With today’s victory for the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act, Michigan voters have pulled off a major breakthrough for the medical marijuana movement.Michigan is the first state in the Midwest to approve it — and, with 10 million people, it’s also the second most populous state to do so.

Medical marijuana isn’t a new issue in Michigan. Voters in five Michigan towns and cities – Ann Arbor, Detroit, Ferndale, Flint, and Traverse City — have previously approved medical marijuana, and legislation attempting to do so has been introduced in the Michigan legislature several times.

Michigan’s new law, sponsored by the Michigan Coalition for Compassionate Care, will allow patients suffering from debilitating medical conditions including cancer, glaucoma, HIV, AIDS, hepatitis C, MS and other conditions to use marijuana with a doctor's recommendation. It would require the department to create an ID card system for qualified patients and their designated caregivers and would allow patients and caregivers to grow small amounts of marijuana indoors in a secure facility, with limits on the amount they could possess. It would permit both registered and unregistered patients and caregivers to assert a medical necessity defense to any prosecution involving marijuana. At the same time, it would place some restrictions on the medical use of marijuana, including prohibitions on public use of marijuana and driving under the influence of marijuana.

The initiative’s passage is all the more amazing considering the well-funded opposition campaign’s desperate and blatantly dishonest attempts to stoke the fears of Michigan voters.

Over the past dozen years, 14 states have now passed laws protecting patients who use medical marijuana when recommended by a physician. Medical marijuana ballot initiatives have been passed in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, while losing only in South Dakota. In addition, over the past five years, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Vermont have passed medical marijuana laws through the state legislative process.

Now that nearly a quarter of Americans live in a state that recognizes the medical legitimacy of medical marijuana when used with a doctor’s recommendation, let’s hope the new Obama administration makes good on his campaign promises to end the federal government’s deliberate campaign to undermine state laws.

With the Office of National Drug Control Policy's five-year reauthorization approaching in 2010, there's never been a better time to scrutinize the White House's "agency of accountability" in the nation's counterproductive drug war.

Without a doubt, the ONDCP needs new metrics for measuring the success of our nation's drug policy. Rather than measuring success based on slight fluctuations in drug use, the primary measure of ONDCP's effectiveness should be the reduction of drug-related harm. If ONDCP is reauthorized, it should be charged with reducing problems associated with drug use itself (overdose, addiction, disease transmission) and problems associated with drug prohibition (over-incarceration, collateral sanctions, loss of civil liberties, racial disparities in enforcement, prosecution and sentencing).

Even by ONDCP's own misguided measures of success, it's failing miserably. Several recent reports underscore ONDCP's breathtaking corruption, dysfunction and lack of accountability:

• As reported in the Washington Post, a new report released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform describes how the White House orchestrated over 300 taxpayer-funded trips to support endangered Republican candidates in 2006. Karl Rove called ONDCP director John Walters (aka the "drug czar") a "superstar" after Walters announced half-million-dollar grants at news conferences with two Republican congressmen and a Republican senator.
  
  The report says that government agencies used taxpayer funds for at least 303 out-of-town trips by senior Bush appointees meant to lend prestige or bring federal grants to 99 politically endangered Republicans that year - despite the fact that federal law prohibits the use of public funds or resources for partisan activities and specifically forbids ONDCP from any participation in a federal election campaign.
  
  Funny timing, as ONDCP happens to be stepping up its usual efforts to spread lies and interfere with Michigan's Proposition 1. This November, Michigan voters will decide whether their state will become the first in the Midwest and the 14^th nationwide to pass a law protecting medical marijuana patients, and ONDCP isn't taking any chances that there will be an inconvenient outbreak of democracy. (Visit the ACLU's ballot initiative action page to alert friends in states that will be voting on civil liberties issues this November, such as Michigan's Proposition 1.)
• As reported by ABC News, a congressionally mandated study conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication has demonstrated the utter failure of the National Youth Anti-Drug Campaign, launched in the late 1990s and at a cost of over $1 billion. The study, which appears in the December 2008 issue of American Journal of Public Health, was based on four rounds of interviews conducted between 1999 and 2004, each involving about 5,000 to 8,000 youths between the ages of 9 and 18 years.
  
  "Despite extensive funding, governmental agency support, the employment of professional advertising and public relations firms, and consultation with subject-matter experts, the evidence from the evaluation suggests that the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign had no favorable effects on youths' behavior and that it may even have had an unintended and undesirable effect on drug cognitions and use," the report said.
  
  One of the study's more interesting findings is that some youth who saw the campaign's ads were actually more likely to use drugs.
  
  "Youths who saw the campaign ads took from them the message that their peers were using marijuana," the report said. "In turn, those who came to believe that their peers were using marijuana were more likely to initiate use themselves."
• According to a report released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), "Drug-Free Communities Support Program: Stronger Internal Controls and Other Actions Needed to Better Manage the Grant-Making Process," the ONDCP "did not always adhere to applicable federal internal control standards, statutory requirements, and other guidance during the grant-making process." Apparently, ONDCP's procedures for determining grant eligibility for the Drug-Free Communities Support Program resulted in the failure to "show that only eligible coalitions received grants in accordance with the Drug-Free Communities Support Program's statutory framework."
  
  In the fall of 2005, ONDCP cut funding for 63 Drug-Free Communities grantees and put 88 others on probation, despite the fact that many had scored highly during peer reviews conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). In an October 2005 letter to ONDCP director John Walters, U.S. Senators Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said that the review process used by the White House agency "relied more on qualitative and subjective data than it did on the peer-review scores that have guided the decision making process in past years."
• These reports come on the heels of a critical review of government data by George Mason University senior fellow Jon Gettman chronicling ONDCP's ineffectiveness, manipulation of statistics and faulty claims-making. Ian Thompson from the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office described Gettman's report in this recent blog post.

Looking ahead to the potential opportunities presented by a new presidential administration, U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich's (D-OH) placement as Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform's Domestic Policy Subcommittee (which has oversight power over ONDCP), and ONDCP reauthorization coming up in 2010, the outlook for reforming ONDCP is looking brighter than ever before.

But don't hold your breath - there's plenty of ways in which your help is needed to implement sensible drug policies today.

Preliminary research indicates that up to 80 percent of all drug cases in America may be based on information provided by informants. Informants work for the government, often secretly, to gather and provide information or to testify in exchange for cash or leniency in punishment for their own crimes. In many courts across the nation, all it takes is the uncorroborated word of an informant to charge someone with a crime.

This week has featured a few encouraging developments for those of us advocating reforms in the ways law enforcement works with informants:

• NPR’s Morning Edition ran a three-part series about problems with the FBI’s use of informants. The third story is about a bill that Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.) plans to introduce “that would essentially hold FBI agents criminally responsible if they fail to share criminal activity of a confidential informant with other law enforcement agencies.”
  
  Last summer, in the wake of the Kathryn Johnston scandal, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on law enforcement’s use of drug informants. Perhaps the most revealing exchange of the hearing occurred when Assistant Director of the FBI Directorate of Intelligence Wayne M. Murphy refused to reassure Congress that the FBI does not tolerate "serious violent felonies" by their informants. Murphy also could not ensure that local authorities would be notified when informants commit serious crimes.
  
  To get an idea just how unaccountable the FBI’s use of informants really is, consider this 2005 report by the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice, finding that the FBI violated its own rules for handling informants in 87 percent of cases.
  
  The FBI handles only a small fraction of all drug cases in the U.S. — the vast majority are handled by state and local agencies — so this is undoubtedly just the tip of the iceberg.
  
  Delahunt’s bill is a good sign, although more broad reforms will be necessary to address the root causes that lead to police work being placed in the hands of unreliable informants in the first place.
  
  
• Also this week, the Montana Supreme Court issued an excellent opinion in a case about the use of informants. The Court held that the Montana state constitution’s right to privacy prohibits the police from “wiring” informants and recording their conversations with suspects without a warrant. The Court said that a district judge should have suppressed evidence in two cases involving informants wired with secret microphones, one in a suspect’s home and another in an automobile.
  
  
• Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering informant issues in two separate cases. Pearson v. Callahan presents the question of whether the Fourth Amendment is violated when police enter a home without a warrant after an informant inside signals to police that a crime, usually a drug deal, is taking place. Some lower courts have allowed this practice based on a legal fiction coined “consent once removed,” which holds that a person who unwittingly consents to an undercover police officer or informant entering is also deemed to have consented to other police officers coming in later to search or arrest. The ACLU submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in the Pearson case arguing that whatever the rationale for applying the “consent once removed” doctrine to undercover officers, it certainly should not be applied to informants who are not even police officers.
  
  
• The second informant case pending before the Court is Van de Kamp v. Goldstein, in which Thomas Goldstein sued former Los Angeles County District Attorney John Van de Kamp for the role he played in Goldstein’s wrongful conviction and 24-year incarceration. Goldstein was convicted of murder based on the word of a jailhouse informant named Edward Fink who falsely testified that Goldstein had confessed the murder to him. Fink’s perjury was possible only because the Deputy District Attorney prosecuting the case had no way of knowing about Fink’s history of deception in other cases, nor about the sweet deal Fink obtained in his own burglary cases in exchange for lying about Goldstein. The lawsuit alleges this information was unknown at trial because Van de Kamp had deliberately refused to put into place any information management system that would have enabled Deputy District Attorneys to access this type of information about jailhouse informants in their cases. The ACLU’s friend-of-the-court brief in the case describes the pervasive undocumented, unregulated use of informants today and the serious threat they pose to the fairness and integrity of the criminal justice system.

Over the past generation, routine police work in the U.S. has become radically militarized in the name of the "War on Drugs." One frightening expression of this trend is the approximately 40,000 paramilitary-style SWAT raids that take place each year in the U.S. — most commonly to serve drug warrants, and often for misdemeanor, nonviolent offenses. SWAT raids are usually forced, aggressive, unannounced entry by heavily armed policemen dressed as soldiers, and are often accompanied by flash-bang grenades and major damage to the residence or business. (For more on the rise of paramilitary police raids, see Radley Balko's report, Overkill.)

When you combine this disturbing trend with a concurrent shift over the past decades away from prosecutorial and judicial oversight of policing practices, you get lots and lots of tragic "isolated incidents" — resulting in preventable deaths of not just drug offenders, but also innocent suspects, bystanders, and police officers.

One of these isolated incidents occurred in the small city of Lima, Ohio, on January 4, 2008, when Sergeant Joseph Chavalia shot blindly into a room where unarmed 26-year-old Tarika Wilson was presumably hiding behind a closed door with her six children, including her one-year-old son Sincere Wilson. Tarika was killed immediately, and Sincere had a finger amputated after being shot in the shoulder and hand. Tarika was not even the target of the raid — rather, the officers had a warrant for Anthony Terry, her boyfriend.

During the raid, one of Chavalia's fellow officers shot and killed two dogs that belonged to Terry. Chavalia testified that when his fellow officers shot the dogs, he mistakenly presumed that hostile gunfire was coming from the Wilson's bedroom. Chavalia then shot blindly in the direction of the bedroom, without first attempting to identify the Wilson and her six children.

On Monday, a jury in Lima ruled that Chavalia didn't show a "substantial lapse of due care" and acquitted him of misdemeanor charges of negligent homicide and negligent assault.

It's a shame that the same considerations aren't made when officers are shot by innocent drug suspects who reasonably mistake unannounced intruders for illegal home invaders (such as in the prosecutions of Tracy Ingle and Corey Maye, as I described in this recent DailyKos post.)

Since Wilson was biracial and Chavalia is white, many have seen the shooting as representative of the disproportionate enforcement of drug laws in African-American and economically disadvantaged communities. (I posted last week on a new report detailing shocking racial disparities in drug enforcement in nearby Cuyahoga County, Ohio).

The shooting even prompted Jesse Jackson, Sr. to pay a visit to Lima to meet with protesters, community members, and city leaders last February. Jackson called the shooting "unnecessary force, excessive, and illegal," and urged prosecution of Lima police.

The fact that all eight members of the jury that acquitted Chavalia were white — even though one-quarter of Lima's residents are black — has only added fuel to the fire.

"We've got to do better. We've given people the license to kill," Jason Upthegrove, president of the Lima chapter of the NAACP, was quoted as saying in the Toledo Blade.

As negligent as Chavalia may have been in shooting Wilson and her son, it's hard to chalk up responsibility to just one trigger-happy officer. Officers are often given little or no background information before taking part in SWAT raids, and thrown into dangerous situations unnecessarily by sloppy or disingenuous work on the part of their colleagues.

It's shocking that more people are not urging their government officials to return SWAT policing to its intended purpose — neutralizing the rare, crisis situations when there is substantiated evidence that someone's life is urgently threatened.

By merely tightening search warrant standards and implementing basic safeguards and regulations that ensure ample oversight and corroboration of informant testimony, we could begin to rebuild the broken trust between police and the communities they aspire to serve and protect. Until then, count on the steady parade of drug raids resulting in needless death and destruction to continue.