Drug WarRant

I really enjoyed this article by David Downs in the Columbia Journalism Review: Get stoked: the MSM are acting less childish about pot.

We’ve all experienced the media’s childishness over the years when it comes to weed. Every story about marijuana was full of puns, double entendres, and sniggering reporters. It was the rule. No story could escape it.

But now…

“The de facto ban on serious, cogent mainstream media discussion about the topic has been lifted,” says Stephen Gutwillig, State Policy Director for the Drug Policy Alliance in Washington. “They’ve stopped acting like they’re in sixth grade. There’s less puns and ‘scare quotes.’ The Wall Street Journal did a front-page story last week that treated medical marijuana like just another industry story.”

Recently, The New York Times ran a classic, “Style” section hit piece on cannabis, but then followed it up, almost as a mea culpa, with an extremely insightful and bold “roundtable discussion” with leading thinkers on the topic. The Economist now stands alongside the National Review in calling for legalization, and even the staid Congressional Quarterly Researcher devoted its entire June issue to a thorough review of the topic.

Quite a change. Of course, the sniggering hasn’t stopped completely. Bruce Mirken reports on how the New York Daily News had to completely make up a quote in order to insert the phrase “harshed the buzz” when talking about serious MPP TV ads on medical marijuana.

But that’s the Daily News.

There has been a sea change, and it get more noticeable every day. Serious articles about marijuana in leading papers, with quotes from doctors and cops and, and as the Columbia Journalism Review article notes, “reporters keep telling us how difficult it is to find opposition quotes.” [quotes from prohibitionists]

It’s true. Look how often Calvina Fay has shown up recently.

Here’s a part I particularly enjoyed…

At the same time, though, the influence of network television is waning amid the rise of an old-style partisan press on the Internet. Just as “we’re seeing a rapid decline of straight media on electoral campaigns,” California political consultant Larry Tramutola points out, the Web is diversifying the conversation about marijuana. The debate “may be decided in the blogosphere,” Tramutola says. “It may be decided on informal networks.”

That’s us, baby! That’s us.

A couple weeks ago, I let you know about an upcoming online event sponsored by Harvard, featuring the Drug Czar.

The audio file from that discussion is now available for download here (WMA file – 55 MB) [Thanks, Tom!]

I’m attempting to listen to it. I’m really a text kind of guy (I despise video or audio of talking heads – I don’t have the patience, and I’d rather read the transcript, if available). The first part was mostly softball questions and vague answers. Things like how we need to look closely at finding the right balance between treatment and enforcement.

The questions from the field were apparently across the board and included quite a few of what the moderator termed “provocative” questions, some regarding medical marijuana. Gil said that that he’s waiting to talk more with the Attorney General and wait for science to help him out regarding medical uses of marijuana (apparently that means that there hasn’t been any science on medical marijuana yet) – even to the point of kind of admitting that he was ducking the question.

A good question got asked regarding the fact that many people arrested for marijuana end up in treatment whether they need it or not, taking up spaces that could be used for those who do need it.

The answer (and I think this was the guy with Gil, not Gil himself) was in two parts.

1. We need more treatment. [paraphrased]
2. “I think it’d be a mistake to imagine that marijuana is a benign substance. Yes, it’s quite true that not everybody that smokes marijuana needs treatment, but a growing proportion of people who seek treatment are those whose major problem is marijuana…” [Let me interrupt there. That’s only true if “seek treatment” means “are forced into treatment” and “major problem” means “drug they got caught with.”] “… Marijuana’s more potent than it’s ever been. It exacerbates other kinds of significant medical problems [?!?], and requires treatment. So we want to make treatment available for those people who need it.”

Wow.

That was 18 minutes and as far as I was willing to listen. Anybody else want to report on the rest, I’m all ears eyes.

Interesting side note to this. There’s some ultra-prohibitionist woman named Linda who does a lot of commenting on some discussion boards and shows up at some events on the west coast — from what I can tell, a kind of local Calvina Fay wannabe. She found my post on the subject, quoted from the comments and seemed fascinated by our ability to be… organized, I guess.

It’s interesting to see how it all works. From the time they receive the information, to how long it takes to get the word out to other pro druggies, and how the internet is so important in accomplishing that task.

As long as we’re being organized… Oops, we missed this one. The Drug Czar and Loveline’s Dr. Drew Pinsky.

[While I failed my job in organizing the druggies, I did manage to squeeze in a question myself before it closed. Won’t know until the transcript comes out whether they addressed it. Of course, I asked it using a nom de plume (actually, it was a nom de mal orthographiés).]

Finally, we’ve got a call for questions from George Stephanopoulos for his upcoming discussion with President Obama on Sunday.

Update: Congratulations! Congress was inundated with phone calls, and Souder was encouraged to withdraw the amendment. Excellent work.

Continue reading →

Just recently, David Raynes was telling us about the failures of the British programs in heroin maintenance.

Now the results of a new study are out. It’s the Randomised Injectable Opioid Treatment Trial (RIOTT), which not only tried heroin maintenance, but compared it to other options in a randomized controlled trial. It was for a group of hard core street heroin users and they received either supervised injectable heroin, supervised injectable methadone or optimised oral methadone.

No surprise that the injectable heroin group had, by far, the best results, and showed dramatically positive response in: retention, abstinence from street heroin, reduction of crime, reduction in crack use, and improved physical, mental health and social functioning.

Danny at Transform provides some perspective:

That should not be news to anyone. I realised during my third or fourth interview yesterday, that the feigned shock from radio presenters that the Great British Public would be funding heroin users ‘addiction’, should be as nothing compared to their real shock that we are all funding the prohibition that leads users to steal and compromises their health in the first place.

Whilst the presumed roll out is to be welcomed, one has to ask why it has taken so long to come to this conclusion. Evidence has existed for years that, for those assessed as having a clinical need, heroin prescribing will keep them alive, improve their health and wellbeing and reduce the collateral damage of their use to wider society.

Danny also pointed out some disturbing facts:

The substantially increased cost of prescribing injectable heroin, compared with oral methadone, must also be seen in the context of the Macfarlane Smith monopoly on the UK opiates market that the Department of Health buys from. That means that the UK pays well over the odds for our diamorphine (£12,000 a year per user), compared to the Dutch (£2000 a year for the same product). This artificial cost barrier has been a major political obstacle.

How stupid is that? We have a massive, dirt-cheap supply of poppies available just a short distance away in Afghanistan. Why do business with a drug cartel that has forced out all competition?

Note: I really don’t know how a heroin maintenance program would work as the full model for legalization (because it’s never been tried in that way – it’s always been limited to the hard core user), but it’s clear that heroin maintenance is an effective and valuable tool in drug policy, and should be included as part of any legalization or decriminalization plan.

I am very pleased with the results of the move from SalonBlogs and RadioUserland to DreamHost and WordPress. Most people have found us in the new digs, and thanks to the marvelous Lawrence Lee at SalonBlogs, so has Google. He put 301 re-directs on some of the most popular pages on my old site to their equivalent pages here, and now if you search Google for “Why is marijuana illegal,” “Drug war victims,” or “the drug czar is required by law to lie” the number one result will be the appropriate pages on the new site (I was really worried that I’d lose all that Google advantage).

Thanks to all of you for joining in the discussions and helping to make this transition fun.

On the one hand, marijuana is practically legal—more mainstream, accessorized, and taken for granted than ever before. On the other, kids are getting busted in the city in record numbers. Guess which kids.

This article in New York Magazine by Mark Jacobson is quite a colorful trip through the marijuana scene in New York, from the arrests of people of color, to the delivery services to the wealthy.

He starts with the global scene as it exists today.

(Photo: Horacio Salinas)

Could it be that, at long last, the Great Pot Moment is upon us?

The planets are aligning. First and foremost is the recession; there’s nothing like a little cash-flow problem to make societies reconsider supposed core values. The balance sheet couldn’t be clearer. We have the so-called War on Drugs, the yawning money pit that used to send its mirror-shade warriors to far-flung corners of the globe, like the Golden Triangle of Burma and the Colombian Amazon, where they’d confront evil kingpins. Now, after 40 years, the front lines have moved to the streets of Juárez, where stray bullets can easily pick off old ladies in the Wal-Mart parking in El Paso, Texas, even as Mexico itself has decriminalized pot possession as well as a devil’s medicine cabinet of other drugs. At the current $40 billion per annum, even General Westmoreland would have trouble calling this progress.

Jacobson does a few taste tests around the city and analyzes the pot today compared to when he smoked it years ago. He knows that strides have been made in pot development over the years, but isn’t impressed (particularly compared to all the reefer madness stories).

This was because the fancy weed I was smoking, and paying twenty times as much for, wasn’t getting me more smashed, at least not in the way I wanted to be.

“I hear this a lot, because back then, you were probably smoking sativas imported from Jamaica, Vietnam, and Mexico,” Danko informed me. Sativas imparted “a head high,” as opposed to the largely “body high” of indicas. The problem with this, he went on, was that tropical sativas, being a large (some as high as fourteen feet!) and difficult plant to grow (the Kush has bigger yields and a shorter flowering time), especially under surreptitious conditions, were rare in today’s market. My lament was a common one among older heads, Danko said, adding that “the good sativa is the grail of the modern smoker.”

Learn something new every day.

Then we turn to the arrests.

The fact is, New York City is the marijuana-arrest capital of the country and maybe the world. […] Harry Levine, a Queens College sociology professor who has been compiling marijuana arrest figures for years, says, “The cops prefer pot busts. They’re easy, because the people are almost never violent and, as opposed to drunks, hardly ever throw up in the car. Some of this has to do with the reduction in crime over the years. Pot arrests are great for keeping the quota numbers up. These kind of arrests toss people into the system, get their fingerprints on file. The bias of these arrests is in the statistics.”

Not everyone, however, is getting arrested.

Francis said the cops weren’t all that much of a factor. “For the most part, I walk through the town unopposed.” But what about the busts?

“What busts?”

I showed Francis a copy of the New York State marijuana-arrest stats. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t know a soul who had been pinched. He was not, however, surprised by the ethnic breakdown. “I hate to say it, but there’s no way I’m hiring a black guy to work for me. The chances of a black guy getting stopped is about 50 times more than a white guy. I can’t afford that. Fact is, pot is legal for white people but not for black people, which is total bullshit.”

Fascinating article.

Is war on drugs worth it? Maybe not, new FBI data suggest.

… fast forward to the obligatory prohibitionist comment:

Pro-legalization groups are missing the forest for the trees, says Gregory D. Lee, a retired Drug Enforcement Administration agent. […] “[Under legalization], the crime rate would rise because of crimes committed by people under the influence of these substances.”

Mr. Lee points to the rising price of cocaine in the US as a sign that domestic and international interdiction is working. “The war on drugs,” he says, “is being won.”

Don’t you just love it when people attribute their own failings to their opponents?

So let’s see. Mr. Lee cherry-picks a short-term statistical blip in cocaine prices (that are probably more a result of the weakened dollar than interdiction) and says that the war on drugs is being won, ignoring such things as, say, Mexico. Classic case of… you guessed it… missing the forest for the trees.

Interesting article in the New York Times: A Popular Plant Is Quietly Spreading Across TV Screens by Brian Stelter

Tips for cultivating marijuana. Testimonials by patients about its medical benefits. Cannabis cooking lessons. Even citations for award-winning strains of pot. Viewers here can now watch, every week, what amounts to a pro-weed news program.

Booted off one skittish TV station but quickly picked up by another, the low-budget “Cannabis Planet” show is televised evidence of how entrenched marijuana has become in California’s cultural firmament and a potent example of the way the pot subculture has been edging into the national mainstream. […]

There are similar stirrings in the scripted TV world. On “Glee,” Fox’s new high school musical, one of the characters is a medical marijuana dealer. At the New York Television Festival next week one of the competing pilot projects seeking a TV network home will be “Rx,” a drama set in the medical marijuana world.

A rash of recent news reports have documented the mainstreaming of pot, citing among other examples frequent drug references in the media and endorsements by a growing list of celebrities. This month Fortune magazine’s cover asks: “Is Pot Already Legal?” CNBC repeats its eight-month-old documentary about the pot business, “Marijuana Inc.,” at least once a week; it continues to be rated one of the channel’s most popular documentaries.

This is good stuff. While there is the potential for some backlash, the most likely result is that people will get used to the notion of marijuana as an accepted part of society. Most people are, to some extent, already. Nobody but politicians, die-hard prohibitionists, and others who profit from prohibition argue for tougher laws on pot.

When they see the notion of marijuana accepted everywhere from the editorial pages to the cable TV shows, and then realize that the sky hasn’t fallen, there hasn’t been a rash of marijuana-induced ax murders, and all they have had to deal with is an increase in the prevalence of that sticky-sweet smell, then people will wonder (even more) what all the fuss was about.

I wonder if the media is having a harder time finding prohibitionists to comment, because Calvina Fay is getting a lot more print than usual recently.

Calvina Fay, the executive director of Drug Free America Foundation, said a weekly TV show extolling marijuana as harmless contributes to inappropriate public perceptions of the drug. “They are putting people’s lives in danger as they promote a toxic, harmful weed to sick people and intentionally ignore the harms of it,” she said, adding that the drug had been “linked to a plethora of health problems.”

Toxic, harmful weed. Right. Here’s an idea, Calvina. I’ll take your toxic, harmful weed and consume it while you consume some other weed — something like, I don’t know, foxglove, or bittersweet nightshade, or castor beans, or mountain laurel, or yew berries. Then we’ll compare notes in a week.

And as far as promoting it to sick people… Well, we haven’t had to. They’ve been asking for it because it helps them, and because it’s safer than the other medications that they get from pharmaceutical companies, most of which are, you guessed it, promoted to sick people every night on the TeeVee.

LEAP reports on the new FBI numbers released today.

The data, from the FBI’s “Crime in the United States” report, shows that in 2008 there were 1,702,537 arrests for drug law violations, or one drug arrest every 18 seconds.

“In our current economic climate, we simply cannot afford to keep arresting more than three people every minute in the failed ‘war on drugs,'” said Jack Cole, a retired undercover narcotics detective who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). “Plus, if we legalized and taxed drug sales, we could actually create new revenue in addition to the money we’d save from ending the cruel policy of arresting users.”

That’s about like arresting the entire population of Vermont, Washington DC, and Wyoming. Every year.

Update: Just to clarify, the figure above is for all drug arrests, not just marijuana arrests. Arrests numbers actually went down slightly, although they’re still the second highest in history.

… around the internet

In the New York Times’ Room for Debate: What Does Mexico’s New Drug Law Portend?, featuring comments from:

• Tony Payan
  

  …decriminalizing drug possession is in and of itself a change of, paradoxically, gigantic and modest proportions. […] In the end the United States may be left alone to fight a 40-year-old failed “war on drugs” or join the rest and craft a more nuanced strategy to consider other possibilities in dealing with psychotropic substances. Perhaps this time change will come from South to North, instead of North to South.

• Jorge Castañeda
  

  If anything, the new law criminalizes drug use much more radically than before […] Mexico should move toward decriminalization, but it cannot do so if the United States does not. Among the many reasons is the so-called Zurich effect…

• Calvina Fay (!)
  

  Mexico’s President Calderon got it wrong on decriminalizing drugs. I fear for the future of Mexico and the domino effect here at home. […] Drug users are not innocent. They support the vicious drug cartels.

• Peter Reuter
  

  Evidence from other countries suggests that decriminalization could be modestly helpful in addressing Mexico’s recent difficulties. […] Unfortunately, decriminalization will not address Mexico’s most severe drug-related crime and violence.

• Ethan Nadelmann
  

  Such reforms generally do not result in higher rates of drug use — at least that’s the evidence from other countries. And it will have no impact on President Calderon’s battle with the major drug trafficking organizations.

Mexico’s Hopeless Drug War by Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the Wall Street Journal.

Mexico’s big problem—for that matter the most pressing security issue throughout the hemisphere—is organized crime’s growth and expanded power, fed by drug profits. Mr. Calderón’s new policy is unlikely to solve anything in that department.

The reason is simple: Prohibition and demand make otherwise worthless weeds valuable. Where they really get valuable is in crossing the U.S. border. If U.S. demand is robust, then producers, traffickers and retailers get rich by satisfying it.

Mary is the drug war voice of reason over at the Wall Street Journal. You can tell from her various articles that she understands the equation and is able to connect the dots. She just doesn’t go all the way and tell you the obvious solution, because, after all, it is the Wall Street Journal opinion section.

The case for legalising all drugs is unanswerable by John Gray in the Guardian.

…the fact is that the costs of drug prohibition now far outweigh any possible benefits the policy may bring. It is time for a radical shift in policy. Full-scale legalisation, with the state intervening chiefly to regulate quality and provide education on the risks of drug use and care for those who have problems with the drugs they use, should now shape the agenda of drug law reform.

Unanswerable, indeed.

Some Potent Arguments For Legalizing Marijuana by Robert McCartney, Washington Post.

When it comes to marijuana, American society has lost the war on drugs–and that’s okay. We should stop squandering time and money trying to reverse history and instead legalize both medical and recreational use of this mild narcotic widely seen as no more harmful than alcohol.

Mexican movie star Gael García Bernal calls for legalization

The Motorcycle Diaries star is adamant the majority of street battles in the North American country are sparked by the trade in illicit narcotics.

And he insists the quickest way to end the bloodshed is to legalise drugs and take the entire industry out of the hands of criminal gangs.
He tells the New York Daily News, “Drugs are illegal – therefore, there’s a fight. I hope drugs become legalised in Mexico. If drugs were legal, there would be nothing to fight about.”