Drug WarRant

Peter Hitchens

Don’t read this unless you’re interested in raising your blood pressure.

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… and not very well

Mr Brown backed Mr Johnson’s decision and defended the right of elected ministers to reject the advice of scientists at times. He said: “On climate change, or health, for example, we take the best scientific advise possible. But in an area like drugs we have to look at it in the round.

In the round? Ah, yes, I see here you have proved that 2+2=4. But, you see, in this area, we have to look at it in the round, so I declare it to be 3.

Lots of random “for the children” and “mixed messages” nonsense, and then.

He rejected the argument that cannabis is less harmful than alcohol and cigarettes.

“We’ve seen brands of cannabis that are distorted by other products and ingredients. That’s one of the reasons why it’s important to send a message that drug abuse is not acceptable and a criminal offence.”

(Yeah, your spliff becomes dangerous when cannabis is mixed with tobacco, but that’s because of the tobacco.)

There’s so much wrong with those sentences…

If you live in Maine, you have a chance to vote for the following today:

Question 5 reads: “Do you want to change the medical marijuana laws to allow treatment of more medical conditions and to create a regulated system of distributions?”

According to Leavitt, the goal of the new legislation is “to provide legal access for qualified patients who couldn’t access their medicine through the 1999 Maine Medical Marijuana Act.”

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.

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