Drug WarRant

We’re seeing all sorts of shifts in the media on drug policy, as talk of legalization has almost become the norm. That may be causing confusion among some editorial staffs.

It certainly seems that way with yesterday’s editorial in the Washington Post. It’s a prime example of something that looks like it was written by a committee… that was arguing.

THE JUSTICE Department announced last week that it would not prosecute patients who legally obtain marijuana from licensed dispensaries in the 13 states that allow medicinal use. The decision is both sensible and potentially problematic.

People suffering from HIV/AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis and other serious ailments should not be harassed or live in fear if they abide by the laws of their state to obtain a drug that may provide relief from such symptoms as pain and nausea. Neither should those who strictly follow legal standards in dispensing marijuana from state-licensed shops. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is right to focus federal resources primarily on large-scale illegal traffickers.

So far, so good. Nice support for leaving medical marijuana patients in those states alone. Next paragraph takes an odd turn.

Yet this policy shift leaves significant questions unaddressed, including whether the Justice Department’s decision essentially constitutes a first step toward legalizing marijuana. Such an immense policy decision should not be ushered in surreptitiously, but should be tackled head-on, with a full-throated public debate about the possible benefits and consequences.

Unaddressed? No, the policy memo and all the follow-ups from the administration were clear — the policy doesn’t even begin to legalize medical marijuana on a federal level, let alone legalizing marijuana in general. There is no surreptitious effort on the part of the federal government to legalize marijuana without a debate. The public’s been debating it and has been slowly and laboriously dragging the politicians into the right direction for years.

Now the editorial goes back to medical marijuana.

More information — good old-fashioned scientific information — is needed before the federal government or more states formally endorse marijuana smoking for medicinal use. The Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, in 1999 published what is widely considered to be the most comprehensive study; it was decidedly mixed, listing the many possible drawbacks of smoking marijuana, including respiratory problems, while noting that such use seemed to provide some patients with relief not obtained from pills containing marijuana’s active ingredients.

We’ve had all sorts of good old-fashioned scientific information since the 1999 report, including the fact that (gasp!) it’s actually possible to ingest marijuana without smoking it. Besides, the federal government and the states don’t need to formally endorse medical marijuana. They only need to stop preventing doctors from treating patients.

More recently, Dr. Peter J. Cohen, an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, noted in a 2009 law review article that reputable studies released in the past few years showed that patients with AIDS and hepatitis C experienced reduced pain and nausea and were better able to tolerate traditional treatment as a result of smoking marijuana. Yet these preliminary results — as Dr. Cohen points out — have not been subjected to rigorous testing by the Food and Drug Administration. The reason: A manufacturer must submit the drug for review before the FDA will tackle the assignment. So far, no such “manufacturer” has come forward.

Uh, yeah. The FDA is not a proper route for marijuana since it’s a plant and there’s no payoff for a single company to go through the expense of FDA approval. So in other words, the good old-fashioned science that you say need to happen has been happening, but the federal government has been unable or unwilling to handle it.

The medical marijuana controversy may be moot in the near future because of a drug known as Sativex, a spray mist approved for conditional use in Canada and the United Kingdom that delivers the active ingredients found in marijuana. If cleared by the FDA, patients will have some confidence that it is safe and effective. Patients have the right to know if the same can be said about smoked marijuana.

Sativex is not a drug that delivers the active ingredients found in marijuana. Sativex is marijuana, simply extracted into liquid form. If the FDA clears that, it’s going to be pretty hard for them to keep the hard line against the plant.

Hey, it’s not a bad editorial for the Washington Post. And it makes a lot of the right noises about the directions we should be headed. But I was definitely amused by their confusion.

After years of UK governments studiously ignoring every scientific report about drug policy, a home affairs select committee hearing, chaired by Keith Vaz, turned to the real expert: Amy Winehouse’s dad.

Marina Hyde has a very amusing take on it at the Guardian:

In light of this week’s efforts, Vaz can only be a hologram sent from the future specifically to plunge early 21st-century Britons into shame at the rancid state of their politics. OK, deeper shame.

On Tuesday, this mission took the form of inviting Amy Winehouse’s father to give evidence before his committee’s hearing into the cocaine trade – about which Mr Winehouse immediately confirmed he knew nothing. A cabbie by profession, he appeared to have been elevated to the status of expert witness on the basis of his daughter’s heroin addiction, and his fronting of a forthcoming documentary.

This is how politicians work. Side-shows and distractions. And Marina notes how similar it is to the antics of U.S. politicians…

In the US this practice has long been out of hand. The rot began in 1985 when Jane Fonda, Sally Field and Sissy Spacek were called as expert witnesses before a congressional hearing entitled The Plight of the Family Farmer. They’d all played farm wives in movies, you see. Forced to pick the nadir of such “expert” appearances, I’d cite Elmo from Sesame Street appearing before a house committee on children’s education. According to one congressman: “Elmo, in many ways, speaks for children everywhere.” No. Elmo is made of fun-fur.

A fun piece that’s also sad in its truth.

On ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos, the discussion go to the topic of marijuana…

the country is “probably in the process now of legalizing marijuana,” conservative columnist George F. Will said

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And a bit later in the program:

“Eighty percent of the revenue of the Mexican cartels is marijuana. If you really want to go after the Mexican cartels, and I’m not saying that is the only criterion for public policy, you’d legalize marijuana,” he said.

An excellent OpEd feature article by Peter Moskos: If it’s on the shelves, it’s off the streets (in the Sunday Magazine)

In this piece, Peter talks about his studies of drug policy in Amsterdam, compared with his experiences as a police officer here.

In America, 37 percent of adults have tried marijuana; in the Netherlands the figure is 17 percent. Heroin usage rates are three times higher in the United States than in the Netherlands. Crystal meth, so destructive here, is almost nonexistent there. By any standard — drug usage rates, addiction, homicides, incarceration and dollars spent — America has lost the war on drugs.

And just as escalating the drug war over the past three decades hasn’t caused a decrease in supply and demand, there’s no good reason to believe that regulating drugs instead of outlawing them would cause an increase. If it did, why are drug usage rates in the Netherlands lower? People start and stop taking drugs for many different reasons, but the law seems to be pretty low on the list.

And he points toward the solution he prefers… getting the federal government out of the way.

History provides some lessons. The 21st Amendment ending Prohibition did not force anybody to drink or any city to license saloons. In 1933, after the failure to ban alcohol, the feds simply got out of the game. Today, they should do the same […]

Without federal control, states, cities and counties would be free to bar or regulate drugs as they saw fit. Just as with alcohol and tobacco regulation, one size does not fit all; we would see local solutions to local problems. […]

Even without federal pressure, most states and cities would undoubtedly start by maintaining the status quo against drugs. That’s fine. […]

One can easily imagine that in some cities — San Francisco, Portland and Seattle come to mind — alternatives to arrest and incarceration could be tried. They could learn from the experience of the Dutch, and we could all learn from their successes and failures.

I think this model makes a lot of sense, and today, despite overwhelming federal oppression, it’s the model that we seem to be partially implementing (at least as it relates to medical marijuana so far…). But it’ll be tough — the federal government sure doesn’t like to sit back and watch.

Although the recent Holder memo doesn’t really change anything in a concrete way (and the Drug Czar and DEA claim that it’s business as usual), there is at least a public perception that there is a kind of tipping point happening here (and perception often drives public policy more than fact).

Sasha Abramsky, writing in the Guardian, says

In and of itself, this is a relatively minor event, a common-sense corrective to another rigid and bullying Bush-era policy. And, in and of itself, there’s not much political capital at stake here for Obama. […]

But, there’s a bigger story here. And it’s that story of the ship of state.

If you exercise too sharp a turn, you risk capsizing. If you go into the turn gradually, giving yourself plenty of room to manoeuvre, you’ve got a much better chance of getting where you want to ultimately go. […]

If you analyse politics simply via the 24-hour-news-cycle, then Obama’s achievements in reforming drug policy have been modest. But, if you think long term […] then I would venture to bet that Monday’s shift on medical marijuana presages some fundamental changes in how America approaches its many drug problems in the years to come.

Over at Narco News, Al Giordano also makes the case for incrementalism The Medical Cannabis Victory: A Textbook Case of Organizing and Resistance

It’s a powerful piece that will be controversial with many, including some regulars here.

…small steps lead to big change […]

In the mid-1990s, some forward-thinking advocates of drug policy reform concluded that the big, central matter – whether recreational drugs should be legalized or not – was simply too big and confusing a matter for so much of the public to tackle all at once. Even the matter of legalizing relatively harmless marijuana was overwhelming in terms of public opinion. As the Gallup poll graph above recounts, in 1996 only 25 percent of Americans favored legalizing marijuana, with 73 percent opposed. Any organizing strategy under such overwhelming negative numbers that chose polarization over organizing was doomed to fail.

And so some pioneering voices and organizers set about on a path of incremental change. They chose to hit hard upon a brittle crack in the drug war artifice: that even if three-quarters of Americans did not then want cannabis legalized for everyone, a critical mass had grave misgivings about policies that persecuted people who were ill – with glaucoma, cancer, AIDS, MS and other ailments – and needed the plant as medicine. […]

Thirteen years later, those who enacted the incremental strategy have proved correct, indeed, prophetic. […]

The history textbooks will note forevermore, when looking back at how the United States repealed pot prohibition (something that will likely now come in most of our lifetimes) that it was the strategy of incremental change that opened the floodgates to fundamental change. […]

…there is also a lesson here for the cynics who, in lieu of participating in community organizing and civil resistance campaigns, preferred to talk trash against step-by-step movements for change on any policy front and pose as somehow more “radical” or “pure.” […]

It is by winning those step-by-step incremental victories – through proven methods of community organizing and civil resistance – that more fundamental change is made possible, indeed, likely to come faster than many dreamed just thirteen years ago.

Have at it.

The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that police can include the entire weight of bong water that tests positive for the presence of a drug when computing the amount of drug possession.

The case involved meth, but you can imagine that they’ll immediately start using it to jack up the amounts for pot possession as well. One cup of water weighs just over 8 ounces.

In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Paul Anderson said the majority’s decision “does not make sense, and borders on the absurd.” He said it isn’t consistent with what the Legislature intended when it wrote the state’s drug laws. And he blasted Rice County authorities for charging Peck with such a serious crime.

Having strange server problems and can’t seem to post anything other than a short line or two without getting “Service Temporarily Unavailable: The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later..” Hopefully I’ll be able to fix this later today.

In the meantime, feel free to have at it in comments.

Boston.com has The Big Picture — 37 photos from the world of drug use and the drug war.

These are powerful and sometimes very disturbing images.

It’s interesting how perspective changes based on what you know. I look at these photos and I see graphic proof of the undeniable need to end this war on drugs.

And yet, based on the comments, there are others who see these photos as evidence that we need to continue the war on drugs.

Lots of good comments, and some heated words…

…and then there are the ones like this:

So it would be easier to legalize drugs rather than fight the war? That has got to be the dumbest thing I ever heard. What about legalizing murder and pedophilia because they too have been around forever, and people will always kill and harm children anyway. We could just get them counseling and slowly ween them away from their violent and distructive behavior. That is the problem with the liberal mind and why this world is in the shape its in. KILL ALL DEALORS AND THEIR FAMILIES, thats a solution

Sigh.

So far, the responses to the Holder memo (that puts in writing the administration policy of not interfering with state medical marijuana operations unless they feel like it) has gotten a lot of favorable press — so much so that it’s likely to help apply pressure on the feds to actually make good their… pledge to prioritize. So despite the lack of teeth in the memo, it has served up a powerful result.

The prohibitionist nay-sayers have been pretty inconspicuous in this discussion. I already talked about the Christian Science Monitor, and the Drug Czar finally gave his two bits here).

But what about the outrageous ones? OK, you know you love these…

1st up: former Baltimore County drug czar and recovering addict Mike Gimbel in the Baltimore Sun (save us from recovering addicts who want to arrest everyone else for their weaknesses): Medical marijuana is an excuse to get high. Yeah, you know this’ll be good…

This is how we handle all potential new drugs in this country, and if the FDA gives its approval, we get our prescriptions filled at a licensed pharmacy. However, this has never been done with marijuana because we all know the results would be negative since the drug is far more dangerous than anyone wants to admit and its medical use is at best minimal.

No, the FDA is really a government arm of the pharmaceutical industry and not set up to handle drugs like marijuana. Every drug that the FDA has approved is more dangerous than marijuana (you know, side effects like death), and despite the government’s unwillingness to deal with it, the science on marijuana’s medical value fills volumes.

Instead, baby boomer lobbyists have convinced several states to set up independent “marijuana dispensaries” to sell marijuana directly to the public, with a doctor’s prescription. No other drug is dispensed this way. Can you imagine an OxyContin dispensary in your neighborhood?

Yes, I can. They’re called Walgreens, and CVS, and Duane Reade, and Costco. They’re all over the place. How else do you sell prescription drugs, but directly to the public with a doctor’s prescription?

Let’s remember that the two drugs that kill more Americans are the two legal drugs: tobacco and alcohol. Making marijuana legal would only lead to the same results.

And that makes sense… how? Are you saying that things kill you because they’re legal? That somehow legalizing marijuana would suddenly make it lethal when it isn’t now? This is like saying “Let’s remember that the two transportation methods that kill more Americans are two legal ones: cars and motorcycles. Making walking legal would only lead to the same results.”

The major difference is when you smoke pot, the goal is to get “stoned or high,” unlike alcohol and tobacco, where you can use a small amount without creating impairment.

First, what’s wrong with getting high? Everybody looks to do that, whether it’s from eating chocolate, having sex, or going to a prayer meeting. Second, you can have a small amount of pot without creating impairment. Third, if getting high was an undesirable side-effect of drinking, why aren’t there more sales of O’Doul’s and sparkling grape juice?

If we are honest with ourselves, we all know that the higher you get after smoking marijuana, the more impaired you get. So if there is a medical use, let’s put it through the proper channels, but if the real goal is to legalize marijuana, we need to think about the consequences.

Um, yes, the higher you get, the more impaired you get. What does that have to do with this argument?

….

For outrageous, but less funny, you’ll need to read Charles Lane’s post in the Washington Post: Medical marijuana is an insult to our intelligence

He essentially calls Angel Raich a hypochondriac pothead, which did not set well with her considering she has to go in for brain surgery next Wednesday (the tumor is very close to her brain stem).

And Lane throws stuff around without any real connection to reality…

What other substances should we handle this way? Cocaine? Laetrile? Didn’t President Obama just sign a bill authorizing the FDA to regulate the nicotine content of tobacco? And I thought he promised to “restore science to its rightful place.” […] The “medical marijuana” movement may not be a threat to our civilization, but it is an insult to our intelligence.

Considering Lane does believe that there are some uses for medical marijuana and that decriminalization is a discussion worth having, the inflammatory nature of this article was just an opportunity to be nasty.

If he was looking to stir up the pot, he certainly succeeded — the comments section is boiling over.

Update: Lane changed his post to drop out some of the more inflammatory statements.

The drug czar’s getting kind of lazy with his “blog.” Apparently somebody decided that they should post something today encouraging people to get involved in drug-free work week, which begins began… Monday.

Shoot, only one week to be drug-free, and we’ve already missed half of it.

That got me wandering around some of the Department of Labor pages on the topic and I ran into something I hadn’t heard before. Apparently, the Department of Transportation has a new rule, as of August, requiring certain drug testing situations to utilize mandatory direct observation collections.

What does that mean?

Direct observation is a procedure that requires a same-gender observer to “watch the urine go from the employee’s body into the collection container.” […] The direct observation rule also requires that immediately prior to all direct observation tests, employees must raise their shirts above the waist and lower their lower clothing to allow observers to verify the absence of any cheating devices.

Now there’s a job for you.

What kind of a sick society are we breeding?