Drug law madness continues

Before the Wise Men get too eager to declare that every stinking pile of shit left by the last occupant of the White House is now owned by Obama, here's another thing he inherited from the Bush DoJ.

In imposing his sentence on Charles C. Lynch, who ran a dispensary in the surfing hamlet of Morro, Judge George H. Wu said the changed federal policy did not directly affect his ruling. But the judge talked at length about what he said were Mr. Lynch’s many efforts to follow California’s laws on marijuana dispensaries and the difficulty the judge had finding a loophole to avoid sending him to prison.

“I find I cannot get around the one-year sentence,” Judge Wu said of federal sentencing laws.

The judge said he had reduced the sentence from a mandatory five years because Mr. Lynch had no criminal record or history of violence, and did not fit the strict definition of a “leader” of a criminal enterprise.

Mr. Lynch, 47, was convicted last summer on five federal counts in connection with the running of his dispensary and the selling of medical marijuana to customers under 21.

Legal experts said the case highlighted the conflict between state and federal laws on medical marijuana. Federal law prohibits the cultivation, sale and use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, but 13 states allow it. In prosecuting for medical marijuana, the Bush administration had considered only federal laws.

Advocates of medical marijuana said the Lynch case would have a chilling effect on activities and undermine state laws. At his trial, and again in seeking leniency in his sentence, Mr. Lynch argued that he had complied with California’s law, which allows certain uses of marijuana with a doctor’s prescription.

“He is caught between California’s voter-approved medical marijuana system and the Bush administration’s single-minded effort to smother it,” said Stephen Gutwillig of the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization that favors a change in drug policy. “That Attorney General Holder changed federal policy three months ago only makes this miscarriage of justice all the more disturbing. Charlie is like a forgotten prisoner of war, abandoned after a truce was declared.”

Crack babies

During our never-ending War Against (some) Drugs (used by some people), mothers have gone to jail for using crack while pregnant.

Turns out that, like so many things about the Drug War, the laws have been based on ignorance and racial bias, because there is no greater danger to babies from their mothers smoking crack than smoking a cigarette.

BALTIMORE — One sister is 14; the other is 9. They are a vibrant pair: the older girl is high-spirited but responsible, a solid student and a devoted helper at home; her sister loves to read and watch cooking shows, and she recently scored well above average on citywide standardized tests.

There would be nothing remarkable about these two happy, normal girls if it were not for their mother’s history. Yvette H., now 38, admits that she used cocaine (along with heroin and alcohol) while she was pregnant with each girl. “A drug addict,” she now says ruefully, “isn’t really concerned about the baby she’s carrying.”

When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would produce a generation of severely damaged children. Newspapers carried headlines like “Cocaine: A Vicious Assault on a Child,” “Crack’s Toll Among Babies: A Joyless View” and “Studies: Future Bleak for Crack Babies.”

But now researchers are systematically following children who were exposed to cocaine before birth, and their findings suggest that the encouraging stories of Ms. H.’s daughters are anything but unusual. So far, these scientists say, the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small.

“Are there differences? Yes,” said Barry M. Lester, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University who directs the Maternal Lifestyle Study, a large federally financed study of children exposed to cocaine in the womb. “Are they reliable and persistent? Yes. Are they big? No.”

Cocaine is undoubtedly bad for the fetus. But experts say its effects are less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco — two legal substances that are used much more often by pregnant women, despite health warnings.

Another Drug War myth exposed, but I doubt it will make much difference on our laws which are based on morality and hype.

William F. Buckley

It couldn't have been pleasant for Buckley these past few years watching as "conservatism" was wrenched from his hands and sent on its current wild ride. I'm sure that in a way, having only recently lost the terrific woman he called his wife, and experiencing the tail end of a cliff diving exercise known as "compassionate conservatism (aka, 'the darkside')," he was ready to go.

And Ezra notices he's only the latest of capital T "Thinkers" to pass on with no one there to replace their wit and ideas.

As a slightly more general point, in the last two or three years, a whole host of giants have passed away, men who were political thinkers at a time when that made you a cultural figure. John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Norman Mailer, and now, William F. Buckley Jr. Gore Vidal is just about the last of their number left. And that's a shame. They would write serious books of political analysis and sell millions of copies -- they were the writers you had to read to call yourself an actual political junkie. Now, the space they inhabited in the discourse is held by the Coulters and O'Reilly's of the world. Where we once prized a tremendous facility for wit, we're now elevating those with a tremendous storehouse for anger. Run a search on quotes from Galbraith, Buckley, or Friedman, then do the same for O'Reilly and Coulter. We're really losing something here. And we don't even have Molly Ivins around to wrest it back.

Exactly. This is what we have in return.

But, before we get too misty-eyed thinking about the thought leaders of the 1960s...well, I'm here not to praise William F. Buckley, but to bury him.

Federalism has come a long way too. In the 60s it grew fat on segregation, taking up the states' rights argument for allowing jim crow to die in bed. The Tribune couldn't countenance the Birmingham bombings, but William Buckley's National Review, which would champion Barry Goldwater for president the following year, was able to. "Let us gently say," it said, "the fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur -- of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro." The magazine said some evidence supported this possibility.

"And let it be said," the National Review declared, "that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court's manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice. Certainly it now appears that Birmingham's Negroes will never be content so long as the white population is free to be free."

He was wrong about a lot of things, even if he didn't scream out his wrongheadedness the way his scions do now.

And he was right about some things.

Drug war intransigence

It's not the judges, it's Congress.

There was an avalanche of sentencing news last week. The Supreme Court gave trial judges more power to show mercy, the United States Sentencing Commission gave almost 20,000 prisoners doing time on crack cocaine charges a good shot at early release, and even President Bush commuted a crack sentence.

The net effect: tinkering.

The United States justice system remains, by international standards at least, exceptionally punitive. And nothing that happened last week will change that.

Even the sentencing commission’s striking move on Tuesday, meant to address the wildly disproportionate punishments for crack and powder cocaine, will have only a minor impact. Unless Congress acts, many thousands of defendants will continue to face vastly different sentences for possessing and selling different types of the same thing.

Worth reading the whole thing...Liptak Mondays...