Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (Pic by World Economic Forum, via Flickr)

Another Latin American president has called for a conversation about the U.S.-sponsored war on drugs during the sixth Summit of the Americas, which takes place next week in Cartagena, Colombia.

Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos said Sunday that he calls for an open debate about whether to continue the current war on drugs or explore other routes, including legalization.

“If a form of depenalization, and at the same time fighting drug trafficking, is less expensive and better for society, then we can make a joint decision, because this is multinational problem that not one or a small group of countries can resolve,” Santos said. ”We’ve spent a lot of time talking and not doing much. … What we have is not the best and we must find less expensive and more efficient alternatives. If there are none then lets move on with what we have.”

According to the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, “the President’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 National Drug Control Budget [.pdf] requests $26.2 billion to reduce drug use and its consequences in the United States. This represents an increase of $322.6 million (1.2 percent) over the FY 2010 enacted level of $25.9 billion.”

The Florida Office of Drug Control’s 2010 report (.pdf) indicates that the state’s drug control funding was $301.6 million, an increase over 2009.

The report calls cocaine the “primary drug threat within Florida,” and states that “South Florida is a primary U.S. point of entry for South American heroin, often through Miami International Airport.” It also indicates that “prescription drug abuse is the most threatening substance abuse issue in the State of Florida.”

The president of Guatemala, Otto Perez Molina, wrote this weekend in the The Guardian that “facts are what we need to concentrate on when considering drug policy options. When we analyse drug markets through realistic lenses (not ideological ones as is pretty much customary in most government circles these days), we realise that drug consumption is a public health issue that, awkwardly, has been transformed into a criminal justice problem.”

In late March, Perez Molina called for a debate on alternatives to the drug war, alternatives that could include legalizing drugs, at the upcoming Cartagena summit.

Stephen Downing, a retired Los Angeles Police Department deputy chief, said in March that “the prohibition of drugs has probably done 100 times more harm to our country and our people than alcohol prohibition did and that was devastating.”

Downing is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, LEAP, which is “made up of current and former members of the law enforcement and criminal justice communities who are speaking out about the failures of our existing drug policies.”

In a recent video, Downing said, “We’ve always said, especially the [Drug Enforcement Administration], ‘Let’s cut the head off this snake, and we will win this war on drugs.’ We’ve been cutting the heads off of snakes for 40 years, and there are no snakes out there. It’s a starfish; you cut an arm off and it regenerates”:

El Espectador, a Colombian daily, targeted by Colombian drug cartels in the 1980s, wrote Sunday:

This war on drugs has failed. Despite the increase of resources and sanctions to eliminate the offer of illegal drugs, the market is well supplied. The war has had grave collateral effects, because it has filled jails in the United States and Latin America with people who have committed no violent crimes. They were simple consumers or low level dealers.

Michael McKinley, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, highlighted in El Espectador on Monday ”the importance of reviewing 40 years of the war against drugs and the impact drug dealing has had on security in Mexico and Central America.”

“We recognize the importance of this debate, we recognize that many countries suffer and have to continue to fight this scourge in the best way possible,” McKinley said, adding that the U.S. has a great responsibility for the problem because it is the main consumer country.

El Espectador added that McKinley defended the “great successes” of the war on drugs, and “policies against drug dealing are important.”

The Miami Herald reported in early March that Vice President Joseph Biden said during a visit to Mexico and Central America “‘there is no possibility’ that Washington would heed a growing call by some Latin American presidents to move toward drug legalization.”

“Even if drug legalization might have benefits like reducing prison populations, it also would engender health problems, expand drug usage and even create bureaucracies for drug distribution,” Biden said.

Hundreds of law enforcement professionals including Denver’s U.S. District Judge John Kane have come together on a curious quest: Saying the drug war has failed, they want to legalize drugs.

Some are very nuts and bolts, saying the war on drugs has cost trillions of dollars while only making the problem worse. Others like Kane, while agreeing on that point, are more philosophical. “Our national drug policy is inconsistent with the nature of justice, abusive of the nature of authority, and ignorant of the compelling force of forgiveness,” he says on the web site of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

Judge John Kane

He says the war on drugs is the number one reason cops become corrupt. “It’s the money. These drug cartels don’t care who they kill. Even a good cop, faced with the choice of ‘take this money or we’ll kill you’ will often take the money. And it is getting worse. Drugs are a vicious business,” he said.

Ryan, now retired, says he never worked in narcotics but that illegal drug trafficking puts every cop’s life at risk and puts every cop in the position of potentially being offered the take a bribe or die proposition.

Retired Denver police officer Tony Ryan

He notes that the online DrugWarChronicle has no problem coming up with a new story every week about corrupt law enforcement professionals.

He says that while the money coming from the sale of drugs causes huge problems on one hand, money coming from the federal government–with virtually every law enforcement organization in the country getting grants of one sort or another to fight the drug war–causes additional problems.

“The war on drugs is an addiction because of the money police departments get,” Ryan says.

Below, video of Ryan talking about why he thinks the war on drugs needs to end. He notes that in Denver the pressure to make high-profile arrests has led to the loss of innocent life.

With budgets down everywhere, he says one reliable source of funds for police departments is money for drug enforcement. “They don’t hire more officers,” he said. “They use the money to avoid layoffs, and they shift people from other uses to drug enforcement.”

Ryan is among those circulating petitions for Colorado’s Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol initiative. He also serves as a public speaker through LEAP.

“We give members of law enforcement, who saw the drug war up close and risked their lives for it, a voice,” Tom Angell, spokesman for the group, told the Colorado Independent. “They will almost universally tell you that the drug war distracted them from the mission of solving crimes and ensuring public safety.”

He says LEAP wants to see all drugs made legal. “There is no drug that is made safer to the public by turning its manufacture and distribution over to cartels and gangs. You don’t want gangs selling drugs on your street corners, but that is what you have,” he said.

The FBI released a report this month showing that even while drugs may be for sale on a street corner near you, it is not for lack of effort that the drug war is being lost. Last year, in the United States, 1.6 million people were arrested on drug charges, with more than 80 percent of those arrested on possession charges. Just under half of all arrests were for simple possession of marijuana.

“Since the declaration of the ‘war on drugs’ 40 years ago we’ve arrested tens of millions of people in an effort to reduce drug use. The fact that cops had to spend time arresting another 1.6 million of our fellow citizens last year shows that it simply hasn’t worked. In the current economy we simply cannot afford to keep arresting three people every minute in the failed ‘war on drugs,’” said Neill Franklin, a retired Baltimore narcotics cop who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). “If we legalized and taxed drugs, we could not only create new revenue in addition to the money we’d save from ending the cruel policy of arresting users, but we’d make society safer by bankrupting the cartels and gangs who control the currently illegal marketplace.”

Below, Franklin, speaking to the NAACP about why he thinks drugs need to be legalized.

It goes without saying that plenty of people still believe the war on drugs is worth fighting. Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said in a recent public forum that if marijuana were legalized in the United States, the cartels would simply move into new lines of business.

Angell said continuing the current policies of prohibition serve no purpose, arguing that drug use in the United States is higher than almost anywhere else in the world. “Almost half of all American adults admit to having used illegal drugs. Everyone who wants to use drugs already is using drugs,” he said.

Angell said that making drugs legal and treating addiction as a health issue would save money and lives.

Former Lafayette judge Leonard Frieling agrees.

“Who do you want controlling the supply of drugs? Gangs, cartels, the Taliban, or the government?” he asks.

Colorado attorney Leonard Frieling.

The city backed down, but Frieling was done as a judge. He works today as an attorney, doing mostly criminal defense, including a lot of drug defense work.

“A new report shows that more people in the United States are killed by prescription drug overdoses than by traffic accidents,” Frieling said.

“If people want to worry about something, they should worry about that,” he says.

In fact, he’s right. A story aired this week by ABC News, says that for the first time in history more people in the U.S. are killed by drug overdoses than traffic accidents and that the bulk of those deaths come from accidental overdoses of prescribed opoids. ABC News reported that cases of addiction to prescription drugs is up 400 percent in the last decade.

He says if efforts to legalize drugs are successful, he will smile as his job as a drug defense attorney is eliminated.

“Drug prohibition is such a waste of resources and it does so much damage to lives, and creates so much violent crime,” he says.

Frieling said that people who abuse drugs have a health problem that needs to be addressed. “You can’t charge someone with a felony because of a health problem and then expect them to pull themselves out of the gutter.”

Frieling says that up until the 1910s all drugs were legal in the United States and that the rate of drug abuse in the country was about the same as it is now. “If you can’t win a war in 40 years, you probably can’t win the war. At some point you need to face the fact that the war cannot be won.”

The ACLU of Colorado Thursday announced it has endorsed the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol.

“In Colorado we believe our laws should be practical and they should be fair. Yet we are wasting scarce public resources in our criminal justice system by having police, prosecutors and the courts treat marijuana users like violent criminals. It is unconscionable for our state to spend tax dollars to arrest, prosecute and crowd the courts, and jail people for possession of a small amount of marijuana, especially when those being arrested and jailed are disproportionately people of color,” said the ACLU in a statement on its web site.

“The war on drugs has failed. Prohibition is not a sensible way to deal with marijuana. The Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol will move us toward a more rational approach to drug laws,” the statement continued.

Rosemary Harris Lytle, communications director at the ACLU of Colorado, said legalizing small amounts of marijuana for adults is a civil rights issue. “Current drug laws contribute to the mass incarceration of people of color, especially young people of color.”

She said that drug use is roughly equal among ethnic groups in the U.S., but that a disproportionate number of those incarcerated for possession of small amounts of drugs are people of color.

Moreover, she said the effort to legalize small amounts of marijuana is in keeping with the ACLU’s mission of promoting and defending individual rights and freedom.

“We believe that prosecuting people for low-level possession of marijuana is a waste of the taxpayers’ resources,” Harris Lytle said.

Mason Tvert, director of SAFER, which is promoting the legalization effort, said “This is a great endorsement. The ACLU is one of the largest organizations in the state and their support lends a lot of credibility to our efforts and helps us make the point that marijuana prohibition is a huge waste of resources. It sends the message to other groups that this is a mainstream issue.”

In its statement, the ACLU said:

• Colorado authorities made 17,000 arrests for drug offenses last year.

• One in five people in Colorado’s prisons are serving time for a drug offense.

See the ACLU statement here.

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Congressman Jared Polis and drug-policy reform advocate Ethan Nadelmann argued Wednesday night in Vail that one of the most compelling reasons to legalize marijuana in the United States is to eliminate a major funding source for deadly Mexican drug cartels. Both Colorado Attorney General John Suthers and recently retired DEA agent Anthony Coulson sharply disagreed.

Polis, Suthers (Williams photo).

“There’s no federal nexus for action. This is not a federal issue. In fact, there’s almost a reverse federal nexus. We are contributing to international difficulties, particularly on our southern border, where about 50 percent of the funds for the criminal cartels come from marijuana smuggling operations,” said Polis, a Boulder Democrat whose district includes Vail and surrounding Eagle County.

Suthers, a Republican who has openly expressed his contempt for Colorado’s current medical marijuana industry, said Mexican politicians and law enforcement officials he’s talked to don’t see legalization of marijuana in the United States as the key to ending drug-gang bloodshed in Mexico.

“They think that [violence is] so ingrained at this point, [and the cartels are] very flexible,” Suthers said. “When the drug market dries up, they kidnap people. Until we get some meaningful change in the Mexican criminal justice system – it’s kind of a non-player down there – [the cartels are] in charge of the country and they’ll do whatever they need to do to make money regardless of what happens in the U.S.”

Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the non-profit Drug Policy Alliance, countered that argument: “The number one thing you need to go into other businesses is capital. The number one source of capital for the Mexican gangs is the illegal drug business. Legalizing marijuana removes a major source of capital for them and will undermine their capacity to expand into other areas.”

Coulson, who formerly directed the federal government’s drug enforcement strategy in southern Arizona and now serves as a drug-policy consultant and director of ADAPTE International, agreed that legalizing marijuana in the States would be a major blow to the cartels.

“Dr. Nadelmann, Congressman Polis are correct that marijuana is the largest cash-generating operation of a cartel,” Coulson said. “If there was no marijuana, heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine would collapse on itself – just logistically not enough money for a cartel to traffic in those drugs. Now you might say that that supports [their argument] on legalizing marijuana … After 28 years that’s not a conclusion that I would come to.”

Instead, Coulson favors keeping marijuana illegal, dramatically increasing federal spending on treatment and prevention and sanctioning the Mexican government and power structure.

“What controls Mexico? Not the Mexican government. The oligarchy. The few rich 200 families in Mexico and the cartels control Mexico. The only impact that we’ll have is sanctioning the government of Mexico for not cooperating with us and sanctioning the oligarchy,” Coulson said.

The former DEA agent went on to say Mexico’s culture of violence will persist even without a major U.S. drug market.

“I would suggest that the violence in Mexico is not a product of our consumption use, although it’s a contributing factor,” Coulson said. “The reason for violence in Mexico is because it is something that they have inherited from their colonial masters, the Spanish and the French, a long time ago.”

During a later question and answer period an audience member who identified himself as being of Mexican descent said Coulson’s comments deeply offended him. He countered that the U.S. drug market has provided a steady flow of cash and guns back across the border that has fueled the rise of the cartels and allowed them to take over human trafficking operations.

Vail has long catered to wealthy Latin American visitors and second homeowners, especially from Mexico, and many of its restaurants and lodges rely on immigrant laborers. Suthers seemed keenly aware of his audience.

“Almost without exception, the people on these panels advocating the legalization of drugs have either been academics, paid affiliates of public policy institutes, editorialists or law enforcement officers or politicians in ski resorts and areas of great affluence,” Suthers said.

Polis, a millionaire entrepreneur whose family owns property in Vail, disputed that notion. While he says he’s never smoked marijuana himself and very rarely even drinks alcohol, Polis said he’s dealt with addiction in his own family and saw a high school friend die of a heroin overdose.

But pot is not heroin, he said, and the ease with which is can be obtained illegally makes it all the more imperative to regulate marijuana for strength and purity and to keep it away from those under the age of 21. Plus, legalization will neuter the cartels and boost the U.S. economy.

“If you had legal, regulated marijuana production in this country, not only is it going to create jobs here, it deals a blow to the cartels,” Polis said. “Will they still exist? Yeah, they still work in heroin and cocaine and whatever else they’re doing. But half of their money, half of the crime will disappear overnight on our southern border and be much more containable by the police resources which we will also be able to buffer by the increased focus on violent crime and the increased resources that come in from regulating and taxing marijuana.”

Nadelmann, Coulson (Williams photo).

“I personally would prefer legalization of marijuana to the medical marijuana regimen we currently have in Colorado,” Suthers said. “I believe the retail dispensary model in Colorado, whereby marijuana is grown in large grow operations and sold in retail dispensaries to people who allegedly have a debilitating medical condition has become a complete joke. It’s nothing more than state-sanctioned fraud on the part of thousands of patients and a few dozen doctors.”

Nadelmann warned that even if Colorado becomes the first state to fully legalize recreational marijuana use, it will not be an easy process.

“It’s not a panacea,” he said. “And I can tell you that if Colorado votes to legalize in 2012 – and please do and I hope the same is true for folks in Washington state, which may also have an initiative – it’s not going to be simple and easy. There’s no flip the switch and we move into an orderly regulated world. The attorney general is going to be called upon to enact that law and implement that law in good faith and I hope he will if it wins.”

Nadelmann added, however, that Colorado has a chance to show the rest of the nation what sensible drug policy looks like.

“You guys can lead,” he said. “You can actually provide the future, and it’s a future in which we’ll have drug policies grounded not in ignorance, fear, prejudice and profit but in science, compassion, health and human rights.”

Breaking news: The war on drugs has failed.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy released its report a few days ago, and it isn’t pretty. Drug use of all kinds is up sharply over the last decade, even as governments spend billions to stop it. When one supply chain is interrupted, another fills the gap, seemingly within minutes.

The Commission recommends decriminalizing drugs and ending the stigmatization of users and the marginalization of small time growers and focusing on regulation and health care.

So, who is this band of liberal, drug-loving miscreants? The Commission includes as its members former U.S. Secretary of Sate George Schultz, former U.S. Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, former Secretary General of the U.N. Kofi Annan and a host of international figures of equal stature.

From the report:

The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.

Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption. Apparent victories in eliminating one source or trafficking organization are negated almost instantly by the emergence of other sources and traffickers. Repressive efforts directed at consumers impede public health measures to reduce HIV/AIDS, overdose fatalities and other harmful consequences of
drug use. Government expenditures on futile supply reduction strategies and incarceration displace more cost-effective and evidence-based investments in demand and harm reduction.

Our principles and recommendations can be summarized as follows:

End the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others. Challenge rather than reinforce common misconceptions about drug markets, drug use and drug dependence.

Encourage experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens. This recommendation applies especially to cannabis, but we also encourage other experiments in decriminalization and legal regulation that can accomplish these objectives and provide models for others.

Offer health and treatment services to those in need. Ensure that a variety of treatment modalities are available, including not just methadone and buprenorphine treatment but also the heroin assisted treatment programs that have proven successful in many European countries and Canada. Implement syringe access and other harm reduction measures that have proven effective in reducing transmission of HIV and other blood-borne infections as well as fatal overdoses. Respect the human rights of people who use drugs. Abolish abusive practices carried out in the name of treatment – such as forced detention, forced labor, and physical or psychological abuse – that contravene human rights standards and norms or that remove the right to self-determination.

Apply much the same principles and policies stated above to people involved in the lower ends of illegal drug markets, such as farmers, couriers and petty sellers. Many are themselves victims of violence and intimidation or are drug dependent. Arresting and incarcerating tens of millions of these people in recent decades has filled prisons and destroyed lives and families without reducing the availability of illicit drugs or the power of criminal organizations. There appears to be almost no limit to the number of people willing to engage in such activities to better their lives, provide for their families, or otherwise escape poverty. Drug control resources are better directed elsewhere.

The report says opiate use increased 35% worldwide from 1998 to 2008. Cocaine use is up 27%, and marijuana use is up 9% over the same period.

The reports ranks drugs by how much harm they cause in the world, Number one is heroin, two is cocaine. Alcohol is ranked fourth, tobacco eighth, cannabis tenth.

As for the inherent violence of the drug trade, the study indicates that violence related to drugs rises in direct proportion to law enforcement activity. The more society tries to stop the trade in illegal drugs, the more violent the business becomes.

The Commission recommends immediate and drastic changes to how the world deals with drugs.

To read Denver Post columnist Ed Quillen’s take on the report, click here.

Appearing in Vienna last week for the 53rd annual United Nations meeting on global drug policy, administration officials shifted from attacking drug use as a crime to be penalized and moved toward a strategy of tackling addiction as an illness to be treated, a number of health and human rights advocates who attended the event said.

Drug reformers for years have promoted so-called “harm reduction” measures as a more effective and humane way to treat drug addiction and the diseases that often accompany it — an approach that runs counter to the punitive attitude epitomized by the Reagan administration’s “war on drugs.” And while the Obama White House — behind Gil Kerlikowske, the White House drug czar, and his deputy, Thomas McLellan — remains officially opposed to the hot-button harm reduction language, officials have also conceded that the current strategy isn’t working, advocates say. That sharp break from past administrations has left reformers hopeful that the Obama White House will mark a new era in the nation’s fight against drug abuse — one that prioritizes treatment and prevention above rap sheets and prison time.

“There was virtually no reference to a criminal justice approach,” Allan Clear, executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition, an advocacy group, said of the U.S. delegation in Vienna. “I’m just so used to being appalled by their behavior … It was very encouraging.”

Deborah Peterson Small, executive director of Break the Chains, another group advocating for drug-policy reforms, agreed, noting a brand new willingness among White House officials to embrace certain elements of the harm reduction strategy. When she spoke about treatment reforms to U.S. drug officials in Vienna in 2008, Small said, the entire delegation walked out on her. “This year it was completely different,” she said. “We finally had a sense that they were listening.”

The comments mark quite a departure from those that drug reformers were making a year ago at the same U.N. event, where the Obama administration killed international efforts to include harm reduction language as part of a U.N. document that will guide the next decade’s global drug policy. Harm reduction refers to things like drug-substitute treatments and clean-needle exchanges — programs being tried (with promising results) in a number of countries to battle the spread of HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C and other drug-related illnesses. The White House has argued that the broad harm reduction language is “ambiguous” and could include controversial programs the administration doesn’t support, including drug legalization, drug consumption rooms and heroin prescription initiatives.

But there are clear signs that the attitude is changing — and the policies are beginning to follow suit.

With Obama’s vocal support, for example, Congress last year repealed the 21-year-old ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs. And last week in Vienna, not only did the United States endorse a new U.N. resolution promoting access to controlled medicines for legitimate medical purposes (commonly considered to include drug dependency treatments, like methadone for heroin addiction), but it co-sponsored a separate declaration designed to tackle the treatment gap plaguing HIV patients. The latter resolution, while it doesn’t mention harm reduction specifically, references a U.N. technical guide promoting certain harm reduction measures, like needle exchange and opioid substitution therapy. Rebecca Schleifer, advocate for the health and human rights division at Human Rights Watch, said this week that the HIV document represents “the most vocal support” the White House has ever given for HIV-treatment efforts focusing on human rights.

Opponents of needle exchange and other harm reduction measures argue that the human rights groups have misinterpreted the signals coming from the White House in Vienna. “If you read Kerlikowske’s statement,” said Lana Beck, spokeswoman for the Drug Free America Foundation, “clearly there’s nothing there to indicate any change.”

That part is true. The remarks prepared for Kerlikowske — officially the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, or ONDCP — reiterated the administration’s opposition to the broader harm reduction language, arguing that the term “creates unnecessary confusion” and might be misused to “promote drug use.” Still, drug reformers were quick to point out that the drug czar declined to include those passages when he addressed the crowd in Vienna — more evidence, they say, that the U.S. is consciously toning down its traditional war-on-drugs rhetoric.

“Traditional advocates of harm reduction recognized that the United States was a different animal [this year],” Clear said.

The ONDCP did not return calls for comment.

For health and human rights advocates, there remains a long way to go. Like any number of emotionally charged issues, drug policy is often dictated more by entrenched ideology than evidence-based rationality. And on Capitol Hill, there remains a strong sense that drug users are criminals to be punished, not patients to be treated. For proof, look no further than the debate over needle exchange. Although a long list of public health organizations — including the National Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and the American Public Health Association — had endorsed needle exchange as an effective way to reduce HIV/AIDS without increasing drug abuse, the politics of Washington kept the ban in place for more than two decades prior to last year’s repeal.

Not that some lawmakers aren’t trying to reform the punitive mindset surrounding drug use. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), for example, has long-criticized the criminal justice system for packing the nation’s prisons with non-violent drug users. A description of his reform proposal notes that the the war on drugs hasn’t diminished drug use, it hasn’t brought the multi-billion dollar drug industry under control, and it targets minority offenders disproportionately. The system, he says, is “broken, unfair, [and] locking up the wrong people.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the Webb proposal in January, leaving supporters hopeful that Democratic leaders will bring the bill to the chamber floor later this year.

Meanwhile, health and human rights advocates have vowed to continue their push for health-centered drug reforms, encouraged by the tone of a White House that seems set to place a greater emphasis on treatment, health and human rights.

“That would put us on par with most other countries — like Iran,” Small quipped, “instead of being the leading jailer in the world.”

SB 231, which passed the Senate today, extends the Colorado Methamphetamine Task Force through 2014 from its planned sunset next year. Penry’s fellow co-sponsors state Reps. Steve King and Laura Bradford and Democratic Rep. Judy Solano from Aurora were touted in the press release this afternoon to promote the bill’s bipartisan sponsor bona fides. Fellow Republican co-sponsor Cortez Rep. Scott Tipton was inexplicably omitted from the congratulatory back-slapping.

The ravages of meth abuse and its associated criminal activity were outlined by Attorney General John Suthers in a Feb. 5 Denver Post story:

Colorado ranks eighth in the nation in per-capita methamphetamine use, costing the state roughly $1.4 billion a year. … “Abuse of methamphetamine brings a whole host of problems with it, particularly crimes such as burglaries and ID thefts,” Suthers said. “In Colorado, roughly two-thirds of all ID thefts are caused by methamphetamine users. Colorado ranks sixth in the country for ID theft.

While the Minority Office press release claims the task force itself is “completely funded by gifts, grants, and donations,” the war on drugs is not.

Supporting a toothless task force tiger makes little sense when as King notes, “Even though we’ve turned the corner on meth addiction on the West Slope, continued focus and support on treatment, enforcement and prevention are to vital to guarantee the elimination of this dark plague on our society.”

Stateline.org reports that Suthers hailed the feds at a Washington, D.C. meeting of state attorneys general with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder last week:

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers, a Republican, praised Obama for including more than $2 billion in funding for anti-drug efforts in the recently approved economic stimulus package. The money comes in the form of direct grants to states and localities to pay for drug task forces, prosecutors and other law enforcement needs.

Suthers questioned why anti-drug funds were included in what was billed strictly as an economic stimulus plan, but he noted that he and other state officials had been asking for the money for months. The Bush administration repeatedly sought to eliminate the grant program that Suthers and other state attorneys general pushed.

Penry and the state Republican leadership may want to huddle with their congressional delegation — Reps. Doug Lamborn and Mike Coffman — who voted against the federal economic stimulus package and are making noise that they will not support the Obama admnistration’s federal budget, in which further drug-fighting grants will be allocated to the states.