Drug WarRant

There’s one problem often faced by those of us well versed in the facts of the drug war. We know the history and the science. We’re able to clearly distinguish the difference between negative consequences of drugs and negative consequences of prohibition. Our factual knowledge base is, quite frankly, overwhelming, and all of it points clearly, unmistakably, and inexorably to reform.
We’re even open to carefully considering opposing arguments (which fail the test of reason time after time), thus strengthening our confidence in the comprehensive nature of our information.
This didn’t happen overnight in most cases. It was the result of a lot of research, observation, and critical thinking.
So when we come across someone who opposes reform, we assume one of two things:

1. They are profiting from the drug war (politically, financially, or sadomoralistically) and thus are uninterested in the truth.
2. They simply don’t have the facts yet.

Once we’re relatively sure that the person is not category 1, then all we have to do is educate them. Right?
And yet, sometimes we find ourselves baffled by the reaction.
There are individuals for whom you could prove conclusively that:

• Legalization would result in less crime
• Legalization would result in reduced use of drugs by children
• Legalization would result in reduced drug abuse
• Legalization would result in enormous financial savings
• Legalization would result in dismantling of dangerous criminal organizations

… and they would still look at you like you were a crazy person bent on destruction of civilization as we know it for even suggesting consideration of legalization, even in controlled, regulated and limited situations.
These people are suffering from a form of cognitive distortion. [The term is most often used in relation to cognitive therapy to deal with things like depression, but I think it’s also appropriate to this situation.]
The cause? An authority figure need combined with a lifetime of propaganda. This combination sets the information down in pathways that cannot be disrupted by mere facts. (The conflict between factual information and established pathways can even cause unpleasant cognitive dissonance, resulting in lashing out against the person with the facts.)
Now I’m probably generalizing way too much in this post, but I’m guessing that a weak and/or fearful mind is much more susceptible to this kind of thing.
On the other hand… if, as a child, you found yourself on occasion saying to yourself “Hey, my teacher got that one wrong,” — and it was because of your own knowledge and not blind adherence to some other authority figure (church/parents) — then I’m guessing you’re probably less susceptible to propaganda and this form of cognitive distortion.
How do you deal with those with cognitive distortion? (Other than years of therapy.) It’s not easy. Those with only mildly set propaganda pathways may be dislodged through gentle yet persistent repetition of facts. It also helps, of course, to eliminate the propaganda reinforcement (we’ve got to do something about the ONDCP).
Maybe, once we’ve legalized drugs, we can use some of those hundreds of thousands of empty prison cells and convert them to mental health facilities to help the cognitively disabled. We wouldn’t want them to suffer.

… particularly if you’re also wearing a badge.

“The agents actually brought with them 146 pounds of marijuana in the trunk of an undercover vehicle,” […]
In addition to posing as drug buyers, [undercover officers] pose as drug dealers and the marijuana will be useful bait to trap more traffickers down the road.
The seized boat will be auctioned off and the sheriff’s office and the other police agencies that took part in the bust can keep the money. They’ll also split the cash the suspects paid for the marijuana.

And they get to keep the cash that we paid them through taxes, too!
And we get…
?
Seriously, we get…
?

Chief Dennis Jones, describing murdered Rachel Hoffman:

“She was completing a diversion program for possession of over 20 grams of marijuana and pending felony charges for possession with intent to sell MDA (or Ecstacy), maintaining a drug house, possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell, possession of drug paraphernalia.”

Sounds pretty hard core, doesn’t it?
Translation:

Rachel was a college student who sold pot to her friends. She was first caught with less than an ounce of pot and later caught with 5 ounces of pot and six ecstasy pills.

On the basis of that, they decided she should go to hard core dealers and attempt to purchase 1500 ecstasy pills, two ounces of cocaine, and a gun.

WFLA-FM 100.7, Tallahassee, FL
http://www.wflafm.com

Wednesday, May 14th at 7:30 am EDT
“The Morning Show” with Preston Scott and Eric Eggers

Guest: Mike Jones of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
Topic: The Rachael Hoffman murder

If you smoke between two ounces and nine ounces of marijuana every week, it’s possible that you might be at an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes. But we don’t actually have any, uh, actual evidence of it.
Link

David Harsanyi has a good read in the Denver Post: The government’s sorta-kinda-maybe logic

It could be argued that the most useless job in Washington, D.C., is held by John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. He’s otherwise known as the country’s Drug Czar.
And when you consider the spectacular number of useless jobs in Washington, that’s quite an accomplishment.
No one is saying, of course, that it’s easy being a figurehead of a cost-inefficient organization charged with implementing the biggest domestic policy disaster since Prohibition.

Ouch.
He goes on to attack the latest nonsense from Walters about teens, marijuana and mental health:

“Adolescent marijuana use may be a factor that triggers psychosis, depression, and other mental illness,” explains Walters, who admits “research about causality is still ongoing.”
Ongoing, doubtlessly, until Walters unearths the answer he’s looking for.
It’s not often you see half-baked phrases like “Could Actually” in the title of a study. You’ll also notice Walters also says it “may be a factor.” Because, in other words, “it may not” be a factor at all.

And then he really nails it:

And in the end, it is also irrelevant. Children shouldn’t use drugs, and even if drugs were legalized, no one is advocating children should be able to use them.

Read the whole thing — it’s a really excellent OpEd.

Unless we own their government and have it heavily on payroll, we’re not particularly popular in Latin American countries these days.
Ecuador Opposes Outpost in American War on Drugs
They don’t like our war on drugs, either.
As someone who works in the arts, I like President Correa’s hiring decisions:

In a shake-up of the armed forces in April, Mr. Correa picked Javier Ponce, a poet who advocates less military cooperation with United States, as defense minister.

And Ponce makes the obvious point:

‹Should Ecuador have a base in Miami? Or New Jersey?Š Mr. Ponce, 59, said. ‹The decision of the government is not to renew this accord.Š

Glenn Greenwald is always on top of government abuse of power, and recently he’s been all over the case of the military analysts for the major networks that were being prepped by the government to feed propaganda to us, their employers.
Mona, over at the art of the possible, helps to put it in perspective from our point of view…

But tax-payer subsidized psy-ops is nothing new; the DEA has been doing it for years, as for example by publishing a ‹debate manualŠ (originally titled How to Hold Your Own in a Drug Legalization Debate) to use during exchanges with those advocating drug-policy reform. (But the DEA counsels avoiding any debate at all, if possible.)
We‰ve been paying for the government to fund lies and propaganda defending its own tyrannical powers since well before Bush and 9/11.

Yep. We’re used to it. The important thing is not to get complacent about it.
There’s something horribly, treasonously wrong in a country of the people, by the people and for the people, where the government functions by lying to the people.

Eric Sterling does some interesting musing and wandering in Medical Marijuana in California — Questions

I am intellectually satisfied that marijuana has a wide range of medical values. […]
Therefore I believe marijuana should be available to patients who need it. So how do I understand what is happening in California? […]
There is a large experiment underway in California yet there probably is no consensus on what the experiment actually is about. Is it an experiment in medical marijuana? Or is it an experiment as Joel Stein says, in legalized marijuana for adults over 18. Certainly it will be hard to evaluate because the experiment is not being controlled or designed.
There are important questions: What is the actual role of the physicians who are issuing the recommendations? Are they facilitating the proper treatment of serious medical conditions that have been resistant to conventional medical treatment? Are they serving to block improper juvenile use of marijuana? Does their “gatekeeper” role help mitigate the abuse of marijuana?
It is time to ask the academic world to step forward to begin to seriously evaluate this experiment.

I understand the questions, but disagree with the final conclusion.
It must be disconcerting for those who spent so much time and effort developing and fighting for medical marijuana in California to be successful, and yet at the same time be unable to even identify their baby.
As a pure scientific medical venture, California’s medical marijuana movement was hopelessly doomed. The federal government’s unjustified active opposition insured that the valuable “state laboratory” concept (as envisioned by Justice Brandeis) could not function. Therefore California’s medical marijuana “system” is a political/social chimera, not a scientifically controlled experiment.
Asking some in the academic world to put something that chaotic into a clinically analyzed box could be disastrous. Lacking rigidly defined controls, the science will be seen to be undefinable, therefore failed, when in fact it is the public policy that has failed the science.
Imagine any other scientific experiment where the very ability to control the environment of the experiment was denied the experimenter — where testing of new food crops, for example, had to be done à la Johnny Appleseed. It would be very hard to be sure of the purity of your results, and yet there would still be something to learn (and enjoy) from each apple tree, until the day that the world woke up and allowed controlled tree farms to develop the best apples.
Medical marijuana in California is a cruelly grafted beast, yet is something to be treasured for whatever combination of things it has managed to be, until the government is willing to allow it to become something more controlled and measurable.

One of the best responses I’ve seen so far to the latest nonsense from Walters is Tim King of the Salem-News.com (Oregon): New Federal Report on Marijuana Use is Misleading, Groups Say

Is this a reaction to the beginning of the end of marijuana prohibition?
(SALEM, Ore.) – A new federal government report on the ill effects of marijuana on teens may be a last ditch effort to demonize the medical weed before it sees its own day of emancipation. As it stands, even the most hardcore marijuana legalization advocates do not support children using anything that causes intoxication.
This new report uses scare tactics and seems to regard medical facts as a meaningless burden…

The whole thing is a fun read. It would be nice to see more of his kind of thing show up in the major news outlets.