Oklahoma! (does #cjreform); HPD raid response doesn't address phony informant; why do probationers die at high rates? And other stories

Here are a few browser clearing odds and ends:

One out of 8 Travis County jail bookings in 2018 was for Class C misdemeanors
In Travis County last year, more than 5,000 people were arrested for a Class-C misdemeanor only - about one out of every eight people booked into the county jail. Between the Freedom Cities ordinance restricting Class C arrests, beginning in January, and the elimination in June of the local no-sit-no-lie ordinance aimed at the homeless, those bookings should decline significantly for 2019.

Post-raid HPD reforms don't address faked informant that got 4 officers shot and killed 2 innocent people
After a no-knock drug raid in Houston this spring killed two innocent people and left four officers shot, HPD Chief Art Acevedo has announced he's creating a special division of the narcotics unit to execute search warrants in drug cases. But as I told the Houston Chronicle:

“His reform is not on point to what caused the problem,” said Scott Henson, policy director with the criminal justice reform nonprofit Just Liberty. “It’s not solving the problem that your investigators are relying on fabricated informants — [it] wasn’t a function of who’s doing the raid, but why you’re doing the raid, and the reliance on this informant, who it turns out didn’t exist. That’s what caused everybody to get shot. It just elides the core issue of what really happened.”

Attacking junk blood-spatter evidence
Check out an amicus brief arguing to disallow blood-spatter evidence in the Joe Bryan murder case that was the subject of Pam Colloff's massive NY Times Magazine/Pro Publica feature. In it, Duke law-school faculty and students argue that, based on current standards, the blood-spatter expert in Bryan's case could not today testify to the main points used to convict him.

Not so natural after all
His death in the Victoria County Jail was attributed to "natural causes." It turns out, he was denied his methadone prescription and died from preventable withdrawal symptoms. Read the excellent Victoria Advocate account from Kali Venable. See also the Advocate editorial board's condemnation of using jails and prisons to treat addiction.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand ..."
"... it never has, and it never will," said Frederick Douglass. So Grits doesn't feel too bad that elected officials in Austin consider criminal-justice reformers excessively pushy, as several implied in this Austin Statesman article about a string of successful, capital-city #cjreform campaigns. Nobody was going to do any of those things if reformers said "Pretty please" and then waited politely for a response.

Own it!
Gov. Greg Abbott's intervention into Austin's homelessness crisis means he now owns the issue. If it isn't solved, it's his fault. Not sure that was the wisest political choice, but it's the one he made. MORE: Now the governor "owns" his own homeless encampment, with neither a budget line item nor any apparent exit plan besides providing still hypothetical services to Austin's homeless ad infinitum. That'll teach 'em! 

Why do probationers die at high rates?
Here's a possible, future, Suspicious Mysteries segment for the Reasonably Suspicious podcast: Grits has long been aware of research showing incarceration in prison reduces life expectancy. But a new study shows that being on probation is associated with a much higher morbidity rate than being in prison or jail, much less in the free world. I don't know how to parse these competing claims. One one hand, while prison healthcare isn't great, being in prison makes it easier to treat chronic conditions because the patient is always available and can't easily decline treatment. On the other, prison can make you sick; e.g., people who contract Hep C in prison  may suffer liver failure later, once they're out. Meanwhile, to the extent criminal laws in general target the poor, the developmentally disabled, substance abusers, the mentally ill, minority communities subject to discrimination, etc., it's not surprising probationers would be an especially sick lot. Or maybe the difference is that people in prison aren't at risk of dying from car crashes! Who knows? Grits would like to better understand this nexus of corrections, health, and morbidity rates. I haven't yet wrapped my head around it. When people die in prison or jail, there is an independent investigation; no one investigates when probationers die, so outside of the above-linked study, we don't have very much information at all regarding why that is.

The Probation Trap
Probation as an institution changes its form and purpose depending on the angle from which one looks at it. Viewed one way, it diverts people from prison. Viewed another, it's a net-widening trap. The Philadelphia Inquirer has published an excellent series expounding the latter view. Via SL&P.

Oklahoma!
As much as it pains me to say so, Oklahoma has now definitely out-paced Texas as the red-state poster child for criminal-justice reform. Also via SL&P:

• Boston Globe, "What a conservative state can teach us about progressive criminal justice reform"
• US News, "Oklahoma Focuses on Criminal Justice Reform"
• Washington Post, "Oklahoma approves largest single-day commutation in U.S. history"

On the ground, #cjreform is not really a red-state-blue-state issue.

When smelling pot is pretext for a search
In Philadelphia, police officers who said they searched a car because they smelled marijuana were extremely unlikely to find any and disproportionately searched black people. When the data was gathered, public defenders argued that "the odor of marijuana [should] no longer be considered probable cause for officers to believe a crime has occurred and conduct a search."

Breathalyzer tests as junk science
The New York Times took a trip down the rabbit hole of DWI breath-test forensics. Like DNA mixture software, analysts treat breathalyzers as a magical black box they simply assume supplies reliable results. The problems, however, have been long known.

'Five facts about crime in the U.S.'
Read this from the Pew Research Center.

Texas should replicate OK approach on drug felonies

Your correspondent has maintained for years that, after Jim Thorpe left, the best thing ever to come out of Oklahoma was I-35. Grits has long been a staunch advocate for a border wall, but would prefer it built along the Red River instead of the Rio Grande. However, after Okie voters approved adjustments to the criminal code to reduce sentences for user-level drug possession to a misdemeanor, perhaps it's time to cast off such dated views.

Prosecutors in Oklahoma County, reported The Oklahoman, filed 24% fewer felony cases in 2017 compared to 2016, declining from 10,043 filed in 2016 to 7,628 in 2017, or a 24% drop. The increase would be even bigger but the new drug laws didn't take effect until July. Estimated the local public defender, "Probably at least two-thirds of the decrease was the decision of the voters to pass the criminal justice reform measure on lowering felonies to misdemeanors for low-level theft crimes and for drug possession charges." Which means that not only did the new law successfully reduce prison admissions by diverting low-level drug cases, other felony crimes appear to have declined at the same time. (N.b.: Drug manufacturing and distribution remain felonies.)

Texas has passed numerous justice reform measures in recent years, but our Legislature has balked at the drug policy change Okie voters made. Now that the approach has been proven to work, Texas should follow their lead.

Government doesn't know how many people it shoots, and other stories

Grits has a busy day today so let's round up a few items which might have made it into individual blog posts if I had more time.

Come Correct
Right on Crime published this blog post on the Texas House Corrections Committee's new interim report. See Grits coverage of that document here, here, and here.

Forfeiture target of property-rights push 
Efforts are ramping up on the right to require criminal convictions for asset forfeiture in Texas. See coverage from the Texas Observer,  Hot Air, the Dallas Observer, and Legal Insurrection. Go here to ask your Texas legislators to support these efforts.

Not all costs of failing to 'raise the age' come in budget
After Grits made the link on Monday, advocates and media in Houston and at the capitol invoked 17-year old Emmanuel Akueir's suicide in the Fort Bend County Jail as an argument for raising the age of adult criminal responsibility to 18. The Houston Chronicle coverage included an interview with his family. "'Emmanuel was a minor who was put with adults who've lived the criminal life and are well aware of right and wrong,' said sister Iman Akueir. 'He was a child and treated like an adult. There's no excuse about what happened. Children are children.'" Added an attorney at the capitol event: "'If we had passed this last session, that 17-year-old would not have been in that facility. So we're talking lives here. ...  If you want to talk about costs, ask his parents about costs."

Government doesn't know how many people it shoots

Grits contributing writer Eva Ruth Moravec reported that the Texas' new reporting of police shootings omitted 16 cases last year, calling into question the lack of enforcement mechanism in the law to compel agencies' participation. This tells us the omissions identified by academics in the state's death-in-custody reporting persist in these new police shooting reports. Indeed, the state has struggled to get a handle on how often police officers shoot or kill Texans. Readers may recall that another Grits contributing writer, Amanda Woog, last year determined that the Attorney General had miscounted the number of police shootings, overstating the number or reports they'd received by 20 percent. So the new reporting system is missing quite a few reports, and the AG has bungled analysis of the ones they do get. The bill from last session creating these reports was an important first step, but the law needs to be tweaked to plug these gaps and give it some teeth when agencies don't report.

Oklahoma!

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin continues to push criminal-justice reforms. Wish she could convince fellow Republican Greg Abbott to do the same.

Punishing prosecutors

From the abstract of a new academic paper: "This article describes the distressing, decades-long absence of discipline imposed on prosecutors whose knowing misconduct has resulted in terrible injustices being visited upon defendants throughout the country. Many honorable lawyers have failed to speak out about errant prosecutors, thus enabling their ethical breaches. The silent accessories include practicing lawyers and judges of trial and reviewing courts who, having observed prosecutorial misconduct, failed to take corrective action. Fault also lies with members of attorney disciplinary bodies who have not investigated widely publicized prosecutorial misconduct. "

How capitalist competition boosted drug cartel efficiency

This interview by Vox with Sanho Tree is worth a read. IMO his central thesis is hard to argue. The drug war has focused for generations nearly exclusively on low hanging fruit, allowing its proponents to mistake activity for achievement without ever seriously threatening the biggest players. Meanwhile, cartel leaders have perfected their craft and devised structures that all but completely insulate them from accountability and ensure that big fish get off, while little fish get eaten. Thought provoking stuff.

On the failures of Texas' eyewitness ID reform, when innocent people plead guilty, pondering immigration policy, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends to clear Grits' browser tabs of brief items which merit readers' attention:

Report confronts sexual assault in Texas prisons
Grits will have more on this soon, but for now here's the link to a new report from the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault and the Prison Justice League on sexual assaults in Texas prisons - one of the first in-depth looks at the issue since Texas agreed to comply with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act. MORE: See coverage from the Houston Press and the San Antonio Current.

TX eyewitness reform didn't stop suggestive IDs, photo arrays
In a recent dissent, Judge Elsa Alcala effectively showed why and how Texas' eyewitness identification reforms have failed to stop convictions based on biased lineups, in this case where the suspect was the "sole one in the photo array matching the physical description of the shooter." See the majority opinion, which mostly relied on outdated criteria from older cases that predated modern best practices in this area.

Concerns over cell-phone location data legitimate, non-partisan

In Texas, lots of folks were concerned about privacy of cell-phone location data long before the recent presidential election, including loads of conservatives. So I hate to see the push for federal cell-phone privacy legislation cast in terms of fear of Donald Trump. Grits wasn't any more happy when it was the Obama Administration pushing to maximize government surveillance powers.

When innocent people plead guilty
Reported AP, "Last year, 68 out of 157 exonerations [nationwide] were cases in which the defendant pleaded guilty, more than any previous year. That's 43.3 percent, for those keeping score at home.

'Detached from reality' Crime and public perception
Following up on their own poll, discussed here on Grits, the Pew Research Center explored why "Voters perceptions of crime continue to conflict with reality." Gallup over the years has continuously found that voters perception of high crime is "detached from reality." At Vox, German Lopez has explored this odd and persistent phenomenon. The Brennan Center has found that headline mentions of murders in newspapers did not decline along with the volume of murders themselves. In this election we saw that misperception brazenly exploited by the President-elect, who went around claiming violent crime was at a 45 year high when the opposite was true. By the time he trotted that one out, he had told so many flat-out fabrications that the media''s fact checking seemed tired and pro forma, as do hubristic pretensions that media will now solve misconceptions they've actively created.

Okie Governor leading by example on criminal-justice reform
Read Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin on the recent election and criminal justice reform. She's saying the sort of things while in office that Texas Gov. Rick Perry waited to embrace until after his departure. Voters in her state just overwhelmingly voted to reduce penalties for low-level drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor. The Lone Star State should follow suit, or Oklahoma may soon supersede the Texas GOP when it comes to Right on Crime bona fides.

Pondering immigration, walls, symbols, and public opinion
Here's the problem with the Trumpian plan to deport "criminal" immigrants: After years of the Obama Administration aggressively enforcing their "Secure Communities" program - a ham-handed operation which never worked well and of which Grits was never a great fan - there aren't nearly 2-3 million of those left to deport. (Immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than citizens. Foreign nationals account for 16 percent of Texas' population, for example, but only eight percent of arrests.)

Will "I'll do what Obama did," plus spending $10-20 billion (or whatever figure) on an American Great Wall, be enough to satisfy voters spurred to the polls by anger over Latin American immigration? Perhaps rebranding the policy as Republican will allow pols to declare victory and stop fighting, the way Texas Rs seem ready to declare victory on border security and spend the money on something else. The campaign is over now and governing requires confronting reality. Grab some popcorn and stay tuned.

In Texas, that reality includes the fact that undocumented immigrants make up more than eight percent of our active labor force. When push came to shove, while some Texas Rs have indulged in nativist rhetoric during campaigns, most have always understood and respected core interests of the business community when governing. At first blush, that seems to be the approach the president-elect will take: Talk big, wait for public discord to die down, then declare victory without really having changed anything and move on. While essentially frivolous as a border security suggestion, perhaps a "Great Wall" will serve a more important purpose as a tangible, lasting symbol. Who knows? Maybe that's what's necessary to sell Obama's immigration policy as a Republican solution that the president-elect's still angry base will accept.

Okie voters will set tone for red-state drug-war legislation

For mostly historical, family reasons (both sides of my family are from the Texas Panhandle, with ties to Oklahoma), Grits has always enjoyed ribbing our friends from Oklahoma, contending for example that the best thing ever to come out of the state was I-35 and arguing to build a border wall along the Red River instead of the Rio Grande.

But I've got to give our Okie neighbors credit where it's due: Their Legislature A ballot initiative put two measures - Props 780 and 781 - on the November ballot to reduce penalties for low-level drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor and divert the savings to counties "to provide community rehabilitative programs, such as mental health and substance abuse services." If passed, Oklahoma's felony threshold on property crimes would be increased to $1,000, according to Ballotopedia, compared to $2,500 in Texas, which increased its threshold amount in 2015. See coverage from Fusion and commentary from Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy.

Oklahoma's Republican Governor Mary Fallin has been much more of a leader on these issues than Greg Abbott, vetoing tough-on-crime legislation, championing clemency, and implementing ban the box policies at state agencies.

These ballot measures would put Oklahoma ahead of the curve compared to Texas regarding smart-on-crime policies on the drug war, but still much more regressive on property-theft thresholds. Still, perhaps Texas may soon lose its (sometimes overstated) reputation as red-state criminal-justice reform leader if the Sooner state passes these measures on a ballot topped by Trump/Clinton and Gov. Fallin continues to champion these and similar causes. OTOH, if the ballot measures lose it could set red-state decarceration reform back five years. Important vote.

MORE: From Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform.

Oklahoma eyeing Medicaid funds for prison hospital costs

A staff editorial in the Tulsa World cited Medicaid funding for prison hospital services as a compelling argument as to why the state should accept federal money for Medicaid expansion in 2014, urging lawmakers to wait past election season to make up their minds. The editorial closes:

With more than 25,000 inmates behind bars, and one of the highest per-capita incarceration rates in the nation, Oklahoma spends a lot on prisons and has for the past 40 years. Inmates aren't always in the best health. With its tough 85-percent rule requiring certain offenders to serve most of their sentence before being eligible for release, inmates are staying in prison longer and therefore growing old there. The geriatric-age prison population is growing rapidly and with aging, coupled with a poor health history, come health problems.

Already, some older, blind and disabled inmates qualify for Medicaid-funded hospitalization. The change would make the eligibility almost universal in the prison system.  ...

Inmate care is an expensive proposition. If most of that cost could be shifted to the federal government, Oklahoma tax dollars might be freed up for other programs such as education and infrastructure. DOC is wise to take a wait-and-see approach and not to refuse the money quickly like Texas apparently has done.

See related Grits posts:

• Obamacare provision a boon to state budget writers on state prison health costs
• Will Texas expand Medicaid coverage under Obamacare to include prisoner hospital costs?

'Absolutely irresponsible': Okies boosting criminal penalties but can't house inmates they've got

Oklahoma prison officials are calling out their Legislature for continuing to boost criminal penalties at a time when prisons are jam-packed and understaffed. Reports Tulsa World ("State corrections officer staffing historically low," April 16):

Board [of Corrections] member Robert Rainey said the board's suggestions on ways to save money have not been accepted by lawmakers.

He said lawmakers continue to increase prison sentences and criminalize activities at a time when the agency is taking cuts. That, he said, is "absolutely irresponsible."

Rainey said lawmakers were invited to attend the meeting, but only one — Republican Rep. Jason Nelson of Oklahoma City — attended.

The department has added about 700 new offenders since last April, Jones said. ...

"We have no beds," he said. ...

Board member David Henneke called the inmate population "beyond critical."

This story is notable for a couple of reasons. First, add the Okies to the list of states struggling to pay high incarceration costs in a budget crunch. Second, it's hard for legislators to stop themselves from boosting criminal penalties, even when there's no money to pay for them.

We've yet to come to grip with this dilemma in Texas. Despite an array of laudable, nationally recognized criminal justice reforms approved in the last several sessions, Texas has continued boosting criminal penalties and increasing sentence lengths, even as the the Legislature spent hundreds of millions on diversion programs. Texas added 59 new felonies during the last legislative session, bringing the total to 2,383.

In Texas, part of that cognitive dissonance can be explained by the fact that the legislation went through different House committees (reforms in Corrections, penalty hikes in Criminal Jurisprudence). Even more importantly, the Legislative Budget Board assigns no "fiscal note" (bureaucratese for "cost") to criminal penalty hikes for budget purposes, so legislators can pass them without directly funding the extra expense. I don't know enough about Oklahoma's legislature to know how they budget criminal penalty hikes, but in general legislators everywhere seem to be in love with these so-called"enhancement" bills and behave as though money is no object.

'Did US law spur Mexican meth sales?'

Well, of course it did!

The title of this post is the headline to a Christian Science Monitor story (11/22) describing an outcome that was not only predictable but, at the time, predicted, at least on this blog. The article opens:

The goal was to curb production of methamphetamine by cutting off key ingredients. It worked: Domestic production of methamphetamine fell. But a blow to meth labs in the United States became, in turn, a boon to a group in Mexico.

La Familia started manufacturing meth a few years earlier in the western state of Michoacán. By 2006, the group had emerged as a major distributor.

No one claims that the emergence of La Familia was the direct result of the US law. But US production of meth has decreased dramatically since 2004, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center's National Methamphetamine Threat Asses­sment of 2008.

A global report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime from 2008 also shows a 92 percent decline in the number of large-capacity labs in the US from 2001 to 2007. But in the same period, methamphetamine seized along the Mexican border dramatically increased. (There was a significant dip again in 2007, but seizure numbers are still higher than they were in 2001.)

Experts say that the expansion of meth networks operated by Mexican organizations is a major factor in the sustained meth supplies in the US today, even with new import restrictions on chemicals in Mexico.

Some are not surprised.

Count me among those unsurprised to learn that the gang La Familia Michoacana rose to power on a lucrative wave of meth smuggling thanks to restrictions on pseudoephedrine in the US market. Rather than focus on treating addicts, for some reason US policymakers thought it was a better idea to force them to buy their meth from gangsters instead of making it at home. Homemade meth was bad news, but rural meth cooks weren't beheading police officers or gunning down children as is happening now in Mexico. Sometimes better the devil you know.

I've been beating the drum about this unintended but painfully obvious outcome on this blog for years. Por ejemplo:

• Texas' anti-meth law shifted production to Mexico; prevention and treatment underfunded
• Redefining drug war success
• Stop digging: US policies enriching Mexican drug cartels
• Are we winning the war on sniffles?
• Mexican meth: 'I'm afraid what we did was create a monster'
• More on the war on sniffles
  
• War on sniffles worsens public safety
  
• Pseudoephedrine restrictions raise fears of 'more addiction, more overdoses and more violence'
  
• Oklahoma meth law not working
  
• Tradeoffs: Mexican cartels boost meth involvement
  
• Oklahoma meth law overhyped
  

Large marijuana grows in North Texas run by Mexican drug gangs

This development merits watching; it could foretell a turning point where Mexico's cartel problems begin much more tangibly to become American ones. Reports McClatchy News:

Mexico’s nimble drug cartels are leapfrogging tightened border security and establishing sophisticated marijuana-growing operations in North Texas and Oklahoma, law enforcement officials say.

"There is no doubt" that three big marijuana fields uncovered this month in Ellis and Navarro counties "have a tie to the border and a Mexican drug cartel," said a drug investigator for the Department of Public Safety. "They brought the tenders up here from Mexico to do the work.

"This is not Joe Bob growing some marijuana to smoke. These are professional drug operations," said the investigator, who asked not to be identified for security reasons.

The traffickers’ farming operations, known as "grows," have been an increasing problem on public lands in California and other Western states for some time. But it’s only been in the last two years that the cartels have started to cultivate densely planted plots in North Texas and eastern Oklahoma, law enforcement officials say. ...

This month alone, sheriff’s departments in Texas’ Ellis and Navarro counties found three irrigated, fertilized and manicured pot-growing operations near Ennis and Corsicana.

More than 16,000 plants have been uprooted from the sites, said Duane Steen, an assistant commander of the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Narcotic Service in Austin.

Last year, a 12,000-plant operation found in Ellis County was the first sign that Mexican drug cartels have branched out from smuggling marijuana to cultivating it in Texas, Steen said.

The Piney Woods of East Texas was where investigators usually found pot patches, Steen said. "The old operations were local: The guy grew up in East Texas and decided to grow a little weed," he said.

What’s being found now is on a different scale.

Okie Sheriff running "sex-slave operation" with female trusties

I'd questioned earlier whether Sheriffs' use of inmate labor should be audited after two Texas Sheriffs departments were found to be using trusty labor for private businesses. Then I saw the lede to an AP story from Oklahoma, declaring:

Authorities have charged a western Oklahoma sheriff with coercing and bribing female inmates so he could use them in a sex-slave operation run out of his jail.

You can't make this stuff up. It really makes you wonder what other creative uses Sheriffs have found for inmate labor?

Oklahoma rethinks incarceration for low-level offenders

While I continue to maintain that that the best thing ever to come out of Oklahoma is Interstate-35, I'm happy to see via Corrections Sentencing that Texas' neighbors to the north are reconsidering mass incarceration for low-level offenders along similar lines to recent Texas proposals.

The biggest difference, their Governor is championing the program personally, proposing $20 million in new drug treatment spending in Oklahama, compared to Gov. Perry's recommendation today for just $14.7 million in treatment spending for much larger Texas, 90% less than what legislative studies say is necessary. As AP reported ("Henry proposes 'smart' public safety plan," Feb. 6):

Gov. Brad Henry on Wednesday proposed to expand his "Smart on Crime" program, which he said would preserve prison space for violent criminals.

Henry said he will set aside an extra $20 million in his executive budget, to be presented to the Oklahoma Legislature on Monday, to finance his program, which stresses drug courts, mental health courts, juvenile courts, drug and alcohol treatment, work programs and restitution.

"For too many years, the state has spent hundreds of millions of dollars warehousing low-level, nonviolent offenders and scrambling to find prison space for the truly violent criminals," the governor said.

"We have to be tough on crime and lock up dangerous offenders, but we need to be smart on crime, too," he added. "That means punishing low-level offenders in a more effective way that protects the public safety without giving them free room and board in a taxpayer-financed prison cell.

Are We Winning the War on Sniffles?

Do laws restricting pseudoephedrine sales "work" to reduce meth? I've argued that they've enriched organized crime, and that other states like Texas that mimicked Oklahoma's first-of-its-kind law were merely grandstanding while ignoring the obvious substitution problem. Kip Esquire brilliantly called the fad "the War on Sniffles." So are we winning? I guess it depends on what you thought the goals were.

Quite a few older Grits posts in the archives sometimes get comments, and this one came in yesterday here from an anonymous Okie that I thought was worth responding to:

The meth law in Oklahoma has closed down the "mom and pop" meth labs here. Children were being exposed to the noxious chemicals these labs produced, and the toxic waste that was being dumped on our backroads and in our rivers and streams has been halted. The restrictions on the sale of "pseudo" were directly responsible for these changes. Now instead of a thousand amatuer chemists, law enforcement can focus on the Mexican "superlabs." oh, and by the way, whining about the inconvenience of having to show ID to buy items containing this chemical sort of makes you look like an asshole (or a pissed-off tweaker that can't get his supply of "pseudo")

Here was my response:

If you think more addicts, more property crime and more violence means the law "works," then more power to you. Meth labs were bad - are they worse than organized crime? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? US drug policy is chasing its own tail. This law didn't improve things, at best it just shifted profits and enviro hazards to Mexico, at worst caused your addicts who used to cook at home to rob your house to buy the drugs from the Mexican cartels.

This is a silly law - further evidence that the best thing ever to come out of Oklahoma is still I-35. ;)

Michael at Corrections Sentencing has echoed that NIMBY-ish response, but with cartel feuding piling up bodies on the border, problems that he didn't want in his backyard are worsening problems in Texans'. (Michael, don't think I won't be looking for ways during the next legislative session Texas can dump some of our problems on Wisconsin! ;) )

What do y'all think? Was a reduction in environmental hazards of meth labs (or, rather, shifting the problem to so-called superlabs in California and Mexico), worth the consequences of enriching drug cartels, higher addiction rates, increasing overdoses from higher potency, and boosting property crime and violence associated with addicts getting money to purchase from the cartels?

Y'all know what I think, but I'm curious about readers' opinion: Was it worth it?

UPDATE: Michael at Corrections Sentencing responds here.

John Grisham takes on wrongful convictions

Bestselling novelist John Grisham's first non-fiction book, The Innocent Man, tells the story of a wrongful conviction based on mendacious testimony by a jailhouse snitch. The accused was exonerated 11 years later based on DNA evidence. Grisham discussed the book with the Jackson (MS) Clarion Ledger:

Grisham's passion about wrongful convictions and the death penalty is no laughing matter to him. In an online note to readers of The Innocent Man, he described the writing of Williamson's story as "a journey."

"The journey also exposed me to the world of wrongful convictions, something that I, even as a former lawyer, had never spent much time thinking about. This is not a problem peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it.

"Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country, and the reasons are all varied and all the same - bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecutors.

"Murders and rapes are still shocking events and people want justice, and quickly. They, citizens and jurors, trust their authorities to behave properly. When they don't, the result is Ron Williamson ... the obvious question is: 'When will the good guys clean house?' "

Bully for John Grisham - he's taking a professional risk (though perhaps not a great one) by dabbling outside his usual genre, and it sounds like he's developed a real passion on the subject of wrongful convictions. His novels have been so immensely popular, one would expect this book to earn a much wider audience than most books on similar topics.

UPDATE: No sooner did I blog on this than somebody gave me a review copy of this book. I've got a few ahead of it on the list, but I may bump it up a little closer to the top of the stack, just out of curiosity's sake. NUTHER UPDATE: See NPR's coverage of the book's release.

Mexican meth: 'I'm afraid what we did was create a monster'

It's official - well-intentioned efforts to restrict homemade meth labs have done nothing to reduce the supply of meth. The only difference: Feuding drug cartels have a new income source to buy even more powerful weapons with which to blow each other to hell.

Welcome to your de facto foreign policy on Texas' southern border, courtesy of the Texas Legislature and US drug control policy.

Rep. Peña points to this Dallas News article ("Narcotics seizures on rise along the border," Sept. 25) by David McLemore describing a situation about which Grits has been sounding the alarm for some time - the crackdown on bathtub-gin style homemade meth handed the lucrative market to Mexican smugglers. The stuff they produce turns out to be purer and even more addictive. Whoops!

Reports McLemore:

The illicit drug marking the biggest increase – and the most alarming, authorities said – is the smokable form of methamphetamine, known as "ice."

This fiscal year, customs inspectors at eight ports of entry between Brownsville and Del Rio have seized 683 pounds of meth as of July 5, the most recent month for which data are available. That compares with 627 pounds for all of fiscal 2005.

DPS agents seized 123 pounds of Mexican meth in the first quarter of fiscal 2006, compared with 28.8 in the same period in the previous. fiscal year.

In June, DEA administrator Karen Tandy told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that about 80 percent of the meth used in the U.S. is distributed by Mexican trafficking organizations and comes from large "super labs" built on the Mexican side of the border. Three are located at Monterrey, Ciudad Acuña and Piedras Negras.

The rise of Mexican ice – purer and more addictive than the meth produced in mom-and-pop clandestine labs in Texas – is due in part to the controlled sale of over-the-counter remedies containing pseudoephedrine, a chemical used in the manufacture of homegrown methamphetamine.

A state law passed in August 2005 limited individual sales of cold medicines to 6 grams, roughly two packages of cold pills, each month. Retailers were also required to move cold medicines behind the counter and record the names of purchasers.

This year, Congress passed a law similar to the Texas law, requiring all medicines containing pseudoephedrine be kept behind the counter and sold in limited amounts.

"I'm afraid what we did was create a monster," Dr. [Jane Carlisle] Maxwell said. "For it opened the doors for the Mexican drug organizations to get into meth manufacture in a big way.

"The Mexican meth is a very scary thing," said Dr. Maxwell. "That could mean people will get addicted much faster. And meth addicts tend to become paranoid and more violent. It's a threat to the entire community."

Finally, the media is beginning to pick up on what's really happened here - the pseudoephedrine restrictions in Oklahoma, Texas and now the rest of the country have had zero effect on supply, increased the purity of the drug, and, worst of all, shoved tens of millions of profits into the pockets of already exceedingly wealthy drug smuggling outfits.

That's not just a failed policy, it's a catastrophic one - another case of criminal justice policy achieving the opposite result from lawmakers' stated hopes. That's the result of using the criminal justice system to treat something that's really a public health problem: drug abuse.

Maybe next session the same lawmakers will focus on proven solutions to meth addiction and the very real problems affecting Texans' public safety.

'War on Sniffles' worsens public safety

Note to drug warriors: Whatever laws you choose to write, the laws of supply and demand will remain in effect. And those laws trump yours -- every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

In the New York Times this morning, Kate Zernike has an item detailing the futility of what Kip Esquire calls the "War on Sniffles" -- restrictions by states on sale of pseudoephedrine products aimed at reducing methamphetamine production (See "Potent Mexican meth floods in as states curb domestic variety," NYT, Jan. 23).

I've discussed these laws in the past and the absurdly counterproductive results we've seen from them in Texas and Oklahoma. From a public safety perspective, they've been a complete bust, mostly because:

"The Mexican drug cartels were right there to feed that demand," said Tom Cunningham, the drug task force coordinator for the district attorneys council for Oklahoma, the first state to put pseudoephedrine behind pharmacy counters, in 2004. "They have always supplied marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. When we took away the local meth lab, they simply added methamphetamine to the truck."

Most interesting to me, not only have these new laws failed to reduce drug use or prevent Mexican suppliers from entering the market, they've actually increased the number of overdoses and drug-related thefts, thus reducing public safety where the laws have been enacted. Reported Zernike:

Sometimes called ice, crystal methamphetamine is far purer, and therefore even more highly addictive, than powdered home-cooked methamphetamine, a change that health officials say has led to greater risk of overdose. And because crystal methamphetamine costs more, the police say thefts are increasing, as people who once cooked at home now have to buy it. ...

"Our burglaries have just skyrocketed," said Jerry Furness, who represents Buchanan County, 150 miles northeast of Des Moines, on the Iowa drug task force. "The state asks how the decrease in meth labs has reduced danger to citizens, and it has, as far as potential explosions. But we've had a lot of burglaries where the occupants are home at the time, and that's probably more of a risk."

I'll bet the politicians who passed these ill-conceived laws don't put that quote on their campaign literature. Much of the overhyped political rhetoric surrounding the passage of Texas' law centered on protecting children of meth users. "Don't you care about children exposed to dangerous drugs?," a legislative staffer asked me last year. The implication was that opposition to pseudoephedrine restrictions meant you didn't care about children, but the Times reports that the situation may have actually worsened, and certainly didn't improve, as a result of the new laws:

although child welfare officials say they are removing fewer children from homes where parents are cooking the drug, the number of children being removed from homes where parents are using it has more than made up the difference.

So at best the law was a wash for kids, at worst more kids are exposed to meth use in the home. So what's the solution? It's the same as it ever was: reducing demand. Reducing supply in a vacuum just creates lucrative business opportunities for new suppliers. As one of the Times' sources put it:

"You can't legislate away demand," said Betty Oldenkamp, secretary of human services in South Dakota, where the governor this month proposed tightening a law that last year restricted customers to two packs of pseudoephedrine per store. "The law enforcement aspects are tremendously important, but we also have to do something to address the demand."

Actually it might be possible to "legislate" demand, or at least to legislate programs that help addicts fight their addiction instead of ostracizing and incarcerating them. You can only reduce demand one person at a time, and addicts won't seek help if they think they'll be imprisoned for decades as a result. A commitment to demand reduction would require that the same politicians who brought us the "tuff on crime" approach to the War on Sniffles shift gears, embracing pragmatism and eschewing demagoguery.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

See prior Grits coverage of this topic:

• Oklahoma meth law overhyped
• Tradeoffs: Mexican cartels boost meth involvement
• Oklahoma meth law not working
• Pseudoephedrine restrictions raise fears of more addiction, more overdoses and more violence
• Drug courts = solution to meth epidemic in Piney Woods

UPDATE: Read about the blogosphere's reaction to the Times article.

Pseudoephedrine restrictions raise fears of 'more addiction, more overdoses, and more violence'

Following Oklahoma's lead (and let's face it, can that ever be a good idea?) Texas earlier this year required pseudoephedrine products (mostly over-the-counter cold medicine) to be kept behind store counters and to require cold-sufferers to sign a logbook documenting their purchase. The idea was to reduce the number of bath-tub-gin-style "meth labs," mostly low-level users making meth for their own private consumption ("Traditional meth busts decrease, meth ice busts spike," KFDX TV, Nov. 16):

Local officers say since a Texas law went into effect restricting the sale of pseudoephedrine, the number of Meth labs found in Texoma has dropped. Instead of working at least one lab a week, they are working one every few weeks, which is a welcomed change since labs are highly toxic.

Instead, though, now a more potent, cheaper Mexican version of meth is flooding Texas' market, causing law enforcement to issue the same, tired, dire predictions we heard just months ago about home meth labs:

[O]fficer John Spragins with the North Texas Drug Task Force says officers are just beginning to confront a new problem.

Meth Ice is a purer form of Methamphetamine and it is popping up weekly. One bust last week netted $88,000 worth of Ice. Spragins says with more people on Ice, he fears we will see more addiction, more overdoses, and more violence.

Well, that's an excellent result, isn't it, for a three month old law? More addiction, more overdoses, and more violence! Surely it's now evident that trying to stamp out supply without managing demand cannot solve America's drug problems. State Sen. Craig Estes and his cohorts who passed this ill-conceived law were chasing their own tails. This substitution problem in Northeast Texas and Oklahoma is just a microcosm of the bigger dilemma -- addicted people can always find a way to get high. (At the DPA conference I heard a physician from Mexico City tell how street kids who can't afford pot sniff cheap glue that's far worse for them.)

Drug treatment is the best way to reduce meth addiction, and where Texas counties have put money into the strategy, it's working. More supply-side solutions focusing on punitive approaches aren't really helping anything.

Oklahoma meth law not working

Despite all the hype, Oklahoma's new anti-meth law turned out to be less than OK. Backers touted the idea as a national model. (Indeed, Texas followed the Okies' lead this spring by requiring pseudoephedrine, which is used to make homemade meth, to be sold only from behind the counter, and customers must sign for the purchase.) Now it turns out the much-ballyhooed new law hasn't worked at all, instead opening up the market for violent Mexican drug cartels. According to the Newhouse News Service:

police say a massive influx of meth made by Mexican "superlabs," which can obtain tons of pseudoephedrine, has kept meth plentiful and potent. The number of Oklahoma users shows no sign of falling, and property crime still keeps the Oklahoma County Jail at capacity.

"We took away their production," said Tom Cunningham, task force coordinator for the Oklahoma District Attorneys Council. "That didn't do anything for their addiction."

That's predictable. In Texas, the Oklahoma law was hyped as a cure-all that would rid the state of meth once and for all. Now it turns out we can expect the drug to be just as "plentiful and potent" as ever under the new law, maybe more so. What's saddest, in 2007 when the same politicians return to Austin complaining we need tougher drug laws, I doubt their constituents will call them on the fact that their past efforts never really mattered at all.

See also, "Pseudoephedrine restrictions raise fears of more addiciton, more overdoses and more violence."

Oklahoma meth law overhyped

Drug warriors across the country have been falling over themselves to emulate Oklahoma's anti-meth statute, which only allows pseudoephedrine tablets (a "precursor" substance used for making meth) to be sold by a pharmacist. Texas state Sen. Craig Estes, R-Wichita Falls, has proposed SB 107, which emulates Oklahoma's law, and SB 108, which would increase prison sentences for meth production (See prior Grits coverage: 99 is not enough).

OK law enforcement says meth lab busts have declined in Oklahoma by 80% since the statute was implemented.

It may not be that simple, though. According to the Lawton (OK) Constitution (pdf), meth busts have declined there, but over the same period, cocaine use skyrocketed to an "all-time high," with arrests for cocaine increasing by 660%.

So if meth busts declined by 80%, but meth users substituted cocaine, arrests for which increased 660%, did the new policy really curb drug abuse in Oklahoma? It seems a stretch to say so.

Here's an alternative explanation: roughly the same percentage of people appear to be addicted to hard drugs in Oklahoma as before the new meth law, just to a different drug, one supplied by Colombian drug lords instead of local meth cooks. But it's not as though a large number of Okies aren't still sucking powder up their noses.

The Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee has proposed expanding drug courts and treatment programs as a way to actually reduce drug abuse. That seems more productive than just shifting addicts from one drug to another.

Update: "War on Sniffles" harms public safety.