American Civil Liberties Union

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.

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:

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:

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.)