Did I just hear a United States representative say, “They probably started off with milk and then went to beer, and then they went to bourbon, and then they might have gone to marijuana. The gateway theory doesn’t work. It’s a reality.”?

Holy crap, there is hope for reason in this debate!

Mexico’s Gulf Cartel may have 40 bulletproof vests emblazoned with “FBI” and “DEA” to trick their drug-trafficking rivals, according to a new law enforcement advisory.

Baseball caps and T-shirts with the agencies’ names long have been a fad among everyday citizens, but ballistic armor raises the stakes and concerns, officials said.

Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Mike Sanders said that during his nearly 20-year career, he’s only heard of a handful of times when criminals imitated agents, but never by wearing vests.

While impersonating U.S. law enforcement officers would seem unusual in Mexico, drug cartel operatives there long have disguised themselves as Mexican federal agents, police and soldiers to carry out attacks or kidnap rivals.

via Mexican cartel upgrades with ‘FBI,’ ‘DEA’ bulletproof vests | Front page | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle.

It’s 11:30pm.  You and your wife are in bed, your infant daughter sleeps in the room next door.  You are working class and cannot afford any better place to live than your non-descript home in a bad part of town.  You hear shuffling outside, thinking you’re seeing shadows of men rushing past your property.  You’ve followed the terrifying news stories of home invasion robberies, so you purchased a handgun and keep it locked up in the nightstand.  You see another shadow, causing you to unlock the case and load the weapon.  You wake your wife and tell her to grab your daughter and head to the basement.  You get a robe on are about to investigate when the door bursts open.  You’re disoriented by the shouting of black-clad masked men commanding you to get on the floor.  Your wife and baby are screaming and the men with guns run toward them.  The men’s body armor has big FBI or DEA letters on them.

Did you shoot anyone?  Did they see your gun and shoot you?  Do your wife and child get hit in any crossfire?  Most of all, are those actually law enforcement officers with a mistaken address on a warrant, or Mexican cartel thugs who have the wrong address for a “hit”?  These are things most of us can only imagine, but something real people like Cory Maye suffer every year.

States ponder early release for prisoners – Economy in Turmoil- msnbc.com
NEW YORK – Their budgets in crisis, governors, legislators and prison officials across the nation are making or considering policy changes that will likely remove tens of thousands of offenders from prisons and parole supervision.

In California, faced with a projected $42 billion deficit and prison overcrowding that has triggered a federal lawsuit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to eliminate parole for all offenders not convicted of violent or sex-related crimes, reducing the parole population by about 70,000. He also wants to divert more petty criminals to county jails and grant early release to more inmates — steps that could trim the prison population by 15,000 over the next 18 months.

In Kentucky, where the inmate population had been soaring, even some murderers and other violent offenders are benefiting from a temporary cost-saving program that has granted early release to nearly 2,000 inmates.

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is proposing early release of about 1,000 inmates. New York Gov. David Paterson wants early release for 1,600 inmates as well as an overhaul of the so-called Rockefeller Drug Laws that impose lengthy mandatory sentences on many nonviolent drug offenders.

Here’s an idea: how about you stop arresting so many of those non-violent drug offenders in the first place?  Based on the numbers from the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2007:

• California arrested 289,449 people for drugs
• Kentucky arrested 11,883 people for drugs
• Virginia arrested 32,941 people for drugs
• New York arrested 61,163 people for drugs

Now if it is too scary to think about not arresting the users of all illegal drugs, let’s narrow it down to cannabis.  The FBI didn’t give me state-level breakdowns of cannabis arrests, but nationwide cannabis accounts for 47% of all drug arrests.  For the four states mentioned, that’s 185,854 cannabis arrests, and since 89% of those are possession-only arrests, that’s 165,410 otherwise law-abiding pot smokers arrested – not growers, traffickers, or dealers, just tokers.

To be fair, most of these 165,410 don’t spend much more than their booking time in a jail.  But it still takes time, money, and space to prosecute them and that begins to add up.  If these four states mentioned just taxed and regulated cannabis like Jagermeister, combined they’d raise $1.9 billion every year.  That wouldn’t completely solve these states’ budget crises, but it sure would keep a few more actual criminals behind bars.

Record number of Americans arrested for marijuana

The FBI has released its annual report on Crime in the United States 2007.  Once again, the number of people in the United States arrested for marijuana has gone up.  872,721 Americans were arrested for marijuana in 2007, and of those arrests, 89% or 775,138 were arrests for simple possession – not buying, selling, trafficking, or manufacture (growing).

This represents an increase in marijuana arrests of 5.2% from the previous year and the fifth straight year marijuana arrests have increased from the previous year.  Now a marijuana smoker is arrested at the rate of 1 every 37 seconds and almost 100 marijuana arrests per hour.

Marijuana possession is increasingly the bulk of the “War on Drugs”

More arrests for marijuana are for simple possession than for any other drug.  While only 11% of marijuana arrests involve buying, selling, trafficking, or manufacture, that rate for heroin and cocaine is 27% and that rate for synthetic drugs is 31%.  

While arrests for marijuana sales/manufacturing increased by 7.6% over 2006, heroin and cocaine sales/manufacturing arrests dropped by 3.8% and synthetic drugs sales/manufacturing arrests dropped 2.6%.

While arrests for marijuana possession rose by 4.9%, heroin and cocaine possession arrests fell by 8.1% and synthetic drugs possession arrests fell by 5.4%.

Overall, while arrests for marijuana increased by 5.2%, arrests for all other drugs combined dropped from 1,060,183 to 968,461, a decline of 8.7%.  Last year, marijuana arrests made up 43.9% of all drug arrests.  This year, marijuana accounts for 47.4% of all drug arrests.  Almost half of the war on drugs is waged on marijuana.

The West is the Best

The FBI breaks their data down into four regions: Northeast, Midwest, South, And West.  Arrests for marijuana make up more than half of all drug arrests in two out of four regions and almost half in a third. The Midwest leads the charge with 60.8% of its drug arrests for marijuana, followed by the South with 52.5% of its arrests and the Northeast with 49.9% of its arrests.  In the West, marijuana arrests only make up a little more than one-third of the drug arrest total at 34.3%.

This is the first time most of the country is dedicating most of its drug arrests toward marijuana.  In the previous year, only the Midwest, at 57%, surpassed 50%, with the South coming in at 49.8%, the Northeast at 47.9%, and the West at 30%.

Accounting for population of these regions, marijuana users in the South are most at risk, where there are 318 marijuana possession arrests for every 100,000 Southerners.  Midwesterners face a 292-to-100,000 ratio, in the Northeast it is 225-to-100,000, and only 201 per 100,000 Westerners are arrested for marijuana possession.

Over past five years, more arrests for marijuana than all violent crime combined

Perhaps most disturbing is comparing marijuana arrests to violent crime.  This year, while 775,138 Americans were arrested for mere marijuana possession, only 597,447 people were arrested for all violent crimes combined, which includes murder, non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

While the percentage of marijuana possession arrests rose by 5.2%, arrests for violent crime dropped by 2.3% from the previous year.  Now, to be fair, the reported incidents of violent crime did show a slight decrease of 0.7%, from 1,417,745 in 2006 to 1,408,337 in 2007, but that’s only a decrease of 9,408 offenses, compared to a decrease of 14,076 arrests for those offenses.

Over the past five years, there have been more arrests every year for marijuana possession than for all violent crime combined.  Over those five years, murders have increased 2.3% and robberies have increased 7.5%. Overall, there were 24,661 more violent crimes in 2007 than in 2003, yet there were only 421 more arrests for violent crime in 2007 compared to 2003.  This year there were only 424 arrests for every 1000 violent crimes, which is 7-to-10 fewer arrests per 1000 than each of the previous four years.

Ten Year Trend

Over the past ten years, arrests for just about every crime have declined.  Arrests for all violent crimes have dropped by 8.9% and property crime arrests declined 12.5%.  Many other miscellaneous crime arrests have seen double-digit percentage declines, like fraud (-30.8%), prostitution (-22%), and offenses against family and children (-16.9%).  Meanwhile, in that ten years, the only crimes for which arrests have gone up are robbery (+5.9%), drug law violations (+17.6%), and embezzlement (+26.5%).

Seized pot worth $25M to $60M – Times-Standard Online
Federal agents who served warrants on properties across Humboldt and into Northern Mendocino County have begun the process of sifting through the massive amount of evidence seized during Tuesday’s marijuana raids, with the plants alone worth an estimated $25 million to $60 million.

Estimates produced by the FBI indicate authorities seized more than 10,000 marijuana plants, one vehicle, computers, more than $160,000 in cash and 30 firearms, including shotguns, handguns and fully automatic weapons.

Wow, that’s weird.  For a minute there, I thought Americans had the right to own vehicles, computers, cash, and firearms.  You’ll always notice how law enforcement emphasizes the firearms netted in these marijuana raids, because they need to scare the public with the unspoken assumption that somehow these marijuana growers are violent criminals.  Those firearms are used in self-defense, since a marijuana grower can’t exactly call the cops if thugs try to steal the marijuana.

Officials stressed from the outset of the operation that 215 patients and medical marijuana dispensaries would not be targeted by the warrants.

In a prepared statement released Wednesday by the FBI, Special Agent in Charge Charlene Thornton, said, “This is not a medical marijuana operation or a group of people growing for personal use. The targets of our investigation are reaping huge profits while contributing to the crime and violence oppressing communities across the state.”

No, the prohibition of marijuana is contributing to crime and violence and allowing growers to reap huge profits.

And as for that promise that they weren’t going after Prop 215 patients?

A Sunny Brea man, whose residence was the target of a warrant Tuesday, said agents raided his house by mistake, and confiscated about 35 marijuana plants he said he was growing under 215 regulations.

The man, who would not give his name, said about 10 agents knocked on his door in the morning and showed him the warrant.

”It was a warrant for someone who wasn’t there, who I presume was connected to this (commercial growing) deal,” he said. “The FBI stressed that they weren’t there for the small 215 garden. They found them, and they said they had to take them, and we didn’t contest it.”

So much for that promise.