Arizona court rules on DUI law for marijuana users

PHOENIX (AP) — Authorities can’t prosecute Arizona motorists for driving under the influence of marijuana unless the person is impaired at the time of the stop, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in the latest opinion on an issue that several states have grappled with across the nation.

The ruling overturned a state Court of Appeals decision last year that upheld the right of authorities to prosecute pot smokers for DUI even when there is no evidence of impairment.

The opinion focuses on two chemical compounds in marijuana that show up in blood and urine tests — one that causes impairment and one that doesn’t but stays in a pot user’s system for weeks. [...]

Tuesday’s state Supreme Court opinion removed that threat in explaining that while state statute makes it illegal for a driver to be impaired by marijuana, the presence of a non-psychoactive compound does not constitute impairment under the law.

(he hasn’t taken it yet, but this would be good…)

The news: U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to pardon “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of federal drug inmates before leaving office. That number might not seem so big. But it’s historic in executive terms. In fact, reports indicate that the potential number will be well above the norm for an outgoing president and may even approach levels not seen since President Gerald Ford gave mass clemency to draft dodgers after the Vietnam War.

According to Yahoo News, the initiative to pardon non-violent drug offenders will be so big that “administration officials are preparing a series of personnel and process changes to help them manage the influx of petitions they expect Obama to approve.”

I was a bit puzzled by this article: If You Support Legal Marijuana, Memorize These 13 Stats

Here are the stats (and each one goes on to describe that it’s a projected tax revenue for some state or the potential market somewhere, or something like that).

• $1.53 billion
• $10.2 billion
• $6.17 million
• $98 million
• $40 million
• 7,500-10,000
• $190 million
• $105 million
• $142.19 million
• $36 million
• $21.5 to $82 million
• $134.6 million
• $17.4 billion

I read it all, and, you know what? I didn’t care. None of that made a stinking bit of difference to me. Maybe there are some people out there whose minds would be changed by these numbers. But personally, I would throw all those out and just remember one word:

This is, of course, a special day.  That is true whether you are celebrating the resurrection of humanity’s Savior a couple thousand years ago, or enjoing a plant that humanity has celebrated for a couple thousand years. Or both.  Can it really be a coincidence that Easter falls on 4/20 in the year that Colorado, Washington, and Uruguay all legalized cannabis?

These two things have more in common than one might think. After all, the existential epiphanies one encounters through a religious experience are not dissimilar to the existential epiphanies that can be enjoyed through the properties of cannabis, and both can help induce a state of both excitement and peace.

Of course, over the years, many humans who represent organized religion have tried to claim that being a good Christian is incompatible with drug use. And yet… Jesus drank wine.

As a kid, raised in the church, the son of a preacher who believed even ocassional use of alcohol was a sin, I asked about the fact that Jesus turned water into wine. I was told something to the effect that most water at that time was dangerous to drink due to contamination, so wine was necessary and safer, while today, we have modern purification processes and don’t need to drink wine. A gullible kid, I accepted that, until later in life, when I asked “Hey, wait a second. Couldn’t Jesus have turned water into clean water? Certainly he was as powerful as Brita!  No, he must have chosen wine for a reason.”  Even at his last supper, Christ drank wine with his apostles. Drug use was an important part of sharing and coming together as friends.

(On a side note, I think it’s also telling that Christ was extremely harsh on those who abused the financial system for their own self-interest, while he was much more likely to be friends with, and providing help to, the fringes of society — the exact opposite of our judiciary today.)

Throughout history, mild drug use has served to bring people together, to foster friendships, to stimulate creativity and dialogue, and to celebrate peaceful coexistence. These things are clearly not at all incompatible with being a good Christian.

Yes, there are those who abuse drugs, just as there are those who abuse religion. Both can have the power to be extremely dangerous when misused, and it makes sense that we don’t want the irresponsible ones to harm others. However, we should never condemn all those who use drugs because of the self-destructive behavior of a few, any more than we should condemn all those who believe in Christ because of the bigoted and violently hateful actions of some who proclaim themselves to be Christians.

Have a euphoric and safe Easter this 4/20.

So, of course, everyone in the media has been gushing about the study that proves that even casual pot smoking damages the brain. Of course, that’s not even close to what the study showed, even if you accept the study itself as legitimate.

The people who really know, know better.

Here’s John Gever, Deputy Managing Editor, MedPage Today: Striking a Nerve: Bungling the Cannabis Story

Correlation does not equal causation, and a single exam cannot show a trend over time. Basic stuff, right?

But judging by coverage of a study just out in the Journal of Neuroscience, these are apparently foreign concepts for many folks in the media. [...]

Sad to say, the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), which publishes the Journal of Neuroscience, may have driven these dramatic overinterpretations by promoting the study in a press release headlined “Brain changes are associated with casual marijuana use in young adults.”

Also note that the study did not identify any cognitive or behavioral abnormalities in the cannabis users versus controls — it was strictly an MRI study.

That, however, didn’t stop senior author Hans Breiter, MD, of Northwestern from opining in the SfN press release that the study “raises a strong challenge to the idea that casual marijuana use isn’t associated with bad consequences.”

Um, no, it doesn’t — not without before-and-after MRI scans showing brain structure changes in users that differ from nonusers and documentation of functional impairments associated with those changes.

Lior Pachter, a computational biologist, was even harsher about the actual science: Does researching casual marijuana use cause brain abnormalities?

This is quite possibly the worst paper I’ve read all year (as some of my previous blog posts show I am saying something with this statement). [...]

First of all, the study has a very small sample size, with only 20 “cases” (marijuana users), a fact that is important to keep in mind in what follows. The title uses the term “recreational users” to describe them, and in the press release accompanying the article Breiter says that “Some of these people only used marijuana to get high once or twice a week. People think a little recreational use shouldn’t cause a problem, if someone is doing OK with work or school. Our data directly says this is not the case.” In fact, the majority of users in the study were smoking more than 10 joints per week. There is even a person in the study smoking more than 30 joints per week (as disclosed above, I’m not an expert on this stuff but if 30 joints per week is “recreation” then it seems to me that person is having a lot of fun). More importantly, Breiter’s statement in the press release is a lie. There is no evidence in the paper whatsoever, not even a tiny shred, that the users who were getting high once or twice a week were having any problems.

Pachter then gets into an analysis of the study’s bad math (which is completely out of my knowledge base and totally over my head, so I can’t really comment on it, but it sounds damning.

And finally:

This issue is one of the oldest in the book. There is even a wikipedia entry about it. Correlation does not imply causation. Yet despite the fact the every result in the paper is directed at testing for association, in the last sentence of the abstract they say “These data suggest that marijuana exposure, even in young recreational users, is associated with exposure-dependent alterations of the neural matrix of core reward structures and is consistent with animal studies of changes in dendritic arborization.” At a minimum, such a result would require doing a longitudinal study. Breiter takes this language to an extreme in the press release accompanying the article. I repeat the statement he made that I quoted above where I boldface the causal claim: “”Some of these people only used marijuana to get high once or twice a week. People think a little recreational use shouldn’t cause a problem, if someone is doing OK with work or school. Our data directly says this is not the case.” I believe that scientists should be sanctioned for making public statements that directly contradict the content of their papers, as appears to be the case here.

Agreed.

Tonight (Thursday) at 8:00 pm, I’ll be speaking at the University of Illinois chapter of Young Americans for Liberty. Topic: The Drug War’s Assault on Liberty. I’ll be covering a number of topics, followed by a Q and A. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you.

This is an open thread.