Republican State Attorney General Rob McKenna summoned bloggers to his 20th floor downtown offices this afternoon for a confab. I gotta hand it to him—it takes some guts to call a bunch of pinkos to the table and tout your record of ratcheting up spending on drug tasks forces and defending the death penalty.

“When they do an autopsy on Michael Jackson, they will probably find Xanax and narcotics in his system,” said McKenna, launching into a diatribe about rampant fatal overdoses caused by prescription drugs. Talking about interdicting contraband across the B.C. border, he used a balloon analogy to describe how traffickers would try to escape crackdowns by moving east or west. “When you push it down on one side it bulges out on the other side,” he said. Then, as he did on the campaign trail for reelection, he talked about how he pushed for toughening anti-meth legislation several years ago and increasing funding for 20 drug task forces (which, more than any other law enforcement division, is known for egregious tactics and baseless seizure of property). Of course, shortly after the national meth craze waned—whether due to cyclical trends in drug use or law enforcement—the prescription drug ttend picked up. To use McKenna’s own balloon analogy, it appeared that the drug of choice simply shifted from meth to something more fatal. In King County in 2007, there were 18 meth-related deaths and 151 deaths from prescription opiates (more than triple the rate of prescription opiate deaths six years prior), according to a King County Public Health and UW study. And according to another 2007 survey (.pdf), “Trend data for the helpline, fatalities and treatment admissions are all at or near highs for prescription type opiates.” Meth is nasty, horrible, no-good stuff, but it’s unclear that McKenna’s anti-meth crusade reduced drug use overall—or that the drugs people use instead are less dangerous.

McKenna next dove into today’s ruling that upheld the death penalty—McKenna had defended lethal injection and is now moving to remove the stay of execution for one of the inmates—saying that this likely opens up the door for execution of two other inmates. He noted that the expense of fighting appeal after appeal to get a death sentence ruling costs “millions of dollars” per case. Of course, it’s partly his office driving up the costs and then whining about how expensive it is. “I’d be fine with it if we had life without parole,” he said. When asked if he would use his lobby power to abolish the death penalty, as he advocated for drug legislation, he passed the buck, saying it’s up to the legislature and voters. I disagreed with that tack, which I told him, but thanked him for having us over. He's a pretty nice guy.