Drug WarRant

DEA announces “historic victory” in the war on drugs

And what exactly is this historic victory?

The San Antonio Police Department has “hit the jackpot.” Today, the Drug Enforcement Administration in San Antonio handed over the largest ever drug forfeiture checks to local law enforcement.

Wednesday, DEA Special Agent Mauricio Fernandez awarded nearly $800 thousand dollars to the San Antonio Police Department. […]

The DEA also wrote a check for more than $3 million dollars to the McMullen County Sheriff’s Office.

See, that’s one of the great things about war. Sure, there’s the killing of the children, and the raping of the women, and the burning of the village, which is all fine, but then… you get to do the looting.

And this is some really good looting… $800,000.00 — $3,000,000.00

The other great thing about loot is that it helps cement the loyalty of the troops. After being rewarded so handsomely, they’ll be the first to volunteer to attack villagers the next time. They’re not going to be swayed by local politicians, or referenda, or public opinion, or… laws.

Their first and only allegiance will be to the provider of all that loot — their benefactor, the DEA.

They’ll be a lot like the Trashcan Man in Steven King’s The Stand…

My life for you! … bumpity bumpity bump…

Via TalkLeft comes a list of the “Top 100 Women in Weed” (compiled by Skunk magazine and listed at CelebStoner) Pleased to see that Jeralyn made the list.

The list is a combination of activists and celebrities who have publicly come out in support of cannabis and/or cannabis law reform.

I’m not a big fan of the word “weed,” but I understand that for a very large portion of the cannabis aficionado crowd, it’s the bee’s knees, it’s hep, and it’s where it’s at.

The original list came in at 114, and then CelebStoner noted an additional critical group that should have been on the list, and I can still see some important omissions (including some very amazing women in the U.S. SSDP ranks).

So I guess the point can be made that this is another area where we have made great strides. To have problems narrowing down the list of public and powerful female activists to 100 in a reform field that has often been dominated by males says something about how that reform field has grown.

…

Speaking of changes in the look of the reform field, it’s worth reading Ethan Nadelmann’s piece in The Nation: The Next Frontier Of Drug Policy Reform

The [sentencing disparity] victory also showed that traditional civil rights leaders are finally beginning to prioritize criminal justice reform. Black support for the late-’80s drug war helped legitimize the policies that led to the incarceration of millions of young African-Americans. The dawning realization of what they had wrought led the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Representative Charlie Rangel and then–SCLC president Joseph Lowery to start calling for reform of the crack/powder disparity in the early 1990s — but it never became a priority for them, the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights or the CBC. […]

Change is clearly afoot. Black legislators are often at the forefront of sentencing and other drug policy reform efforts in state capitals. Michelle Alexander’s powerful new book, The New Jim Crow, in which she calls out civil rights organizations for failing to grasp that the drug war is accomplishing what Jim Crow once did, is stirring up much-needed debate. And the endorsement of California’s marijuana legalization initiative, Proposition 19, by both Alice Huffman, the influential head of the California NAACP, and the National Black Police Association proves that courageous leadership is possible.

This is an extraordinarily positive, and probably necessary, development.

Shepard Smith: “Are you kidding me? Compared to Oxycontin and Percocet, the side effects of marijuana are serious?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSyBAacofkM

Study shows cannabis relieves nerve pain. Gee. Yet another piece of science that will be ignored by our government.

---

CMA Journal Article Backs Drug Injection Site

An article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal slams the federal government for its efforts to shut down Insite in downtown Vancouver, Canada’s only safe injection site for drug addicts. […]

“We’ve concluded after reviewing the evidence that Insite is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, and furthermore that we’re very concerned that the federal government has misled on the science,” said Dr. Michael Rachlis, a professor of health policy at the University of Toronto.

Surprise, surprise. Another case where the activists have pushed for research and trials and the science has been rejected by a government.

---

Jeff Ackerman: Pot busts — Reading between the lines

I’ll bet a beer that most of you would have no problem finding a gin and tonic, if booze was illegal today.

Guys like Al Capone would see to that. Big Al, they say, was knocking down $60 million per year in the late 1920s from alcohol alone, during a period when our government brain trust decided the best way to get people to sober up was to pass an 18th Amendment banning the sale, transportation and manufacturing of alcohol in America.

Big Al wasn’t that smart, but he was smart enough to know a sucker when he saw one and Uncle Sam was the biggest sucker of all.

Unfortunately, Uncle Sam doesn’t learn from his mistakes…

---

My trusty MacBook Pro, which some of you helped me purchase, and which has been doing a wonderful job serving as my blogging platform for the last four years, has come down with a fatal hard drive failure. I’ve got it in to the shop in the hopes that I can keep it alive a while longer with a replacement hard drive. I still have access to other computers, but blogging is going to be a little less convenient than usual for a bit.

---

This is an open thread.

Says Calvina Fay:

Legalization would also create an influx in drugged-driving fatalities, more deteriorated neighborhoods, more divorce, more domestic violence, more child abuse, and more addiction!

And yes, she is referring to cannabis.

While she’s quite the tool now, once cannabis is legal I think I might employ her as a gardener. She claims to be able to produce 240,000 joints from a 5′ by 5′ piece of dirt.

Cutbacks force police to curtail calls for some crimes

Budget cuts are forcing police around the country to stop responding to fraud, burglary and theft calls as officers focus limited resources on violent crime.

Notice the glaring omission in that sentence?

Mark Kleiman has a good post about some of the problems that are occurring in the unfortunate federal legal limbo of medical marijuana (like patients losing their jobs over drug tests): Cannabis, medicine, employment, and science

He notes that it won’t be solved unless/until cannabis is legalized at the federal level or a strain of cannabis is FDA approved.

For that to happen, the Federal government has to stop its current policy of obstructing clinical research.

Exactly.

Good stuff. But then he goes on to attempt to describe “our side,” complete with “medical marijuana” in scare quotes:

Many advocates of “medical marijuana” tacitly or explicitly oppose the clinical-research approach, even though that puts them on the same side of the issue as the drug warriors and the Drug Enforcement Administration. They insist that no research is needed because they already know the answer. (To advocates, “data” is just the plural of “anecdote.”) And they fear, quite correctly, that cannabis as a prescription drug would be no cheaper than illicit-market cannabis, and that actual prescriptions wouldn’t be nearly as easy to obtain as California “recommendations.”

Maybe I’ve been too tough on Mark in the past, assuming that he was including me when he talked about legalizers. If he really knows advocates who oppose research, then that’s sad.

None of the drug policy reform advocates that I’ve met fall into that category. I welcome research. I demand it. More information is always better.

Here’s an important point, though. I believe, as do most of us, that there is sufficient research and sufficient knowledge of the properties of cannabis to confidently (and in a scientifically appropriate way) allow its use for a wide variety of medical purposes.
(So if a prohibitionist tells me “They can’t use medical marijuana until there’s more research,” I call bullshit, particularly given the fact that that person generally knows that the government has no intention of following through on research.)

We understand that data is not the plural of anecdote. However, in the case of cannabis, there are plenty of instances, even when levels of research sufficient to result in FDA approval (assuming that’s even a proper standard) have not been conducted, where the knowledge is sufficient for going ahead confidently with medical use. The Institute of Medicine report “Assessing the Science Base” suggested that “n of 1” trials would be a good approach for cannabis, rather than waiting, for example.

There’s also a significant difference between analyzing a drug that’s used for symptom relief and one used for providing a cure.

Broadly using cannabis to cure cancer would require significant study (see laetrile) because allowing the patient to use cannabis instead of other treatments could jeopardize the patient’s treatment options.

However, using cannabis to treat the symptom of nausea from chemotherapy chemicals requires only two things:

1. Does it work for this patient? This is a simple matter of observation by the patient and his/her doctor.
2. Is it safe? And we have decades of the lack of bodies to sufficiently demonstrate the safety of cannabis.

In most cases today, medical cannabis is being used for the second example, and therefore the supposed need to wait for additional FDA approval is merely harmful to current sick people. That doesn’t mean that more research shouldn’t be done. It should. Just that it should not prevent medical cannabis use now.

Mark also says

The more sophisticated among them will say explicitly (in private) that “medical marijuana” is the best organizing issue for drug policy reform, and that FDA approval of cannabis as a real, live medicine (just like methamphetamine) would take a lot of the wind out of their sails.

I guess I just must not be very sophisticated.

Sure. I have said (publicly) that medical marijuana (not in quotes) is an excellent organizing issue for drug policy reform. That’s a simple fact. Once people see that medical marijuana exists and the sky doesn’t fall and people don’t turn into axe-wielding zombies, they’ll realize that they’ve been lied to all these years, and it’ll be easier to get them to be open to the truths about full legalization.

But I’m not using medical marijuana patients to further my cause. If the FDA approved a medical marijuana strain so that Julie Falco could get the medicine she needs to get through her day without having to resort to criminal activity, then I’d be absolutely thrilled, and I’d focus on legalizing cannabis and all other currently illicit drugs for recreational purposes.

The ones who use medical marijuana patients in harmful ways are the prohibitionists, who do everything that they can to block medical marijuana, because they also know that medical marijuana will cause people to learn the truth. And they’re willing to harm sick people in order to hide the truth. That’s despicable.

Maybe I’m hopelessly naive. Maybe there’s a bunch of drug policy reformers out there with bad motives who oppose research. I just haven’t met them.

Kleiman ends his piece strong:

The real mystery is why the Obama Administration, which has largely dropped drug-war language and ideology and is generally in favor of gathering and using scientific information to make policy, hasn’t changed course on this issue.

Given the overwhelming support for the medical use of cannabis found in every poll and confirmed in several referenda, and given the fact that the DEA’s own administrative law judge ruled in favor of breaking the research-cannabis monopoly and had to be over-ruled by the DEA Administrator, I would have thought the choice to let the science speak for itself would have been a no-brainer. But I would have been wrong.

The fact that policy that not only fits the President’s agenda and also has such popular support can be so easily squelched, just goes to show how profitably entrenched the prohibition lobby is in our government.

Tony Newman and Stephen Gutwillig have a really nice OpEd in today’s Santa Cruz Sentinel: California’s marijuana legalization initiative is already a winner

Basically, the point of the OpEd is that, regardless of the outcome, Prop 19 is already a winner because it is contributed to a major national and international discussion on the importance of legalizing marijuana (and not just medical marijuana). Excellent point, and well argued. It’s a good, quick read.

---

On the other side, we have a really ignorant (or perhaps willfully deceptive) OpEd in the Palm Springs Desert Sun by Donald S. Karvelis: No, legalizing marijuana would cause more problems than it would cure. The unsupported claims in this are truly amazing, but here’s the one that made me laugh out loud.

Marijuana is a dangerous drug. It may have treatment value for some conditions, but as with most pharmaceuticals, dangerous side-effects are possible.

The fourth-leading cause of death in America today results from reaction to prescription drugs. Recreational use of marijuana will make this situation worse.

Pharmaceuticals? Marijuana is a natural plant.

This is like saying “Chicken soup has verified medical benefits. Therefore, if we legalize it, we will have additional deaths from chicken soup since pharmaceuticals (of which chicken soup is one by nature of its medical value) can cause death.”

What a brilliantly twisted mind it takes to reach that leap of logic.

Editorial: The Rising Trend Against The War On Drugs (Globe and Mail, Canada)

Toronto this week became the first city in the world to formally endorse the Vienna Declaration that states that war-on-drugs-style prohibitions are a costly failure, denounces the “severe negative consequences” of such policies both in terms of public health and crime rates, and urges a shift in emphasis to regulation and harm reduction.

It would be easy to dismiss the city council’s decision as a meaningless gesture by local politicians working well out of their depth, except that the push to decriminalize, not only marijuana, but hard drugs like cocaine and heroin as well, is a rising international phenomenon, being driven by serious and credible sources, not by local politicians or stoner websites. […]

The record suggests current federal government policy will not succeed in achieving any reduction of use, crime or harm. Canada, consequently, should resurrect the legislation to decriminalize marijuana and embark on a broader national discussion about policy on harder drugs, and the need for harm reduction in Canada.

Baltimore Sun

“I ended the war on drugs, if you didn’t know this war was over. That was last May,” Kerlikowske said. He characterized the decades-old war on drugs as an empty “bumper sticker,” saying the country was ready for a more “complex discussion of a complex subject.”

As with the war in Iraq, where combat operations officially ended last week, the fight against drugs continues but in a different form. During a day in which he toured several drug treatment and prevention centers and met with city police brass, Kerlikowske promoted a cooperative approach in which law enforcement, community groups, recovery specialists and job-training providers work together to combat the problem.

“It’s not about being soft on crime or soft on drugs,” he would say repeatedly throughout the day. “It’s about being smart on drugs.”

As soon as he said “smart on drugs,” the conversation fell apart as first Deputy Director Ben Tucker, and then David Mineta, broke out laughing. Within seconds, the Drug Czar himself joined in, unable to keep the straight face any longer. “War on drugs…over” Tucker chortled.

Aides were pleased to see Kerlikowske smile, saying it was time he stopped taking the job so seriously. “I think it’s the first time he didn’t look constipated since he took the job,” one quipped.

Meanwhile…

Drug war just that: A war

REYNOSA, Mexico — A car explodes outside a police station, another outside a television station. A gang is suspected of massacring 72 migrants. A prosecutor investigating those deaths suddenly disappears.

Mexico’s drug cartels seem to be adopting the tactics of war zones half a world away.

And…

15 Slain in Acapulco