Drug WarRant

This is an enjoyable article. An intrepid reporter braves the clouds of pot smoke

This soccer mom admits she was out of her league at a marijuana smokefest. But she left with a better understanding. And the munchies…
Organizers were handing out festival maps at Queen’s Park yesterday, but the kids ahead of me just laughed them off.
“Who the hell needs a map?” chuckled one freedom toker to the other. “Just follow the smell.”
You sure couldn’t miss it. My editor told me not to inhale, but I’m not sure what he was smoking when he offered that impossible advice.

But apparently this is an activity that is worthy of putting people in prison, kicking them out of college, and ruining their chances of working in certain jobs.
Did you notice the other thing missing in this situation (and any mass marijuana smoking situation) in comparison to any mass alcohol drinking situation?

I’ve been out of circulation for a few days, but finals week is finally here. Still a bit to do, but things are easing up. Tonight I played piano for a musical theatre class final — this weekend I put together two digital slide presentations and an awards presentation, and last week I had four photo calls, in addition to regular work.
So… what did I miss?

It’s the very end of the school year and I’m falling down on the job, here, but my loyal readers are coming through with links for you.
“bullet” Timothy Garon died yesterday. He was a patient who was denied a liver transplant because of his legal use of medical marijuana. More here (thanks to Tim and Paul).
“bullet” Will Pot Ever Be Legal in this Schizoid Country?
“bullet” Via Paul Armentano, comes this Reuters story: Low-dose pot eases pain while keeping mind clear.
“bullet” Mike passes on a couple of links to grow-house raids in Florida, here and here (the video is interesting).
“bullet” Scot at Grits for Breakfast has a post: Redefining drug war success — where he notes that the drug war has truly become desperate when people switching from meth to crack is considered a drug war victory.
“bullet” Jim sends a link to this hilarious Tim Meadows pot scene from “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”

“bullet” DrugSense Weekly
“bullet” “drcnet”

“bullet” Fascinating story of Dr. Stephen Richards. An ex-felon who spent 9 years in prison for conspiracy to distribute several tons of marijuana, but got his college degree and eventually his PhD and now teaches criminal justice at UW-Oshkosh (although as an ex-felon, he can’t drive a cab or work at McDonald’s).
“bullet” If you haven’t yet, you really should read this important piece in the NY Times by Jim Dwyer: On Arrests, Demographics, and Marijuana. In NYC between 1988 and 1997, police arrested 45,300 people for having a small amount of pot. However, between 1998 and 2007, they arrested 374,900!
Guess what most of them looked like.
And Scott Morgan points out one of the side notes in the article: Don’t Give Your Marijuana to the Police. Yes, they are allowed to trick you.
“bullet” Albert Hofmann, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102

He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug‰s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity‰s oneness with nature.

It is undoubtably his repeated use of the drug that ruined his health and caused him to die at such a young age.
“bullet” Simon Jenkins in the Guardian has a blunt message in response to Gordon Brown’s expected move to re-classify cannabis back up to Class B in the UK: The only message being sent is of cowardice and stupidity
“bullet” David Guard has an update on the medical marijuana bill in Illinois. Good faith attempts are being made to get law enforcement on board, with a real dialogue and some changes to the bill. That contrasts with Minnesota, where some of the law enforcement rhetoric has been so outrageous, that Minnesotans for Compassionate Care put out an excellent point by point rebuttal.
“bullet” Does anybody get it yet? When you see stories like this: Tijuana Hospital Locked Down as Doctors Treat Drug Traffickers Hurt in Shootouts, is there any doubt that we should be looking for some solution other than a drug war?

There are so many ways to lie, and the drug czar knows them all. But it’s a game of sorts — his office likes to pretend they’re not really lying, that they’re… technically telling the truth.
Usually they use the sleight of hand lie — unrelated or irrelevant statements intended to mislead

• “Evidence now tells us that the higher-than-ever potency of today’s marijuana translates into serious health consequences for teens. Among teens who are receiving treatment for drug abuse or dependence, more than 60% report marijuana as their primary drug of abuse.”
• Marijuana contains hundreds of carcinogens.

Two prime examples of the sleight of hand lie. The first one simply ignores the fact that most people in for marijuana treatment are there not because of any dependence, but because they were referred there by the criminal justice system. So the statistics have absolutely nothing to do with higher THC or addictive qualities of marijuana. The second is intended to imply that marijuana causes cancer (Since the largest study in the world — funded by the U.S. government — proved that there is no risk of lung cancer from smoking marijuana, Walters cannot come out and say that marijuana causes cancer, but he can use the sleight of hand lie.
And then there’s another kind of lie. Simply find someone so utterly and incredibly low that they don’t mind giving the obvious lies, and approvingly link to them.

Someone approached me with a question:

We already have two legal meats in this country, beef and pork. And these have caused all sorts of problems with cholesterol, heart attacks and obesity. People like them too much, so we’ll probably never be able to get rid of them, but why should we add another dangerous meat, by legalizing chicken?

And so I answered:

1. This is a free country and you don’t get to decide that people in power like pork so it’s OK, but I can’t be allowed to like chicken. You can (and should) inform me of the real dangers involved in any of the meats and encourage me to consume them responsibly, but you can’t sit there swallowing sausage and send me to jail for my chicken breast.
2. Chicken is actually better for you than beef and pork in many ways. Legal chicken could mean that some people will occasionally eat chicken instead of beef. And that’s a good thing. Imagine if, when you went to Wendy’s, instead of just having hamburgers, you could instead get a grilled chicken sandwich or chicken nuggets. How is that a bad thing?
3. Chicken has a whole range of nutritional and health benefits.
4. Making chicken illegal has not stopped people from eating meat (or even eating chicken). And it’s caused a host of other problems.
5. You’re a moron.

“bullet” Nice to see a college OpEd with some sense.
“bullet” This is how the world looks when you are only able to perceive one side of things. Then the only question you can ask is how to make prohibition work and you are unaware that the word “whether” exists.
“bullet” How dysfunctional is the drug war? Just check this out: A D.A.R.E. officer(!) arranges a major drug transaction… in the parking lot of an elementary school. Investigators are onto the rogue officer and tape the transaction, while accidentally broadcasting it over the police scanner to anyone who might be listening.

Hey, Testers, Leave Those Kids Alone

* If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. This is the single most odious line of reasoning ever concocted because it misses the point. People, including students, are not required to prove they’ve done nothing wrong.

There’s an extensive legalization comment thread over at Marginal Revolution. Some of the comments are quite uninformed, but there are a few reasoned individuals as well. It comes from a discussion of whether prohibition violence would really decrease with legalization (something we know for certain).
Here’s the part that really gets surreal:

Under one model, local gangs have a more or less fixed ability to terrorize a neighborhood. Even if everything is legalized, the gangs will continue local monopolies to maximize tribute, subject of course to constraints from other gangs and the police. In this model, legalizing drugs doesn’t do much good. The local gang either shifts its monopoly to another area (milk and sugar, if need be), or de facto the gang’s local monopoly on the drug trade continues. The gang busts you if you try to get your supply of crack cocaine from Merck.

It’s one of the more bizarre notions I’ve heard (even though Tyler Cowen only believes that it will be partly operative).
There’s no way that criminals can compete with a reasonably priced, well-supplied legal market, and absolutely no way that they can monopolize it, assuming a civilization not in total anarchy.
Sure, assuming an instant legalization, criminal enterprises and gangs will be left suddenly scrambling to find some other way of surviving outside the law, and they will try a number of models. But with the money spigot turned off, the lure will be lost for new recruits, and any attempts they make to switch to victim-based crimes will be met with a newly united front of community and law enforcement that will be formidable.