Drug WarRant

Charles M. Blow has a scathing OpEd in today’s New York Times blasting Democratic politicians: Smoke and Horrors

He refers to a war “being waged primarily against minorities and promoted, fueled and financed primarily by Democratic politicians.”

He notes the latest figures in California showing a marijuana war that grossly and disproportionately targets minorities, yet has a Democratic administration “chest-thumping” against an initiative designed, in part, to address that problem.

He points out that it was a Democratic president who signed the provision forcing young people out of college for drug offenses (aimed primarily at poor young people).

And he reminds us that it’s Democrats that keep pushing to restore funding to the Byrne grants — grants that push a numbers-oriented drug war frenzy that naturally is staged predominantly in minority communities.

Why would Democrats support a program that has such a deleterious effect on their most loyal constituencies? It is, in part, callous political calculus. It’s an easy and relatively cheap way for them to buy a tough-on-crime badge while simultaneously pleasing police unions. The fact that they are ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic men and, by extension, the communities they belong to barely seems to register.

This is outrageous and immoral and the Democrat’s complicity is unconscionable, particularly for a party that likes to promote its social justice bona fides.

No one knows all the repercussions of legalizing marijuana, but it is clear that criminalizing it has made it a life-ruining racial weapon. As Ms. Alexander told me, “Our failed war on drugs has done incalculable damage.”

When will politicians have the courage to stand up, acknowledge this fact and stop allowing young minority men to be collateral damage?

Powerful.

I think this would be a good article to send to your Democratic representatives. For too long (all the way back to Tip O’Neill and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986), the Democratic politicians have gotten a free ride on expanding and supporting the drug war as a way to act tough. They need to learn that there are consequences (that Prohibition Isn’t Free), and that these consequences can affect them politically.

Note: There is an odd disconnect between Democratic voters and Democratic politicians on this issue. It’s true that Democratic voters tend to be more likely to support drug policy reform. Yet while there often are political repercussions for a Democratic politician who doesn’t support gay marriage or abortion rights, they are rarely held to account for their position on drug policy. That needs to change.

This article gives them something they must answer.

Update:

Some commenters seem to be missing the point entirely, here.

Of course it’s not just the Democratic politicians. Republican politicians have included Nixon, Reagan, Walters, Souder, and tons of other hard-core drug warriors.

The point is that, for too long, Democratic politicians have viewed themselves in the drug war as Republican-lite, and therefore have acted like they should get credit for being as tough as Republicans, but not have the responsibility for the drug war they’ve been fully complicit in creating and sustaining.

If we continue to call them “almost as bad as the Republicans” then they have no political reason to change. They can continue to prattle on about how drug policy reform is a difficult political thing and now is not the time to waste political capital when there are important other things like health care and abortion rights that need to be front and center.

It’s healthy for Democratic politicians to be held to the fire and made to be aware that they can’t hide behind Republican-lite, but that they are personally responsible for racist policy that harms their constituents. And their constituents have to realize that as well.

The fact that this powerful OpEd from a minority author is in the New York Times one week before election is good timing to get their attention and help them start realizing that this could be a real election issue for them personally one day very soon.

The U.N. has mostly stood by silently while its drug control agencies (United Nations Office of Drug Control (UNODC), International Narcotics Control Board (INCB)) set and ran international drug control policy, and those agencies have been mostly influenced by their biggest contributors (United States and Sweden).

Theoretically, all United Nations efforts are subordinate to the Human Rights Treaties, although the UNODC has rarely done anything but pay lip service to them, and no one else in the U.N. has called them on it.

That could change.

Transform Drug Policy Foundation reports on a very interesting development that will culminate in a press conference in New York this coming Tuesday.

Anand Grover, from India, is the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right of Everyone to the Highest Attainable Standard of Physical and Mental Health, whose mandate is derived from the UN Human Rights Council. Mr Grover’s annual thematic report, to be presented on October 25/26, sets out the range of human rights abuses that have resulted from international drug control efforts, and calls on Governments to:

• Ensure that all harm-reduction measures (as itemized by UNAIDS) and drug-dependence treatment services, particularly opioid substitution therapy, are available to people who use drugs, in particular those among incarcerated populations.
• Decriminalize or de-penalize possession and use of drugs.
• Repeal or substantially reform laws and policies inhibiting the delivery of essential health services to drug users, and review law enforcement initiatives around drug control to ensure compliance with human rights obligations.
• Amend laws, regulations and policies to increase access to controlled essential medicines
• To the UN drug control agencies, Mr Grover recommends the creation of an alternative drug regulatory framework based on a model such as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

The report is the clearest statement to date from within the UN system about the harms that drug policies have caused and the need for a fundamental shift in drug policy.

The report has been welcomed by the European Union in the EU statement on crime and drugs to the UN General Assembly.

The U.N. drug control regime is not going to change overnight, yet this is a powerful development that signals the potential for major shifts. It states that the status quo in drug control systems is no longer a certainty, and, in fact, is in conflict with higher goals of the U.N. This could open the door to change. Additionally, this may weaken attempts by the United States to claim that significant drug policy change here in the States is impossible due to international treaty obligations.

Pass it on folks.

More on the video at the NORML Blog

For those who aren’t up on it, here is the much darker video by Eminem and Rihanna that is being parodied.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

The Director of the ONDCP has an entire office full of trolls who never see the light of day, searching through various sets of data to come up with different combinations that might please His Worship. Then the Czar waves his wand over the numbers, mutters incantations and declares them to have…. meaning! He then assigns the meaning and reports it to the press, who dutifully record it in the sacred newspapers.

This time, he’s going after California with his bogus data analysis.

Today, ONDCP highlighted the fact that the percentage of Californians voluntarily seeking treatment for marijuana as their drug of choice was higher than that for the rest of the United States. The information was based on data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s 2008 Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS).

The findings show:

• 51% of treatment admissions where marijuana was the primary drug involved came from non-criminal justice sources in California, compared to only 42% for the rest of the U.S. Referral sources included individual referrals, schools, substance abuse and healthcare providers, employers, and other community referrals.
• 47% of people receiving treatment for marijuana in California were under the age of 18, compared to 28% in the rest of the country.
• 65% of Californians who received treatment for marijuana began using the drug at age 14 or younger. This compares to 55 percent for the rest of the U.S.

ONDCP Director Kerlikowske cited the discussions of so-called “medical” marijuana, marijuana legalization, and downplaying marijuana’s harms as a significant contributor in sending the wrong message to young people about the health consequences of drug use.

All right. Let’s take a quick look at this.

First, the whole “admitted for treatment for marijuana” thing is pretty much completely useless for determining anything. So many people are referred by the criminal justice system that it completely undermines the data. Here, you see the Drug Czar knows that we’ve already shown that to be bogus, so in the first figures, he tries to claim that “other than criminal justice” equals “voluntarily seeking treatment.” Of course, that’s bogus as well, since it includes all sorts of other referrals. Even individual referrals don’t necessarily mean much, since attorneys often advise their clients to enroll in a treatment program so it looks better when they’re in front of the judge.

The marijuana treatment data is so meaningless, the Government figures themselves show that over 37 percent of those who entered treatment “for marijuana” had not used it in the past month.

Now I’ve done my share of digging through the cauldron of TEDS data. I’m not going to take the time to do it just to show the Drug Czar is playing loose with the facts. I don’t have to.

The first stat he uses certainly doesn’t show that more people are voluntarily entering treatment marijuana in California. There’s a lot of possibilities, given all the parameters of referral sources, but there’s no evidence of what the Drug Czar claims.

Let’s move to the second one:

47% of people receiving treatment for marijuana in California were under the age of 18, compared to 28% in the rest of the country.

Hmmm… sounds significant, doesn’t it? Ah, but what’s missing? Context. Those are internal comparative figures. Without knowing how they relate to the total population, there’s no way that they demonstrate the significance attached to them by the Czar.

At first glance, it appears that the data says that a significantly higher percentage of children in California enter treatment than in other states. But it doesn’t say that at all. It only talks about comparative populations.

Just for fun, let’s make up some numbers.

People Owning Widgets	Under 18 years	18+ years
State A	30	20
State B	40	60

In this fictional set of numbers, 60% of the State A widget owners are under 18, whereas only 40% of the State B ones are children. And yet, as you can see in the figures, that doesn’t tell the story at all. The story is, in State A, adults are less likely to own widgets.

OK. Consider that California has medical marijuana and, as some have said, it’s pretty much de facto decriminalization for many adults. So it would actually make sense that a much smaller portion of the adult population of California would end up in situations where they were forced to enter treatment “for marijuana” (but without a corresponding reduction in youth susceptibility to criminal justice and school referrals). This would naturally make the youth portion seem larger in comparison. This would explain both points 2 and 3.

This, in fact, completely shoots down the Drug Czar’s argument that California liberalization of marijuana talk has increased the youth drug problem.

There may be other explanations for this data as well, if we cared enough to dig through the bubbling cauldron full of eye of newt and toe of frog, treatment admissions and tongue of dog.

The point is, that even in the relatively useless set of TEDS data (at least for analytical purposes due to the abuse of the treatment system), the Drug Czar comes up with numbers that can only superficially support his treatise. And even that support disappears like a wisp of dirty steam once you take those numbers into the light of day.

The Drug Czar is no true witch. He’s just a charlatan, playing with his trolls’ digits.

Also, today Hanna Dershowitz, a mother of two in Culver CIty, California, released the following statement in response to federal drug czar Gil Kerlikowske’s comments about teen marijuana use:

“As a mother, I too am concerned about the high rate of marijuana use by our youth. But I would like to point out that the federal officials who flew here from Washington are only helping to reveal the failure of the current policy, which makes illegal marijuana more accessible to teens than legal and age-regulated alcohol. Illegal drug dealers don’t check for ID, and that’s why we need to put them out of business by passing Proposition 19 to control and tax marijuana.”

Is marijuana addictive? Yes.

Is marijuana addictive? No.

Both answers may be correct, depending on how you define addiction, and the question itself is probably irrelevant.

I chided Maia Szalavitz yesterday for her “both sides have been wrong” nonsense, but she redeems herself somewhat in a pretty strong piece in Time: Is Marijuana Addictive? It Depends How You Define Addiction

After exploring the differing definitions of addiction, she gets to the heart of the matter — the important thing is harm.

According to Stanton Peele, author of the classic book Love and Addiction, the real question is not the substance’s addictive quality, but its potential for harm. “I wrote an article on this titled ‘Marijuana is addictive — so what?'” he says. “How harmful is this addiction compared to other addictions? It can be disruptive to people’s lives; I have a treatment center, and some people end up there because of marijuana. On the other hand, in terms of physical assaults to your body, it’s better than smoking and better than alcohol.” […]

As Dr. Elders also said on CNN, marijuana is nontoxic. You can fatally overdose on alcohol, heroin or cocaine, but the only way a dose of marijuana will kill you is if someone crushes you under a bale of it.

In fact it may be the social consequences of using marijuana that are more harmful than the physical ones. Peele notes that being convicted for marijuana possession can make a college student ineligible for federal student aid. “No psychologist in the universe could possibly say that smoking marijuana is worse for you than being deprived of the opportunity to get an education,” says Peele.

Hart agrees. “I’ve studied the effects of marijuana withdrawal and effects on cognition. I was ambivalent about it for a long time,” he says. “I now have a 15-year-old son. I am far more concerned about him interacting with law enforcement than I am with marijuana, based on the research.”

This, of course, won’t sit well with many of the treatment professionals, who depend, for their bread and butter, on a broad definition of addiction and the automatic assumption that addiction=harm, without looking at relative harm.

Via Thoreau, Jim Henley reminds us of how that burden operates…

The war on drugs will surely work at some point – we’ve only been at it for 90-odd years, trillions of dollars and countless deaths and humiliations. But should anyone anywhere decriminalize anything, a single death or inconvenience in the first week would condemn the entire effort.

And we certainly don’t dare pass Prop 19 — there are… uncertainties and imperfections.

One of the unchanging constants of the drug war is that the Government lies.

And yet, time after time, “serious” people in the media repeat those lies, mindlessly furthering the dissemination of Government lies and evading their responsibility to investigate the truth.

They should be outraged, screaming at the top of their media lungs, seeing the trust of the people so perverted, so undermined, so treasonously betrayed.

Others, academicians somehow ignorant of the role of a Government Of the People, By the People, and For the People, seem to think that the Government is merely another partisan with an agenda of its own that should be judged equally with other activists.

That’s also outrageous.

Let’s take a look at a sane world: You’d have legalizers on one side, pushing their agenda, pointing out the facts that support their agenda (that’s what activists do), and you’d have groups like MADD and Partnership for a Drug Free America on the other side, pushing their agenda, pointing out the facts that support their agenda. Both sides might select, out of competing facts in uncertain futures, those scenarios that look particularly good for their side. That’s a fully appropriate role for activists.

In the middle, not taking a side, would be the Government, the repository of as much information as possible, to help citizens sort between the competing interests.

But no, in this perverted system, we have the Government as an activist, not only exaggerating and cherry-picking the data, but actively lying.

This puts those of us on the side of legalization at a horrendously unfair disadvantage (which makes our successes all the more incredible and a testament to the truth being mostly on our side).

But people are so used to the Government lying, they forget to be outraged.

Maia Szalavitz, usually an excellent writer on the drug war, forgot who the players were in her recent article in Time Magazine: The Marijuana Number That Was Too Good to Check

Over the last few years, supporters and opponents of marijuana legalization have both cited the same statistic to back their cause: 60% of the profits made by violent Mexican drug lords come from marijuana. But now, it seems, both sides have been wrong.

Both sides.

Who are these two sides? Why, us, and the Government.

Turns out that the Rand study believes that 60% is too high, but they don’t know for sure what number is correct.

So was it the legalizers that made up this number?

Where does the 60% figure come from? It was released by the Office of National Drug Control Policy — the federal drug czar —in 2006, but its origins and exact derivation were not made public. With legalization advocates using it enthusiastically, however, the agency officially backed away from it in September, claiming that the models on which it was based “are dated and may no longer apply.”

Maia actually treats the Government as merely one side in a partisan debate and blames both sides for playing loose with the numbers, even when it’s the Government that supplied the number in the first place.

She has essentially said that the Government need not be held to any higher standard than a blogger or a special interest group. That’s… unbelievable.

She’s so used to it, she’s forgotten to be outraged.

The latest in Government lying, supported fully by a complicit Michel Martin at NPR, has to do with marijuana use and kids — another blatant attempt to spin legalization efforts as being responsible for increased use by children.

White House Turns Attention To Teens And Drugs, Michel Martin, host.

MARTIN: What leaps out at you about this survey? What do you think is the most important finding?

Mr. KERLIKOWSKE: I think there are two important findings. One is that this increase in drug use is led by marijuana. And the second part is that the age of initiation – the first time a young person started using marijuana – dropped from 17.8 years to 17 years, and that’s actually quite significant.

MARTIN: Because that’s an average. So one has to assume that if that’s the average, the actual earliest use for some people is much younger.

Mr. KERLIKOWSKE: And that’s exactly right. And the concern there is that for the six years that we have had that data, the number had always gone up. This was a year that it not only went down, but it went down by a significant number.

MARTIN: Why do you think that is?

Mr. KERLIKOWSKE: Well, I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that there is a huge amount of public attention to equating medicine and marijuana. And that is the wrong message. I have met with high school kids from Portland to the Bronx. And when they talk about medicine and marijuana, they say this is sending the wrong message to us.

So the age of initiation dropped from 17.8 to 17 years. What does that mean, exactly?

Well, Kerlikowske isn’t giving the whole story. Erin Rosa at the Narcosphere caught it in The Drug Czar Office’s Misleading Claim on Teenage Marijuana Use

After a closer look of the data cited by the ONDCP, the claim that teens today are currently using marijuana at younger ages is misleading. In fact, the same data shows that young people who recently tried marijuana are doing so at older ages.

The statistic used by the ONDCP comes from this sentence in the survey:

In 2009, the average age of marijuana initiates among persons aged 12 to 49 was 17.0 years, significantly lower than the average age of marijuana initiates in 2008 (17.8 years), but similar to that in 2002 (17.0 years).

The Office fails to mention in its press release that the .8 percentage drop in age among first time marijuana users was not based on a survey of teenagers, but came from an older demographic of those aged 12-49 years. There is no indication of when such behavior occurred, or that teens today are in fact trying marijuana at young ages.

In other words, when you ask a 48-year-old what year they started marijuana and they say age 18, that was actually in 1980, and has very little relevance to teens today. Those numbers are really quite meaningless.

If you take a look at recent initiates who initiated use prior to age 21, the age estimate has actually gone up in the last year.

And really, the only way to know for sure if there was an lowering of age of initiation this year is if they actually tracked that specific information, and they appear not to have done so (or, if they did, the numbers didn’t suit Kerlikowske’s agenda).

And once again, the Government is not only not held to a higher standard than a partisan special interest group, but no attempt is made to even hold it to a standard of basic truth.

That is outrageous, and so is the lack of outrage.

….

Update:

PASADENA, Calif.—President Obama’s drug czar is scheduled to visit a Southern California drug treatment center Wednesday to speak out against the November ballot initiative that would legalize recreational marijuana use in the state.

Director of National Drug Control Policy Gil Kerlikowske is planning to release new government data showing that California already has a much higher percentage of children in treatment for marijuana use than the rest of the country.

He also plans to highlight statistics indicating the state has a higher than average percentage of residents voluntarily seeking treatment because of problems with pot.

“Celebrity Rehab” host Dr. Drew Pinsky is supposed to accompany Kerlikowske on his visit to the Pasadena Recovery Center.

Glenn Greenwald hits one out of the park with The Wars on Drugs and Terror: mirror images

He is one of the brightest and most passionate defenders of civil liberties from government overreach out there, so you can imagine that he’s not a fan of the war on drugs.

I’m convinced that drug prohibition, and especially the “War on Drugs” which enables it, is going to be one of those policies which, decades from now, future generations will be completely unable to understand how we could have tolerated. So irrational and empirically false are the justifications for drug prohibition, and so costly is the War waged in its name, that it is difficult to imagine a more counter-productive policy than this

Most of his daily writing is more likely to connect to administration dealings with the war on terror, but he sees the powerful connection between the two (something we’ve discussed here before).

the War on Drugs is a mirror image of the War on Terror: sustained with the same deceitful propaganda, driven by many of the same motives, prosecuted with similar templates, and destructive in many of the same ways.

The similarities are obvious. Both wars rely upon cartoon depictions of Scary Villains (The Drug Kingpin, Mexican Cartels, the Terrorist Mastermind) to keep the population in a state of heightened fear and thus blind them to rational discourse. But both wars are not only complete failures in eradicating those villains, but they both do more to empower those very villains than any other single cause — the War on Drugs by ensuring that cartels’ profits from the illegal drug trade remain sky-high, and the War on Terror by ensuring more and more support and recruits for anti-American extremists. And both, separately and together, endlessly erode basic American liberties by convincing a frightened public that they can Stay Safe only if they cede more and more power to the state. Many of the civil liberties erosions from the War on Terror have their genesis in the War on Drugs.

The whole piece is worth reading. I could get great quotes from every paragraph.

There’s been a lot going on with Prop 19 — it gets hard to keep up at times.

Peter Bensinger wrote a letter trying to convince people that marijuana impairment lasts over 24 hours. Cully Stimson, instead of slinking away in embarrassment and disgrace after his last absurd attempt, actually tried again and was once more soundly dismantled. Los Angeles Sheriff Baca publicly announced his intention to break his oath of office. Mark Kleiman, in some kind of bizarre attempt to avoid any personal responsibility for the policies he promotes, reiterated his likely intention to attempt to vote with the losing side.

However, there’s even more good stuff happening on the positive side of Prop 19, including some wonderful endorsements (although one of those below is generally spun a different way…)

• Peter Lewis kicked in over $200,000 to join some other big donations for Prop 19.
• Former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders called for an end to marijuana prohibition.
• Surprising positive news from the feds. Attorney General Eric Holder likes Prop 19 so much he said that if people would vote for it, he’d have the federal government take over all marijuana arrests and prosecutions in California, potentially saving the state millions of dollars.
• San Diego Citybeat had the most entertaining media endorsement in the state regarding Prop 19, and yes, they’re for it!
  

  And, yes, we also disclose that legalization will a) help CityBeat’s bottom line—and consequently allow us to serve you better—and b) make our nights and weekends way more fun. For those who value personal liberty, yes on 19 is the only moral vote.

• And now, the mothers join in… Tomorrow (Tuesday) at 10:30 am, a group of mothers will be at West Hollywood Park to announce their support for Proposition 19. This is a critical subset of voters, and it’s great to have them on our side. It’s so important that they understand that it’s criminalization that puts kids in danger, not legalization.

If you’re a mother and would like to make your voice heard, sign on to the letter here

To the Voters of California:

As mothers, we treasure, nurture, and protect our kids, and, as mothers, we support Proposition 19, to control and tax cannabis in California.

The prohibition of cannabis has been an abject failure. These days, it’s easier for our kids to buy illegal cannabis than legal and age-regulated alcohol, because street dealers don’t ask our kids for ID. Proposition 19 will make it harder for kids to get access to cannabis, by taking it out of the shadows and off the streets and controlling it like alcohol.

Proposition 19 will cut off funding to the murderous drug cartels that make 60 percent of their revenues off the illegal sales of marijuana in the United States. The revenues that now go to criminals will be captured in the form of taxes and fees and these new public funds could be used to shore up our struggling schools, hospitals, and other important public services. Meanwhile, the massive resources—to the tune of $300 million a year—spent on marijuana enforcement in California today could be redirected to fighting violent crime in our neighborhoods and communities.

Proposition 19 will keep our streets and highways safe by maintaining strict criminal penalties for those caught driving under the influence of cannabis. In addition, Proposition 19 bans smoking marijuana on school grounds, in public, and while minors are present.

Criminalizing marijuana does not deter kids, and the array of consequences stemming from arrests is damaging to future education, employment, and other prospects. We advocate using public education and other tools instead. According to the American Lung Association, U.S. consumption of tobacco has declined by more than 100 billion cigarettes over the past decade. That dramatic decline in smoking is due to education and taxation, not incarceration. Moreover, the California Legislative Analyst’s Office reports that it costs an average of $47,000 per year to incarcerate an inmate in prison in California, which is the equivalent of tuition and fees for nine students at California State University.

As mothers, we believe it’s time to end California’s failed war on cannabis, enable responsible adults to consume small amounts of cannabis in private, and keep cannabis away from our kids by controlling it and taxing it like alcohol.

California voters should vote Yes on Proposition 19 on November 2nd.