Drug WarRant

Keith Humphreys, who has been blogging over at Mark Kleiman’s place (and yes, this blog consistently performs a Mark Kleiman Drug Policy Watch function) has been joining in with Mark in lamenting the sad state of affairs that is the less-than-honest arguments used by both sides of the legalization debate. “Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?” (OK, so they don’t actually talk like Big Daddy from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof).

Of course, this is usually done by pointing out a specific example of lying on the part of the prohibitionists, and then balancing it by saying “and the other side is just as bad.” Or, they may trot out an argument that is used by some legalizers (legalization may bring in as much as $X in taxes, for example – something that we’ve never given much of a damn about compared to reducing the harms of prohibition), point out how that full dollar amount is unlikely to be achieved and use that as justification to tar all legalizers as dishonest.

As always, they pose as reasonable moderates who abhor the excesses of prohibition, and long for a legalization of marijuana that fits their specific requirements (ie, is not legally sold by anyone, ever), while still resisting any efforts to consider real reform, which means replacing prohibition with an actual regulatory scheme. But always, they complain about arguments on both sides lacking valid support.

Let’s see how Keith does in presenting the facts in a debate about legalization. He pointed out that he was nicely captured by Paul Rogers in this debate with Joe McNamara, so I thought we might look at it.

Let’s start with one of my pet peeves in dishonest arguments:

Q: Mother’s Against Drunk Driving opposes Prop 19. Is highway safety an issue?

KH: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration did a roadside survey and showed on a weekend evening something like one in six people had a legal or illegal substance in their system. At least some of them are going to be high. When you are driving down the road, are you happy that one in six people have a drug in their system? I’m certainly not.

OK, Keith. You worked in the Drug Czar’s office. You know how data works, and clearly you learned how to work data. Which means straight out lying. Let’s review the study you reference once again.

“The reader is cautioned that drug presence does not necessarily imply impairment. For many drug types, drug presence can be detected long after any impairment that might affect driving has passed. For example, traces of marijuana can be detected in blood samples several weeks after chronic users stop ingestion. Also, whereas the impairment effects for various concentration levels of alcohol is well understood, little evidence is available to link concentrations of other drug types to driver performance.” (Page 3, boxed for extra visibility)

Also:
“Caution should be exercised in assuming that drug presence implies driver impairment. Drug tests do not necessarily indicate current impairment. Drug presence can be measured for a period of days or weeks after ingestion in many cases. This latency of drug presence may partially explain the consistency between daytime and nighttime drug findings.” (Page 3)

This study didn’t measure anything other than a base line to use in future studies. Nothing meaningful in itself, except in terms of intellectual curiosity. Most of us have some kind of drug in our system at one point or other.

In other words, it is intellectually dishonest to use this study in the way you did (and the way the drug czar did until I corrected him). Period. Oh, sure, you can say “Well, I didn’t claim that they were all stoned. I just said that some of them were probably stoned.”

Then why reference the study? You could have said that you assume that some drivers on the road are stoned, and nobody would have disputed that, but no, you had to go and use a study dishonestly so as to appear to back up your story. That’s a powerful and obnoxious odor in the room.

KH: However you respond to addictive substances there will be costs. You can’t make tobacco illegal. You can’t go back. But I could say “400,000 dead a year.” Is that working?

And just what does 400,000 dead a year have to do with marijuana?

The horrible [gang] violence in Mexico has killed probably 30,000 people in Mexico in the last six years. But 40,000 Mexicans a year die from smoking, according to the Mexican Department of Health. In the United States, tobacco products kill 400,000 people a year. So if you look at who is going to end up in the grave prematurely, it’s wrong to think that if we move from an illegal market to a corporation we will reduce death. We won’t.

Again, what does that have to do with marijuana? Tobacco causes lung cancer. Marijuana doesn’t. Period. So why bring up all these dead smokers as a reason for not saving dead Mexicans from violence?

Ah, but you have a connection…

In a lot of the world people smoke cannabis and tobacco together. What do you think will happen to health when there are products that are cannabis-tobacco mix products like they have in Europe? When Madison Avenue is cut loose on cannabis? When you have marketing to kids?

In what fantasy world do you live? Sure, across the pond, that may be the way they like the cannabis, but not here in the States. And given the negative public relations that surrounds tobacco and the tobacco companies right now, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that such a move would be forthcoming. In fact, legalisation in England might allow a situation where you could actually have public service announcements warning people not to add dangerous tobacco to their relatively safe skunk.

At one point, Joe McNamara pointed out that the big danger with decrim (fines for possession, but still criminal to sell) rather than legalization is the problems involved with the sales of marijuana being controlled by the black market and that a legal industry would reduce the harms. Keith responded:

KH: To say that a legal industry will make the product safer, then you have to say that the tobacco leaf is more dangerous than a Marlboro. It is the legal industry that makes that raw tobacco leaf into a deadly product.

JM: That’s not a good comparison.

KH: It’s a very good comparison. It’s the one we have.

Um. No, it’s not.

It’s abundantly clear that Humphreys shares Kleiman’s fear of the tobacco industry (although I dare say that Mark would never descend this far into mendacity).

McNamara got him good right off the start, though, in a way that helps us really see what’s going on…

KH: Number one, this is about the business side, rather than the user side. The legislature has already decriminalized marijuana, so it’s going to be like a parking ticket in California.

(The California legislature approved SB 1449, by State Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, on August 31, sending it to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk. The bill would reduce possession of less than an ounce of marijuana from a misdemeanor to an infraction, meaning those in violation of the law would not be arrested, booked or forced to appear in court. They would continue to pay a $100 fine.)

So you should really be voting on this based on whether you want an industry that delivers marijuana. Because what will be legal, which is legal in no other part of the world for marijuana, will be marketing, lobbying, sports endorsements, celebrity endorsements, labs that spend all day trying to figure out how to make the product more flavorful and addictive. And if it sounds like I am describing the tobacco companies, I am. But that’s the question that’s really before us. Do you want that industry? What’s been our experience with tobacco, and are we satisfied with that experience such that we want to repeat it with cannabis?

Q: Your thoughts, chief?

JM: The industry is already here. The industry as it is now produces incredible amounts of crime and violence.

That’s right. Keith Humphreys would rather have large, violent, criminal enterprises control the distribution and sales of marijuana than risk even a long-shot possibility of an American corporation selling it.

That’s pretty bizarre.

It’s also pretty paranoid. There’s no reason that cannabis legalization is going to result in Philip Morris. It could just as easily (in fact, perhaps more likely) result in Starbucks. About the only things that cannabis and tobacco have in common is that they can be smoked. But then, cigars can be smoked and they’re marketed and managed a whole lot differently than cigarettes.

The culture surrounding cannabis is going to produce a different kind of commercialization than cigarettes.

It’s also unrealistic to think that the rise of a Cannabis Morris could occur today with the same dangerous characteristics of chemically manipulated cigarettes as they were developed and marketed in the past century. We’ve been through that once and are aware of it, and unlike in the 20th Century, we’ve got a raging Nanny State that is examining everything we even consider consuming with a magnifying lens on steroids.

We’re also much more of a socially conscious consumer society that is interested in things like gourmet and organic together, and is willing to pay $4 for a coffee. That’s more likely to result in a craft beer version of cannabis than a Budweiser. And yes, I’m mixing coffee and beer and cigars and cigarettes because cannabis is none of those things. It will have its own characteristics of commerce. It won’t be Marlboro.

Keith Humphreys does a nice job now and then of pointing out the problems with prohibition, and is quick to note when he parts company with the excesses of prohibitionist views, and that I appreciate. However, the arguments that he uses to oppose Prop 19 himself range from the hysterical to that powerful odor of mendacity.

The CCPOA came out with its final endorsements for the election, and it expresses an opinion on most candidate, but only on one proposition (opposed to Prop 22).

That’s good news. It appears that Prop 19 has been getting all the endorsements of those unions expressing an opinion, including the big one — SEIU.

David Harsanyi has a particularly ignorant column at Reason about legalization, which is a real surprise. Waiting for the Man
The long road to marijuana legalization

This is someone who is in favorof legalization. He seems to be saying that nothing is going to come of legalization because the politicians aren’t ready to act, and we don’t have any arguments that will sway them (or sway the people enough to make them act).

His conclusion is:

The minority that wants real reform? Politically speaking, our bad arguments are terrible and our good ones are worse.

Really?

Well, maybe if you look through the arguments that he cherry-picked to represent us, and ignore all the arguments that he chose to leave out, then maybe you’d get a little of that feeling, but even then, you’d have to take his sarcasm seriously (I’m halfway wondering if his OpEd was supposed to be sarcastic and he really means the opposite, because he jokes a lot in it, but I’m having trouble reading it that way).

Sure, we can claim that illicit drugs are harmless. But having partaken in youthful “experimentation,” I can say with empirical certainty this is untrue. If drugs are harmless, why did I try to convert Pez dispensers into bongs or choose journalism as a career?

What a strange person.

Besides, we don’t claim that all illicit drugs are harmless. We claim that drug prohibition is harmful — much more so than drugs, without the benefit of reducing any of the harm of drugs. Now that’s a solid argument with traction. One he leaves out entirely.

Or we could keep pretending that pot has profound medicinal value. In Denver, a sham medical pot industry has blossomed, and coincidentally there have been mass outbreaks of Andromeda strain and cooties among 20-somethings. This makes a mockery of real sickness and threatens to turn one-time public support into deeper skepticism.

Pretending that pot has profound medicinal value? It does, and the fact that others want to use it as well doesn’t change the medicinal value.

We could argue that legalizing drugs would provide government with a great source of revenue. (No worries; the “wealthiest among us” would pay their fair share.) But a new Cato Institute study by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron and Katherine Waldock at New York University finds that there would be a rather unexceptional $17.4 billion in yearly national budgetary improvement from legalizing marijuana.

Unexceptional. In today’s economy? Let’s see, with that money, you could send over two million young people to a state university for a year.

There are plenty of other solid arguments that can resonate with the people (and thereby to the politicians). Reducing corruption. Starving the black market. Reducing the collateral damage to society of being over-reliant on prisons. Improving the relationship of cops to the community. Doing a better job of helping those with drug problems.

I don’t know what Harsanyi was thinking, but it sure wasn’t Reasonable.

It’s a simple one.

If Proposition 19 passes, will you obey the law?

Jeffrey A. Miron has been the leading economist in studying the fiscal effects of the drug war. Just in time for the home stretch on Prop 19, he has teamed up with Katherine Waldock and CATO Institute to publish a white paper: The Budgetary Impact of Ending Drug Prohibition

The report concludes that drug legalization would reduce government expenditure by about $41.3 billion annually. […]

Legalization would also generate tax revenue of roughly $46.7 billion annually if drugs were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco.

Now that’s a set of numbers to get a little bit excited over. But it’s only a set of numbers — a realistic look at what could be, assuming full legalization, and taking advantage of all the resulting cost savings and tax revenue. That’s what this kind of estimates are about. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to see $88 billion.

The most intellectually dishonest of the prohibition enablers out there see numbers like this and then, finding a reason why we might not see all of it, irrationally act like they have disproved legalization arguments.

But Miron understands, as do all us reformers, that economic benefits of legalization are just one of many benefits, and that any portion of that $88 billion is a bonus.

The conclusion is worth quoting at length:

First, the total impact of drug legalization on government budgets would be approximately $88 billion per year.

Second, about half of the budgetary improvement from legalization is due to reduced criminal justice expenditure. But for this component of the impact to show up in government budgets, policymakers would have to lay off police, prosecutors, prison guards, and the like. Because such a move would be politically painful, it may not occur. It is certainly true that reduced expenditure on enforcing drug prohibition can still be beneficial if those criminal justice resources are re-deployed to better uses, but that outcome is difficult to achieve.

Third, only about $17.4 billion in budgetary improvement can be expected to come from legalizing marijuana in isolation. Yet the current political climate gives no indication that legalization of other drugs is achievable in the short term. So the budgetary impact from the politically possible component of legalization—marijuana—seems fairly modest.

None of these considerations weakens the critique of drug prohibition since that critique has always rested mainly on other considerations, such as the crime, corruption, and curtailment of civil liberties that have been the side-effects of attempting to fight drug use with police officers and prisons. What the estimates provided here do provide are two additional reasons to end drug prohibition: reduced expenditure on law enforcement and an increase in tax revenue from legalized sales.

Exactly.

A really excellent OpEd at CNN.com by the Drug Policy Alliance’s Bill Piper.

It’s titled Time to end the war on marijuana, but clearly he’s talking about more than just marijuana.

Here are a couple of really outstanding quotes that give you an idea of the piece:

It is long past time to abandon the silly notion that America can be a drug-free nation. The inconvenient truth in drug policy is that Americans love drugs — alcohol, caffeine, marijuana, cocaine, and prescription drugs for everything from anxiety to fatigue. Although some people develop problems with their drug use, most do not. This holds true for both legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, and illegal drugs like marijuana and cocaine. Decades of evidence shows that the average user of any drug doesn’t get addicted and doesn’t create problems for anyone else.

and…

What matters most is not how many people use marijuana, alcohol or other drugs, but what’s the best way to reduce the problems associated with substance misuse without creating more harmful social problems. Drug use rates rise and fall almost independently of what politicians say and do, but criminalizing drug use makes the situation worse. Prohibition doesn’t stop drug use; it makes drug use more dangerous while filling prisons with nonviolent offenders and making crime lords rich.

And again, nice to see such an OpEd featured at a place like CNN.

Why Parents Should Support Legalizing Pot

My son just started kindergarten. So naturally, I have been thinking a lot about the type of world and community in which I want him and our seven-year-old daughter to live. I am involved in a project to improve school lunches in our district to reinforce the nutrition lessons we teach in our home. I am a founding board member of a community group trying to improve our city’s parks. And I am working to help pass Proposition 19, the initiative to control and tax marijuana in California. It is important to me as a mother that my children grow up in a state—hopefully a country soon—that rejects the ineffective and damaging policy of marijuana prohibition. It may be counterintuitive, but legalizing marijuana will be better and safer for our children.

I’ve noticed a consistent but baseless distortion being spread by opponents of California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize, regulate and tax cannabis. They complain that Prop 19 is poorly crafted and/or would produce an unenforceable “patchwork” of regulation. The reality is that, compared with most propositions in California’s history, Prop 19 is very sensibly written, with the express purpose of giving state and local governments maximum flexibility to make legal marijuana workable. The fictitious, nightmarish “patchwork” of regulations caused by allowing local governments to craft local ordinances is no different than how local governments handle almost everything in our economy, including alcohol, parking, pizza ovens, farmers markets and building codes.

Apparently quite a ruckus. I still have nothing but contempt by those who are so shortsighted and selfish that they’re willing to throw away a chance at legalization, and starting a national movement because it’s not exactly what they wanted.

We are asked to believe that people drinking a daily six-pack for a quarter-century is not a lamentable sign of a health crisis, but instead a “lifestyle” triumph worthy of flag-colored celebration — and we are expected to think that legalizing a safer alternative to this “lifestyle” is dangerous. Likewise, as laws obstruct veterans from obtaining doctor-prescribed marijuana for post-traumatic stress disorder, we are asked to believe that shotgunning cans of lager is the real way to “support our troops.”

Open Thread.

The organizations and web sites of those opposing Prop 19 have been really ridiculous — tired old nonsense that’s been disproved over and over. I was beginning to despair of finding a site that could possibly give us a decent challenge.

Well, there is one. Someone stopped by and gave us the link in comments, but it was caught by the spam filter (perhaps the spam filter is politically watching my back?) But I rescued it.

www.opposeprop19.com

California Prop 19 would have California treat marijuana much the same way we now treat alcohol following Prohibition. Adults would have the option of legally using marijuana in the privacy of their home. Prop 19 is nothing more than a crude attempt to undo over 70 years of Harry Anslinger’s enlightened approach towards marijuana.

The site includes the true story of how the narcotics squad got the hopped up killer, or this tragedy:

THE sprawled body of a young girl lay crushed on the sidewalk the other day after a plunge from the fifth story of a Chicago apartment house. Everyone called it suicide, but actually it was murder. The killer was a narcotic known to America as marijuana

The site’s conclusion is compelling…

If we can put every marijuana user in jail and we can find and kill every single marijuana plant, there would be almost no violent crime left in America. This fact is recognized by the liquor industry. That’s why the liquor industry supports our efforts to defeat Prop 19 with such generous financial contributions.

Keep the status quo by defeating Prop 19. Join with Rep. Lamar Smith, other self-interested politicians, a large percentage of law enforcement, prison guards, the liquor industry, Mexican cartels, and thousands of drug dealers in opposing Prop 19. Don’t let our prisons go under-utilized. Arresting marijuana users makes good sense and is just plain good business.

Somebody put a lot of good work into that site.

Update: Read this before commenting. The site I’m talking about here is a parody. Be sure to know what that means before you comment. You can always look it up on teh Google. This is part of a basic education, people. Breathe. Laugh. and…. Lighten up, Francis.

I swear if another person shows up in the comments all pissed off by the material from this site, I’m going to pass a law saying that everyone but you gets to smoke pot legally.

You know how difficult it is to get prohibitionists to agree to debates or to appear in a public forum? They’re usually pretty much afraid to face us.

Well, they finally came up with a format that was acceptable….

The Wednesday “Just the Facts” forum, sponsored by Coalition for a Drug-Free Nevada County and Grass Valley Chamber of Commerce, featured seven panelists who oppose the Nov. 2 ballot measure to legalize marijuana, Proposition 19.

They included Nevada County District Attorney Cliff Newell, Nevada County Sheriff’s Sgt. Bill Smethers, Grass Valley Police Capt. Rex Marks, Chip Arenchild of InterWest insurance, Michelle Gregory of the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, Earle Jamison High School Principal Anita Bagwell and Aimee Hendle, a representative of the San Diego-based group Californians for Drug Free Youths.

Apparently the ironically named “Just the Facts” forum decided that Proposition 19 wasn’t a very good idea. Kudos to the participants for managing to counter the opposition so well.