TSA = Tyrranical Stupid Assholes

CNN is carrying a story today about the Director of Development for Campaign for Liberty (an offshoot of the Ron Paul Campaign) being harassed by TSA recently while returning from a convention. He was carrying $4,700 in cash in his checked baggage and the TSA decided it was their business. It wasn't. There is no law saying air passengers can't carry large sums of cash on an airplane. However, if you are caught with large sums of cash in your car the cops can take it without any evidence that the cash is from ill-gotten gains and you have to spend money in court to prove that your money was acquired legally. You usually wind up spending more than the cops took so most people who find themselves in this situation don't try to get their money back. Meanwhile the cops get to keep the money they stole from you and divvy it up amongst themselves to buy more cop toys with which to oppress the public. That has to be one of the most fucked up things ever.

Anyway...turns out the guy was carrying his IPhone, with recording capabilities, and a pocket Constitution and he put them both to good use. The TSA locked him in a windowless room and questioned him about his money. He asked if he was required to answer those questions under the law. They said he wasn't cooperating and that they were going to arrest him and call in the DEA. Finally someone with brains shows up (read NOT A TSA AGENT) and sends him on his way. Now the ACLU has stepped in and is suing Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. GREAT!!

Having traveled a great deal since Sept. 11, 2001 I can totally relate to this guys anger over the way the goofball TSA agents, who were apparently just rounded up off the street and handed badges, treat airline customers. In 2006, while I was on my way to a conference in California, a TSA agent at the Birmingham Airport tried to take my tampons. He did not win that battle. To date no one has ever offered an explanation about why tampons pose any danger to flight crew or passengers. I mean what is the worst that could happen? That someone would tie them together and try to strangle the pilot or a passing stewardess? PUUUUULEASE. I think they just want women to bleed all over the seats so they can charge them with a crime involving weapons of biological terror or some crazy shit.

In 2004 on the return trip from Colombia, South America to the Miami Airport I was accosted by TSA and then Customs. Everyone in the group I had traveled with went through fine...no problems. We all said the same thing with regards to where we had been and what we had been doing. Everything was grand until they scanned my passport. Then I got hauled away to be questioned, have my bags searched and all the fun stuff that happens when you are a drug policy reformer in the good old USofA.

Customs is worse. I've had so many bad experiences with US and Canadian Customs I've lost count. On my first trip to Canada Canadian Customs held me in limbo for six hours because I was there to see my best friend Marc Emery. They got all the way to snapping on the white gloves when I finally snapped and said, "For God Sake I am from Alabama and I came up here to smoke Canadian pot not pollute the awesome genetics with Alabama ditch weed. There is no reason for me to bring ditch weed to Canada when y'all already have the best weed on earth. What would be the point?" And it worked because they let me pass into their fine country. Sometimes I think I should have never left.

I also had an infuriating experience crossing back into the US from Canada a few years later. Got into Canada with no problems. The border guard even asked me jokingly to bring him back a sample from the convention I was attending. Not so on the American side. This is the episode where the customs agents confiscated my laptop, searched the taxi cab I was riding in with a weed wand (in case I'd somehow convinced the driver to make the frame of the car out of hash) and made me miss my flight.

I am very glad someone is suing the DHS for overstepping their bounds and just plain harassment of airline passengers. It is long, long, long overdue.

Drug Prohibition has Bred Super-Traffickers

(Note: Sanho Tree was my tour guide when I traveled to Colombia back in 2004. I can say without doubt that Sanho is the wisest human I have ever met. He is one of my top role models in the drug policy reform movement.)

Minuteman Media

DECEMBER 26, 2007

What Darwin Teaches Us About the Drug War

by Sanho Tree

With every passing year the drug problem seems to
get worse. The U.S. government responds by
pumping billions more dollars into the war on
drugs. Federal spending for this “war without
end” is more than twenty times what it was in
1980 and still the drug traffickers appear to be
winning. Despite more than six billion dollars
spent on “Plan Colombia” alone, cocaine
production has actually increased in that
country. Now the Bush Administration is asking
for $1.4 billion more to aid the Mexican
government’s drug crackdown through the “Merida Initiative.”

Although it may seem counterintuitive, the “law
and order” response by our politicians only
intensifies the problem. Instead, they might turn
to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to glean
insight as to why these “common sense”
reactionary solutions often are counterproductive.

As illegal drugs become easier to obtain and more
potent, politicians respond in a knee-jerk manner
by ramping up law enforcement. After all, drugs
are bad so why not escalate the war against
drugs? Politicians get to look tough in front of
voters, the drug war bureaucracy is delighted
with ever expanding budgets, and lots of
low-level bad guys get locked up. Everyone wins –
including, unfortunately, the major drug traffickers.

As politicians intensified the drug war decade
after decade, an unintended consequence began to
appear. These “get tough” policies have caused
the drug economy to evolve under Darwinian
principles (i.e., survival of the fittest).
Indeed, the drug war has stimulated this economy
to grow and innovate at a frightening pace.

By escalating the drug war, the kinds of people
the police typically capture are the ones who are
dumb enough to get caught. These criminal
networks are occasionally taken down when people
within the organization get careless. Thus, law
enforcement tends to apprehend the most inept and
least efficient traffickers. The common street
expression puts it best: “the dealer who uses,
loses.” Conversely, the kinds of people law
enforcement tends to miss are the most cunning,
innovative and efficient traffickers.

It’s as though we have had a decades-long
unintended policy of artificial selection. Just
as public health professionals warn against the
overuse of antibiotics because it can lead to
drug resistant strains of bacteria, our overuse
of law enforcement has thinned out the
trafficking herd so that the weak and inefficient
traffickers get captured or killed and only the
most proficient dealers survive and prosper.
Indeed, U.S. drug war policies have selectively bred “super-traffickers.”

Politicians cannot hope to win a war on drugs
when their policies ensure that only the most
efficient trafficking networks survive. Not only
do they survive, but they thrive because law
enforcement has destroyed the competition for
them by picking off the unfit traffickers and
letting the most evolved ones take over the
lucrative trafficking space. The destruction of
the Medellin and Cali cartels, for instance, only
created a vacuum for hundreds of smaller (and
more efficient) operations. Now the police cannot
even count the number of smaller cartels that
have taken over – much less try to infiltrate and disrupt them.

Moreover, the police have constricted the supply
of drugs on the street while the demand remains
constant thus driving up prices and profits for
the remaining dealers. Increasing drug
interdiction creates an unintended price support
for drug dealers which, in turn, lures more
participants into the drug economy. Of all the
laws that Congress can pass or repeal, the law of
supply and demand is apparently not one of them.

A public health approach to dealing with illicit
drugs should take precedence over “law and order”
approaches. Treatment and prevention must take
priority over interdiction and eradication
because drugs are a demand-driven problem.
Politicians, however, continue to devote most
drug funding toward cutting the supply. The
proposed aid package for the notoriously corrupt
Mexican drug war establishment would be better
spent on providing treatment for addicts in the
United States. Over reliance on politically
expedient “get tough” policies will only continue
an endless spiral of drug trafficking evolution.

--

Sanho Tree is a Fellow at the Institute for
Policy Studies in Washington, DC and directs its
Drug Policy Project. The Institute for Policy
Studies is the only multi-issue progressive think
tank in Washington, D.C. Through books, articles,
films, conferences, and activist education IPS
offers resources for progressive social change
locally, nationally, and globally. www.ips-dc.org.

************************************
Sanho Tree
Fellow, Drug Policy Project
Institute for Policy Studies
1112 16th St., NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036
202/787-5266 (direct line)
202/387-7915 (fax)
202/494-8004 (mobile)
email: stree@igc.org
http://www.ips-dc.org
******************************

Clips from waaaaaaay back

I thought some of my readers might enjoy watching clips of production material from when I worked for Marc Emery as anchor of Pot TV News. If you search the POT TV News page for "Loretta Nall" you will find all of the video's my husband Terry and I produced beginning in 2003.
(NOTE: The scroll bar is on the left hand side of the page...don't ask me why)
I greatly miss doing video production and have to get back into that method of outreach and expression ASAP.


Here are some pictures I took of the coca fields, oil pipelines, US aerial fumigated patches of dead rainforest, soldiers, FARC, AUC, graffitti and other horrid things (all a result of the US war on drugs) in Colombia, South America, mixed with other images of the U.S. war on Colombia and some Guns-N-Roses. Looking at it tonight I would have mixed it slightly different if I had it to do over again. Still a great 45 seconds of your time though.



Pop Culture strikes back when this ONDCP propaganda tape gets the USMJP treatment.



Spinning USMJP flag with deep bass.



Pumpkins meet Ogre in Catnip Bust



Scream


MAPS magazine cover


Turn your volume down for this one.