Drug WarRant

Over at Westword.com there are some good articles regarding current efforts in Colorado to set a THC driving limit at five nanograms per milliliter of blood — a level that, while better than the per-se laws in states like Illinois (where any detection of THC qualifies as impairment), is still far too low for many people, particularly regular medical marijuana users.

THC driving limits could cause more innocent people to spend months in jail, attorney says explores the problems of testing, the long delays in tests, and the fact that too few people in the criminal justice system have been trained to understand them.

The document above also illustrates another issue that would be amplified by the passage of a THC driving limits bill, in Bresee’s opinion. The results listed under the test name “Blood Cannabinoid Confirmation” read, “Delta-9-THC-COOH 30 ng/ml,” which suggest that the driver in question had a THC level six times higher than the proposed intoxication limit. But that’s not true, since the THC-COOH reading measures “the amount of THC that is stored in fatty tissue cells, but that isn’t active,” Bresee says.

​Department of heath tests later showed that the amount of active THC in the driver’s system (usually listed on forms as “Delta-9-THC,” sans the COOH) was six nanograms. And a private test that Bresee says is more accurate than ones the state runs — its methodology utilizes liquid, not gas, as does the CDPHE’s lab — registered the amount at just 1.5 nanograms.

Confused? So are many prosecutors, Bresee believes. […]

In one case set in a small eastern Colorado county, Bresee says it took him more than nine months to make a prosecutor understand the relevance of active versus inactive THC.

THC blood test: Pot critic William Breathes nearly 3 times over proposed limit when sober – in this article, a medical marijuana patient has his blood tested after a night of sleep and not smoking marijuana for 15 hours.

Even when deemed sober by a doctor, my active THC levels were almost triple the proposed standard of 5 nanograms per milliliter of blood.[…]

The lab ran a serum/plasma test which showed my THC count to be at 27. According to Dr. Alan Shackelford, who ordered the blood work and evaluated my results, the number of active THC nanograms per milliliter count is about half of that total, or 13.5 nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood.

In short: If this bill passes and I was pulled over by police, I would be over the limit by 8.5 nanograms. By that logic, I would be more likely to have mowed down a family in my car on my way to the doctor’s office that day than actually arriving there safely. But I didn’t — because I wasn’t impaired.

Don’t take my word for it. According to Shackelford, who evaluated me before writing the order to have my blood drawn last Wednesday, I was “in no way incapacitated.” According to him, my test results show that it would not be uncommon to see such a high level in other people who use cannabis regularly — like medical marijuana patients. “Your level was about 13.5 for whole blood… which would have made you incapacitated on a lab value,” he said. “They need to vote this sucker down based on that alone.”

I’m all in favor of getting drivers off the road when they’re impaired, but a test that doesn’t actually determine impairment and will sweep up non-impaired drivers into the net is not at all helpful.

It seems to me that the best option may be a combination of videotaped field roadside sobriety tests plus blood testing, along with good judgement. The notion that at at x nanograms you’re OK, but x+1 nanograms and you’re impaired (particularly when that result can mean years of prison) is absurd.

Now if you have a videotaped sobriety test and the driver is staggering around with slurred speech and eye-hand coordination problems and the test comes in with significant THC presence, then I think a judge or jury can readily determine impairment. If, on the other hand, the person seems able to perform all requested sobriety tasks competently despite having a high THC blood level, and perhaps is able to show through subsequent testing that her regular use (as a patient or not) brings her levels up higher, then a judge or jury can rightly say that she was not impaired.

These are human beings, not machines.

Since the cause of most crashes is fatigue, I wonder why the legislature isn’t setting a legal limit on the levels of adenosine in the body.

So you’ve held the Drug Czar job for a couple of years, now. Is lying to the public non-stop about destructive drug policies everything you’d hoped for?

Chicago

President Barack Obama‘s drug czar is among the contenders to become the first Chicago police superintendent in Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel‘s administration, the Chicago News Cooperative has learned.

Gil Kerlikowske, whose formal title is director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, met last week with Emanuel in Chicago and was in town again over the weekend for an interview with the police board, sources told the CNC.

Looking to jump ship? Wash your hands of Mexico?

Hmmm… not surprised. It seems to me that Kerlikowske is merely an unprincipled liar, not a true believer like Walters was.

1. Drug-free

A drug-free world for future generations in the Sri Lanka Sunday Observer

Drug-related social issues have become a topic of discussion not only in media, but also among individuals in various social strata. The Mathata Thitha concept of President Mahinda Rajapaksa was formulated for eradicating the drug menace from our motherland.

Fortunately, we don’t see this term much any more. The U.S. 1986 crime bill said that we’d be drug-free by 1995. Newt Gingrich then said we’d be drug-free by 2001. And the U.N. was ultimately embarrassed by its bold claim that the world would be drug-free by 2008.

Even organizations like Partnership for a Drug Free America and the Drug Free America Foundation seem to just be keep their obsolete names without really believing that such a thing is possible.

It’s a laughable concept. Drug-free? What do you mean? Aspirin is a drug. Caffeine is a drug. Medical science uses drugs like they’re water (I believe my dad takes 16 pills a day, required by his doctors). Your body manufactures drugs.

In an attempt to understand the morons who use the “drug-free” term, well, maybe they mean that “drug-free” is shorthand. Maybe it really is supposed to stand for the more awkward “free of currently-illicit drugs.” OK, let’s examine that. People have been using currently illicit drugs for millennia and will continue do so as clearly evidenced by the absolute failure of any prohibition scheme to put a dent in use.

But wait! I have a solution. I can give you your drug-free world (if it means “free of currently-illicit drugs”) in one easy step. Legalize. Voila! No more currently-illicit drugs being used.

2. Blood cocaine

Aussie cocaine users have the blood of Mexican drug war victims on their hands – ACC boss

AUSTRALIANS who use cocaine have the blood of those slain in the Mexican drug wars on their hands, according to the head of the Australian Crime Commission (ACC).

ACC chief executive John Lawler says cocaine is freely available on Australian streets and police are making record levels of arrests.

But he says those using the “blood cocaine” were indirectly supporting the drug cartels responsible for slaying tens of thousands of Mexicans.

The Mexican government estimates about 35,000 police officers, gang members and bystanders have died since 2006 in the nation’s battle to eradicate the drug cartels.

This type of ridiculous claim has been made many times before — think ONDCP Superbowl ads after 9/11, where they tried to tie drug-use with terrorism.

Yes, if you eliminated all drug use, you would wipe out the cartels’ profits. And if you eliminated all sex, you would wipe out STD’s. Neither concept can exist in the real world.

The truth is, John Lawler is trying to deflect the fact that he and the rest of the drug war apparatus is what’s responsible for the destruction in Mexico.

If cocaine was regulated, this wouldn’t happen.

This isn’t even a tough choice situation. When it comes to produce, some people buy “organic,” while a lot of people aren’t interested in going that route or paying a few extra pennies and so buy non-organically produced produce. A few people support environmental efforts by purchasing toilet paper made from recycled paper, while many others really want their Charmin.

When it comes to currently illicit drugs, if a legal option was available that wasn’t priced completely out of reach, people would overwhelmingly choose the legal option, cutting off the money supply to the criminals.

John Lawler tries further to justify his deflection…

“I’d like to pose to (cocaine users) the question, if it were an egg they were consuming that had been grown in a battery environment, would they consume it?” Mr Lawler asked.

Perhaps an Australian can clue us in to what Lawler means by “battery environment.” It’s not a term familiar to me, but I can guess that it means some kind of illicit situation perhaps related to violence (and not electrical storage containers).

Well you can bet your sweet ass that if eggs were illegal, Australians would be consuming them, regardless of where they were “grown.” They would be as indiscriminate as goannas seeking out those succulent chicken embryos for breakfast. And they would then rub their bellies in satisfaction with a clear conscience while fully and rightly blaming the government for the tragic and unnecessary “battery environment” its stupid laws were fueling.

The Economist had a hard-hitting piece about how the drug war in Mexico has spilled into the smaller countries of Central America like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Whatever the weaknesses of the Mexican state, it is a Leviathan compared with the likes of Guatemala or Honduras. Large areas of Guatemala—including some of its prisons—are out of the government’s control; and, despite the efforts of its president, the government is infiltrated by the mafia. The countries of Central America’s northern triangle (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) are now among the most violent places on earth, deadlier even than most conventional war zones. So weak are their judicial systems that in Guatemala, for example, only one murder in 20 is punished.

And, of course, it is the U.S. drug war that is making it harder for these countries to function as they should (or to prioritize their efforts on helping their people). The Economist makes the conclusion quite clear:

But the Central American governments are not solely responsible for the countries’ problems. The drugs policies of the United States are also to blame. And, to cap it all, climate change—to which the unfortunate Central Americans have contributed virtually nothing—seems to be increasing the ferocity of nature in the isthmus. Catastrophic flooding is killing people with increasing frequency, and raising the cost of maintaining infrastructure.

When the guerrilla wars of the 1970s and 1980s ended, Americans forgot about Central America. It is time they remembered it again, and offered some help. They could, for example, lead an aid programme that would tie money for roads, ports and security hardware to increases in the tax take to pay for better security and social conditions.

Such schemes will not, however, solve the fundamental problem: that as long as drugs that people want to consume are prohibited, and therefore provided by criminals, driving the trade out of one bloodstained area will only push it into some other godforsaken place. But unless and until drugs are legalised, that is the best Central America can hope to do.

Glenn Greenwald is one of the most important writers in America today, and if you don’t follow him regularly, you’re missing out. Although politically he’s often considered on the “Left,” the civil liberties issues he covers are, like the drug war, not so much “Right” vs. “Left” as they are right vs. wrong. He believes in liberty and justice for all and will take on anyone who perverts that standard, regardless of the letter following their name.

He had a post a few days ago discussing The two-tiered justice system – “the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system.”

It’s quite compelling, and in a companion video, filmed by the ACLU of Massachusetts, he takes you down the path that has created this two-tiered system, from the pardon of Richard Nixon all the way to the telecom immunity, the lack of torture investigations, and the lack of prosecutions in the financial crisis…

And when you juxtipose that full scale immunity with the fact that America has the world’s largest and most oppressive penal state, where ordinary Americans are subjected to the harshest punishment for the pettiest and most trivial of crimes — that don’t really trigger imprisonment anywhere else — and the incredibly harsh conditions of those prisons, what we really have is exactly what the founders said was the most threatening to freedom, which is, not equal treatment under the law, but a completely distinct and separate justice system based on one’s status and power.

We cannot forget that the drug war is specifically tied to that two-tiered justice system. We cannot be a truly free nation if people who commit torture are given a free pass while those who grow cannabis are sent away for decades.

Having a tough time finding time to post right now, operating on a severe lack of sleep.

Having a good time, though. I’m faculty advisor for a college student group called Theatre of Ted. They do underground open-mic-style theatre every Saturday night at midnight along with other events. One annual thing they do is sponsor a Four-Square Marathon for Student Scholarships. Four-square? The grade school playground game? Yes, but the students here have their own style and rules.

The way the marathon works is that they keep at least one court going night and day, while getting people to pledge $1 or $.50 per hour based on how long it’ll go, as well as getting direct donations. They started Wednesday at 5 pm and have gone 38 hours so far at the time of this posting. They’re hoping to break last year’s record of 64 hours, which would mean continuing until sometime Saturday morning.

I’m there through all the nighttime hours to keep an eye on things, as well as cooking grilled cheese sandwiches and breakfast sandwiches for them on the griddle.

I’m also a member of one of the fundraising teams (team #8) and if you think it would be a fun thing to help out some outstanding students raise money to create their own scholarship fund, here’s your chance. You can donate directly online with credit card (add 8 cents to the donation so my team gets credit).

Discuss what you like.

… from NarcoNews TV

Now, don’t get too excited… it was one judge in Ontario, Canada. And he’s given the government 3 months to fix the problem.

But still…

Ontario judge declares criminalization of pot unconstitutional

Ontario is one step closer to the legalization of marijuana after the Ontario Superior Court struck down two key parts of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act that prohibit the possession and production of pot.

The court declared the rules that govern medical marijuana access and the prohibitions laid out in Sections 4 and 7 of the act “constitutionally invalid and of no force and effect” on Monday, effectively paving the way for legalization.

If the government does not respond within 90 days with a successful delay or re-regulation of marijuana, the drug will be legal to possess and produce in Ontario, where the decision is binding.

This all stems from medical marijuana. The judge ruled that since the government has not come up with a good way for people to obtain medical marijuana, nor provided the necessary guidance to help doctors utilizing the federal medical marijuana program, it’s forcing people to crime, and that was the rather unusual basis behind the ruling.

Star: In an April 11 ruling, Justice Donald Taliano found that doctors across the country have “massively boycotted” the medical marijuana program and largely refuse to sign off on forms giving sick people access to necessary medication.

As a result, legitimately sick people cannot access medical marijuana through appropriate means and must resort to illegal actions.

Doctors’ “overwhelming refusal to participate in the medicinal marijuana program completely undermines the effectiveness of the program,” the judge wrote in his ruling.

“The effect of this blind delegation is that seriously ill people who need marijuana to treat their symptoms are branded criminals simply because they are unable to overcome the barriers to legal access put in place by the legislative scheme.”

Taliano declared the program to be invalid, as well as the criminal laws prohibiting possession and production of cannabis.

So essentially the judge is saying that unless the government fixes its atrocious federal medical marijuana program, he’ll make marijuana legal for everyone to insure that sick people will be able to get it without having to go to criminals. Fascinating.

The notion of federal laws against marijuana used to be considered unconstitutional in this country, too.

We’ve been having fun here with the ongoing “Kids Say the Darndest Things” series, and probably will continue to do so as long as student journalists embarrass themselves and the future of the profession.

Here’s an example that actually proves the point of that ridicule by demonstrating what student journalism can and should be.

Macy Linton is a 19-year-old freshman at LSU and wrote this OpEd in the LSU Reveille: Southern Discourse: Mexican, US drug legalization necessary to end war

It’s a well-thought-out, well-written opinion piece about the drug war in Mexico and Vicente Fox’s call for legalization.

It’s not perfect by any means. Her mention of “34,000 people dead from drug-related incidents” is very badly phrased since they’re drug-war-related incidents and not drug-related (but unfortunately that same imprecision is used by many professional columnists). It’s also unfortunate that she repeated as truth Vicente Fox’s one blunder in his recent speaking — saying that Portugal showed a 25% decrease in drug use in the ten years since decriminalization (in fact, Portugal showed dramatic gains, including reduction in absolute terms of use by certain age cohorts – including the critical 15-19 cohort – and only mild increases less than the EU averages in other age groups, plus a huge reduction in drug-related deaths, etc., but a 25% reduction in overall drug use wasn’t part of this clear success).

Keep at it Macy. Good luck with your international studies. We need more like you.

A fun protest… with a point.