Drug WarRant

For those of you (like myself) who have not had the chance to see a first-class medical marijuana operation, here’s a nice look (Via Scott Morgan)

It’s also the potential vision of what a post-legalization distribution method could be.

Good job, Jessica Corry.

Joe Fiorito has an excellent column in The Star, discussing Canada’s plans to add mandatory minimums to a bunch of drug offenses, and a speech by Eugene Oscapella of the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy.

The column is like a basic primer: Why tough drug laws won’t work

Here’s the problem, according to Oscapella and almost everyone else who looks at drugs with a clear eye: The first result of the prohibition of any substance – alcohol, tobacco, cocaine – is the creation of a lucrative black market. […]

Drugs are less about getting high, and more about making huge pots of money. As for risk, it is possible to fit enough heroin to supply this country for a year in the back of a cube van; a year’s supply of cocaine will fit in a shipping container. How many shipping containers and cube vans come into Canada in any given year? What’s the cost of a timely bribe?

In other words, criminal law has created a lucrative black market, and criminal law is powerless to stop it. […]

Oscapella said, “If you’re a mom-and-pop producer of marijuana, mandatory minimums will scare you out of business.” Yeah, so? “Organized crime will step in; the government has moved the competition out of the way.”

This is an unintended consequence of the worst kind: Banning a substance makes it wildly lucrative; punishing the small fry makes it easier for the bad guys to do business.

Mandatory reading for all Canadian politicians.

Jacob Sullum notes that the opponents of legalization in the recent California hearing appeared less than well-prepared.

This one was really outrageous..

Sara Simpson, acting assistant chief of the state Justice Department’s Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, said much of California’s major marijuana cultivation is run by Mexican drug cartels on remote public lands, and she recited a litany of violent and deadly clashes with armed guards at such sites. Such growing operations also are environmentally devastating, she said, and produce marijuana far more potent than that used just years ago. There’s no reason to believe the cartels would adhere to state laws on cultivation, potency and taxation any more than they adhere to prohibition now, she said.

Jacob does a fine job of debunking the stupidity…

The point is not the “the cartels” would suddenly start behaving like good corporate citizens but that they would be driven out of this particular business by open, legal competition.

… but what boggles my mind is that we should even have to debunk this.

Maybe I’m just naturally intellectually superior to most of the rest of the world, so I have a hard time understanding that their minds are incapable of grasping some of these basic notions related to legalization.

Or Sara Simpson is a moron.

There has been overwhelming support for David Nutt, who was sacked for actually providing scientific advice in his role as a scientific advisor to the U.K. government.

But not everyone.

Burton Addiction Centre founder Noreen Oliver takes exception to Nutt’s comments on the relative safety of marijuana, with this amazing statement:

I have worked with thousands of drug users and they all say cannabis is an entry drug. We did research and from our records it showed that 99.9 per cent of the time cannabis leads on to stronger drugs.

“99.9 per cent of the time cannabis leads on to stronger drugs”

Wow. It takes guts to make up a whopper like that. But what does it take to report it without question? Katie Bowler of the Burton Mail appears to have an odd notion of being a reporter.

I wonder… if I told Katie that, according to my records, 99.9% of all automobile trips resulted in a fatal crash, would she simply print that quote unchallenged?

Links to all the testimony from the California legalization hearing.

Parents wake up and decide that they may not be so happy after all with having someone watch their child pee.

More Evidence That Vaporization Works by Bruce Mirken

The article also provides some new practical information on vaporization, suggesting that a temperature of 230 degrees Celsius is ideal, and that using smaller amounts of marijuana in the vaporizer produces more vapor, but does not extract THC more efficiently, so there is no apparent gain in using an amount less than about half a gram at a time.

Pot Is More Mainstream Than Ever, So Why Is Legalization Still Taboo? by Steve Wishnia

More members of Congress have publicly questioned whether President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii than have endorsed legalizing marijuana.

Sad.

To win that support, St. Pierre says, the legalization movement needs to sustain grassroots activism and become more multiracial instead of being almost all-white and mainly male. Advancing legalization would also need the support of charismatic politicians early in their careers, as “it’s impossible to flip a 50- or 60-year-old alpha male in Washington.” […]

“We have not achieved the political legitimacy of the gay and lesbian community,” he concludes. “As long as 0.1 percent of cannabis consumers are involved with their own liberation, reform is unlikely.” If just 1 percent of the nation’s estimated 36 million pot smokers would get involved, he says, that would be a constituency of 360,000 activists.

How’s that big fence working?

SAN MIGUEL, Ariz. — A pickup truck in Mexico pulls up to the 5-foot vehicle barriers that make up part of the multibillion-dollar border fence. A retractable ramp is extended from the truck, forming a bridge up and over the barriers.

Then, a second pickup — this one loaded with a ton of marijuana — rolls over the bridge and into the U.S.

With gadgetry such as custom-built ramps as well as ultralight planes, false doors and good old-fashioned duct tape, smugglers have demonstrated unbounded creativity when it comes to sneaking drugs across the Mexican border. And the U.S. government acknowledges there is only so much it can do to stop the flow. [AP]

Thought so.

DEA to the elderly: be sure to schedule your pain for times of the day when we allow pain medication to be distributed.

DrugSense Weekly – a weekly review of the most interesting or relevant articles in the press and on the web related to drug policy reform.

Drug War Chronicle – weekly update of drug war news and analysis from Stop the Drug War.org.

Shootingthe Messenger

The UK’s chief drugs adviser has been sacked by Home Secretary Alan Johnson, after criticising government policies.

Professor David Nutt, head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, criticised the decision to reclassify cannabis to Class B from C.

What I really love is the reason given by the home secretary:

“I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as chair of the ACMD.

“I would therefore ask you to step down from the Council with immediate effect.”

Got that? Can’t have “science” mucking up the policy we’ve decided we want. Those pesky facts keep getting in the way of our bad policy.

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said the decision to sack the adviser had been “disgraceful”.

“What is the point of having independent scientific advice if as soon as you get some advice that you don’t like, you sack the person who has given it to you?” he said.

Mr Huhne said if the government did not want to take expert scientific advice, it might as well have “a committee of tabloid newspaper editors to advise on drugs policy”.

I thought that’s what they had — although it seemed to me like there was just one: the editor of the Daily Mail.

In other news across the pond (and yes, this is actually reported in the Mail), it seems that British police got themselves a pretty new asset forfeiture law a few years back, and, wanting to cash in like their American counterparts have been doing regularly in the war on drugs, decided to take this law to lengths undreamt of…

After being turned down at least once by a judge and shopping around for one that didn’t know enough about the law and would give them the warrant, they raided a series of public safe deposit vaults at once, and broke open all 6,717 safe deposit boxes, taking all the cash (53 million pounds), jewelry, and lots of other valuables. They then assumed that all were the result of illegal activities and required the owners to prove otherwise.

Some of the contents just vanished in the procedural maze, never to be seen again.

One goldsmith from north London fought for over a year to get his £40,000 cash and valuables back, then claimed it was not all there. He has now filed an official complaint.

‘The police kept saying, “Why have you got all this cash?” and I showed them my books.’

His premises were raided twice, the second time by 20 officers.
‘They found nothing because I had done nothing and eventually this summer, everything was returned to me. But £10,000 was gone – and my wife’s diamond earrings.’

Sure, there were definitely illegal items in some of the boxes (cocaine, etc.) But it’s now looking like the vast majority was seized from innocent victims of the police raid.

Of the 6,717 boxes targeted by detectives in the biggest raid in the Met’s history, just over half were occupied. And of those that were full, 2,838 boxes were now handed back, a figure that represents 80 per cent of the number of boxes seized.

Eight out of ten box owners were provably innocent. Taylor said: ‘Of the £53 million in cash that the police took, £20 million has also been given back and £33 million is now being referred to as “under investigation”, of which only £2.83 million has been confiscated or forfeited by the courts.

Many of the innocent victims had the resources to retain very good lawyers.

In fact, the operation may end up costing the taxpayer a fortune. Rize has certainly helped put a number of hard-line criminals behind bars, but at what cost?

And, of course, it’s not just a financial cost. There is the huge cost in the lack of confidence in a government that can step in and steal your stuff whenever they want.

Via Radley’s tweet, here is what some prohibitionists apparently think is a good argument for continuing prohibition.

Joint Cause Commercial from Wil Wells on Vimeo.

Seriously? That’s the best you’ve got?

This is from CADFY (Community Alliances for Drug Free Youth), who have this gem of a response regarding the relative dangers of marijuana and alcohol…

The pro-legalization supporters will say:

“Marijuana is safer than alcohol, yet it’s illegal.”

The truth:

• If we applied that standard, alcohol would be illegal and crack-cocaine would be legal, since alcohol use trumps all other drugs with respect to its contribution to violent crime.
• Alcohol, unlike marijuana or any other illegal drug, has a long, wide-spread history of use in Western culture, dating back to the Old Testament and Ancient Rome.
• Yes, marijuana has been used for a while, but not in a broad, wide-spread manner like alcohol.

Wow.

Here’s the group at a press conference prior to the California hearings on legalization. This looks like the cast of extras in a Mel Brooks movie.

Untitled from Wil Wells on Vimeo.

Note that they’re all wearing the “Seriously?” buttons.

After the recent appearance on ABC, where George Will mentioned that he thought legalization of marijuana is in process in the U.S., he has written a new column which is in papers all over the country: A bit of reality on drug use

It’s supposedly about Kerlikowske, but it’s broader than that. Not a whole lot that’s directly quotable, but Will’s quotes from The Economist magazine, and his references to tobacco and alcohol (along with failures of prohibition in various areas), make it clear that reform is the answer.

An historic event yesterday

No tie-dye was on display at a standing-room only hearing held by a California lawmaker on Wednesday in a bid to get his marijuana legalization bill taken seriously.

Instead, suits and sober discussion were the rule at the state Capitol as Assemblyman Tom Ammiano presided over what his office said was the first legislative consideration of the issue since California banned the drug in 1913.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with this bill, and I still think that it’s a long shot, but there’s never been a better time for it.

And even though this is obviously true, it was nice to see it mentioned…

Legal experts on both sides also agreed at the informational hearing that nothing in current federal law can prevent California from stripping criminal penalties for marijuana from its own books.

“If California decides to legalize marijuana, there’s nothing in the Constitution that stands in its way,” said Tamar Todd, a staff attorney for the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance.

This particular article did have a couple of annoying notes, one of which came from the Rand Corporation’s embarrassing Rosalie Pacula.

Rosalie Pacula, director of drug policy research at the nonpartisan Rand Corp., said data on the economics of marijuana were “insufficient on which to base any sound policy.”

Now, since we’ve had no modern version of legalization, that’s true enough, but that’s not a very good reason for continuing on a destructive path.

She continues…

Pacula said a failed effort in Canada to increase taxes on cigarettes showed that unless taxes had a minimal effect on prevailing prices, “you create the economic incentive for the black market to remain.”

There is a significant difference between nature and scope of the black market caused by high taxes and the black market caused by prohibition. Any “economist” who fails to note that is either stupid or willfully attempting to deceive their audience.

Note: I’ve written about Pacula before, more than once.

Back to yesterday’s event… Paul Armentano provides the testimony he gave at the hearing.

Also, YouTube video of James P. Gray’s testimony.