Drug WarRant

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

…

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.

There is a ton of nonsense floating around the media recently (a lot of it has been noted in comments here). Some of it is no doubt linked to blowback due to recent gains made by legalizers. But these dinosaurs are having a harder time finding new audiences for their nonsense. Sure, there are a few fossils who agree with them, but they’re becoming extinct.

Is There a Marathon-Marijuana Connection? by Steve Adelman, director of Physician Health Services, Inc., a corporation of the Massachusetts Medical Society.

This idiot is writing for a Medical Society Blog, no less, and yet can do nothing but wild conjecture in five different directions, all of which implicate marijuana, of course.

Numerous acquaintances of Dzhokhar describe the suspected bomber as something of a “stoner.” If he was getting high on a daily or near-daily basis, then he most certainly had THC in his brain at the time of the bombing.

On the other hand, when a chronic marijuana abuser decides to go clean, it can take 6 to 12 weeks for the THC to leave his system. As THC levels drop, chronic users can become anxious and irritable. Perhaps low-grade withdrawal symptoms played a role in irrational decision making.

But if chronic or intermittent pot-smoking remained in the picture until Patriots Day, then perhaps this most profoundly misguided of decisions was influenced by the suspect’s being under the influence. Heavy marijuana users shed IQ points, and don’t think as clearly as they did before they started bathing their brains in THC, which is there around-the-clock because of its ultra-long half-life.

Much of the reporting indicates that Dzhokhar functioned at a higher level in high school than he did in college. If so, marijuana may have played a role in “dumbing him down.” His academics may have suffered, and, in the words of his own uncle, he became, “a loser.” It isn’t easy to tolerate going from being a winner to being a loser. A pot-addled loser, with parents half a world away, might be particularly at risk for coming under the influence of a simplistic, radical ideology, foisted upon him by a domineering older brother.

Britain’s marijuana mafia: Two million users, £6bn worth of trade and 30,000 deaths. A leading author meets the men (and women) feeding the UK’s terrifying addiction

This is Daily Mail at its most outrageous (which is saying something). Of course, most of the problems they talked about were actually problems due to prohibition. But, are you curious about those 30,000 deaths? I was.

Here’s how they come up with it:

Cannabis is far from ‘safe’ despite its reputation. […]
It is also carcinogenic. The British Lung Foundation says smoking three joints a day causes similar damage to smoking 20 cigarettes a day. That would suggest that up to 30,000 people a year contract cannabis-related cancer.

Well, they’re off by about… 30,000.

Just in case you needed more proof than already exists that marijuana smoking does not increase your risks of lung cancer, here’s another study at the Oncology Report that looks at all the other studies, and finds…

Marijuana habit not linked to lung cancer

Regular cannabis smokers are no more likely to develop lung cancer than are people who indulge occasionally.

The finding of no significant increased risk held true whether the smokers imbibed once or twice – or more – each day, and regardless of how many years they had smoked, Dr. Li Rita Zhang reported at the annual meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research.

The study included data from six case-control studies conducted from 1999 to 2012 in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, with a subject pool of 2,159 lung cancer cases and 2,985 controls. All of the studies were part of the International Lung Cancer Consortium (ILCCO), an international group of lung cancer researchers with the aim of sharing comparable data from ongoing and recently completed lung cancer studies from different geographical areas and ethnicities.

No surprise here, but it seems to still be news that some folks just refuse to absorb.