Drug WarRant

Some new bills being introduced in Congress, starting tomorrow. The DEA won’t be happy.

Effort building to change US pot laws

Polis’ measure would regulate marijuana the way the federal government handles alcohol: In states that legalize pot, growers would have to obtain a federal permit. Oversight of marijuana would be removed from the Drug Enforcement Administration and given to the newly renamed Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Marijuana and Firearms…

Oh, I like that. Don’t see much reason for a federal permit (seems like guidelines for state permits would be sufficient), but I really like getting the DEA out of the business.

Of course, this is still just a bill being proposed by a couple of Representatives and doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing… yet, but knowing that it’s being discussed in Congress? That’s huge.

Michelle Alexander in the New York Times: Why Police Officers Lie Under Oath

Mr. Keane, in his Chronicle article, offered two major reasons the police lie so much. First, because they can. Police officers “know that in a swearing match between a drug defendant and a police officer, the judge always rules in favor of the officer.” At worst, the case will be dismissed, but the officer is free to continue business as usual. Second, criminal defendants are typically poor and uneducated, often belong to a racial minority, and often have a criminal record. “Police know that no one cares about these people,” Mr. Keane explained.

All true, but there is more to the story than that.

Police departments have been rewarded in recent years for the sheer numbers of stops, searches and arrests. In the war on drugs, federal grant programs like the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program have encouraged state and local law enforcement agencies to boost drug arrests in order to compete for millions of dollars in funding. Agencies receive cash rewards for arresting high numbers of people for drug offenses, no matter how minor the offenses or how weak the evidence. Law enforcement has increasingly become a numbers game. And as it has, police officers’ tendency to regard procedural rules as optional and to lie and distort the facts has grown as well.

We give law enforcement an extraordinary amount of power over citizens. Because of that, it is even more essential that their integrity be beyond reproach.

If there was no other reason to end the drug war, this would be sufficient — to reduce the culture and incentives that lead to law enforcement corruption and that break down the sense of trust between police and community.

Item 1: Los Angeles Times publishes an excellent editorial: The DEA’s marijuana mistake

But guess who bears responsibility for this level of ignorance? The DEA itself, which through its ultra-tight restrictions on marijuana has made it nearly impossible for researchers to obtain the drug for study, and the National Institute for Drug Abuse, which controls the availability of the tiny quantity of research-grade marijuana that is federally approved for production.

Item 2: The DEA responds: The DEA’s pot defense [Blowback] by Robert Bonner – full of deceptions and misdirections.

And yet the editorial is based on the myth that the DEA has made it “nearly impossible” for researchers to obtain marijuana for such scientific studies. To the contrary, not a single scientifically valid study by a qualified researcher has ever been denied by the DEA or, for that matter, by the National Institute of Drug Abuse. And there is ample government-grown marijuana, specifically for research, available at the marijuana farm run by the University of Mississippi. More surprising, as your editorial points out, is that there is still no scientifically valid study that proves that marijuana is effective, much less safe, as a medicine. […]

Essentially, I invited those who advocate marijuana use as a medicine to conduct research and then present it to the DEA. I laid out a road map for what they needed to do. If scientifically valid studies demonstrated that marijuana was “effective” and “safe,” as the FDA defines those terms, the agency would reclassify marijuana into one of the other schedules. It is amazing that 20 years later there is still no such scientific study establishing that marijuana is effective as a medicine. And yet in the interim, the well-funded marijuana lobby, including the National Assn. for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and others, have spent tens of millions of dollars on convincing voters to pass medical marijuana initiatives based on anecdotes but not science. […]

One can only conclude the marijuana proponents did not go this route because doing so would have shown that cannabis is not an effective and safe medicine. Alternatively, we are left to conclude that their agenda was not about marijuana to help sick people, but rather was getting voters to pass medical marijuana initiatives as a wedge to legalize the drug for “recreational” use.

Item 3: Noted scientist Rick Doblin (of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)) responds.

I have put my full energies for the last 20+ years into trying to conduct FDA-approved medical marijuana drug development research. Unfortunately, my experience, to which I hope you will give some credence, is exactly opposite of the open door to research that you claim exists. MAPS has obtained FDA and IRB approval for three different protocols to which NIDA refused to sell any marijuana, preventing the studies from taking place. In addition, NIDA refused for 7 years to sell MAPS 10 grams (!!) of marijuana for laboratory research investigating the vapors that come out of the Volcano vaporizer, compared to smoke from combusted marijuana.

Furthermore, MAPS has been involved for the last decade in litigation against DEA for refusing to license Prof. Craker, UMass Amherst, to grow marijuana exclusively for use in federally regulated research. In 2007, DEA Administrative Law Judge Bittner recommended, after extensive hearings with witness testimony, that it would be in the public interest for DEA to license Prof. Craker to grow marijuana under contract to MAPS, ending the NIDA monopoly on the supply of marijuana legal for use in FDA-regulated studies. DEA waited for almost two years and then rejected the ALJ recommendation just six days before the inauguration of Pres. Obama. On May 11, 2012, oral arguments took place before the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in a lawsuit by Prof. Craker challenging DEA’s rationale for rejecting the DEA ALJ recommendation. A ruling is currently pending from the 1st Circuit. From my perspective, DEA’s rationale for rejecting the DEA ALJ recommendation is arbitrary and capricious, but of course what matters is what the 1st Circuit will eventually decide. […]

My conclusion is opposite of yours, when you said, “One can only conclude the marijuana proponents did not go this route because doing so would have shown that cannabis is not an effective and safe medicine.”

Rather, one can only conclude that privately-funded medical marijuana drug development research is being aggressively and actively obstructed by DEA/NIDA/PHS because they know it can be scientifically proven that marijuana, smoked or vaporized, is both safe and effective.

They used to want to watch kids pee in a cup. Now school officials have moved on to voodoo. They want a lock of kids’ hair in order to control them.

High School To Collect Students’ Hair For Mandatory Drug Testing

The school will collect 60 strands of hair from the student and test for several types of drugs, including marijuana and cocaine. If a student comes back with a positive drug test, that student will have 90 days to get drug-free.

Via Glenn Greenwald, who noted:

Training high school students to be meek subjects of authoritarian power: mandatory hair collection for drug tests http://t.co/I8qQorjn

The excellent Maia Szalavitz takes on Project Sam: The New Weed Whackers

In fact, I can’t really get my head around why people who have suffered addiction would support criminalization—especially people like Kennedy whose top talking point is that addiction is a disease. For one, isn’t the very fact that they themselves got addicted evidence of the failure of current drug policy? If prohibition worked as prevention, illegal drug addicts wouldn’t have a story of their own to tell.

Second, if arresting and incarcerating users is essential to effective treatment, why argue that addiction is a disease? No one says we should arrest diabetics for failing to take their insulin or heart patients who don’t exercise. Nor is anyone calling for jailing obese people caught within 500 feet of a McDonald’s or criminalizing the possession of non-diet soda, despite New Yorkers’ complaints about Mayor Bloomberg’s “nanny state.”

I know we’ve already pretty thoroughly dismantled Sabet and Kennedy’s efforts here, but it’s still nice to see this particular take-down.

An excellent post at the New Amsterdam Psychedelic Law Blog: The meaning of the DEA’s recent victory in ASA v DEA

The article posits that petitioners made a mistake by attempting to show that the DEA’s requirements for determining that marijuana had an established medical use had been met, when in fact, the DEA makes that threshold impossible to meet through a procedure that is not legal. They should have instead attacked the DEA’s capricious rules.

Once you accept the standard designed by the DEA to keep cannabis and other psychedelics prohibited forever, just give up. Such an approach is a disaster, as the Court’s holding demonstrates. The DEA operates in a parallel universe of legal sophistry, a labyrinth of obfuscation and denial, the purpose of which is to maintain cannabis prohibition as an expression of an ideological position as to the nature of “mental health” and “mental illness.” […]

The DEA promulgated a regulation requiring that a petition to reschedule cannabis show that there is a CAMUIT [currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States]. There is no basis whatsoever for that standard anywhere in the Controlled Substances Act. The DEA created it out of thin air. It is actually directly contrary to the CSA. The CSA does not require proof of medical use before conducting a hearing. It’s an obvious matter of logic: whether there is a medical use is determined at the hearing on the petition and therefore it cannot be the threshold issue in the petition for initiating the hearing. It is the conclusion to be reached through consideration of evidence.

Interesting. Worth doing a little more reading on the subject. I’d love to see the DEA challenged directly on the arbitariness of it procedures in a willing court.

Russ Belville: A Response to Kevin Sabet’s ‘A Response to Steven Chapman’s ‘The War on Pot: Not a Safe Bet”

An entertaining takedown by Russ Belville. He hits all the top Sabet talking points quite nicely.

Anthony Johnson at National Cannabis Coalition catches this one:

When asked by HuffPost Washington Bureau Chief Ryan Grim why we keep marijuana illegal, Chabot responded: “Why do we keep heroin, LSD, prostitution, child pornography illegal?”

If Paul Chabot doesn’t know the difference between laws against marijuana and laws against exploiting children to make child porn, then perhaps he needs to be placed on one of those registries.

…

And in case you were wondering, the title of this post refers to child pornography, not marijuana. For what should be obvious reaasons.

http://youtu.be/lVf0xrVMU6A

Clearly the UK is no better at making anti-drug ads than the ONDCP. (Frank, BTW, is essentially the UK equivalent of an ONDCP mascot.)

Check out these others.

This is a comment by Transform’s Steve Rolles in response to a particular article, but it would be appropriate as a response for just about any argument against legalization.

Neil McKeganey’s key concern with legalisation and regulation of drugs appears to be his assumption that use and abuse would rise. This is a legitimate concern, but itself assumes punitive prohibitions are an effective deterrent – the evidence for which is strikingly weak.

McKeganey provides none. Comparisons between countries with different enforcement regimes show no clear pattern, nor is there evidence that increasing penalties decreases use, or vice versa. The influences on drug misuse appear to be mostly social, cultural and economic; with enforcement policy having, at best, a small impact.

And this, of course, is the heart of the matter. After eliminating those whose arguments in favor of criminalization are self-serving, every other argument against legalization boils down to the assumption that legalization, regardless of the levels of regulation involved, necessarily means significantly higher levels of abuse than a criminalization model.

And we are somehow supposed to ignore the fact that after decades of experimentation with criminalization, there is no hard evidence of this supposed fact.

On our side of the argument, on the other hand, are reams of documented evidence of the harms of criminalization.

It’s really a no-brainer.