Drug WarRant

Get the breakables out of reach…
It’s Bill O’Reilly and Joseph Califano.

The latest scare story about marijuana is that, once again, some pot is apparently more potent than other pot: Marijuana potency surpasses 10 percent, U.S. says.
This causes all the usual suspects to act concerned, as if this was something bad, yet at the same time, none of them would even consider a proposal to label pot by its potency. You’d think that would be the logical reaction. Or even regulating potency. But no, not a word.
Apparently potency is a big deal. Let’s take a quick review of potency:

• Beer: 4-7 percent potency
• Pot: 10 percent potency
• Wine: 11-13 percent potency
• Distilled Spirits: 40 percent potency
• Bacardi 151: 75 percent potency
• Marinol: 100 percent potency

(*Your grandfather’s pot: negative 5 percent potency, apparently, if you believe government officials)
Government officials discovered something else pretty remarkable:

The stronger marijuana is of particular concern because high concentrations of THC have the opposite effect of low concentrations, officials say.

I’m a little confused by this. Are they saying that high concentrations of THC make you no longer like Doritos? Or perhaps that it makes you prefer Debby Boone over Pink Floyd? I have no idea.

Ridicule, yes. But that’s different.
I don’t pretend to know all the details about the situation in Connecticut. Apparently, the head of the Connecticut NORML chapter sent (possibly by accident) an email threatening violence to a state senator. The national organization of NORML has dropped that chapter.
We are not the ones to use violence and threats. We are the ones who face violence and threats every day, from a drug war that treats its citizens like enemies and props up violent criminals.
We have to be better than them. And it can be hard, very hard. The frustration from decades of lies, and seeing our friends jailed or dying can make us want to snap. But to our credit, we don’t. We just continue to be… right. And that’s a very powerful force. As Ethan Nadelmann said “The analogy we have is this is like turning around an ocean liner,” he said. “What’s important is the damn thing is beginning to turn.” And it’s turning despite the lies and the war against we the people.
So no, we don’t need to use threats of violence against individuals who support prohibition. They are not worthy of violence, only scorn. That, however, we gladly do. Sure, I’ve photoshopped John Walters into a clown, and added a new word to the language to describe Mark Souder. And I have no regrets on that score. But even more intimidating to the prohibitionists is that we expose their ideas to the rest of the world, showing that the emperor is, in fact, naked.
That kind of intimidation just a natural consequence of our proper job.
Of course, the Connecticut incident has brought some of these folks out to claim that they have been horribly abused.

Dr. Andrea Barthwell, a prominent treatment professional, recently spoke of her experiences. ‹They are not above using misinformation, intimidation, and retribution to advance their goals. As a long time advocate for the prevention and treatment of drug abuse, I have been harassed and threatened in person and on blogs by people and groups who support the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) agenda,Š said Barthwell.

Of course, Dr. Barthwell is the queen of misinformation herself, having lied about the sponsorship of her Illinois Marijuana Lectures and having spread false information about drunk driving death rates. Both of these things were brought to light by a blog – this one. If that’s intimidation, then I own up to it proudly. If she thinks that’s retribution, then fine, but it’s not. It’s clearing up her misinformation.

Calvina Fay, Executive Director of Drug Free America Foundation (DFAF) concludes, ‹Advocates for legalizing drugs are known for attempting to silence their critics. We have been subject to all forms of threats and harassment by the pro-drug lobby. Drug legalization is a controversial topic, but we must keep the debate respectful. That the other side is resorting to strong-arm lobbying tactics tells me they don‰t have the facts to back up their assertions. They are desperate to win by any means, legal or otherwise.Š

“Silence their critics”? Au contraire! We relish your attempts to justify prohibition. We revel in the opportunity to shine a light on your words. We’ll whip out our facts any time, any place, and demonstrate just how small yours is. We are the ones who call for the debate. You are the ones who run from debate, who don’t want the open discussion.
I will publicly, and respectfully, debate you anytime, Calvina. Bring it on.
If there are individuals who go too far, and use physical threats, they are not recognized or encouraged by anyone in the drug policy reform movement. This attempt to smear all reformers as thugs is just another in a continuous line of misinformation efforts by Barthwell, Faye, et al

White House Czar Calls for End to ‘War on Drugs’

The Obama administration’s new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting “a war on drugs,” a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.
In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation’s drug issues.
“Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” he said. “We’re not at war with people in this country.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’ll be able to dismantle Drug WarRant anytime soon. Kerlikowske isn’t going to even consider ending prohibition.
However, it is extraordinarily refreshing to hear someone in his position acknowledge that the war on drugs is really seen as a war on we the people.

Update: Two views on the Czar’s statement:

• Jacob Sullum calls it more of the same
• Radley Balko says rhetoric matters

Link

According to CNBC ‹The Kudlow ReportŠ host Larry Kudlow, the way current California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is trying to promote [marijuana legalization] isn‰t for the purest of intentions, but just to bring in more revenue for his state‰s beleaguered budget.
‹ á Gov. Schwarzenegger, I mean he basically wants to get everybody stoned and then raise taxes,Š Kudlow said on his May 12 broadcast. ‹Now I have a problem with that. If we raise taxes, we ought to do it in a sober way so people can lash back at it.Š

Let me explain how it works, Larry. Legalizing marijuana doesn’t mean that everyone has to get stoned. We’re not going to put it in the water supply. And clearly you haven’t been paying any attention to the marijuana discussion online. The pro-legalization folks haven’t been showing any evidence of being too stoned to have an informed debate. In fact, their knowledge of the subject far out-shines that of mediocre cable news hosts.
And as far as Schwarzenegger possibly promoting legalization without the purest of intentions, gosh, that’s got to be the first time that ever happened in politics.
And I don’t particularly care about the purity of his intentions if the idea is a good one.
Finally, Kudlow’s seeming concern for people getting their taxes raised is a complete crock of sh*t, since we’re talking about people who could otherwise be facing criminal sanctions if marijuana remains illegal.

Stephen Baldwin and Kevin McCullough co-write a truly bizarre column: Common Sense Says, “No Thanks!”

America doesn’t want its pot…American potheads do!
Sure the debate is raging presently, but it’s as fictional in its need as whether pigs can fly or whether Superman was or was not faster than that bullet.
In the modern trumped up controversy over whether marijuana should be legalized for the masses, the biggest canard of all is the supposed demand that exists.

Does that make any sense? At all?
Or how about the supposed arguments given by legalizers

Marijuana proponents claim that the benefit to society would be enhanced by fewer offenders being sent to prison, tax revenues that would be generated, and the establishment of marijuana farming systems.

Farming systems? Who is talking about farming systems? Sure, we’d like to get it out of the hands of the black market, which certainly means farming it here, but we don’t talk about farming systems. But they debunk it anyway with this stunning argument:

And the farming argument is just dumb.

Speaking of the black market, they apparently think that criminals will still be selling it when it’s legal.

And second, they are convinced that it will give them easy access to the “high” they want, as well as give the pushers a new line of clientele.

Bonus points: Try to make sense of this sentence:

A major untruth that they [marijuana proponents] spread is that for every criminal it would prevent from being sent to prison, dealing with the increasingly prevalent use by underage users would be doubled or even tripled.

Yes, the notion that underage users would double or triple with legalization is a major untruth all right, but it’s not the marijuana proponents that are spreading it.
And to try to parse that sentence will make your head explode… “for every criminal” … “use would be doubled or even tripled.” So, prevent one criminal from going to jail and underage use doubles or triples. Prevent two criminals from going to jail and underage use increases from four times to nine times as high. Prevent three criminals from going to jail and underage use increases from eight times to twenty-seven times as high. By the time we save 15 people from going to jail, all the underage aliens in the Tau Ceti system are going to be smoking pot.
Oh, but wait — they said “dealing with the increasingly prevalent use by underage users would be doubled or even tripled.” So does that mean that society will exponentially spend its time interceding with pot smoking teenagers? I’m so confused.
All I can say is, Thank God for Stephen Baldwin and Kevin McCullough. It sure is nice having them represent the other side.

… and gets lost.
He calls his post Cheech and Chong mathematics. You decide.
It’s an attempt to debunk claims regarding the amount of tax revenue that California might reap from legalization. He then works out his own estimates of how much pot that a pot smoker would smoke in order to generate that amount of revenue, corrects his figures, corrects them again, corrects them a third time, and apparently shows that the amount of tax revenue that some people are claiming would result from legalization couldn’t occur without a significant increase in use.
Fine.
This, however, somehow leads him to a completely, and outrageously, false conclusion:

So the advocates of legalizing cannabis can argue, as they do, that legalization wouldn’t substantially increase the level of drug abuse, or they can argue that it could bring in noticeable amounts of revenue. But not both.

Nonsense. All he “proved” so far in his calculations (assuming they are correct) is that the particular amount of revenue ($1.3 billion) that some people claim could be reached (not a claim that I’ve made), couldn’t happen without a significant increase in the level of drug use.
It’s obvious, even using Mark’s figures, that you can bring in a noticeable amount of revenue without substantially increasing the level of drug abuse.
I mean, come on. This is juvenile stuff here, folks. Logic 101. It’s like the prohibitionists who say that because not every single reduction in the black market that some people have predicted is likely to occur, therefore there will be no reduction in the black market. That’s just ridiculous.
I can, and will, argue that legalizing cannabis won’t substantially increase the level of drug abuse and that it will bring in noticeable amounts of revenue.
It’s true. And, despite the paucity of directly relevant evidence (as a result of not having a proper laboratory (which California could provide)), all appropriate extant evidence supports my view.
So that’s a pretty positive thing and perhaps a good enough reason to legalize all on its own, not even counting the savings from law enforcement, prisons, courts, crime, corruption, etc., etc.
Oh, and yeah, the fact that the government in a free society has absolutely no legitimate right to wield the sledge hammer of punishment — punishing the many for the supposed sins of the few.

How often have you seen this kind of talk in a newspaper?

But if federal laws were changed, Ammiano’s proposal would present intriguing and banal policy questions:
— Would it be regulated by a state agency, such as the state Alcoholic Beverage Control department, or would local jurisdictions have that power?
— What zoning issues would a cannabis license be subject to?
— Could local jurisdictions ban the licenses outright – resulting in “dry” areas?
— Where marijuana could be sold, whether in specialty stores or everywhere alcohol and tobacco are sold, would also create intense debate. Would the speciality stores be run by the state, like liquor stores in Idaho and Oregon, or by private citizens?
Richard Lee, president of Oaksterdam University in Oakland, a marijuana dispensary and education group, said he prefers allowing pot sales only in cafes, as is done in Amsterdam.
“I like the coffee-shop model,” Lee said. “I think it goes well together, like a restaurant that serves alcohol that goes well with a meal.”

If we can get to this point on a regular basis, where people are haggling over the details of legalization, we’ve essentially won.

Charles Cochran, lieutenant of the Hartford Police Department’s vice and narcotics division, said that there are many reasons why it is not a good idea for a civilian to enlist children to set up drug deals.

I think we can agree with that. This comes out of a situation where an assistant principal apparently sent a student to buy drugs from another student in order to catch that second student.
The lieutenant goes on to say:

“Committing one crime to make another crime go away. Is that really the example we want to set for kids?”

That’s a really good question. But isn’t that something the police do every day in the drug war? (Except, of course, for the nonsensical notion that since they do it it’s not a crime.)

I’ve heard some of Representative King’s rantings on a variety of subjects and already knew he was an idiot, but I didn’t realize how much until I read his extremely long speech in the House of Representatives on Thursday regarding illegal aliens that also discussed illegal drugs.
[Note: His speech begins on H5389 of the Congressional Record (see headline “Immigration”). At the end of H5391 he really gets going on drugs…]

All the while in this stream of humanity comes 90 percent of the illegal drugs in America, Madam Speaker, 90 percent coming into the United States across
our southern border and all the human carnage that goes with that, the damage to our families, the damage to our productivity, the loss in lives, the children that are abused, the wives and sometimes less often the husbands that are violently assaulted by their spouse, their boyfriend, their significant other, whatever arrangement it might be, the
children that are abused that come because of methamphetamines and because
of marijuana and because of heroin and because of crack cocaine and because of cocaine itself. Those drugs, the marijuana, which often is a gateway drug to the drugs that incite a
higher level of violence, this damage to America‰s society is high. It‰s high in terms of dollars and lost productivity. It‰s high in terms of human suffering. It‰s high in terms of human life.

Yep. This is the kind of stuff he’s spewing.
Now check out his notion of how the drug supply chain works:

And when I ask the Drug Enforcement people what would happen if magically tomorrow morning everyone woke up in their own country, a place where they were legal, what if we had no illegals in America magically tomorrow morning, what would happen to the illegal drug distribution system in the United States? And their answer has consistently been that will suspend immediately illegal drug distribution in America because it‰s at least one link, and every distribution chain is a link that‰s forged by an illegal in the United States. Sometimes every link is an illegal link, but they‰re forging
these links. At least one link in every illegal drug distribution chain is an illegal
immigrant that‰s here transferring drugs.
And I won‰t argue this, so I will say this first hypothetically: If we had full enforcement of our immigration laws overnight, we would shut off illegal drug distribution overnight, Madam Speaker. Now, that‰s not to say that those distribution chains wouldn‰t be
reconstructed, that there wouldn‰t be illegal drug distribution manufacturing entrepreneurs that would fill that demand, because the demand does exist. It exists here in the United States, but the profit is going to Mexico.

It’s an interesting fantasy that feeds into his anti-immigrant passion, but at least he notes that demand will not cease, so, of course, his point about eliminating illegal aliens to eliminate drugs is really rather irrelevant. A smarter man would figure out that legalizing drugs would eliminate the profits for those illegal aliens who are involved in the drug trade.
But he’s got some answers. Wait till you see these ideas.

So we have about two choices on this, or I will say there are three
choices [note: I never found out what the third one is]: We can ramp up the interdiction to the point where it raises the transaction costs so high that bringing it into the United States would get so costly that it would cease. That‰s one thing that we can do.

Of course, like all good little supply-side prohibitionists, he doesn’t say how the hell he’d do that. There is no physical way to ramp up the interdiction to the point where drug distribution ceases. It will always find a way. You could theoretically ramp it up to the point where it would cease crossing the border of U.S./Mexico, but then pretty much all legitimate trade would cease as well (or get prohibitively expensive) and the economic fallout would be disastrous.
What are his other ideas?
Drug testing. Lots and lots of drug testing. He rambles on and on all over the place on this, so I’m just going to excerpt some bits and pieces.

And another thing that we could do would be to turn up the drug testing in
the United States, […]
If every employer had a drug-free workplace, if every employer enforced a drug-free workplace policy, if the employers actually initiated drug testing within their workforce in
four different categories, […] So you would have preemployment testing, you would have post-accident testing, you would have to have reasonable suspicion testing, […] And the fourth way, and I think it‰s most effective, is random drug testing…

Then he goes on to add mandatory random drug testing for anyone receiving government assistance, and continues…

So if we test in the workplace, we test in welfare, the other place to test is in educational institutions. Yes, that includes our colleges and universities, includes our schools to almost every degree, and it includes the employees that are there as well if we had a random drug testing system set up. […]
we have cleaned up the workforce, we have cleaned up the welfare roles. We have cleaned up the educational institution, three huge universes of this society and civilization, and the result of it, who would be left? Who would be left to be on drugs? And the answer is nobody except those who are dealing and those who are stealing.

That’s right – universal drug testing for just about everyone in America.
Now, the guy is a complete flake. If you read his entire speech, it’s a rambling mess. (If you want to watch some of the speech, the drug testing part is available on YouTube.)
The truly bizarre thing in his speech is that he even notes that the country had to make a decision during alcohol prohibition to legalize in order to stop the violence, yet he rejects it for today’s situation. See if you can make any sense out of it…

But if we should fail to do that, and if we are unable to implement a policy
that would be workplace drug testing, then at some point all the violence that comes with this, drugs that we have today, is a mirror of what happened back during the prohibition era of the Roaring Twenties, when this country came to a conclusion they couldn‰t enforce a prohibition on alcohol, and that the violent crime that was coming with it, and then the nonviolent crime, was so great that they would rather tolerate the alcohol than tolerate the violence.
I am not there. We have a tolerance level built into this civilization that‰s the United States of America that accepts the idea that if we don‰t see it in front of us every day, we are not going to score the carnage. But the carnage is high. The loss in lives is high. The loss of lives even at the hands of illegal aliens to Americans is very, very high.

… and then he rants more about illegal aliens, so I have no idea what he means.