Drug WarRant

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.

Today, the drug czar unveiled the latest ad campaign: MethResources.gov. Certainly better than an alien stealing your girlfriend if you smoke pot, but I can’t help but believe that anti-drug advertising is counterproductive, and not just because it’s been badly/laughably done in the past.

Consider cigarettes. While public perception has changed considerably over the years regarding cigarettes, it seems to me that anti-cigarette advertising had very little to do with it. For most of my friends, this ubiquitous ad actually made them crave a cigarette. (Just as studies showed that the Media Campaign ads against marijuana tended to reinforce marijuana interest.)

The government should really get out of the propaganda business and focus on encouraging scientific inquiry.

Mark Kleiman in Another drug legalization pitch notes:

Esquire publishes yet another drug-leglization screed. Whoever does press relations for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition deserves a bonus.

Perhaps. I’m not going to speak to the salary level of LEAP’s press rep (although I’m happy to support a raise). But what’s interesting is the annoyance with the fact that, once again, legalization is being discussed as a serious policy debate (even though he pretends nonchalance by putting “yawn” in the title).

But Kleiman and his colleagues have not only opposed “legalization” (a somewhat odd thing, since Kleiman himself favors a form of marijuana legalization — the term seems to be more related to his obsessive fear of cocaine legalization and his dislike of “legalizers”), but as a group, they have often steered public policy discussion away from even including the discussion of legalization itself. Most references to legalization are snide comments about legalizers, or throwaway arguments that are completely lacking in evidence.

Now, in the case of the Esquire article, it’s interesting and useful to start having more of a discussion of what prohibition actually costs us in numbers of lives (as opposed to the merely anecdotally horrific). That doesn’t mean that I believe the full numbers in the Esquire article stand up to scientific rigor for accuracy (nor do I believe the author claimed it to be more than an attempt at rough number crunching).

For years, we have heard prohibitionists and their apologists toss out numbers that include things like prison and some pretty made-up “lost productivity” numbers as part of the costs to society of drug use, and few (other than legalizers) have stepped up to correct that (See James Roberts just last week at CATO: “Numerous studies have totaled up some of the costs to taxpayers and consumers from the current problems with drug addiction. These burdens on society — estimated at more than $180 billion a year — affect everyone.”). So a bit of hyperbole on the other side to make a point, while not my preference, seems reasonable.

Kleiman has some legitimate beef with the numbers used. Not all overdose deaths will end with legalization. But his “few hints” to get the reader started in demolishing the Esquire article go nowhere.

1. Alcohol – the drug we decided to legalize and regulate – kills about 100,000 people a year: several times as many as all the illicit drugs combined.

Could be. I don’t know. There are so many different numbers out there regarding alcohol deaths, it’s hard to sort through them. This undoubtably includes fatal car crashes where alcohol was a factor and may or may not have been a contributing factor. But regardless, I’m not sure what significance these rough numbers have to the argument. There’s not going to be 100,000 deaths a year from marijuana if it’s legalized. That’s certain. I can’t think of anyone who would dispute that. So merely legalizing and regulating any particular drug does not mean that it will automatically lead to the same actual lethality as alcohol. The 100,000 number gives us nothing meaningful to use in applying to any other drug.

2. The notion that there’s a set of taxes and regulations that would avoid creating a big illicit market while not increasing drug abuse substantially doesn’t pass the giggle test. (Licit pharmaceutical-grade cocaine costs about a tenth as much as street cocaine. So legalization means either a huge price drop or a set of taxes crying out for profitable evasion, and thus requiring enforcement.

As he’s done before, Kleiman here uses dishonest argument structure to create an unsupported conclusion out of thin air. Re-word that argument into its basic form.

Argument: Legalization means either a huge price drop, or a set of taxes crying out for profitable evasion, and thus requiring enforcement.

Conclusion: Thus, legalization means either a substantial increase in drug abuse, or a big illicit market.

Structure: A means either B or C, therefore A means either D or E. Nonsense.

He’s trying to get you to accept that a huge price drop is the same thing as a substantial increase in drug abuse a priori, and that a set of taxes crying out for profitable evasion is the same thing as a big illicit market. Cigarettes have a set of taxes crying out for profitable evasion, and yet the illicit market is negligible compared to the massive world-wide destructive drug prohibition market.

3. Counting all the overdoses as costs of prohibition would make sense – if no one ever died of alcohol poisoning or overdosed on prescdription drugs (often mixed with alcohol).

I agree. However, it’s nice to actually discuss the fact that many overdoses are costs of prohibition, and that ending prohibition could actually reduce the number of overdoses.

4. Yes, street gangs do some drug dealing. But it’s absurd to imagine that the gang killings would disappear if the drug market became legal.

Here Kleiman uses a combination of straw man and the nirvana fallacy. The article never claimed that all gang killings would disappear if the drug market became legal. In fact, they specifically chose to “lowball it” when coming up with the estimated portion that would stop with the end of drug prohibition.

Sometimes I think that the legalizers and the drug warriors have a secret arms control treaty, in which each side renounces the use of factually and logically sound arguments.

What does that mean? Particularly from one who is both a legalizer and a drug warrior, and who uses logically unsound arguments?

I know that Mark Kleiman is convinced that legalization of cocaine will immediately mean that roughly the same number of people using and abusing alcohol now will use and abuse cocaine (with no reduction in alcohol use or abuse) and that therefore we will have armageddon, because nobody can resist the allure of cocaine addiction. And that just isn’t true.

Legalizing cocaine doesn’t mean that it has to be in the alcohol model. There are many options that will make it possible for responsible adults to acquire safe drugs legally without having cocaine keggers and people selling 8-balls in every football stadium. In fact, much like we have dramatically reduced the number of cigarette smokers through education and public attitudes, it’s likely that there will be strong public attitudes directed against public cocaine intoxication. And there are many people who enjoy a drink who will have no interest in ever using cocaine.

Also, legalization is a complex interaction of various options and opportunities. Marijuana legalization will have an affect on the other drugs. Heroin will have its own model, different from cocaine and marijuana. Meth will probably be replaced by a pharmaceutical amphetamine (little blue pills). Most people will continue to use none of them, and many will use drugs but not abuse them. Some will abuse drugs and some will commit crimes, and we’ll be able to focus our limited resources on those last two groups (possibly being even more effective by being able to be swift and certain in our response (but more about that when I shortly review Kleiman’s new book)). The opportunities for rich discussions of public policy will be enormous.

Legalization is on the table. It is a point of discussion. It cannot be ignored or merely pushed off as so politically impractical to negate consideration. Those who would lead policy will have to be willing to have serious discussion about it, or they’ll be left behind.

There are lots of discussions for us to have, arguments to thrash out, policy differences to air, methods to consider, and that should be exciting.

AP article

Nearly a third of all cocaine seized in the United States is laced with a dangerous veterinary medicine — a livestock de-worming drug that might enhance cocaine’s effects but has been blamed in at least three deaths and scores of serious illnesses.

Sound familiar? Remember the rash of deaths from fentanyl-tainted heroin? Similar situation (although it doesn’t appear that levamisole is quite as dangerous as fentanyl).

So, what kind of information do we have to help people, when it’s part of a black market item?

“I would think it would be fair to say the vast majority of doctors in the United States have no idea this is going on,” said Eric Lavonas, assistant director of the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center in Denver, where as much as half of the cocaine is believed to contain levamisole. “You can’t diagnose a disease you’ve never heard of.” […]

“It’s hard to know where this contamination (is), in what part of the country it’s located, because there’s really no systematic testing for it,” said Dr. Joel McCullough, health officer for the Spokane area.

In other words, we got nothing. Unless you want to count DEA spokesman Paul Knierim’s glib and unhelpful remark:

“I think the message is the same: Don’t use cocaine, it’s a dangerous drug,” Knierim said.

Would that be his message if his whisky was adulterated with oil of creosote or industrial plasticizer as it might have been during alcohol prohibition?

Throughout the article, when reading the speculation for why cocaine may be cut with levamisole, you realize that every aspect of it is an indictment of prohibition.

The solution is clear, but always unspoken. Legalize and regulate.

Health officials including Lavonas say the public needs to be warned about the dangers.

“It’s not like you can put it on the bottle,” he said.

Sigh.

Mike Gray’s excellent book “Drug Crazy: How We Got Into this Mess and How We Can Get Out” is now available to read online for free at Libertary.com

With an bizarrely titled review of Julie Myerson’s book “The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story,” Dominique Browning descends into the depths of the real Reefer Madness herself.

Browning tells us that the book shows how the author

…was finally forced to throw her eldest son out of the house — and change the locks — when his cannabis habit so deranged him that he became physically violent. He was 17 years old.

Browning also decides to tell us herself, as supposed reviewer of a book, how dangerous this stuff is

Even as stronger varieties are being bred and marketed, medical research is linking cannabis use to behavioral and cognitive changes reminiscent of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression and anxiety disorder. And yet we find ourselves arguing about whether pot is addictive or a gateway drug or should be legalized. We are collectively losing our minds. “The Lost Child” is a cry for help and a plea for a clear acknowledgment of the toll this drug is taking on our children.

Reefer Madness, indeed. This is nonsense from a book reviewer who knows nothing about the subject, and who, apparently, also knows nothing about the book.

Fortunately, Maia Szalavitz is on hand to do another outstanding job, this time with a scathing review of the reviewer.

“The Lost Child” purports to tell the story of a mother struggling with her son’s harrowing marijuana addiction; but — and readers of the review aren’t made aware of this – the son has claimed that his mother’s story is false. His revelations have stirred furious debate in Britain and considerable criticism for the author, a noted novelist and journalist, who has been accused of being addicted to using her own family for copy.

As t he antagonist in the story, Myerson’s son, Jake, told the Daily Mail:

“I was just a very confused, unhappy teenager who was too young to know who he was and the cannabis all became tied in with normal teenage rebellion… My mother talks about losing her little boy, but what mother doesn’t lose her baby at some point? It’s called puberty.”

[…]

Surely a review of the book should have at least noted his protest—and perhaps, the fact that he has now changed his name as a result of the book, and that his mother came in for widespread oppobrium in the British media, both from critics and people posting comments on the news articles? And surely this controversy should have raised some element of caution in seeing Jake’s story as a policy prescription for teenage drug addiction?

No kidding.