NEWSWAR ON DRUGS

Patricia Spottedcrow, the 26 year-old mother of four who was convicted of selling $31 of marijuana to a police informant, has had her 12 year prison sentence reduced to eight years with four years of probation.

While the reduction in her sentence shows understanding, it is not justice and does not go far enough. As Spottedcrow's attorney, Josh Welch puts it, she shouldn't be in jail at all:

"Nobody understands why this woman is serving this long of a sentence for this type of crime. Look at other states; you can commit this same crime and it's not illegal. That's insane. She sold $30 of marijuana for gas money and food money for her family. It's stupid. It's wrong. But you don't go to prison for eight or 12 years for that. You shouldn't go to prison period."

It has been seven months since Zac Champommier was shot and killed by plain clothes police. His mother still hasn’t received an official report on the events of that fateful night, nor has she been told the name of the person who pulled the trigger. In a case where there seems to be a lot of finger pointing and little real accountability, another promising young man is gone and another mother is in mourning, asking why.

Zac Champommier was 18, an honor student and a self-proclaimed “band geek." He had recently graduated high school and was preparing to enter college in a few months. On the night of June 24, he went to meet a new friend and see a movie. They were to meet in a Studio City parking lot, behind a Chipotle. But when Zac showed up, he saw his friend being rushed by a group of seemingly-aggressive men.

Some have surmised Zac became scared and attempted to leave the lot; others say he drove toward the group as if to intervene. But in the end, one man would be hit by Zac’s car and Zac would be shot dead.

What Zac didn’t know at the time was the group of men confronting his friend, Douglas Ryan Oeters, were all law enforcement. The officers, including members of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), DEA and LA County Sheriff’s Department had just executed a search warrant and were hanging out in the parking lot “debriefing." According to the officers, they saw Oeters walking around the lot, looking in cars, and believed he was casing them for theft. Oeters contends he did look in a white car because he thought Zac had beat him to the lot.

More than 34,000 people have died in drug-related violence since Mexican President Felipe Calderon stepped up the war on illegal narcotics four years ago, with more than 15,000 – including 11 mayors and a leading candidate for governor -- killed last year alone. Yet drugs are just as cheap and available as anytime before, if not more so. Clearly prohibition isn't working.

But if you work for the U.S. government, don't you dare say that or you'll be out of a job. Former Border Patrol agent Bryan Gonzalez found out the hard way.

As a lawsuit filed last week by the ACLU of New Mexico alleges, Gonzalez was terminated by U.S. Border Patrol last fall after a fellow agent reported him for remarking during a casual conversation that maybe the war on drugs – which isn't just a slogan, but an actual war with actual guns and militaries – is contributing to the violence that has engulfed Mexico and begun spreading through Central America.

According to the complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District, Gonzalez was reported to his superiors – and an Internal Affairs investigation was launched soon thereafter – when he “remarked that legalization of drugs would end the drug war and related violence in Mexico,” noting that the vast majority of narcotics that pass through the country are intended to meet U.S. demand. In other words, he was fired for exercising his right to free speech.

Three months after taking office, President Obama took part in a town hall-style meeting where he answered questions voted on by Americans – about 3 ½ million of them, to be exact.

But when the top vote-getter turned out to be a question about legalizing marijuana, the president's response wasn't as respectful and dignified as a whole lot of people had hoped it would be, consisting of a hefty dose of condescension spliced with laughter, which is all too typical of politicians confronted with the opinions of the unwashed masses they claim to represent.

“[T]here was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy,” Obama said, chuckling. “I don't know what this says about the online audience … The answer is, no.”

And I don't know what it says about our elected officials that they are so dismissive of maybe, just possibly, pursuing a different strategy than the tried-and-failed one of the last few decades of spending billions of dollars incarcerating evermore Americans for non-violent drug offenses; in 2009, more than 858,000 people were arrested for marijuana violations alone. Well, actually, I do know what that says about our politicians, but the words that come to mind aren't printable.

Later this week, Americans will again get a chance to ask President Obama why he's so committed to a marijuana policy – and a war on drugs – that is so costly in terms of lives and taxpayer money, but has achieved little more than the largest prison population in world history.

Another police raid and yet another innocent family caught up in a failed war that sends heavily armed, masked and hyped up cops in search of largely nonviolent offenders. This time the raid happened in Spring Valley, New York, and left a 13-year-old child vomiting and gasping for air in an asthma attack triggered by the over-the-top and misdirected actions of police and DEA agents.

Several agencies executed numerous search warrants before dawn early in January. But when the SWAT team, complete with guns drawn, forced their way into the home at 36 Sharon Drive, they didn’t find the “Michael” they kept screaming for. It wasn’t because Michael was hiding or even out for the night -- it was because Michael lived down the street at 46 Sharon Drive.

The McKay family, including husband David, wife, 13-year-old daughter, and brother-in-law, were all roused from their sleep and rounded up by masked law enforcement agents. The child was pulled from her bed and “drug” down the stairs. She would later be taken to the emergency room for the resulting asthma attack, vomiting, and fainting episode. The entire family was led outside while officers searched inside for Michael, with the father in his underwear on the front lawn desperately trying to explain that no such person lived there.

(Update: New Orleans has long been the incarceration capital of the U.S., imprisoning more people per capita than anywhere else in the country. But in a vote on February 3, the city council approved a new 1,400 bed jail that is less than half the size of the decaying facility it will be replacing, rejecting a proposal from the sheriff to build an even bigger jail after dozens of Change.org members and other activists urged them to consider alternatives to incarceration.)

New Orleans continues to make great strides toward a more focused -- and more efficient -- criminal justice system.

Last month, the city council voted to allow police officers to issue tickets -- rather than make arrests -- for low-level, non-violent crimes. This is a major shift for a city that has long lived a sort of double-life between the anything-goes vibe of the French Quarter to the quick arrests and tough sentences for crimes both minor and major.

As a report from the city's Metropolitan Crime Commission found in December, New Orleans police in recent years have arrested thousands of people over things like traffic tickets, minor warrants from other jurisdictions and other offenses not likely to ever make it to court. And while law enforcement and court resources are expended on the paperwork of these minor offenses, attention is distracted from major crime investigations. Although violent crime dropped in New Orleans in 2010, it could fall much further -- and these reforms will help make that happen.

Elizabeth and I have both written about these reforms, and more than 140 Change.org members have sent New Orleans' leaders a petition urging them to reconsider plans to expand the parish prison. Avoiding one-day jail stays for minor offenses could free up money from the jail expansion and from the red tape that follows every arrest. Those funds could instead be spent on crime prevention, alternatives to incarceration and law enforcement work on the cases that really matter. Add your name to the petition here.

The war on drugs has been a miserable failure, with prohibition doing little more than boosting the black market profits that have helped fuel an increasingly violent drug trade. But politicians, notoriously willing to admit mistakes and adjust public policy accordingly, are beginning to acknowledge that failure.

Kidding!

As Georgia paper The Daily Citizen reports, state Rep. Tom Weldon thinks the problem isn't the war on drugs. No, it's his constituents' medical privacy – they have too much of it, you see. Thankfully, the Republican lawmaker has plan to fix that by, well, doing away with it.

“We don’t have a searchable database that sheriffs and law enforcement can go in and see who has been buying meth products and who has been buying an excessive amount of pills,” Weldon said during a recent meeting with a local chapter of the Chamber of Commerce. So he's proposing to create one – and to allow law enforcement to access it without so much as obtaining a warrant, something even his fellow drug warriors in the GOP question as perhaps a bit much.

But his intent isn't to eviscerate the rights of Georgia residents, of course: it's to protect the children.

Medical marijuana advocates in Michigan are crying foul in the wake of recent demands by the federal government that the state health department turn over the records of seven legal medical marijuana patients.

According to the Associated Press, the U.S. attorney's office has asked a judge to order the Department of Community Health to comply with an earlier subpoena for the records of seven people with Michigan user and caregiver cards.

The request was made on behalf of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which would not comment on the case; there is no additional information available on whose records are being targeted. According to the report, the DEA first asked for the records in June. So far, the health department has declined because of a privacy provision in the Michigan law, according to the AP.

Michigan's medical marijuana law, one of 15 in the U.S. today (Arizona voters were the latest to approve one this past November) has been in effect since 2009. Voters there passed the new law by referendum with 63 percent of the vote in 2008.

Kemba Smith Pradia was 7 months pregnant when, at just 24 years of age, she was sentenced to a quarter-century behind bars for playing a minor role in her abusive boyfriend's scheme to sell crack cocaine. Though she didn't sell any drugs herself, she knew that her boyfriend did – and when he was murdered, prosecutors decided to blame her for his stash.

But Pradia was one of the lucky ones. After her story gained national attention, spurring widespread calls for her release, she was released after serving 6 ½ years when in 2000 President Bill Clinton commuted her sentence. Now that she's free, she's working to help those she left behind -- the thousands of other victims of harsh mandatory minimum sentences not as fortunate as her to attract a president's attention.

“On December 22, the anniversary of my release, I will join others in a fast for justice to honor those in prison who deserve the same relief from their long sentences for low-level drug offenses,” Pradia writes today in a piece for CNN. Since winning her freedom a decade ago, Pradia has gone on to law school and to raise the son she give birth to while incarcerated. She's also started her own foundation. ”But also since my release, an estimated 5,000 men and women have gone to federal prison each year for a crack cocaine offense.”

Crack and powder cocaine are essentially the exact same thing -- the only difference is the former is mixed with baking powder. Yet one is used primarily by poor minorities, while the other is traditionally associated with more well-off Caucasians. Guess which triggers the harsher punishment?

Fueled by the usual dangerous mix of fear and demagoguery, the Democratic-controlled Congress of 1986 passed a series of laws that transformed the war on drugs from a metaphor to an all-too-real reality for many Americans. Though chemically identical, lawmakers enacted a 100-to-1 ratio for crack and powder cocaine sentencing, meaning that while it would take 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger a 5-year mandatory minimum sentence, it would take just 5 grams of crack cocaine to trigger the same -- even for a first-time offender.

The effects were predictable – the nation's prisons became filled with more than a quarter million nonviolent drug offenders – and racially disproportionate, with the U.S. Sentencing Commission pointing out that just under 90 percent of those sentenced for crack cocaine offenses in 2009 were either black or Hispanic; for powder cocaine, the figure was a marginally better 79 percent (the majority of cocaine users are, of course, white).

Perhaps scandalized by the fact that one out of every 15 African Americans is now behind bars, Congress acted over the summer to reduce -- but heavens no, not actually eliminate -- that crack-power cocaine sentencing disparity, cutting it to "just" 18-to-1, meaning, as blogger John Caruso wrote at the time, that blacks are “now merely 18 times more likely than whites to go to jail for similar crimes.”