Drug WarRant

A principled stance by Sierra Nevada beer (h/t to CelebStoner).

From Sierra Nevada – We’ve been getting lots of calls and email regarding our stance on California’s Proposition 19-which would legalize marijuana if passed. A beer industry group surprised us by linking our name in with their opposition. We had no idea it was happening and we disagree with their position.

This week, the California Beer and Beverage Distributors (CBBD) came out against California Proposition 19—also known as the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010. The CBBD is an industry group that represents the interests of beer distributors and members. Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. and many other independent craft brewers are associate members of the CBBD.

Although we are members of this organization, we were neither consulted—nor informed of—their decision to take a stand against California Proposition 19. Sierra Nevada’s role as an associate member grants no access or influence on the political agendas of the CBBD, and we had no knowledge of the organization’s intention to fight this ballot proposition.

The CBBD does not represent Sierra Nevada’s political interests in any way, and does not represent the brewery’s stance on the issue. We’ve requested the CBBD to remove our name from their list of members, and also to disassociate the brewery from this and any future political actions.

Over the past three decades, Sierra Nevada has maintained neutrality concerning political issues. We feel that people have the obligation to choose what is right for themselves without influence from outside interests. We regret any implied association with this action by the CBBD, and maintain our independence and neutrality regarding matters of politics

Looks like it’s time for me to try a Sierra Nevada.

Bob Barr better read up a little more. You’d think by now, having been on both sides of the issue, he’d know better.

Five years ago, in a 6-3 opinion, in which only Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas dissented, the Court struck down California’s medical marijuana law that similarly had been passed by voter referendum.

No. Does it really look to you like California’s medical marijuana law was struck down? What the Supreme Court did in Raich was affirm the federal government’s ability to enforce its own law under the interstate commerce clause even when there was no commerce and no interstate. It had nothing to do with striking down a state referendum.

Mexico paper seeks drug gang guidance

“The loss of two reporters from this publishing house in less than two years represents an irreparable sorrow for all of us who work here, and, in particular, for their families,” the newspaper said.

Describing the drug lords as the “de facto authorities” within Ciudad Juarez, the newspaper asked the cartels: “We ask you to explain what you want from us, what we should try to publish or not publish, so we know what to expect.”

This is an open thread.

It gets harder and harder for the Onion to come up with stories that aren’t already happening somewhere in this strange world, so have a little fun with this one: Mexico Killed In Drug Deal

MEXICO CITY—In the latest incident of drug-related violence to hit the country, all 111 million citizens of Mexico were killed Monday during a shoot-out between rival drug cartels.

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the violence was sparked by a botched drug deal involving an estimated 20 kilograms of marijuana […]

They have some fun with the DEA and Director Michele Leonhart:

“A four-gram bag of cocaine was also recovered by agents,” Leonhart added.

Leonhart said the DEA has sealed off the 761,606-square-mile crime scene, which is littered with bullet-riddled bodies and assault rifles, and splattered with blood. […]

“We are doing our best at the moment to locate any Mexican police or military officials who are still alive so that we may work hand-in-hand with them to combat the growing problem of drug violence in Mexico,” Leonhart told reporters. “Episodes like this are simply unacceptable and will not be tolerated by the United States government.”

The alcohol lobby hasn’t responded to press requests regarding their donation to the Prop 19 opposition, so the Mercury News, after getting quotes from MPP’s Steve Fox about alcohol’s fear of marijuana as competition, decided to go to Public Safety First spokesman Roger Salazar.

But Public Safety First spokesman Roger Salazar said it’s a public-safety issue, pure and simple.
Salazar also noted the beer and beverage industry owns and operates large truck fleets in California to bring their products to market. “I would think they would no more support allowing their drivers to drink beer before getting behind the wheel of their trucks or vans, than they would want them smoking marijuana.”

Am I the only one who sees the utter absurdity of that statement?

So… Roger is saying that, if marijuana is legalized, the alcohol industry is concerned that the drivers of beer trucks will be high on marijuana?

We’ve got these drivers, and they’re driving trucks full of legal beer, and they’re taking them to bars and liquor stores and convenience stores that have nice cold beer and probably the store/bar owners would be happy to give them a nice cold one for the road, but due to company policy, they’re somehow able to get these drivers to drive without drinking. But marijuana?

Wow.

Don’t you love political consultants? They don’t even pretend to tell the truth.

(Oh, and Malcolm Kyle has the connections Roger Salazar is spokesman for Public Safety First and is also working for the Jerry Brown for Governor campaign, for which Malcolm has shown the beverage contributions. It’s all about money and where the money is connected.)

Thoreau, writing at Unqualified Offerings, has a couple of interesting posts about drug legalization: Stop worrying and love the bong? and More on drugs.

There’s one part that caught my attention and I wanted to discuss…

If I say that the drug war enriches criminals, I am suggesting that without the drug war the criminals would make less money. I have no illusion that organized crime would vanish, but at least they’d have fewer revenue streams, and riskier revenue streams. If they get money by selling drugs, the people that they get their money from will not call the cops. If they get their money by identity theft, somebody will most definitely call the cops. Even if they get their money by trafficking sex slaves, at the very least there’s a person who wants to call the cops, and now and then somebody will get away and call the cops. But nobody calls the cops to report “Officer, that guy just sold me a joint.” (At least not before getting stoned. Once he’s sufficiently stoned, well, I suppose anything’s possible.)

My friends, however, do not believe that legalization will have any effect on crime, or at least no significant effect in the long run. I think it requires a great deal of cynicism to believe that organized crime will not be hurt at all if a major revenue stream is eliminated.

The problem with Thoreau’s friends (and a lot of other people out there) is that they have this bizarre and mistaken notion that there is an identifiable and discrete subset of the population that are “criminals,” and that this subset is apparently automatically refilled naturally. Perhaps at birth, these individuals are marked with an X on their foreheads showing that they are unable to do anything in society except criminal enterprises. In such a society, removing a huge source of criminal revenue might not make a big dent in crime.

However, our society is not so black and white. All of us are criminals in one way or another (who hasn’t broken some law somewhere, perhaps even unknowing?). And while circumstances of birth can, in some instances, increase the likelihood that someone may end up involved in criminal enterprises, there is no X on the forehead.

The truth is that prohibition creates criminals. Not all of them, but a lot.

Here’s a scenario that repeats every day in this country…

A young person helps out his friends by picking up pot for them when he’s getting his. No big deal. He knows it’s illegal, but it’s not like he’s hurting anyone. Soon he starts getting a few bucks doing this and that’s really helping out. The money is better than McDonald’s, so he starts doing this full time. Nothing serious, mostly pot. No violence.

One of his customers gets caught with some pot and rolls on this dealer. He’s able to get by with probation, but hates giving up the pot sales — plus, most of his friends now expect that he’ll be able to hook them up. So he gets caught again and does some time.

Now, he’s an ex-con with most of his contacts being criminals. Can’t get a lot of legitimate jobs, and there’s a real demand in something that he knows well. Run-ins with the law have hardened him and he’s maybe willing to do some things that he wouldn’t have before….

You see where this is heading….

Long term, the absence of a black market in drugs simply means that new people aren’t being recruited into the business.

The same factor is at work in the larger, more violent, markets. The cartel heads in Mexico may be the worst of the worst, and it’s reasonable to assume that they won’t go into working fast food, but the money they get from the black market allows them to hire complete armies of people from foot soldiers to government officials. There’s a huge infusion of capital that’s on the criminal side of the market, instead of the alternate: a huge infusion of capital on the lawful side of the market. When people need jobs, they’ll go to where the money is.

Long term, there’s no doubt that legalization will lead to a reduction in criminality.

Some fun from CRACKED.com

Laser ray guns, tanks, piranhas, bears, grenade launchers and more… If you can own them, why can’t you own a plant?

There’s an OpEd at the Dakota Voice: Legalizing Marijuana: Why Citizens Should Just Say No by Cully Stimson of the Heritage Foundation. The “Legal Memorandum,” as it’s called there, is also available at the Heritage Site and probably easier to read there.

Now this Cully Stimson is no ordinary bloke. This is a “serious” guy with “serious” credentials. Check out his bio and you’ll see. Not a lot of drug policy experience, true, but some real serious education and high-level world experience in a lot of areas including some major positions in criminal justice fields. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that he managed to do all that he has done in one lifetime.

I point this out to make it clear that what he puts in this legal memorandum is not the result of ignorance.

The only way this article happens is through intentional and malicious manipulation of the facts in order to come up with the conclusion desired by the Heritage Foundation.

Oh, in places it sounds good. Sure. Like it’s been written by someone who’s done some research. But any analysis of any section of it, and it all falls apart.

Start with his analysis of our approach…

The current campaign, like previous efforts, downplays the well-documented harms of marijuana trafficking and use while promising benefits ranging from reduced crime to additional tax revenue. In particular, supporters of the initiative make five bold claims:

1. “Marijuana is safe and non-addictive.”
2. “Marijuana prohibition makes no more sense than alcohol prohibition did in the early 1900s.”
3. “The government’s efforts to combat illegal drugs have been a total failure.”
4. “The money spent on government efforts to combat the illegal drug trade can be better spent on substance abuse and treatment for the allegedly few marijuana users who abuse the drug.”
5. “Tax revenue collected from marijuana sales would substantially outweigh the social costs of legalization.”[3]

As this paper details, all five claims are demonstrably false or, based on the best evidence, highly dubious.

Check out the things Stimson snuck in there…. “downplays the well-documented harms of marijuana trafficking and use.” Of course, the well-documented harms of marijuana trafficking are the result of prohibition and we haven’t been downplaying that at all, and the well-documented harms of marijuana use are not-so-well-documented.

As far as the 5 things he says we’re claiming, on 1 he’s right (although some of us would insert “when used responsibly.” Number 2? Absolutely. Same with number 3. Number 4 is badly worded and I’d bet some of us would wonder about wasting a lot of money on treatment for marijuana. But in general, yes, these are claims we make and can prove, and Stimson’s memorandum does nothing to disprove them.

But number 5? Nobody I know makes this claim. “Tax revenue collected from marijuana sales would substantially outweigh the social costs of legalization.” That’s because we don’t have to. What we know for a fact is that the savings in reduced criminal justice costs and the societal savings in black market violence way more than makes up for any supposed social costs of legalization (which nobody has been able to identify with any certainty), even if there is not a single penny in tax revenue.

Our opponents like to create this straw man, and then supposedly shoot it down by showing that the potential tax revenue is uncertain. From our perspective, tax revenue is just a carrot to stick in front of the nose to get the approval/attention of some, but we don’t need it to achieve a net benefit to society.

I could take his entire memorandum apart piece by piece, but it doesn’t really deserve it. I’ll be happy to address any part of it you request, or if he stops by, I’ll do the same. In the meantime, you can have fun with it in comments.

I do want to point out the most amazing section of this article, where Stimson practically has to alter the physical makeup of the universe in order for his argument to work…

Unsafe in Any Amount: How Marijuana Is Not Like Alcohol

Marijuana advocates have had some success peddling the notion that marijuana is a “soft” drug, similar to alcohol, and fundamentally different from “hard” drugs like cocaine or heroin. It is true that marijuana is not the most dangerous of the commonly abused drugs, but that is not to say that it is safe. Indeed, marijuana shares more in common with the “hard” drugs than it does with alcohol.

A common argument for legalization is that smoking marijuana is no more dangerous than drinking alcohol and that prohibiting the use of marijuana is therefore no more justified than the prohibition of alcohol. As Jacob Sullum, author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, writes:

Americans understood the problems associated with alcohol abuse, but they also understood the problems associated with Prohibition, which included violence, organized crime, official corruption, the erosion of civil liberties, disrespect for the law, and injuries and deaths caused by tainted black-market booze. They decided that these unintended side effects far outweighed whatever harms Prohibition prevented by discouraging drinking. The same sort of analysis today would show that the harm caused by drug prohibition far outweighs the harm it prevents, even without taking into account the value to each individual of being sovereign over his own body and mind.[7]

At first blush, this argument is appealing, especially to those wary of over-regulation by government. But it overlooks the enormous difference between alcohol and marijuana.

Legalization advocates claim that marijuana and alcohol are mild intoxicants and so should be regulated similarly; but as the experience of nearly every culture, over the thousands of years of human history, demonstrates, alcohol is different. Nearly every culture has its own alcoholic preparations, and nearly all have successfully regulated alcohol consumption through cultural norms. The same cannot be said of marijuana. There are several possible explanations for alcohol’s unique status: For most people, it is not addictive; it is rarely consumed to the point of intoxication; low-level consumption is consistent with most manual and intellectual tasks; it has several positive health benefits; and it is formed by the fermentation of many common substances and easily metabolized by the body.

You getting this? This is amazing stuff. But he’s not done.

Alcohol differs from marijuana in several crucial respects. First, marijuana is far more likely to cause addiction. Second, it is usually consumed to the point of intoxication. Third, it has no known general healthful properties, though it may have some palliative effects. Fourth, it is toxic and deleterious to health. Thus, while it is true that both alcohol and marijuana are less intoxicating than other mood-altering drugs, that is not to say that marijuana is especially similar to alcohol or that its use is healthy or even safe.

In fact, compared to alcohol, marijuana is not safe. Long-term, moderate consumption of alcohol carries few health risks and even offers some significant benefits. […]

To equate marijuana use with alcohol consumption is, at best, uninformed and, at worst, actively misleading. Only in the most superficial ways are the two substances alike, and they differ in every way that counts: addictiveness, toxicity, health effects, and risk of intoxication.

Not a single bit of that is connected to reality.

I find myself trying to imagine the discussion that went on in the Heritage Foundation when they assigned this article to Cully. “OK, here’s the deal… We really don’t like the people who like marijuana. This is a cultural battle, but we’re supposed to be a think tank, so we can’t say keep it illegal because it’s immoral or because we don’t like those people. We need to make it look like this is a researched academic paper that comes to this indisputable conclusion. Now we’re about small government, so you’re going to have to really lay it on about marijuana being so dangerous that we have no choice but to use government to outlaw it. And we all like to drink, so you’ve got to show that alcohol is OK, while marijuana is not. And… go!”

Wonder how it feels to sell your soul?

Wednesday, the Arizona Cardinals donated $10,000 to the organization called Keep AZ Drug Free, which opposes a medical marijuana bill.

This is from a football organization on their fifth year of a beer sponsorship deal with Anheuser-Busch.

Budweiser and Bud Light will serve as the exclusive alcohol sponsors of the club, and a “Budweiser Red Zone” will occupy a place in the south end zone of the stadium. Signage on the video display boards and elsewhere is also part of the deal.

The Drug Czar:

The data also show that nearly 21 million people in the U.S. needed treatment for substance abuse. However, 95 percent of this group felt they did not need treatment

Makes you wonder.

Every year, whenever a new set of numbers comes out regarding illicit drugs, the drug warriors are ready to pounce. Their staff combs through the numbers and looks for specific ones (out of thousands) to cherry-pick. It’s a fun and easy game for them, because it doesn’t matter which way the numbers go.

1. If drug use is some category is up, then We Need to Push Harder with the Drug War! With More Funding!
2. If drug use in some category is down, then it’s See, the Drug War is working! We Need More Funding to Fix the Other Areas!

Once in a while, as Eric Sterling notes, they’ll attempt to use the numbers another way to attack opponents, such as Kerlikowske did yesterday when discussing the increase in marijuana use among teens aged 12-17.

“I can absolutely not rule out this constant discussion of so-called medical marijuana, marijuana legalization and the downplaying of marijuana harms that is prevalent in the media,”

Don’t you love it? The phrase “absolutely not rule out” is pure gold. It means nothing, yet sounds so definitive. I can absolutely not rule out the existence of a spaghetti monster. I can absolutely not rule out the possibility that our political leaders have been taken over by Red Lectroids from Planet 10.

The numbers game is starting to get old, even for the media. John Cloud, in the Health Section of Time Magazine, writes, Is Drug Use Really on the Rise?

Each year when the federal government releases new statistics on drug use, the bad news always gets reported first. That’s partly because bad news is always a better story than good news. It’s also partly because government anti-drug agencies depend on bad news to maintain funding levels from Congress, so they publicize danger signs first.

Whoa. Not the usual obedient repetition of drug czar proclamations in the media that we had in the past.

The Time article takes the scary numbers and puts them in a little more perspective:

As for other drugs: use of alcohol is unchanged, while the decline in tobacco use has stalled. Also, a headline buried in the SAMHSA report: the number of people who begin to use illegal drugs each day has not changed from last year. Every day, approximately 8,500 Americans use an illegal drug for the first time. Nearly 60% of these people are smoking pot for the first time. These figures are similar to the numbers of the past few years. The average age at which an American first smokes pot? Not 12 or 13, as scary reports would suggest, but 17.

Finally, the number of Americans who report being dependent on substances has been stable since 2002 — about 22 million of us are dependent. It’s still too high, but let’s all take a deep breath. With or without a bong at hand.

Nice to see some realism.

Part of the problem with all of these numbers games anyway is that generally, the ONDCP is obsessing over the wrong numbers.

The goal of the ONDCP, as mandated by Congress, is to reduce the number of people using illicit drugs. That is a bad, and even destructive, goal. With the incentive being to find quick ways to reduce large numbers, the focus isn’t on the people who need help, but rather with the casual (non-problematic) user where the ONDCP may be able to scare them off by tough enforcement talk or propaganda.

If you’re going to have a drug policy entity at the federal level to solve the “drug problem,” then its goal should be to reduce harm, not reduce level of use. In that situation the drug czar’s office would have no interest in responsible recreational users, and would focus on both the aspects of drug abuse and drug prohibition that are harmful.