Drug WarRant

This article has been discussed at length in the comments here by those who hang out on the couch, but I was slow to get around to reading it — to be honest, I didn’t feel very excited about slogging through it. But I finally took a look:

The Real Dangers of Marijuana by Jonathan P. Caulkins in National Affairs.

Caulkins is part of a fairly tight group of drug policy pundits “in the academy” who, over the years, have claimed a middle ground by regularly condemning both sides in the drug policy debate, even if they had to invent straw men to “balance” the sides. Because of this, over the years, I have often referred to them as “intellectually dishonest” — the one insult that seems to aggravate them the most. It’s likely that part of the reason for their false middle positioning is pragmatic, as it helps give them consulting cred for opportunities with RAND, AEI, etc.

Here’s a great example in Caulkins’ piece of blatant faulty comparison:

Choosing prohibition means choosing black markets; choosing legalization means choosing greater drug dependence. It is trite but true: A country can choose what kind of drug problem it wants, but it cannot choose not to have a drug problem.

They’ve written books together, articles together, etc., and, while they do have their disagreements from time to time, you can usually count on them to stand together in their balanced opposition to both prohibition and any real opposition to prohibition, as well as the impossible demand to have the answers to all possible future questions about legalization before making significant changes in policy (as Mark Kleiman positively approves over at The Reality-based Community).

Another thing they seem to share is a strong (some might even say fascistic) nanny-state approach to policy when it comes to any kind of recreational drug. They will invariably identify a minority of the population who, for one reason or another (reasons they tend to avoid discussing at length) have a dysfunctional relationship with that drug, and then decide that policy should dictate extreme restrictions for the entire population (not just the affected population).

For example, Caulkins specifically notes that “marijuana is, for the most part, not directly harmful to third parties” and “its health harms are, for the most part, minor.” For most people, that would be a sure indication that any restriction should be very narrowly tailored. And now, of course, that legalization is inevitable, Caulkins no longer objects per se, but instead suggests that marijuana should be, as Kleiman suggests “tolerated grudgingly.” Caulkins approvingly notes “That means allowing adults access to some legally produced supply, hopefully on liberal enough terms to undermine the black market, but with restraints and hoops for users and suppliers to jump through that will be seen as features of the regulatory regime, not wrinkles to be ironed out.” Never a thought of narrowly tailoring any solution to specifically dealing with those who have a problem with marijuana. Instead, all users and suppliers are to have difficulty under Caulkins’ thinking.

This is bad policy. And just like prohibition, it involves using a sledge hammer instead of really addressing any actual problems.

Here’s a bit in the article I found rather humorous:

With the exception of the Drug Enforcement Administration, most opposition comes not from government but from non-profit groups like National Families in Action, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, the Institute for Behavioral Health, and the Hudson Institute. The governmental heavyweight, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is quick to point out marijuana’s dangers but even quicker to disavow having any official position on policy questions like legalization or decriminalization.

That really downplays governmental opposition. First of all, the DEA is huge. Second, there is the matter of all the rest of law enforcement in the country, which has been, to a large extent, bribed by the federal government to toe the anti-legalization line. Then there are agencies like the IRS and the U.S. Postal Service that have gotten in the way of state legalization efforts, the U.S. attorneys, Congress, the military… Yeah, not much governmental opposition there.

Now, let’s get to the title that I put on this post:

“It is clear we would all be better off if Jonathan P. Caulkins did not exist.”

What a horrible statement! I’m sure that Jonathan has family and friends who love him very much and the notion that they’d be better off if he didn’t exist is offensive. Why would I even consider making such a statement just because I disagree with a small impact that he has in this world? Why not just oppose those specific points without completely negating any value that he might have as a human being?

Exactly.

The purpose of the title of the post was to draw attention to Caulkin’s statement:

“It is clear we would all be better off if marijuana did not exist.”

In this one statement, he betrays any sense of intellectual honesty.

Who is he to decide that the entire world would be better off without the existence of marijuana just because he has identified a small subset of the population who deal with it dysfunctionally? What kind of arrogance is that?

For many people, marijuana is a valuable and wonderful thing with which they have a fully functional relationship (much as Jonathan’s friends and family may have with him). To deny or ignore that is to completely miss the boat in developing actual legitimate public policy.

By making this statement, Caulkins has shown that he’s not interested in good public policy, but rather, like a petulant child, imposing a particular viewpoint on everyone.

Johann continues to kick ass in the press, coming up with OpEds and interviews that are clear and understandable to the casual public who may not be aware of all the details of the drug war, and that make compelling arguments.

His latest is in the Los Angeles Times – a paper that has often been a drug war cheerleader.

Yes, pot is stronger today, but not for the reasons you think

Here’s the irony. Drugs are more potent today, and people are taking more powerful drugs — but that’s largely because of the drug war, not despite it.

To grasp why, you need to understand a counterintuitive phenomenon best explained by the writer Mike Gray in his book “Drug Crazy.” Let’s start in January 1920. The day before Prohibition went into effect, the most popular alcoholic drinks, by far, were beer and wine. Once alcohol was legalized again, in December 1933, the most popular drinks, by far, were again beer and wine — as they remain today. But between those dates, beer and wine virtually vanished and the only alcoholic beverages available became hard spirits such as whiskey, vodka and moonshine.

So why would banning a drug change people’s taste? In fact, it didn’t. It just changed what they had access to. […]

The technical term for this — coined by the advocate for drug reform Richard Cowan — is “the iron law of prohibition.” As crackdowns on a drug become more harsh, the milder forms of that drug disappear — and the most extreme strains become most widely available.

This is an important point to continue to hammer home. Opponents of legalization are often pushing that old “this isn’t your father’s pot” argument.

Something we’ve been saying for a long time…

Via the Marijuana Majority twitter account:

“Creating a legal, responsible and regulated framework for marijuana is a predominant civil right issue and it’s long overdue,” said Alice Huffman, longtime President of California State NAACP.

The California State NAACP has formally endorsed the Adult Use of Marijuana Act (AUMA).

Of course, it’s not just legalization of marijuana. It’s the entire drug war that’s a civil rights issue (and a host of other issues as well). But again, since marijuana enforcement is the biggest piece of the drug war, it’s a great place to start.

Study Concludes Biking While High on Marijuana Isn’t Dangerous

“Hardly any coordinative disturbances could be detected under the influence of high or very high THC concentrations,” the study, published by the International Journal of Legal Medicine this week, found.

Canada Needs Permission From International Treaties to Legalize Marijuana, Says New PM Justin Trudeau

Justin Trudeau, the Liberal prime minister who won last October’s elections in Canada against the Conservative Stephen Harper, who was seeking a third term, ran in part on a promise to legalize marijuana, and said he was going to “get started on that right away,” signaling a departure from the Harper administration’s anti-pot stance.

Now, Trudeau’s said his efforts have hit a snag—international treaties. They were, uh, there during the election campaign, even if they were left unmentioned by the candidate himself.

According to the Canadian Press:

Trudeau’s plan to legalize, regulate and restrict access to marijuana is already proving a complicated and controversial undertaking on the domestic front, in part because it requires working with the provinces.

Internationally, says a briefing note prepared for the prime minister, Canada will also have to find a way to essentially tell the world how it plans to conform to its treaty obligations.

It’s time to get rid of these fossils in politics…

Maine governor blames state’s heroin problem on racist stereotypes

“These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty… these types of guys … they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home,” LePage said. “Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.”

The answer is “yes.”

Is Police Corruption Inevitable in the War on Drugs?

Last week, police in Pennsylvania pulled over a car carrying three men and apparently $2 million worth of weed. Among the 247 pounds of pot and $11,000 in cash in the vehicle, investigators also found a law enforcement badge and service weapon belonging to California Sheriff’s deputy Christopher Heath, one of the men arrested and a frequent drug investigator in Northern California. Now Heath’s bosses have to figure out if the drug cases he led on their behalf will hold up in court given that one of their investigators has been outed as a corrupt cop.

Given how much money’s at stake in the drug game, the fact that police can be swayed to join the distributors they usually bust isn’t all that surprising. Yet police corruption in the drug war is often depicted by the media as a foreign phenomenon, consigned to countries with notoriously powerful cartels such as Mexico or Colombia—despite decades of high-profile examples of US authorities breaking bad, too.

Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

Justice IG: DEA paid Amtrak employees nearly $1 million as informants

WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration paid an Amtrak employee more than $850,000 during the past 20 years to serve as a confidential informant for the agency only to receive information that was always available to the DEA at no cost, an internal Justice Department review found.

Happy New Year! Just back from a trip visiting relatives over the holidays, and trying to figure out what retirement means in this, my first week of actually dealing with retirement. Thanks for bearing with me in the long holiday pause.

I would say one of the most potentially interesting news items over break was this one about the Surgeon General:

Surgeon General Announces Review of Federal Drug Policies

Areas of focus in the report may include the history of the prevention, treatment and recovery fields; components of the substance use continuum (i.e., prevention, treatment and recovery); epidemiology of substance use, misuse and substance use disorders; etiology of substance misuse and related disorders; neurobiological base of substance misuse and related disorders; risk and protective factors; application of scientific research in the field, including methods, challenges and current and future directions; social, economic and health consequences of substance misuse; co-occurrence of substance use disorders and other diseases and disorders; the state of health care access and coverage as it relates to substance use prevention, treatment and recovery; integration of substance use disorders, mental health and physical health care in clinical settings; national, state and local initiatives to assess and improve the quality of care for substance misuse and related disorders; organization and financing of prevention, treatment and recovery services within the health care system; ethical, legal and policy issues; and potential future directions.

It’s quite easy to find reasons to be both optimistic and pessimistic about this news. Certainly, there’s a lot of history in the federal government in claiming to want to find the scientific truth when they really are doing nothing more than distorting it to confirm political preferences. And yet, the surgeon general’s office has historically been less likely to be as politically driven, which could be good.

If we assume that the Surgeon General will actually follow the science and facts wherever they lead, recommendations could still get derailed (witness Joycelyn Elders). But if the administration is trying to pave the way for a real change in federal drug policy before the end of the term, this would be the way to do it — with the weight of the top medical doctor in the country behind the recommendations.

Wonderful holiday wishes to all Drug WarRant readers, and especially to the regular couch-mates who make this place special.

I just finished my last day of work yesterday, and look forward to discovering what retirement will bring. But first, I’m hitting the road for the holidays to visit family and friends.

For those sticking around, there’s some of Alton Brown’s aged eggnog in the refrigerator (make sure Matt doesn’t O.D. on it), and I believe there’s still a fruitcake being used as a doorstop (and no, Mr_Alex, it wasn’t made by the Semblers, so it’s OK).

Have a great time. I’ll stop in during the holidays when I can.

We’ve often talked here about the fact that suspicionless drug testing in most situations is wrong, and doesn’t actually work, whether it’s in high schools, for welfare recipients, or on the job. And, of course, it’s a big business.

It’s bad enough at the high school level, but college?

Here are two pieces from StopTheDrugWar.org’s Chronicle

Drug Testing

University of Alabama Subjects All Frat Members to Mandatory Drug Tests. Every fraternity member at the school was required to pass a drug test at the beginning of the academic year, and now, fraternity members are being randomly selected each week for more drug tests. If students test positive, they get several warnings before they are expelled from the fraternity and a university anti-drug program intervenes to “help students get back on track before the school doles out harsher penalties. The drug testing program has been criticized by fraternity members and others as invading the privacy of students, but no one has yet challenged it in court.

ACLU to Appeal Federal Court Ruling Allowing Drug Testing of All Students at Missouri Tech College. The ACLU of Missouri said it will appeal an 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding the suspicionless drug testing of all students at the State Technical College of Missouri. The ACLU is seeking a rehearing of the case before the same three-judge appeals court panel that ruled in the school’s favor or by the entire bench in the 8th Circuit. The ACLU had filed suit in 2011 to challenge the policy and won at the district court level, but the appeals court last year reversed the lower court decision. The federal courts have held that, with a handful of exceptions, mandatory suspicionless drug testing violates the Fourth Amendment’s proscription against warrantless searches and seizures. The ACLU said the appeals court decision is “poorly crafted and departs from the 8th Circuit and Supreme Court precedent.”

I remember when the Missouri Tech College case originally came up and thinking that it should be a slam dunk to stop that in the courts (and it was initially). But I don’t remember hearing about the appeals court. This needs to be stopped so it doesn’t give any other colleges ideas.

As far as the one at University of Alabama, I see where they’re going with it – using the idea that worked in high schools, of targeting those who participate in extra-curricular activities – in this case as a requirement to participate in frats. What a colossally stupid approach. In my experience, the biggest problem in frats is alcohol, something that will not be caught by drug testing. If anything, it’ll drive the frats to focus solely on alcohol, which is not necessarily a good thing.

When I was in college, we didn’t have frats, but we had similarly structured “social groups” (just without separate housing). The one social group least likely to put their fist through a wall, hurt someone, or cause problems on campus was the one whose drug of choice was pot rather than alcohol.

Via Huffington Post Weird News comes this remarkably absurd anti-marijuana campaign out of Australia.

Supposedly, it’s the work of Australia’s New South Wales Department of Premier and Cabinet.

And there’s a website.

Thanks to Tom Angell for the info:

This is regarding the lawsuit against Colorado by those states, because they feel harmed by the cost of having to arrest people in their own states for possessing marijuana.

Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae

The motion for leave to file a bill of complaint should be denied because this is not an appropriate case for the exercise of this Court’s original jurisdic-tion. Entertaining the type of dispute at issue here—essentially that one State’s laws make it more likely that third parties will violate federal and state law in another State—would represent a substantial and unwarranted expansion of this Court’s original jurisdiction.

Well said.

Hard to think about the year being over soon, but we are starting to see year-in-review pieces.

Phillip Smith has one at Alternet: The People Are Rising Up Against the Destructive Drug War: 8 Key Developments

The items he notes are:

1. The sky hasn’t fallen on legal marijuana states.
2. The marijuana majority solidifies.
3. Monopoly marijuana is rejected in the Heartland.
4. Black Lives Matter’s policing critique implicates the drug war.
5. Overdoses kill tens of thousands, harm reduction responses emerge.
6. Asset forfeiture reform picks up steam.
7. Six thousand federal drug war prisoners come home.
8. Canada elects a marijuana-legalizing prime minister.