecuting a peaceful and regulated community, wasting Federal resources in using a series of threatening tactics to shut down regulated access to medical cannabis across the state of California." The DCCC also accuses the federal government of "depriving...the State of California [of] much needed tax revenue."

We already know that the War on Marijuana wastes billions of dollars every year (that's just marijuana, by the way), and has accomplished exactly nothing, by anyone's estimation. (And, incidentally, despite Obama's support for medical marijuana during his campaign, his record as president has not been good on the subject.)

Although it's difficult to justify the continued waste of money and resources that the government's battle on the Demon Weed entails, it does occasionally give us some fascinating insights into the minds of the people opposing it.


But rather than pointing out the failed logic in the anti-marijuana arguments, or comparing marijuana and alcohol, someone should probably remember the fact that the prohibition of pot was initially a racist concept.

The early arguments against marijuana weren't that it would "destroy the fabric of society as we know it!" In fact, pot had been prescribed by doctors for many years.

Marijuana was listed in the United States Pharmacopeia from 1850 until 1942 and was prescribed for various conditions including labor pains, nausea, and rheumatism. Its use as an intoxicant was also commonplace from the 1850s to the 1930s. A campaign conducted in the 1930s by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (now the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs) sought to portray marijuana as a powerful, addicting substance that would lead users into narcotics addiction. It is still considered a "gateway" drug by some authorities.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007

Care to guess what makes it a "gateway drug"? The fact that it's illegal.

There are no reputable studies that link marijuana use to the use of other drugs, except for one pesky little fact: buying marijuana puts you in contact with people who sell those other drugs. So they're suddenly accessible to you. That's it. That's the sum total of the reasons that make marijuana a "gateway drug."

You see, what happened was, in 1931, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon appointed his soon to be nephew-in-law, Henry J. Anslinger, to head the newly formed Beaureau of Narcotics. And why did Anslinger, a former prohibitionist, decide that it was this naturally-occurring herb that was to blame for all of society's ills? Well, in his words:

There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others... Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men.

Not that he was the only one who felt that way. William Randolph Hearst, when he wasn't starting wars, was fairly outspoken himself.

Marihuana influences Negroes to to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice.

(To be honest, Hearst had a second reason to declare war on marijuana - it makes a cheap, renewable source of paper, and Hearst was heavily invested in the logging industry.)

Perhaps when you consider the quality of people who celebrated the arrest of pot smokers by pouring themselves a drink, a few other questions might occur to you about the War on Drugs.

Want to eat? Pee in this, please.

As either of my long-time readers could tell you, I have held for quite some time that South Carolina just sucks. And they keep on trying to prove it.

Latest idiocy: Governor Nikki Haley (R-Obviously) wants to drug test people who get unemployment benefits.



In her words (and channeling her inner teenage cheerleader), "I so want drug testing. I so want it."

But, being a Republican, if the facts don't match the "common wisdom," she's more than happy to make shit up.

"Down on River Site, they were hiring a few hundred people, and when we sat down and talked to them -- this was back before the campaign -- when we sat down and talked to them, they said of everybody they interviewed, half of them failed a drug test, and of the half that was left, of that 50 percent, the other half couldn't read and write properly," Haley said.

Fortunately, the Huffington Post reporter did that thing we used to call "journalism" and asked somebody if she was right.

Jim Giusti, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, which owns the River Site, told HuffPost he had no idea what Haley was talking about with regard to applicants flunking a drug test.

"Half the people who applied for a job last year or year 2009 did not fail the drug test," Giusti said. "At the peak of hiring under the Recovery Act we had less than 1 percent of those hired test positive."

The River Site doesn't even test applicants. "We only test them when they have been accepted," Giusti said.

I'll give Haley a little bit of credit, though. She got the one thing right.

"That's what we have in South Carolina," she continued. "We don't have an unemployment problem. We have an education and poverty problem."

The rest is crap, but she's finally figured out one of the chief causes of unemployment. I mean, it's a shame that she couldn't have figured it out a couple of months ago, when she tried to slash education funding for the state so badly that the state Legislature, Democrat and Republican, overturned most of her budget and overrode her attempts to veto. But at least she knows it now, right?

Of course, Teabaggers don't care about facts; they care about ideology. Governor Rick Scott of Florida instituted a drug testing policy for unemployment, which didn't do the state a lick of good.

The law, which took effect July 1, requires applicants to pay for their own drug tests. Those who test drug-free are reimbursed by the state, and those who fail cannot receive benefits for a year.

Having begun the drug testing in mid-July, the state Department of Children and Families is still tabulating the results. But at least 1,000 welfare applicants took the drug tests through mid-August, according to the department, which expects at least 1,500 applicants to take the tests monthly.

So far, they say, about 2 percent of applicants are failing the test; another 2 percent are not completing the application process, for reasons unspecified.

Cost of the tests averages about $30. Assuming that 1,000 to 1,500 applicants take the test every month, the state will owe about $28,800-$43,200 monthly in reimbursements to those who test drug-free.

That compares with roughly $32,200-$48,200 the state may save on one month's worth of rejected applicants.

The paper went on to calculate that Florida will save $40,800-$98,400, an amount which will be eaten up in staff hours and other resources in administering the program. Oh, and they're going to spend over a million dollars defending it in court. So, Rick Scott just cost Floridians more money that they don't have. So that's some awesome leadership, right there.

Now, if you do the math, the national rate of drug use is about 8.9 percent of the population aged 12 or older. (The majority of those users are 18 or older, but that's like math and stuff, so screw that.) Now, if only 2-4% of the people applying for unemployment are drug users, that means that the unemployed population is actually using less drugs than the rest of America. (Maybe because they can't afford them - that might make sense...)

Obviously, Governor Haley can't do simple logic.

One toke over the line

Porque no tiene,
Porque le falta,
Marijuana que fumar.

I wonder how long we'll be able to keep the US/Mexico border under control with the number of crossings sure to increase by a factor of a hundred at any moment now. I have a feeling millions of Americans will be on their way south now that Mexico has decriminalized Heroin, Cocaine, LSD, methamphetimines and Marijuana.

Andale! Arriba!

Raw Story reported this morning that small amounts of these drugs would now be tolerated.

"Prosecutors said the new law sets clear limits that keep Mexico's corruption-prone police from shaking down casual users and offers addicts free treatment to keep growing domestic drug use in check."

It won't do much to hurt tourism either. It remains to be seen whether they will see the same influx of foreign stoners that the Netherlands has had to deal with and the same problems with petty crime, but it is an indication that Mexico at least, is tired of doing the same thing that's been making the situation worse and worse for nearly a century and trying to do something that won't feed the plague of violence and corruption.

"The new law sets out maximum "personal use" amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained with those quantities no longer face criminal prosecution"

said Mexican attorney general Bernardo Espino del Castillo. Thanks Bernie and seeya all south of the border.
Down Mexico way.


*Disclaimer -- the above post does not necessarily reflect the views of Capt. Fogg or anyone in particular and is intended to be a farcical and sophomoric attempt to get some laughs -- and you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.