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When one of your cities has more Drug War murders than California, it refocuses your attention on ending the Drug War

The marijuana internets are abuzz with the latest headline about world leaders declaring the War on Drugs to be a failure and calling for the legalization of marijuana. Here are a few:

World Leaders: Time to End Marijuana Prohibition

Who’s Who of World Leaders Call Global Drug War a “Failure”

World Leaders Recommend Ending The ‘Failed’ Drug War

These headlines cover the report released by the Global Commission on Drug Policy yesterday.  However, I think the preceding headlines fail to make an important distinction, one that was not lost on the editors at NPR (emphasis mine):

‘Global War On Drugs Has Failed,’ Former World Leaders Say

MEMBERS OF THE GLOBAL COMMISSION ON DRUG POLICY

– Asma Jahangir; human rights activist, former U.N. Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary, Extrajudicial and Summary Executions; Pakistan.
– Carlos Fuentes; writer; Mexico.
– Cesar Gaviria; former president of Colombia.
– Ernesto Zedillo; former president of Mexico.
– Fernando Henrique Cardoso; former president of Brazil.
– George Papandreou; Prime Minister of Greece. [The exception that proves the rule? --"R"R]
– George Shultz; former secretary of state.
– Javier Solana; former European Union High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy; Spain.
– John Whitehead; banker and civil servant, chair of the World Trade Center Memorial; United States.
– Kofi Annan; former secretary general of the United Nations.
– Louise Arbour; former U.N. high commissioner for human rights; Canada.
– Maria Cattaui; member of the board, Petroplus Holdings; former secretary-general of the International Chamber of Commerce; Switzerland.
– Marion Caspers-Merk; former state secretary at the German Federal Ministry of Health, Germany.
– Mario Vargas Llosa; writer; Peru.
– Michel Kazatchkine; executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; France.
– Paul Volcker; former chairman of the Federal Reserve.
– Richard Branson; entrepreneur; founder of the Virgin Group; U.K.
– Ruth Dreifuss- former president of Switzerland.
– Thorvald Stoltenberg; former minister of foreign affairs and U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees; Norway.

It’s rarely current world leaders expressing these sentiments.  They seem to only speak out after they are out of office and lacking the power to help end that “failure”.  I’ve been reporting on the “former leaders” who call for an end to the Drug War since 2008:

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox calls for debate on marijuana legalization

Latin American ex-presidents urge US to decriminalize marijuana, rethink drug war

Former UK Drug Warrior: “What harms society is the illegality of drugs…”

Fortunately a few brave leaders speak out while they are still in office:

Argentine president calls for decriminalization of drug use

Jamaica lawmaker calls for legalizing small amounts of marijuana for private use

And when they succeed in decriminalization of drug use, they get amazing results:

United Nations backs drug decriminalization

The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal

The report itself makes many of the same recommendations NORML has been touting for four decades now.  The former world leaders recommend that we stop ”the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others.”  They point out that “models of legal regulation of drugs” should be instituted by governments to reduce the power of organized crime and protect the health of citizens and that this “applies especially to cannabis.”  They explain that a realistic government drug policy would avoid “simplistic ‘just say no’ messages and ‘zero tolerance’ policies in favor of educational efforts”.  It’s nice to finally have world leaders, even former ones, recognizing we were and are right.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Unfortunately, it’s the current ones – the ones who have the power to make these changes – we have to convince… and they’re not budging from their “Schedule I dangerous drug what about the children?!?” rhetoric:

(Los Angeles Times) ”Making drugs more available — as this report suggests — will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe,” said Rafael Lemaitre, spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

More available?  Almost 1 in 4  high school kids can get a bag of weed within an hour and say it’s easier to buy than beer and prescription drugs.  Twenty-five million American adults are using cannabis annually and fifteen million use monthly.  Marijuana is already quite available, it’s just a question of who controls and profits from the market – regulated businesses or violent criminals.

“Legalizing dangerous drugs would be a profound mistake, leading to more use, and more harmful consequences,” drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said this year.

Administration officials dispute the idea that nothing can be done to reduce the demand for drugs in the United States. A spokesman for the White House drug agency said U.S. consumption peaked in 1979, when surveys showed that 14% of respondents had used illegal drugs in the previous month. Now that figure has dropped to 7%.

Remember that when Gateway Gil says “drugs”, he means “marijuana”.  Among 12th graders, monthly use of marijuana peaked in 1978, but amphetamines peaked in 1981, cocaine use peaked in 1985, ecstasy use peaked in 2000, hallucinogen use peaked in 1975, heroin use peaked in 2000, and sedative use peaked in 1975.  Since marijuana is far more popular (15 million annual users) than all other drugs combined (6 million annual users), any movement of the marijuana numbers moves the “drugs” numbers.

And since he brought it up, I’d remind Gateway Gil that his claim of that monthly drug use dropped in half since 1979 came as sixteen states passed medical marijuana laws and two states decriminalized marijuana possession.  Your predecessors warned us that if we legalized marijuana, even in those very specific and limited ways, it would be a profound mistake, leading to more use, and more harmful consequences.  It’s understandable, since you and your predecessors are bound by law to oppose any move toward legalization, so you can understand when we completely ignore your Chicken Little warnings about legalization.

I left my professional law enforcement ethics... in San Francisco...

Not only do we have to be aware of the legitimate police who are enforcing the existing marijuana laws, we also have to subject to these corrupt cops who are out there all over the country, setting up innocent people to serve their own agenda whatever that may be.   I say we take the marijuana offenders out of prison and put these jerks in!

SF Chronicle A San Francisco judge dismissed marijuana trafficking allegations Wednesday after finding a videotape contradicted officers’ account of a drug search at a suspect’s Richmond District apartment.

In the latest case in which video appeared to undermine police testimony, Superior Court Judge Gerardo Sandoval issued his dismissal order after a three-day preliminary hearing on drug dealing charges lodged against McLaren Wenzell, 23, stemming from the March 1 police search and seizure of 4 pounds of marijuana.

Sandoval cited inconsistencies in the police accounts with the videotape.

The case has strong similarities to the scandal unfolding against eight Southern Station officers, who have been reassigned from a plainclothes detail after videotapes appeared to contradict their accounts of several drug raids in a Tenderloin single room occupancy hotel.

So far, that scandal has triggered dismissal of 76 cases as well as an ongoing FBI probe.

[Russ adds: I am shocked - shocked! - to learn that the drug war has corrupted cops in America.]

In the latest incident, three Richmond Station plainclothes officers asserted in police reports that Wenzell agreed to let them search his Richmond District apartment. Wenzell said Wednesday that he never gave the officers permission, but simply went into his unit without saying one way or other.

The officers recounted that they were answering a report of a possible marijuana grow operation inside the building on 33rd Avenue and Geary Boulevard when they encountered Wenzell as he came out of the unit.

They said that they had their stars visible outside their clothing when they talked to Wenzell, who admitted having a small amount of marijuana, showed them his prescription note and then let them in 30 seconds after he went back inside his unit.

[Russ adds: So three officers all got up on the stand and told the same testilie?  It's ironic that so many civil libertarians decry the proliferation of surveillance cameras everywhere in the public sphere, but it's the video evidence from these cameras that is protecting the civil rights of citizens from usurpation by law enforcement.  It's tragic that in many states, the citizen must rely on the chance they will have an encounter with law enforcement where there is a public surveillance cam, because privately videotaping officers on duty can get you arrested and prosecuted for interfering with law enforcement.]

I work this issue every day and am well aware of the racist nature of the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs. But even I wasn’t aware of the outrageous statistics comparing the Drug War to Jim Crow era. Michelle Alexander lays it all out in her new book, The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste:

• There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
• As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently are at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal — complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods — but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison.

The only thing more shocking to me than the new Jim Crow of the drug war is how few African-Americans are involved in ending it.

• The board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) is composed of 14 white men, 1 white woman, and 1 Latina (Full disclosure: this board is my employer)
• Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) has no African-Americans or Latinos on their board as far as I’m aware (MPP does not publish this information on their website, as far as I can tell)
• Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) boasts three African-American men on their board of directors
• Americans for Safe Access (to medical marijuana, or ASA) has no African-Americans or Latinos on their board
• Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) has one African-American on their board

Medical Marijuana march in Madison, Wisconsin (I know Madison, Seattle, and Albuquerque aren't exactly Atlanta, Detroit, and Chicago, but there has to be SOME black people there, right?)

This sort of racial homogeneity is also found at the grassroots activist level as well. I coordinate NORML’s 95 active state, local, and college chapters and off the top of my head I can think of only one chapter not run by a white person (Oregon NORML‘s Madeline Martinez, who, coincidentally, is that sole Latina on the National NORML Board).

When I speak at conferences and festivals to crowds ranging from 50 to 50,000, it is always a nearly unbroken sea of white faces looking back at me. When I participate in the marches and protests against the drug war, I rarely see black or Latino people carrying a sign.

My view from the stage before speaking at last year's Seattle Hempfest, the largest marijuana reform rally in the world.

The War on Drugs is primarily a War on Marijuana, which makes up 49.8% of all drug war arrests, 89% of those arrests for simple possession. In New York City, a black man is nine times more likely to be busted for pot than a white man and three times more likely to get a custodial sentence out of that arrest. Yet when we look at the cannabis community, the only place we find many African-American faces is in rap videos extolling the virtues of “the chronic”.

Where is the Martin Luther King Jr. of the movement to end the War on Drugs? Why is he or she not responding to the efforts to end the single greatest cause of racial inequality in this nation?

Is he or she dissuaded by the culture of the black church, which demonizes drugs and drug use to the point where those who support sensible drug policies are shamed into silence?

Drug Policy Alliance's Int'l Reform Conference in Albuquerque, 2009

Is he or she turned away by looking at the leadership of drug law reform and seeing no faces like theirs?

Is he or she already feeling like they wear a target for law enforcement on their back already based on skin color and don’t feel like exacerbating that by publicly standing for drug law reform?

Whatever it is, this white man who’s used cannabis for twenty years and never once had an interaction with police is urgently calling out to my black and Latino brothers and sisters to get involved with your own liberation!

Earlier this week the US Department of Justice released their budget requests for 2011. The DEA’s budget request was over two billion. The National Drug Intelligence Center, employs about 340 people and does most of the computer intelligence work of the DEA by scanning seized computers from suspected drug traffickers. They are requesting $44,580,000 for 2011. The Criminal Division of the Department of Justice is asking for $39,680,000 specifically to reduce the threat, use and related violence of illegal drugs. The US Attorney’s office is asking for $733,322,000 specifically to pursue cases involving illegal drugs.

Did you think that all those forfeiture laws were just about making the DEA rich? Well, did you ever think that expenses relating to property seizures, management, and disposal including investigative expenses are pretty steep? The Departments of Justice’s assets and forfeiture fund will need $780 million to get that messy job done next year. The Interagency Crime and Drug enforcement, the people responsible for requesting military help if needed and working with other governments in cases of drug trafficking, like the Marc Emery case, is asking for $579,319,000.

The FBI would like to spend some $91 million of their $4.5 billion dollar budget on drug crimes. It is impossible to identify exactly how much of this requested budget will be solely devoted to marijuana. All illegal drugs are lumped together. Some will be spent on cocaine, meth-amphetamine and others, but we know that the majority of this budget will be spent on the number-one choice of illicit substances. Most of the 4 billion, 357 million, 129 thousand dollars of your money will be spent by the Federal Agents of the United States of America to persecute drug users. When it is all down in black and white it looks like the prohibition of cannabis use for American adults is really a jobs program for law enforcement. Maybe that explains why the police are compelled to let lawmakers know they are against cannabis law reform.

NEW YORK (CNN) — Here’s something to think about:

How many police officers and sheriff’s deputies are involved in investigating and solving crimes involving illegal drugs? And arresting and transporting and interrogating and jailing the suspects?

How many prosecutors and their staffs spend time prosecuting drug cases? How many defense lawyers spend their time defending drug suspects?

How many hours of courtroom time are devoted to drug trials? How many judges, bailiffs, courtroom security officers, stenographers, etc., spend their time on drug trials?

How many prison cells are filled with drug offenders? And how many corrections officers does it take to guard them? How much food do these convicts consume?

And when they get out, how many parole and probation officers does it take to supervise their release? And how many ex-offenders turn right around and do it again?

So how’s this war on drugs going?

Someone described insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time. That’s a perfect description of the war on drugs.

via Commentary: War on drugs is insane – CNN.com.

Even the most mainstream of commentators is unafraid to say The Emperor Wears No Clothes!  So let me prepare you now for what comes next in the rhetoric.  The notion of legalizing sale and use of marijuana is becoming too attractive, so the drug warriors will be trying to tie marijuana to cocaine, meth, and heroin.  Cafferty’s piece describes the cost of the war on drugs as $44 billion a year and legalization reaping $33 billion a year – but that’s if we’re talking about all drugs, and that’s a radical notion to most people who aren’t so afraid of you smoking a doobie, but you snorting a line or shooting up scares the crap out of them.

What they’ll try to portray is the notion that drug legalization means Acapulco Gold, Columbian Flake, Super Speed, and White Horse sold in flashy branded ads and available at a convenience store near you.  Legalize weed and there will be heroin-filled disposable syringes available next to 40-ouncers at the Qwik-E-Mart.

What we need to do is inject common sense into the debate.  NORML doesn’t take a stance on other drugs, we’re about legalizing marijuana and supporting its responsible use by adults.  That said, we’re also pretty staunch anti-prohibitionists: locking people up for drug use clearly doesn’t work.  How I address the issue is to say, “Why can you get aspirin at the grocery store, but you have to see a doctor, get a prescription, and visit a pharmacy to get Oxycontin?  Why can you buy 3.2 beer in most places in America at the store, but you have to go to a liquor store to get Bacardi 151 rum, and then only in some states?  It’s because rational people understand different drugs need different rules.  I support treating marijuana like alcohol because it is clearly safer.  I think rules for cocaine, meth, and heroin would probably need to be much stricter, because I believe those drugs are more dangerous.”

We must maintain separation between marijuana and other drugs.  Marijuana was on the verge of legality in the ’70s until cocaine made such a splash in the latter part of the decade (seasoned Stashers will remember High Times mags with lines of coke on the cover…)  The recent tabloid story of Vice President Joe “Mandatory Minimums” Biden’s daughter’s alleged cocaine video tape just made me shudder.  Maintain focus.  Say things like, “I don’t know about hard drugs, but we certainly need to legalize marijuana.”

Guy Lawson from Rolling Stone is on with Morning Joe hosts talking about the Mexican cartels and the drugs and guns that are fueling the spiraling violence. Look for a couple key points from Lawson during the interview. The drug war being a fiasco and legalizing marijuana cutting off 70% of the cartels income at around the 5:40 mark and his answer to what the end game of the violence is simple and correct beginning at the 7:59 mark. Lawson’s answer bears repeating as it’s brief, to the point and I’ll paraphrase. “You have three choices: continue violence on violence from the Mexican military and police against the cartels, you can pretend to enforce the laws (corruption), or you can end Prohibition. Those are your choices.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

After pointing out the evidence of the Drug War’s failure to achieve “A drug free world by 2008″ as the UN’s general assembly crowed in 1998, The Economist points out:

This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

The Economist then explains how legalization won’t be a tough sell at all in the producer countries, but it is faced with major political hurdles in the consumer countries:

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.

Here at NORML we promote the legalization of cannabis.  Other drugs should require other measures that take into account the addictiveness and socially destructive capabilities of those drugs.  I personally don’t believe those measures should include locking up addicts — prison is a lousy rehab — but I also don’t think a regulatory scheme that treats marijuana similar to alcohol would be appropriate for, say, cocaine, meth, or heroin.

But when you say the word “Legalization”, immediately people conjure visions of “Maui Wowie”, “Colombia Flake”, “Crystal Energy”, and “Super Smack” sold on convenience store shelves next to the 24-oz beers and junk food snack cakes.  “Legalization”, though, can mean marijuana in adults-only stores with IDs checked for age 21 and limits placed on amount purchased while it can also mean much more stringent restrictions on other drugs like prescriptions and pharmacies and tight controls.

MEXICO CITY — As drug violence spirals out of control in Mexico, a commission led by three former Latin American heads of state blasted the U.S.-led drug war as a failure that is pushing Latin American societies to the breaking point.

“The available evidence indicates that the war on drugs is a failed war,” said former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in a conference call with reporters from Rio de Janeiro. “We have to move from this approach to another one.”

The commission, headed by Mr. Cardoso and former presidents Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and César Gaviria of Colombia, says Latin American governments as well as the U.S. must break what they say is a policy “taboo” and re-examine U.S.-inspired antidrugs efforts. The panel recommends that governments consider measures including decriminalizing the use of marijuana.

This Wall Street Journal article also cites work by the Brookings Institution that confirms that there is as much supply and demand for drugs as ever, despite declaring all-out war on drugs.  Naturally, the prohibition addicts who got us in this mess say that the decapitated dead bodies in the streets of Tijuana and Juarez are just signs that total victory over drugs is just around the corner:

John Walters, former director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said, “It’s not true that we’ve lost or can’t do anything about the drug problem,” and cited security improvements in Colombia.

Mr. Walters said increased violence in border areas of Mexico was partly a result of criminal organizations compensating for reduced income from the supply of drugs by turning to other activities, such as people-smuggling, and continuing to fight over turf.

U.S. law-enforcement officials — as well as some of their counterparts in Mexico — say the explosion in violence indicates progress in the war on drugs as organizations under pressure are clashing.

“If the drug effort were failing there would be no violence,” a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. There is violence “because these guys are flailing. We’re taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now.”

Yes, I see.  It’s just a few dead-enders.  We’re in the last throes of the narcotrafficante insurgency, if you will.  The surge is working.  We just have to have patience.  We’re turning a corner in the Drug War.  All we’re missing is a “Mission Accomplished” banner on a boat in the Rio Grande.

Mr. former Drug Czar Walters, how many dead innocent Mexicans do there have to be before we’re sure we’ve finally won?

KVIA.com El Paso, Las Cruces – Weather, News, Sports – Day before re-vote, mayor’s e-mail says ‘potheads’ have had sayEL PASO, Texas — City Council is poised to re-vote Tuesday on a drug war resolution that includes the controversial request for an open and honest debate on the prohibition of drugs.

Mayor John Cook quickly vetoed the resolution after city Rep. Beto O’Rourke added that request at the last minute.

Monday, an e-mail from the mayor surfaced, urging those who are against the resolution to make sure they are heard, because “the pot heads” have sent their message.

It states: “I can tell you that all the pot heads have sent their e-mails and they are encouraging the reps to stand by their decision. But why does the silent majority remain silent? We have certainly attracted attention to our city, but I don’t think the attention is positive.”

Cook told [reporters] the e-mail was private and not meant to be forwarded to others. “Specifically, I was referring to one individual who happened to write an e-mail to me saying that he’s been smoking pot for over twenty years and he thinks we should legalize marijuana in the United States … So if calling that person a pot head is insulting to him, then I apologize.”

O’Rourke had this to say about Cook’s remarks in the e-mail: “I’m sure the mayor probably didn’t mean for everyone to read this, but I was concerned that anyone who might support having a national open discussion on our best options in the drug war would be described as a pothead.”

The vote to override Mayor Cook’s veto of the resolution on the drug war in Juarez is scheduled for Tuesday.

Mayor Cook, did you ever stop to think that the people who want to at least talk about alternatives to the prohibition of drugs are the majority and aren’t being silent?  

Or is that too difficult to handle when you haven’t even mastered the difference between the plural (“all the pot heads have sent their e-mails”) and the singular (“if calling that person a pot head is insulting to him, then I apologize.”)

It is insulting, Mayor Cook, to me and to all the people who support the El Paso Council’s unanimous vote to begin a new discussion on the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs, to call us “potheads”.  (I call myself a “pothead”, but that’s because I wear a 100% hemp cap with a pot leaf on it.  Literally: pot on head.)  It’s the kind of word we can use amongst ourselves with good friends (think “n-word”) but is automatically offensive when used by outsiders to describe us.

Won’t it be something if later today that council overrides his veto?  The city that started this stupid War on Drugs almost one hundred years ago could be the city that begins to end it.