Drug WarRant

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.

Cops and the DEA have constantly said that industrial hemp is too dangerous for the U.S. to grow (denying farmers a potentially profitable crop, and forcing us to import any hemp products). They usually come up with some bizarre justification, like the notion druggies will hide marijuana crops inside the hemp fields (total nonsense because of the problem of cross-pollination, which would create worthless offspring).

What it really boils down to is that they want to be able to search and destroy anything that looks like marijuana, without having to do, you know, police work.

Just look how tough the job is for cops in other countries…

It was an anonymous tip that set things in motion. A quick view from a helicopter was enough for the confirmation. The Lelystad (Netherlands) police was certain: the 47,000 plants in this illegal hemp plantation, hidden in the midst of a corn field, would be worth about $6 million, when sold as weed. So there was only one thing they had to do: ruin the plantation, as soon as possible.

Yesterday they worked their way through about half of the plants as a couple of researchers from Wageningen University showed up. They were flabbergasted. Why on earth would the police kill all the plants they had been growing for so long and handled with so much care? Why would they destroy their contribution to innovation in the natural fiber industry? Slowly the policemen became aware that what they thought was the raw material for a lot of hash, in fact was an academic test site for new textiles.

Oops.

Update: Once again, Scott Morgan and I independently write essentially the same damn post.

With the Woodstock anniversary and the new Ang Lee film “Taking Woodstock” in the news, that whole “movement” is once again being discussed.

I was too young to really experience the hippy movement. And yes, I wish I had. Oh, I don’t mean that I would have dropped out and joined a commune, but I would have liked to have been there. I did go to college in Iowa in the 1970s, which is about when the 60s reached Iowa, so I got a taste, but to have actually been to Woodstock or Haight-Ashbury…. that would have been something.

I realize that as a “movement” it was flawed — perhaps overly idealistic, a little naïve, lacking the follow-through to change the world, but the concepts were just fine: Peace, love, music, inner spiritual exploration, anti-authoritarianism, cultural diversity… and a little pot.

So I’m a bit surprised by the depth of vicious hatred for hippies (and all things hippy) I sometimes see out there.

What particularly caught my attention was a “review” at Breitbart’s Big Hollywood (yeah, I know, I shouldn’t go there) of Ang Lee’s film by John Nolte: ‘Taking Woodstock’: Mythologizing the Worst Generation. I haven’t seen the film, and I have no idea if it’s any good, but the review wasn’t so much about the film…

In the late 1960s there were young people in college and starting families, young people far from home fighting and dying for the sovereignty of our allies in Vietnam, young people just starting to see results from their brave and noble fight for Civil Rights, and then there were the dirty, filthy hippies – the most spoiled, narcissistic, ungrateful species in the history of mankind – whose legacy of drug addiction, STDs, the misery of single motherhood and 2 million left dead on the Killing Fields of Cambodia, still reverberates forty years on.

Wow. Now that’s some hatred. (Check out the comments section for even more.)

There’s a lot more of it out there around the web. Some of it seems to be directed against the anti-war movement (that I did participate in somewhat — I was a draft counselor in college) and some seems to just generally be an unreasoning hatred for all things related to hippy culture (the music, the long hair, the lack of bras, the pot, the way they talk, their relaxed attitude, their tie-dying and beads, their lack of body shame, their narcissistic lack of capitalist greed…)

Hmmm…. It’s re-awakened the nostalgia for something I never experienced. Now I’m trying to decide whether to drop $50 on: Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music Director’s Cut. Maybe I’ll just put on a little Santana while I think about it.

What do you think?

AP

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Gunmen broke into a drug rehabilitation center, lined people against a wall and shot 17 dead in a particularly bloody day in Mexico’s relentless drug war. The brazen attack followed the killing of the No. 2 security official in President Felipe Calderon’s home state.

I guess this must be another one of those signs that we’re winning the drug war.

“As never before, we have weakened the logistical and financial structure of crime,” the president told legislators.

…

Any drug policy that doesn’t include some form of legalization to de-fund the black market means that we are actively supporting this violence.

Gil Kerlikowske will be participating in an hour-long online event: A Dialogue with the Drug Czar

September 10, 2009: 6-7 pm (EDT)

It’s free and open to the public. Registration required. You need to have some software installed in order to participate, which heavily favors Windows users (so I probably won’t be involved) and I’m guessing those on dial-up won’t fare well. If you’re interested, check out the site and instructions and register.

Work on some ideas for questions in comments.

Over at officer.com is Turning Over a New Leaf:
California chiefs, others aim to keep the country from going to pot by Rebecca Kanable. Any article that turns to Judy Kreamer for advice has sunk really low.

Basically, the article is a call for law enforcement officers to get more active in the fight against… us, lamenting that “Advocates of drug decriminalization are often well-funded” and “Unfortunately, law enforcement isn’t always asked to weigh-in on a debate like decriminalization.”

It’s a piece of crap not worth debunking, but I thought you might get a kick out of it.