Drug WarRant

Dear sons of SAM and daughters of the American prohibition; to all the treatment industry, drug testing, private prison, and sheriff union lobbyists; and, of course, to our friends who are required by law to lie:

I keep hearing from your side that you have noble motives for your opposition to marijuana legalization. I hear that all you care about is using scientific inquiry to determine what is best for the people.

However, I’m not sure if you’re aware of it, but you keep talking about things in ways that aren’t scientific, or that are meaningless without the proper context.

That kind of thing may have worked once, but in general, people are a little more sophisticated about scientific knowledge — they no longer uncritically accept “Here be dragons” for cartography or “If she floats, she’s a witch” as a judicial system.

Here are just a few of the danger signs that you may be mis-using or underutilizing scientific rigor in your discussions about marijuana legalization.

1. The invisible “user.”

You can’t discuss policy that affects all marijuana users by leaving out the actual category of marijuana users. When you discuss marijuana policy by saying we should treat instead of jail, then you’re completely ignoring the largest population — those who need neither. It’s like discussing whether to jail or require sexual assault treatment for all those who have sex — simply absurd.

2. The marijuana “addict.”

When you toss out the word “addictive” (and you do so very often), realize that the word is meaningless by itself. People talk about being addicted to Facebook, chocolate, and “Doctor Who” (what do you mean I have to wait until November 23?). Not even the top professionals in the mental health field can agree on its definition.

So if you’re going to use it, you need to put it in context, and the best way to do that is to compare with familiar things to the public, such as legal drugs like alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine. How do they compare in terms of likelihood of dependence, severity of dependence and severity of withdrawal effects? Without putting that in perspective, your use of “addictive” has absolutely no science in it at all.

Oh, and if you’re going to claim (or infer) that legalization will result in a percentage increase of “addicts” equal to the percentage increase of use, then you’d better be prepared to show some hard proof, since it’s clear that marijuana prohibition is more likely to deter casual users.

3. Scary “Carcinogens”

Don’t even think about using the word “carcinogens,” unless you’re ready to discuss the science of carcinogens and how much of our ordinary life contains carcinogens, including the air we breathe. Additionally, if you’re going to even inferentially talk about cancer and marijuana, you’d better not leave out the reams of scientific evidence that proves anti-cancer properties of marijuana.

You completely betray your claimed interest in science and the well-being of people when you cherry-pick really bad studies (like that New Zealand one) to try to declare that the outcome is still uncertain about whether marijuana causes cancer. Real scientists have done systematic reviews that include even those flawed studies and still concluded that marijuana doesn’t cause cancer.

The tragedy is that we’re spending time debunking false claims of marijuana causing cancer which distracts us from the important scientific work of learning more about how marijuana could be used to prevent or heal cancer.

4. Health concern du jour

Over the course of my life drinking coffee was good for me, then bad for me, then merely OK, then bad for me, then good for me, and never once during that time was it made illegal.

When you hear about some little health thing about marijuana, you might want to get confirmation. After all, researchers are paid to try to find things wrong with marijuana, and sometimes do, even though the results are not reproducible. This should raise red flags in particular with a substance that has been in popular use for many decades. The key phrase to ask yourself is: “Where are the bodies?”

5. Cannabis behind the wheel

Are there additional dangers due to driving under the influence of marijuana? Sure, probably. But once again here, everything is relative. There are real additional dangers of driving after your girlfriend breaks up with you, or after you get chewed out by your boss at work. You can be less than 100% on the road for a thousand different reasons. So policy should be about real comparable dangers.

Compare the actual risks of driving under the influence of marijuana with the actual risks of driving under the influence of alcohol or fatigue. As part of this, look at a comparison of the actual ways in which driving is affected by marijuana, alcohol, or fatigue.

We never see anything regarding such comparisons from you. In fact, you never even mention fatigue as a significant factor in traffic accidents (even though it’s huge), nor is there any major national effort to arrest tired drivers.

This makes all you say about marijuana and driving very suspect.

6. Correlation and Causation are two different words.

Get this one right. There are millions of people who use and have used marijuana, so there’s bound to be some strong correlations out there. Correlations are interesting, and may be a reason to do further study, but generally, they are not, of themselves, a reason to act.

For example, marijuana use has been linked to Nobel Prizes, the U.S. Presidency, and Olympic Gold Medals. That doesn’t mean that marijuana use is going to cause you to get any of those things.

….

So, that’s just six items. There are more, I’m sure, but if you’ll work on getting these correct, we’ll have a lot less disagreement.

A friend of mine who writes under the handle of “Occasionally Wrong” has a podcast that he uses whenever there’s a topic that makes him mad, and he invited me to join him on his newest episode: Am I Mad? Episode 7: It’s ok to admit the Drug War sucks.

We chatted for about 20 minutes about what happens after drug legalization, and another 20 minutes on the problems with political parties.

I really don’t like listening to my own voice, so I haven’t listened to it yet, but I had fun doing it.

“Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use…” – President Jimmy Carter to Congress, August 2, 1977.

The Drug Policy Alliance has created a new document; An Exit Strategy for the Failed War on Drugs: A Federal Legislative Guide

The report basically recognizes that after decades of incorporating the drug war into the very fabric of the federal government, the U.S. needs more than just an understanding that the drug war has failed, but it actually needs an exit strategy. The Drug Policy Alliance provides 75 concrete actions that could be taken to help the federal government exit this failed drug war.

Here are some examples:

• Eliminate abstinence-only zero tolerance policies.
• Make harm reduction a cornerstone of U.S. drug policy.
• Allow states to reform their drug policies without federal interference.
• Reform the 1961, 1971 and 1988 U.N. treaties on narcotics drugs and support the rights of other countries to set their own drug policies.
  Reform civil asset forfeiture laws.
• Limit the Drug Enforcement Administration’s authority over the practice of medicine.
• Restore voting rights to formerly incarcerated individuals and people on parole and probation.
• Eliminate random, suspicionless drug testing of most federal employees and reform the Drug-Free Workplace Act.
• Sunset drug war programs.
• Eliminate or cut subsidies to local law enforcement agencies for drug enforcement activities.
• Prohibit federal agencies from undermining state marijuana laws.
• Repeal federal mandatory minimum sentencing.
• Reform federal provisions prohibiting people convicted of a drug law violation from accessing public housing, and prohibit federal housing authorities from punishing entire families for the action of one family member.
• Encourage and allow for the establishment of supervised injection facilities.

Of course, most of these on their own are totally insufficient to eliminate or even significantly reduce the harms of the drug war, but you’re looking at such a daunting task as dismantling the federal drug war machine, it helps to have a defined set of concrete steps that can be taken.

This is one useful document among many. The Exit Strategy doesn’t, for example, provide a look at how legalization might be structured. For that, we turn to Transform’s excellent After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation

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Speaking of legalization, thanks to Allan for providing us with a link to the draft regulations for selling marijuana in Washington State.

I think I got through about half of it before complete boredom set in (although there were a few light moments such as the example of a regulation-proper label for “Space Cakes”). I found myself wondering if they would be this exruciatingly, mind-numbingly detailed about the regulations for producing plutonium, and wanted to ask “Did anyone tell them this is just about pot?”

I thought for sure that nobody could top the idiocy of Steve Adelman who danced a jig around the possibilities of marijuana’s involvement in the Boston tragedy.

But here comes DuPont. Lessons from Boston bombings about marijuana, education

While Jahar’s marijuana use did not directly make him a terrorist, it closed the door to his dreams of being an engineer or physician and it opened the door to his suicidal violence

Really? And you know this… how? And yes, at first, I thought that DuPont had topped Adelman on the stupid scale. But no, it turns out it’s not stupdity after all. Remember that DuPont is in the drug testing business…

Human loss is particularly onerous if it is avoidable.

What if Jahar had been required to take drug tests to obtain and maintain a driver’s license? Might he have changed his behavior if faced with real and immediate certain consequences for his drug use? What about the tens of thousands of kids nationwide who are caught in similar drug-induced downward spirals? New technologies make minimally intrusive drug testing part of a practical approach to preventing and identifying drug problems early. Can our society afford to ignore the measures that are available to encourage young people to find positive drug-free directions for their lives?

Yes, that’s right. DuPont is telling lies and trading on those who died in Boston to promote drug testing to increase his own profits.

That’s as low as you can go.

In Mexico, restrictions on U.S. agents signal drug war shift

Peña Nieto’s decision to limit the ability of American agents to operate in Mexico has been met with dismay by U.S. law enforcement agencies, which left a heavy footprint under the previous administration of Felipe Calderon. They warn that intelligence sharing will suffer if they can no longer choose which Mexican force — the army, navy or federal police — to give sensitive information to; they’ve been instructed to now funnel everything through Mexico’s Interior Ministry instead.

The agents also caution that the personal relationships developed under Calderon will fray if they are no longer welcome to work side by side with trusted partners at sites such as the joint command centers where Americans helped spy on Mexican narcotics traffickers and direct operations against them.

Yeah, they don’t want to be bothered by little details like the fact that Mexico is a sovereign nation. They just want to run the drug war their own way and get their own Mexican agents working for them, rather than working for… Mexico.

The same is true here in the United States where the DEA for years has worked to undermine local and state government authority in the drug war through joint task forces and the so-called “equitable sharing” of forfeitures.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, this is quite a wonderful thing to see in Congress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yAcEH6ZbNwI

In Meridian, Idaho, Mayor Tammy de Weerd has taken it upon herself to use tax dollars to spread Reefer Madness to her constituents.

By Executive Order, Tammy established the Mayor’s Anti-Drug Coalition (MADC), which received $625,000 from a Drug-Free Community Grant through the federal government.

Tammy doesn’t like marijuana much. Note one of her recent blog posts (on the official city website).

It is clear that Idaho is a target of pro-marijuana organizations; as communities we need to take a stand against this occurring […] In addition, we are asking the State Legislature and Governor to send a Joint Memorial to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder requesting the federal government take appropriate action to enforce federal drug laws in all states and uphold international treaties relating to the control of illegal drugs in the world.

When the time comes, I hope you will stand with us against efforts to legalize marijuana.

Now a Meridian resident notes that the town has been distributing these anti-marijuana leaflets inserted in the water bill!

Front (click on images for larger version):

Inside:

The flyer is full of discredited nonsense, exaggeration, and misdirection. Remember, this is a city government, most likely using federal grant money, to send false information about a political issue in official communications to their citizens. We ought to be outraged.

If only we weren’t so used to being lied to by the government when it comes to the drug war.

… which is really becoming another word for “idiotic.”

Via Hit and Run

Paul said he believes in freedom and wants a “virtuous society” where people practice “self-restraint.” Yet he believes in laws and limits as well. Instead of advocating for legalized drugs, for example, he pushes for reduced penalties for many drug offenses.

“I’m not advocating everyone go out and run around with no clothes on and smoke pot,” [Rand] said. “I’m not a libertarian. I’m a libertarian Republican. I’m a constitutional conservative.”

“He made it very clear that he does not support legalization of drugs like marijuana and that he supports traditional marriage,” [said Brad Sherman of the Solid Rock Christian Church in Coralville, Iowa].

You don’t have to advocate it. You just have to stop arresting people for it. (And there are times and places where running around with no clothes on and smoking pot is a perfectly acceptable thing.)

Tourist cannabis cafe ban leads to surge in dealing in the south

The government’s decision to turn the cafes into members’ only clubs in the southern provinces last May led to a sharp rise in street dealing, the paper says. It bases its claim on police and city council figures.

In Maastricht, at the forefront of efforts to reduce drugs tourism, the number of drugs crimes has doubled over the past year while in Roermond they are up three-fold with at least 60 active street dealers, the AD says.

Gee, who could have guessed that would happen?

Generally saner heads prevail…

Officials in Amsterdam and many other towns have already said they will not implement the ban on tourists and will instead take advantage of the legal provision for a ‘tailor-made’ approach to the marijuana trade.

The question has never been about whether people will buy and sell cannabis. The question is only who will be doing it and where. If you care at all about the second question, then you really have no choice but to be in favor of legalization.