Tag Archives: Drug War

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Federal Crackdown on Legalized Pot Would Backfire

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

Real Clear Politics

Recent statements by Attorney General Eric Holder and by drug czar Gil Kerlikowske may signal an impending crackdown on the experiments with partial legalization of recreational marijuana for which solid majorities of the Colorado and Washington State electorates voted last November.

“When it comes to these marijuana initiatives, I think among the kinds of things we will have to consider is the impact on children,” Holder told a House appropriations subcommittee. “We are certainly going to enforce federal law.”

At a National Press Club luncheon, Kerlikowske asserted that “neither a state nor the executive branch can nullify” federal anti-marijuana laws, adding that “using marijuana has public health consequences.”

But the impact on children, and the public health consequences, are likely to be bad if the Obama administration cracks down on the hundreds of marijuana businesses that Colorado and Washington are preparing to license, regulate, and tax.

Such action would likely backfire — warping both federal and state drug policy for years to come — by aggravating the harm to public health, especially to kids, and the leakage of marijuana across state lines that the administration and other opponents of legalization want to prevent.

How would a crackdown backfire? By producing — immediately in Colorado, and eventually in other states — an atomized, anarchic, state-legalized but unregulated marijuana market that federal drug enforcers lack the manpower to contain and the legal power to force the states to contain.

Consider how a federal effort to abort the state experiment would unfold in Colorado, where the voters (unlike those in Washington) chose to create both a state-regulated marijuana industry and another, largely unregulated, one.

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Marijuana Policy and Presidential Leadership: How to Avoid a Federal-State Train Wreck

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The Brookings Institution

Stuart Taylor, Jr. examines how the federal government and the eighteen states (plus the District of Columbia) that have partially legalized medical or recreational marijuana or both since 1996 can be true to their respective laws, and can agree on how to enforce them wisely while avoiding federal-state clashes that would increase confusion and harm communities and consumers. Continue reading the article here.

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Montana’s States’ Rights Showdown

by Daniel Stone and Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

State lawmakers have done a lot since President Obama’s election to shake off Uncle Sam, passing "sovereignty" resolutions and a record number of laws that specifically defy Congress on issues such as legalized marijuana and health-care reform. Most make the same claim: that the U.S. Constitution gives the federal government power to regulate commerce between states but doesn’t permit interference in purely local affairs. Later this year, the Montana Firearms Freedom Act, which proclaims that

State lawmakers have done a lot since Pre…

State lawmakers have done a lot since President Obama’s election to shake off Uncle Sam, passing "sovereignty" resolutions and a record number of laws that specifically defy Congress on issues such as legalized marijuana and health-care reform. Most make the same claim: that the U.S. Constitution gives the federal government power to regulate commerce between states but doesn’t permit interference in purely local affairs. Later this year, the Montana Firearms Freedom Act, which proclaims that

State lawmakers have done a lot since President Obama’s election to shake off Uncle Sam, passing "sovereignty" resolutions and a record number of laws that specifically defy Congress on issues such as legalized marijuana and health-care reform. Most make the same claim: that the U.S. Constitution gives the federal government power to regulate commerce between states but doesn’t permit interference in purely local affairs. Later this year, the Montana Firearms Freedom Act, which proclaims that guns manufactured in Montana and sold in state are not subject to federal rules such as background checks, is slated to become the first of these Obama-era commerce challenges tested in court. But the case, which originated when a gun-rights group sued the Justice Department for threatening a crackdown, shouldn’t give separatists hope: it’s doomed to fail, as will similar rebukes.

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Opening Argument – Liberal Drug Warriors! Conservative Pot-Coddlers!

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

The Supreme Court’s four more-liberal members voted to allow federal prosecution of medical-marijuana users — including cancer patients who grow small quantities at home to alleviate agonizing pain — even in the 11 states that have legalized medical marijuana. So did centrist Justice Anthony Kennedy and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

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Legal Affairs – Medical Marijuana and the Folly of the Drug War

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

The Supreme Court delivered a timely reminder of the social costs of our "war on drugs" with its May 14 decision rejecting a medical-necessity exception to the federal law criminalizing marijuana. Meanwhile, President Bush has moved toward abandoning his own best instincts and repeating his predecessors’ mistakes by endlessly escalating a $20 billion-a-year "war" that-as most Americans now understand-we have lost.

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Why The Story Matters

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

The most important cocaine question for George W. Bush is this: would you seek long prison terms for today’s 18-year-olds for doing what you say you may or may not have done as a young man–and when you now suggest that whatever you did was a mere youthful indiscretion, and thus irrelevant to your candidacy?

Countless thousands of people are rotting in prisons all across America–many in Texas–for being caught with small amounts of cocaine or crack, its smokable variant. Many were only peripherally involved in drug sales. Some were mere users. As governor of Texas, Bush–like most other politicians in both parties–has joined in this orgy of punishment with enthusiasm, signing laws that toughen penalties for drug users as well as pushers, and that send juveniles as young as 14 to prison for especially serious crimes, including some drug crimes.

How can he square this with his position that whether he used drugs is irrelevant to his candidacy? If Bush won’t tell us whether he used cocaine or other illegal drugs in his first 28 years–and there’s no evidence that he did–he should at least tell us whether his admitted but unspecified “young and irresponsible” escapades would have landed him in prison had the drug laws he supports been enforced against him.

In 1997 Bush signed a measure authorizing judges to give jail time to people convicted of possessing (or selling) less than one gram (one twenty-eighth of an ounce) of cocaine. Texas sentencing guidelines had previously prescribed mandatory probation for such small quantities. And in 1995, Bush pushed through the new law expanding the list of crimes for which juveniles as young as 14 (down from 15) can be tried and imprisoned as adults.

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Free Speech vs. Kids’ Lives

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

"Virginia Slims-It’s a woman thing."

A momentary glance outward-from a taxicab, while reading a legal brief defending tobacco companies’ First Amendment right to advertise-sufficed to send the billboard’s message skipping through my synapses, sped by splashes of color.

Similar messages are everywhere-magazines, buses, drugstores, ballparks, T-shirts-pressing in on my two preteen daughters and their peers, as they careen with undue haste toward "woman things."

Can the government restrict such ads in the interest of protecting kids from getting hooked on deadly tobacco products? Or would such restrictions (if upheld) "destroy the commercial speech doctrine," as a tobacco lawyer argued earlier this year before U.S. District Judge William Osteen of Greensboro, N.C.?

This is the most important clash of constitutional principle-perhaps the most important issue of all-in the whole, vast, spreading tobacco war. It should be resolved by allowing the government reasonable latitude to restrict (though not to abolish) tobacco ads.

The First Amendment front is relatively quiescent for now. The Supreme Court declined on April 28 to review a federal appellate decision upholding Baltimore’s broad curbs on billboard advertising of tobacco and alcoholic beverages. Judge Osteen also avoided the First Amendment issue in his much-publicized April 25 decision on the Food and Drug Administration’s proposed regulations. While upholding the FDA’s jurisdiction to regulate the manufacture and sale of tobacco products, the judge blocked the agency’s proposed curbs on advertising and promotion on the ground that Congress had not specifically authorized such regulations.

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NewsHour: Supreme Court Action: Mandatory Drug Testing – January 14, 1997

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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The case before the Supreme Court comes from Georgia. It concerns drug testing and political candidates. We get a briefing on today’s arguments from NewsHour regular Stuart Taylor, correspondent for the American Lawyer and Legal Times. Thanks for being with us, Stuart.

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: Nice to be here.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What are the facts in this case?

STUART TAYLOR: The Georgia state legislature in 1990 prompted in part by the federal indictment of Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry on drug charges, passed a new law that required anyone who wanted to run for election for any high office in the state of Georgia, governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, commissioner of agriculture, state legislature, including judges from the Supreme Court on down had to pass a drug test first, specifically they had to submit a certificate showing that they are going to a state-approved laboratory, a doctor’s office, given a urine specimen, passed the test within 30 days of filing for the election. Two Libertarian candidates for state office in the 1994 election sued, claiming that this drug testing law violated their rights, their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizures, and their First Amendment rights of free speech. And the lower courts projected that claim, the Court of Appeals by a two to one vote. The candidates approved to the appeal to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court will now decide whether it’s constitutional.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: In the lower court cases the state of Georgia acknowledged that there was no evidence that people running for office had particular drug problems, right? So that’s not an issue here.

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NewsHour: Double Jeopardy in the War on Drugs – April 17, 1996

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CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Now for more on today’s oral arguments, we turn to NewsHour regular Stuart Taylor of the "American Lawyer" magazine. Stuart, thank you for joining us. We’ve just seen the details of the California case, but there were two cases, the other from Michigan. Briefly explain that one.

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: Yes. The Michigan case is a little bit more sympathetic for the defendant than this case in California, because the defendant in Michigan, for one thing, is not a drug dealer. He grew some marijuana near his home, and he cured it in his home, and he, his wife, and his grown son smoked it until the son broke up with his fiancee, who turned them all in, and they were arrested, or he was arrested, and first, his property, the government tried to forfeit his home and his ten acres, and then they prosecuted, convicted him, and wanted to send him to prison for five years. And he’s in the Supreme Court saying, they can’t do both of these things to me.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Are the cases together? I mean, they’re joined?

STUART TAYLOR: The cases have been consolidated because they have a lot more in common than they have indifferent, but it would be possible for, for one of them to win and the other to lose, not likely but possible.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And basically just to reiterate that the case is simply–can you say the case is simply–

STUART TAYLOR: Simply about–

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: About–

STUART TAYLOR: Yeah. The only issue in both cases is whether the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution bars the government from first prosecuting someone for the crime and then trying to forfeit their property in a separate proceeding, or doing the same thing in the reverse order.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Why is this case so important?

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Clinton: Jailing the Ghetto for Votes

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

"Scarcely any political question arises in the United States which is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835.

And these days, it sometimes seems, scarcely any judicial question arises that is not resolved, sooner later, into a racial question.

So it is that the draconian federal penalties for nonviolent drug offenses have finally attracted a bit of public notice-not because they are called "savagely severe" by people like Richard Posner, the Reagan-appointed judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, but because they are called racist by people like Jesse Jackson.

Some of these penalties are racist. But that’s not the heart of the problem. The heart of it is that Congress has adopted-and President Clinton and his equally gutless attorney general, Janet Reno, are perpetuating-a regime of grotesquely excessive mandatory minimum prison terms for drug defendants of all races.

This regime has wrecked the lives of thousands of small-time, nonviolent drug offenders. It has done little to dent the drug problem; makes no sense as policy; and is being maintained by politicians for the most cynical of political reasons.

The especially egregious unfairness of one aspect of this sentencing regime-its requirement that each gram of crack cocaine be treated as though it were 100 grams of powder cocaine-was obliquely acknowledged both by Clinton, in his Oct. 30 announcement of his deplorable decision to reject the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s proposal to eliminate the 100-1 ratio, and by Reno, in an Oct. 26 press conference.