Drug WarRant

That’s the title of this OpEd by Gwynne Dyer

It’s too early to say that there is a general revolt against the “war on drugs” that the United States has been waging for the past 39 years, but something significant is happening. European countries have been quietly defecting from the war for years, decriminalizing personal consumption of some or all of the banned drugs in order to minimize harm to their own people, but it’s different when countries like Argentina and Mexico do it.

Latin American countries are much more in the firing line. The United States can hurt them a lot if it is angered by their actions, and it has a long history of doing just that. But from Argentina to Mexico, they are fed up to the back teeth with the violent and dogmatic U.S. policy on drugs, and they are starting to do something about it.

It’s a good point. The U.S. is the lead player in the destructive war on drugs, and for many years it has held this international war together by sheer will, iron fisted control of information/propaganda, and the combined carrot/stick of foreign aid and military power. But that grip is weakening, not just because other countries are realizing that U.S. drug policy hurts them (perhaps more than any potential loss of aid), but also because of the work we have done internally to educate people and the press.

The progress we’ve made within the U.S. makes it harder for our government to punish other countries for common sense reforms.

• Mexico decriminalized small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, meth, LSD.
• Argentina Supreme Court ruled possession of small amounts of marijuana not illegal.
• Brazil decriminalized drug possession in 2006
• Bolivia successfully commenced the formal process to remove chewing coca leaves prohibition from the Single Treaty this year. The U.S. has not yet objected.
• As recently as 2005, the U.S. was able to pressure the UNODC into backing off on needle exchange support. Now the UNODC has fully embraced the notion, and harm reduction is talked about openly.

Significant cracks, both within and without. And each crack emboldens more countries. Each positive drug policy change helps them realize that reform is better than prohibition.

As depressing as many drug war stories are each day, it’s important to look around now and then and realize that the entire foundation of the drug war is being eaten away bit by bit.

Update: Colombia

Colombia’s Supreme Court ruled that possession of illegal drugs for personal use is not a criminal offense, citing a 1994 decision by the country’s Constitutional Court, Caracol Radio said Wednesday.

With the resignation/ouster of Mexico’s Medina-Mora this week, I was wondering what Calderon was considering.

Now we know.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — With a new attorney general, Mexican President Felipe Calderdon is trying to get even tougher on drug cartels and those who protect them.

Now that makes perfect sense. After all, there’s only 13,500 dead so far — that’s a real pussy war. A good war should reach 6 figures easy in dead citizens, including women and children. So clearly, they need to pump it up a little.

Look at it this way: the U.S. and Mexican governments have been saying that the violence is a sign that they’re winning the war. If they double the violence, they’ll be twice the winners! Yay!

Sigh.

Apparently so.

Missouri

Local officials are optimistic and “excited” that support is building for a statewide law requiring prescriptions to purchase medicine containing pseudoephedrine.

During a roundtable discussion Tuesday with national drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, the issue was discussed and “to a person,” participants agreed that pseudoephedrine needs to be controlled through prescriptions, said Washington Mayor Dick Stratman who attended the session in St. Louis.

It’s bad enough now that you have to go put your name on a register in the drug store during open hours in order to get any decent cold medicine (no more getting Nyquil D in the middle of the night so you can rest — you have to plan ahead to get sick). Now they want you to have to go to the doctor and get a prescription to buy it. Stupid.

Let’s assume they actually want to pursue this nonsense — have they thought at all about what is next?

Apparently not, because Mayor Stratman thinks “If we can prevent labs, we can keep people from getting into meth.”

Um, no.

Think about it for a minute. What happens when you clamp down on pseudoephedrine here in the U.S.?

That’s right! It comes from Mexico instead. Remember Mexico — the country with all the black market drug war profits fueling cartel violence? And you want to give them some more business.

Pseudoephedrine legislation in the U.S. has been referred to as “The Mexican Drug Lab Full Employment Act” and you want to add to it.

So… made pseudoephedrine prescription only and make the common cold more of a problem than it already is, while increasing the black market profits for cartels in Mexico, and doing next to nothing to decrease meth availability.

Yeah, that’s what you get when you put a bunch of clueless people in a room together.

… or rather, the way they avoid thinking.

Over at RealPolice.net forum a junior commenter asked a question about marijuana and D.U.I., ending with this relatively innocuous statement:

I’m pretty liberal on my marijuana views. Don’t smoke it myself, but I am for decriminalization (not legalization). But people definitely shouldn’t be smoking it and driving.

Maybe a little enlightened for a cop forum, but still pretty tame. However, before long, a forum moderator shot out a warning

Please keep in mind when discussing this, the comment you made even just ‘supporting’ decriminalization borders very closely on the line to earning a ban here. This board has an absolute and strictly enforced ‘Zero’ tolerance policy against talk of drugs being ‘good’. Just a friendly fyi.

Now I’m assuming this is a private enterprise (I have no idea who runs it) and so they certainly have the right to set the rules of discussion the way they wish. I don’t object to that.

But I find it telling. We welcome people with a different point of view here. Now they may not find it easy, but we love having the discussion. In part, this is because we’re sure enough of our position to encourage open discussion. (Can you imagine me saying that anyone defending prohibition would be banned from my site?)

We’re the ones who call for debates (and are usually ignored). We’ll discuss the facts, the policies, the whole range of issues, any time, any place.

It’s not just that legalization isn’t in their vocabulary. They’re afraid of the discussion.

There are certain religions, or religious factions, that try to prevent people from experiencing certain movies, books, comics, scientific theories, music, art, etc. Whenever I see a religious group attempt to impose such a restriction on others, they immediately show themselves to be terribly weak in faith. If they have to shield people from reality in order to keep their faith, it must be pretty fragile.

In a way, prohibitionists (and this group of law enforcement officers in particular) are part of a religious-style cult whose faith is built on sand.

At the forum, it was interesting how members seemed to want to outdo each other in their eagerness to show how much they despise marijuana and drugs, even to the point of bragging about how they routinely violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the Constitution. Senior member jd524:

I hate MJ, and always have. I don’t run traffic to write tickets. I stop cars to get into them. I have a strong thirst to find drugs.

“I stop cars to get into them.” Wow.

It’s not that I’m surprised that happens (not in the least). But it surprises me that we’ve reached the point that they don’t even bother to hide their contempt for the rule of law any more.

[Clarification Note: This post isn’t about cops. It’s about the kind of cops who inhabit that kind of site. There are plenty of other cops out there who would find this attitude horrid. Also note that this is not a particularly recent post on that site, but the point of my response to it is still valid today.]

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[Additional Note: I’d like to give a little shout out to my mom, who has taken to reading Drug WarRant to keep up with me (I really should write her more often), especially when I mention religion or the Bible. Hi, Mom!]

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I keep learning more and adding little features to the site. You’ve probably already noted the Recent Posts and Recent Comments on the left bar. Now I’ve added links to the Most Commented posts in the past 20 days. This should make it easier to keep up with posts that have dropped off the first page, but are still having a lively debate (like the Where Kleiman gets annoyed once again that people are having a discussion thread).

I’m also going to try removing the requirement to moderate the first comment made by a poster. The spam filter seems to be working quite well, so I think we should be OK. Visitors can feel free to dive right in to our amazing discussions without having to wait for me to approve your first comment. This may mean the occasional spam will sneak through, but I’ll be by to delete it later.

Some good Sunday reading:

Prohibition’s failed. Time for a new drugs policy — Editorial in The Guardian.

Is America ready to admit defeat in its 40-year war on drugs? A wave of decriminalisation is sweeping through Latin America by Ed Vulliamy in The Guardian.

The war on drugs has failed. Now we need a more humane strategy — Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil, in the Guardian.

Lights Out at the Penitentiary: Strapped States are Shutting Prisons, But Moving 1,100 Inmates — Beds and All — Is a Trial by Gary Fields in the Wall Street Journal.

Reporters love scary things. It allows them to breathlessly warn about the latest danger or epidemic. This leads them to fail to actually, you know, report.

Here’s an example.

I ran across an article by Rachel Hillier Pratt, the Albuquerque Health News Examiner: One out of four college students use stimulants to get by.

(Now pretty much anybody can be an Examiner — even John English — regardless of their qualifications or sanity, but still this serves as an example of what happens out there.)

So Rachel Pratt says:

Currently one in four college students have used Adderall…

Interesting. But a little bell with the letters “B.S.” written on it was ringing furiously in the back of my head. I know a lot more than four college students, and while I have no illusions that my college friends are all drug-free, Adderall doesn’t seem to be high on the list of preferred substances. Sure, even back in my day of college, there was the occasional little blue speed capsules that made their way around at exam time so I know about the tendency for college students to consider artificial wakefulness assistance, but while I wouldn’t doubt a number of college students use Adderall, the one in four bothered me.

So I clicked on her link to Drug News where I read:

As many as one-in-four college students misused ADHD medications according to a nationwide survey reported in the journal, Addiction.

OK, we already see a divergence from one article to the other. Drug News said ADHD medications, Rachel limited it to Adderall. And then there’s… “As many as…” Not “one in four,” but “as many as one-in-four.” What does that mean?

It reminds me of those TV commercials promoting “as much as 25% off” during their store-wide sale!!! Does that mean everything is 25% off? Of course not.

So I went to the journal Addiction and found the study’s abstract, where I learned about their study of college students in 119 colleges in 2001:

The life-time prevalence of non-medical prescription stimulant use was 6.9%, past year prevalence was 4.1% and past month prevalence was 2.1%. Past year rates of non-medical use ranged from zero to 25% at individual colleges.

So the one in four of self-reported use was at the highest range of colleges (perhaps one college). At the other end was zero. So Drug News could just as easily have said “As few as zero college students misused ADHD medications…” and perhaps then Rachel would have had an article proclaiming that “No college students use stimulants to get by” (it would be as accurate as her article).

This took me less than two minutes with teh Google, and I’m not a science writer like Rachel Pratt.

So what’s the actual story? Among college students self-reporting in 2001, just over 4 percent had used Ritalin, Dexedrine or Adderall non-medically in the past year.

Not as scary and exciting, but true, and a better starting point for, you know, reporting.

Note: We’ve had another interesting visitor to the comments section of Where Kleiman gets annoyed once again that people are having a discussion — David Raynes of The International Task Force on Strategic Drug Policy.

Absolute must-read — Simon Jenkins: The war on drugs is immoral idiocy. We need the courage of Argentina.

The global trade in illicit narcotics ranks with that in oil and arms. Its prohibition wrecks the lives of wealthy and wretched, east and west alike. It fills jails, corrupts politicians and plagues nations. It finances wars from Afghanistan to Colombia. It is utterly mad. […]

Making supply illegal is worse than pointless. It oils a black market, drives trade underground, cross-subsidises other crime and leaves consumers at the mercy of poisons. It is the politics of stupid. […]

The mountain that must be climbed is licensing, regulating and taxing supply, thus ending a prohibition now outstripping in absurdity and damage America’s alcohol prohibition between the wars.

From the the deaths of British troops in Helmand to the narco-terrorism of Mexico and the mules cramming London’s jails, the war on drugs can be seen only as a total failure, a vast self-imposed cost on western society. It is the greatest sweeping-under-the-carpet of our age.

It’s a scathing OpEd. Really brilliant.

Another good read today is Fresh thinking on the war on drugs? by Bernd Debusmann for Reuters

What’s with the drug czar’s continuing fear of words?

Asked if Washington could learn from Mexico and take the step to allow possession of small quantities of harder drugs like heroin, Kerlikowske said: “It is not something that has been discussed under any circumstances.”

Not “the notion has been studied and rejected,” but rather that it hasn’t been discussed… under any circumstances.

DrugSense Weekly

On Tuesday, I wrote a post: Where Kleiman gets annoyed once again that people are having a discussion about Mark Kleiman’s post: Another Drug Legalization Pitch, reacting to the Esquire piece: A Radical Solution to End the Drug War: Legalize Everything.

I expected some fireworks and was not disappointed. Mark himself stopped by and joined us in comments (you’re always welcome, Mark — I’d love it if you’d try comments again at your site). And there’s still a good discussion going in our comments section worth checking out.

Kleiman updated his post with a rebuttal to mine.

My objection is to the claim that there’s a hideous monster out there called “prohibition,” and that the main drug policy task is to slay that monster with the magic sword of “taxation and regulation.” That claim is just as stupid as the drug-warrior claim that there’s a hideous monster out there called “drugs” and that the main drug-policy task is to slay that monster with the magic sword of a “a drug-free society.”

Over at Horsesass.org, Lee does a very fine job of addressing that attempted bit of misdirection…

First of all, both “prohibition” and “drug abuse” are “hideous monsters”. Prohibition is such because it takes a commodity that has significant demand from both responsible adults and people with addictions and hands it to criminals who have significant income with which to fight over their share of the marketplace. Drug abuse is a “hideous monster” because human beings are flawed creatures who often make mistakes and end up without the control to help themselves overcome an addiction. Both are things that we need to deal with as problems in our society, but the important difference is that one of the two is a basic human tendency that we can’t stop while the other is a creation of government that we most certainly can stop.

Second, one only needs to look at the example of alcohol prohibition to see where the “magic sword of taxation and regulation” has slayed the monster of prohibition.

Spot on. And the rest of Lee’s post is definitely worth reading as well.

This just struck me as humorous…

U.S. Dept. of Labor sets dates for the 4th annual Drug Free Work Week

The U.S. Department of Labor today encouraged public and private community organizations to participate in the 4th annual Drug-Free Work Week, which will occur Oct. 19 to 25.

So remember, kids, to mark your calendars and don’t go to work stoned that week.

Of course, in reality, I’m in favor of a drug-free workplace, in that people shouldn’t be impaired by drugs (including alcohol) when working (on the other hand, I’m also in favor of people working, as appropriate, when enhanced by drugs — such as jazz musicians).

Also, of course, in reality, the drug-free workplace programs aren’t really about a drug-free workplace. They’re about penalizing people who use certain drugs at any time, even if that use has no connection to work.