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Today's
Stories
July
24 / 25, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The Democrats and Their Conventions:
Part One
July
23, 2004
Lee
Sustar
Revolution in Nicaragua: 25 Years
On
Dave
Lindorff
Battle for NYC: Bush 1, Protesters
0
Saul
Landau
Zaniest President in US History: Bush
Beats Reagan
Mike
Whitney
The 9/11 Whitewash: Blaming No One
Mickey
Z
Get On the Bus: 150 Years After Elizabeth
Jennings
Gary
Leupp
The 9/11 Commission and the Looming
War on Iran
July
22, 2004
M.
Junaid Alam
Ten Ways to Build a Better Democrat
Brian
McKinlay
Rusted On Down Under: Howard, Bush and Sharon
Jason
Leopold
Cheney Lobbied for Easing of Sanctions on Terrorist Regimes While
CEO of Halliburton
Chris
Floyd
Mob Rule: Ripping the Lid Off of America's Pious Myths
Uri
Avnery
Chirac v. Sharon
July
21, 2004
Paula
J. Caplan
The Emotional Casualities of War: Psychologists
Can't Heal All the Damage
Joshua
Frank
Nader Sleeping with the Enemy? Let's be Fair
Ron
Jacobs
American Exceptionalism
Reza
Ghorashi
The Elections, Iran and al--Qaeda
Amy
Martin
Will Congress Rearm the Guatemalan Generals?
John
Ross
Bush May Lose, But His Wars Will Go On and On
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's Sizzling
New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
July
20, 2004
Stan
Cox
The Bush / Kerry War Ticket
Chris
Randolph
An Open Letter to Dr. Ehrenreich: It's Over, Barb!
Forrest
Hylton
The Ghosts of Gonismo: "Popular Patricipation"
and Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Mark
Scaramella
It's Official! Mendocino County is Crazier and Fatter Than the Rest
of California
Sam
Bahour
The World is Knocking on Israel's Door
George
Reiter
A Defense of David Cobb
John
Ross
Burying Iraq, Burying Bush
John
L. Hess
Girlie Stuff: Media Tolerance of Arnold & Co.
Website
of the Day
This Land is Your Land
July
19, 2004
Uri
Avnery
Marie and the Ghosts: the Hoax of Paris
Col.
Dan Smith
What Has Been Accomplished?
Mike
Whitney
Allawi: Our Puppet with a Pistol
Karyn
Strickler
Just Marriage, Not Gay Marriage
Robert
Fisk
The Crisis of Information in Baghdad
David
Swanson
Media Blackout of US Labor Opposition to Iraq
War
Jennifer
van Bergen
The Death of the Great Writ of Liberty
July
17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
July
16, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Adonal Foyle: Master of the Lefty Lay--Up
Shervan
Sardar
Dershowitz, the ICJ and Jim Crow Laws
Ron
Jacobs
The Lil' Engine That Couldn't: Kucinich Surrenders on Anti--War Plank
Robert
Fisk
Iraq, According to Edgar Allen Poe: Coffin Bombs
in Baghdad
Greg
Moses
The Forts of Iraq
Mickey
Z.
Ad Infinitum?: Presidential Campaigns in the Age of TV
Dan
Bacher
A Landmark Win for Salmon and the Tribes
Dave
Lindorff
The Mumia Case: Support from NAACP, But a Movement
in Shambles
Paul
McGeough
Did Allawi Shoot Inmates in Cold Blood?
Website
of the Day
10 Reasons to Fire Bush (and 9 Reasons Kerry Won't Be Any Better)
| Weekend
Edition
July 24 / 25, 2004
There's
Dope and There's Dope
Proposition
36's Phony Stats
By
MARK SCARAMELLA
There's
pot, crank, uppers, downers, zoo-zoos and whim-whams, the dope you
can get anywhere in Anderson Valley within walking distance of your
house.
Then
there's government dope, the money that funds all the jobs ex-dopers
get to stop the illegal dope.
Government
dope is the hardest to kick.
Proposition
36 is a government dope program seemingly aimed at stopping illegal
dope. It was shot up, so to speak, on July 1st, 2001, and now there's
more dope and more dopers in Mendocino County than ever and more
dope money than ever to stop the dope and the dopers.
The
Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act (SACPA), aka Prop 36, was
approved by 61% of the state's voters in November of 2000 before
it was applied to the state's ever-larger number of stoners. Voters
had expected that the new laws would divert low-level, non-violent
drug offenders convicted solely of possession for personal use into
community-based treatment programs instead of doing time in over-crowded,
costly county jails and state prisons.
The
idea was to keep otherwise law-abiding persons out of the criminal
justice system.
The
prevailing public attitude is that too many people are in jail for
simple drug use or possession of a joint or two that helps them
contend with the pressures of modern society; that strict enforcement
of existing drug laws was doing little more than feeding the prison
industry, denying treatment to low-level users and costing the taxpayers
more and more money as the population of drug users and the prevalence
of illegal drugs seemed to grow faster than the state's burgeoning
prison system.
Theory
immediately diverged from practice.
What
voters didn't know was that there were already quite a few ways
that the ordinary soldiers of California's drug divisions could
elude jail.
It
often happens that district attorneys simply don't file charges
because most district attorneys are already in full triage mode
as they vainly attempt to sort out the enormous volume of complaints
arriving on their busy desks every day. If Mendocino County DA Norm
Vroman prosecuted every drug bust case filed every week throughout
Mendocino County by its several police departments, he'd need double
the prosecutors he has now.
So
the cops or the DA often cite and release.
Sometimes
the doper makes bail and his case is endlessly delayed while investigations
proceed. And proceed. And proceed until the delays kill the case
of old age. Sometimes the doper is released on his own recognizance,
or granted DA diversion, which is an agreement between the doper
and the DA that the doper, if he agrees to certain conditions beginning
with a promise not to get caught doing it again, the charges pending
against him will eventually be dropped.
"PC
1000 diversion," for example, is a pre-36 attempt to deal with
first-time drug offenders without sending them to jail. Others are
put on formal or informal probation, which requires them to attend
meetings led by ex-stoners and subjects them to periodic reviews
as to their progress in drug free living while they and their premises
are subject to search without warrants. The most serious non-jailed
arrested drug user is assigned to drug court where a judge frequently
monitors their status for an extended period. And of course, if
the arrest is for marijuana use or possession (such arrests are
now infrequent in Mendocino County) the user could present a Proposition
215 card and claim he's growing the 5,000 plants in his backyard
for himself and his ailing mother.
There's
one other complication that applies only to non-citizens: If you're
arrested for simple possession or use, and you can't immediately
prove that you're in the country legally, you're automatically ineligible
for Proposition 36 and put on INS hold, kept in jail until your
status is cleared up, at which time you'll either be deported or
charged. If you, the illegal doper, have already served much time
in jail waiting for an immigration status determination but you're
legally entitled to be in Gringo Landia, you'll get credit for time
served and be released. If you're not here legally you'll be put
on a bus and driven to Tijuana from where you can make your way
back to Ukiah in a day or so. Either way, no Prop 36 for you.
But the primary beneficiaries of Proposition 36 are white drug users;
members of ethnic minorities are more frequently charged with other
crimes when they're arrested, making them ineligible for Prop 36
diversion and the alleged treatment that comes with diversion.
In
the three years since Proposition 36 passed all of the above jail-avoidance
options have been used by Mendocino County's drug community. All
the strategies pre and post-36 have failed. (The relatively small
number of committed methamphetamine users arrested here in Anderson
Valley are regularly in and out of the County Jail and in and out
of Mendocino County's wholly ineffective drug programs. Anderson
Valley's much ballyhooed anti-crank crusade is not only grant-driven
-- no money, no "concern" -- it has failed to deter young
people from adventures in the drug life. Young people are unable
to distinguish between the pot their parents smoke and white powder.
There are few officials in Mendocino County, including school officials,
who didn't arrive at their present eminence via the tie-dye track.)
Proposition
36 is nothing more than another get-out-of-jail option. because
there aren't enough jails to lock up the numbers of Americans who
need drugs to make life bearable.
The
public is schizophrenic about drug use, probably because there are
no families left in the country who have not lost one or more family
members to what amounts to a national plague on the land.
As
a consequence of mass in-home drug loss, we're willing to give addicts
a little slack and a chance at treatment -- in the abstract, at
least. But if the drug user cons us, or doesn't clean up after a
chance or two, or if the drug user is known to be the neighborhood
crook, treatment isn't exactly the first thought that comes to his
neighbor's mind. (In Mendocino County as, one supposes, everywhere,
the neighborhood crook negatively affects what is quaintly known
as "quality of life." He (or she) congregates in highly
public places with other mopes and assorted low-lifes; he's a great
one for vandalizing whatever structures he's in or near; he blasts
moron music late into the night; exchanges drugs for sex, thereby
spreading the latest in communicable diseases; he constantly steals
to buy drugs because he's forever too screwed up to work. He is
a one-man crime wave, destroying everything in his path. (And we
haven't even mentioned his kids.) Even if drugs were legal, he or
she would be too lazy to drag his sorry ass down to the dispensary
to pick them up. He comprises a good part of everyday's court calendar
in the Mendocino County Courthouse.)
Proposition 36's authors, a group of drug legalization advocates
from Southern California called the Drug Policy Alliance, carefully
chose its title after close analysis of focus group results. They
scrupulously avoided the word "drug" and added the crucial
sell phrase "crime prevention" to their successful cynicism.
As
designed, voters duly based their vote on the promise that the proposition
would keep drug users out of jail, saving tax money that funds ever
more prisons, reforming addicts, and reduce crime. Prop 36 passed
with an overwhelmingly large 61% majority vote although there were
already plenty of ways a Californian arrested for simple possession
or use could avoid jail.
Does
Proposition 36 work? Are users getting off drugs and is crime being
prevented?
The
short answer is, No.
The
longer answers are 1. It depends on who you talk to, and 2. Nobody
really knows, even though the Proposition requires that they do
know.
The
Prop 36 requires California's counties to submit budget and expenditure
reports to the state's Alcohol and Drugs Program (ADP). It also
explicitly requires that the state ADP annually evaluate the effectiveness
and fiscal impact of the county programs being funded (at $120 million
a year) including an evaluation of the implementation process, incarceration
costs, changes in the crime rate, and prison and jail construction
costs, as well as welfare costs.
Proposition
36 also separately directs that a $3.3 million study be done by
a special UCLA-based organization called the "Integrated Substance
Abuse Program," a research group based at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric
Institute. (The study was supposed to be completed last year, but
there have been unexplained delays in its release.)
The
state's Proposition 36 bureaucrats in the Alcohol and Drugs Program
are found in a State Department of Health Office called "The
Office of Criminal Justice Collaboration." When I called the
OCJC's press contact, Ms. Lisa Fisher, to ask about the mandated
Proposition 36 statistics and finances, all she could send me was
a demographic report with a breakdown of persons in the program,
showing numbers of program entries, ethnicity, drug of choice, and
so forth.
The
only "effectiveness" information I could find was this
singularly unconvincing statement on the OCJC's website: "In
the first release of findings, data reflect *unanticipated success*
[my emphasis] of SACPA. More than 30,000 drug offenders were in
treatment during the first year."
In
other words, Proposition 36's state officials consider drug users
choosing a treatment program to get out of jail a "success."
How's
Prop 36 doing on saving money on jail/prison and welfare because
so many dopers have opted for drug programs over incarceration?
Again,
no one really knows. The state OCJC office uses a method suggested
by the Proposition's sponsor, the Drug Policy Alliance which equates
the sign-up sheet as evidence of program success: "37,495 people
have opted for treatment (in the first year) and have been assessed
for placement, assuming that these individuals would otherwise have
been sentenced to jail or prison for drug possession."
Choosing
a treatment program to get out of jail is not exactly "opting"
for it. Second, the assumption that everyone "opting"
for treatment would go to jail is demonstrably wrong, given the
many pre-36 ways an arrested drug user can stay out of jail.
But that doesn't stop the OCJC from massing even more implausible
statistics to buttress their invisible success.
Prop
36 supporters estimate that a whopping $275 million in incarceration
costs has been saved based simply by counting the number of people
entering the program. They assume that the 37,495 people who "opted"
for treatment would otherwise have been sentenced to jail or prison
for drug use or possession. "One-quarter were assumed to have
avoided prison," says the OCJC website, "with an average
sentence of 16 months, while three-quarters were assumed to have
avoided a jail sentence, conservatively estimated at an average
of 23 days (based on the reported 'average length of stay' in county
jails across California). With a $28,000 annual incarceration cost,
the costs avoided for all the persons in Prop 36 averaged $10,640
per offender. Treatment costs of $120 million were deducted from
the resulting total costs-avoided figure of $398 million, providing
net savings of more than $275 million."
Self-serving
junk statistics like this can be found in practically every patchwork
program in the state, which is why trying to cut the state's bloated
bureaucracies is so hard to do. There's often scant hard evidence
upon which to base rational decision making, and what evidence there
is is often calculated as above.
In
the case of Proposition 36, nobody is tracking the core statistics,
the numbers needed to honestly assess the desired effects of Prop
36. No one is evaluating whether arrested drug users who enter Proposition
36 would have been sentenced to jail. There is no state registry
of persons in the program or a roster of persons who have completed
the program; or one of persons who have completed the program and
remained unarrested for subsequent drug use or possession of drugs.
No one is tracking the "clients" who are actively in the
program against their (non-drug-related) law enforcement records,
or tracking whether people who disappear from the program leave
the area, move to another county, are hospitalized, die, or are
re-arrested or jailed.
Even
under the best of circumstances, and in the relatively few cases
where a person completes the treatment program and stays drug-free
for an extended period of time, there's no proof that those individuals
have become drug free *because* of the Prop 36 treatment. In any
population of addicts a certain percentage will quit on their own
or due to convincing experience of other rehab/treatment programs.
The treatment industry has no way of knowing why people straighten
up. Whether or not they leave the drug life because of this or that
treatment approach or because they simply want to live a non-chemical
life beyond societies of creeps and late-night mopes. But there
isn't a treatment program in the country, or a government-funded
drug fighting entity, that can't promptly produce success stories
for elected officials.
The
Ventura County Grand Jury recently made public a lengthy report
highly critical of Proposition 36. They concluded (among many other
things) "statewide reporting systems rely heavily on self-disclosure
by individual counties, and the mischaracterization and alteration
of the standards and data within this [Ventura] county bring into
question the integrity of future statewide claims by independent
studies. If other California counties are impelled to conjure favorable
results to the same extent as Ventura County, the entire statewide
evaluation effort will be seriously compromised."
The
State Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs (ADP) issues annual
allocations of Prop 36's annual $120 million to county governments
to cover the cost of administering SACPA. Allocations of attractive
hunks of public money are made using a formula that distributes
50% on a base allocation, 25% on the number of drug arrests, and
25% on drug treatment caseload. In other words, county treatment
programs have no financial incentive to reduce the number of arrested
addicts, and where there's no financial incentive.... Half their
government money comes to them no matter what they do, and the other
half depends on how many people are arrested and stay in their program.
Some
members of law enforcement go so far as to say that Proposition
36, contrary to its "crime prevention" promise, is contributing
to crime by keeping more drug users out of jail while they continue
typical drug-user criminal behavior. Those law enforcement sources
add that consequences of dirty drug tests and non-compliance are
put off too long; drug test failures and other program violations
can be considered confidential while the addict continues in the
program -- and on the street -- for long periods while the bureaucracies
decide whether or not he's salvageable. Since deception and self-deception
are among the addict's true gifts, it's hard to tell the con artist
from the person who truly wants to leave the stoned life.
Further,
as noted by Mendo's Proposition 36 prosecutor Matt Finnegan, a significant
number of Prop 36 clients simply don't make it through the treatment
program for one reason or another. There are no cost savings in
prolonging the probation of defendants who have shown themselves
to be unable to finish the program. For them incarceration is inevitable.
Mark
Scaramella is the managing editor of the Anderson Valley
Advertiser.
Weekend Edition July 17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
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