Drug WarRant

A smooth 839 mile drive in just over 12 hours got me to New Orleans tired, but ready to start. However, a problem with internet service in the hotel, and in my room in particular (they thought there was a plug-in, but there wasn’t), has derailed my evening.
So right now I’m grabbing a little internet access from the wireless in the lobby before crashing. They may move me to a different room tomorrow.
I did get to have some rather tasty seafood gumbo from room service while waiting for the internet issues to be resolved.

Today I’m driving 839 miles to New Orleans, so posting will be… light. So far, I’ve been unable to master the skill of posting my blog while driving.
So talk amongst yourselves… and keep working on the questions for Costa. You’ve come up with some pretty good ones so far.
As soon as I get settled in the hotel late tonight, I’ll start filling you in on New Orleans
If you’re going to the convention, be sure to look me up.

The Justice Policy Institute will be releasing a study today “detailing the different treatment white and black drug offenders receive under the criminal justice system.”
It appears to be explosive from the first reports to hit the news…
According to the report, for drug offenses in San Francisco…

whites are incarcerated at a rate of 35 per 100,000 white people, while blacks are incarcerated at a rate of 1,013 per 100,000 black people

In Chicago

African-Americans in Cook County were imprisoned for drug offenses at 58 times the rate of white peopleÖthe seventh-worst racial disparity among large counties nationwide.

Also

The institute found that nationwide, African-Americans are imprisoned for drugs at 10 times the rate of white people.

The top major counties in racial disparity?

1. Forsyth County, NC
2. Onondaga County, NY
3. Dane County, WI

This report may add some critical material to some of the sessions at this week’s international Drug Policy Conference, where one major focus will be on African-Americans and drug policy.

Mark Kleiman and the Drug Czar both link approvingly to Physicians unlikely to embrace marijuana as medicine by Keith Humphreys.
We know the drug czar’s motivation — he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about sick people today and is willing to sacrifice them in order to demonize recreational marijuana. I’ll hold off characterizing Kleiman’s motivation.
Now to be sure, Mark properly refutes some of the more outrageous omissions and mischaracterizations in Humphreys’ OpEd (a dreadful piece lacking basic scientific knowledge about the state of medical marijuana research). And I commend him for that diligence. And he does go on to say:

If morphine is a medicine, there’s no reason why vaporized or nebulized cannabis extract can’t be a medicine.

But ultimately, the premise of Humphreys’ article is nonsensical.
Humphreys says that mainstream medicine is unlikely to embrace marijuana as a treatment. When it comes to reasons why he believes this, about all he can muster is:

1. Doctors are gun-shy because of the damage caused by cigarette smoking, and so are unlikely to accept a smoked medicine (this sounds like an indictment of the medical community — that they’d make decisions not based on facts, but on fears).
2. Doses are hard to regulate (this is an old one and may end up being important in some situations, but it’s completely irrelevant in others — in fact, smoked marijuana is easier to self-regulate than most pharmaceutical drugs, and doctors know full well that one pharmaceutically regulated cold capsule dose could have no impact on one patient while knocking another patient out completely.)

And Kleiman accepts the premise…

His basic point: medicines may be developed from cannabis, but American physicians simply aren’t going to have their patients smoke their medicine.
That seems right…

and his RSS teaser:

Can cannabis be a medicine?
Sure. But not smoked in joints or bongs.

Why not?
So let’s go back to the premise. Mainstream medicine will not accept smoked marijuana.
What does that mean? If it means that pharmaceutical companies will not accept smoked marijuana, then, yes, you’re absolutely right. They stand to lose billions of dollars of our money.
However, if you mean doctors, then that’s just hogwash.
Despite the lack of support from the medical establishment, and the harassment from the federal government, there are tons of well-trained, licensed physicians who are fully prepared to recommend smoked marijuana to their patients, and who do so on a daily basis, in accordance with state laws.
And that should be the story. Not what some mythical “mainstream medicine” may eventually decree.
To me, mainstream medicine is what happens between a doctor and a patient, not between a pharmaceutical company and a professor of psychiatry. Sure, some doctors may not wish to prescribe marijuana. Some patients may not wish to smoke it. For some patients, Marinol or Sativex may work better. Others may find brownies effective.
Those of us in the drug policy reform community want scientific research to continue — we want the drug companies to investigate cannabinoids in various forms, and develop pills, and sprays, and injections, and rectal suppositories, and whatever else they find is effective for various illnesses.
But in the meantime, there are patients who benefit from smoked marijuana, and there are doctors recommending it. And it is completely irresponsible for politicians and academicians to tell them they can’t or shouldn’t. Or that patients should just tell their pain or their nausea to wait until a “proper” medicine has been synthesized that they can buy at premium prices from the Rx Lords.
Because marijuana is so effective and safe (and by any human standards, marijuana has been proven both safe and effective beyond any doubt) and so easy and cheap to manufacture, and because it is associated with recreational use, it is going to make certain people uncomfortable. So be it. It’s past time to shake things up and say not that marijuana can become a medicine, but that it already is, and you’d better get on board or you’ll be left behind.
Full Disclosure: I am a legalizer. I believe that marijuana should be legally available for recreational use within a regulated system that takes it out of the black market. However, I also happen to believe that sick people should be able to take safe and effective medicine that has been recommended by their doctor. That’s not opportunistic; it’s merely consistent. Yes, I give a rat’s ass about sick people.

I’ve been doing a little more thinking about one of the Thursday keynote speakers at the Drug Policy Alliance’s 2007 International Drug Policy Reform Conference — UNODC’s Antonio Maria Costa.
I find myself wondering what I would say if I had a chance to talk to him. What question would I ask?
I admire prohibitionists who are willing to talk to their opposition. So few of them are. So it’s important to me that we treat him with respect. It’s also important that we try to understand them.
Certainly, over time, Costa has made some scattered overtures toward… sanity? He has said that treatment is more effective than incarceration. He appeared that he might even be personally interested in harm reduction (needle provision in 3rd world countries, for example) before political necessity made him change to zero tolerance for harm reduction.
But ultimately, his legacy is full-blown prohibitionist propaganda meant to feed authoritarian government approaches regardless of the facts.

“Today the harmful characteristics of cannabis are no longer that different from those of other plant-based drugs such as cocaine and heroin,”

“Amid all the libertarian talk about the right of individuals to engage in dangerous practices provided no one else gets hurt, certain key facts are easily forgotten. First, cannabis is a dangerous drug – not just to the individuals who use it. People who drive under the influence of cannabis put others at risk. Would even the most ardent supporter of legalisation want to fly in an aircraft whose pilot used cannabis?

Governments and societies must keep their nerve and avoid being swayed by misguided notions of tolerance. They must not lose sight of the fact that illicit drugs are dangerous – that is why the world agreed to restrict them.”

He has set himself up as judge over whether countries were sufficiently pure in their prohibition.

“The law conforms with three main United Nations agreements on drugs,” he said.æ Under the proposed law, possession of marijuana would remain illegal.æ However someone caught with less than 15 grams would face only a fine.æ Mr.æ Costa said 15 grams is too high a threshold.

And he has pushed for eradication in Afghanistan despite the danger to the country and to our soldiers…

“History teaches us that it will take a generation to render Afghanistan opium-free,” UNODC executive director Antonio Maria Costa said in a statement.

“It is possible to claw Afghanistan back into legality province by province, as was done in Thailand, Laos and Myanmar, all of which were once characterized by large scale opium cultivation.”

What else do you know about Costa?
What question would you ask him in a Q and A session?
Oh, and yes, I will be blogging the Conference. Won’t be quite live-blogging — they don’t have wireless in the conference rooms — I’ll have to wait until I get to the lobby or my room to actually post, but I’m going to try to share a lot of the conference and New Orleans with you — including photos, so be sure to tune in Thursday through Saturday.

This is such an amazingly spot-on description of how politicians make decisions related to the drug war…

Federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson is pressing ahead with plans to create mandatory minimum prison terms for drug crimes in spite of two studies prepared for his own department that say such laws don’t work, and are increasingly unpopular as crime-fighting measures in other countries.
“Minimum sentences are not an effective sentencing tool: that is, they constrain judicial discretion without offering any increased crime-prevention benefits. Nevertheless, mandatory sentences remain popular with some Canadian politicians.”

It costs a lot and it doesn’t work. Let’s do it!

Ben Wallace-Wells’ extensive article in Rolling Stone chronicles a litany of failures in the modern age of the war on drugs — failures of politics, judgement, and personality.
While I’m not sure I agree with all of Wallace-Wells’ assumptions (such as whether, if smarter decisions had been made, significant “victories” in the war on drugs would have been possible), the article is an essential primer for understanding this war.

“bullet” “drcnet”
“bullet” Drug Sense Weekly

It’s the same old story, but still a very telling article in Indiana: Drug task force faces audit critical.

The Muncie-Delaware County Drug Task Force is playing a game of keep away that uses money instead of a ball, and the state of Indiana is the monkey in the middle.
Going back to at least 1999, the DTF has ignored a state law requiring cash and proceeds from the sale of other property seized from drug dealers to be deposited in the general fund of the governmental unit employing the DTF officers, according to the State Board of Accounts.

In a nutshell, the state law, set up to avoid the abuse of drug task forces prioritizing law enforcement based on potential seizures, provides that any seizure money must be deposited in the general fund of the city or the county, etc. and then just the specific expenses incurred in the bust being reimbursed to the law enforcement agency, with the remainder used by the city/county/state.
But what the task force does is have the courts direct the deposit into the task force account. Then they expense every officer’s time and every other cost they possibly can relate to the bust in order to keep the money, including paying the deputy prosecutors who aggressively pursue the forfeiture a percentage of the take. In the rare cases that anything is still left, they kick it back to the feds, who keep 20% and give the law enforcement unit 80%, bypassing the city/county/state education fund.
The DTF is downright arrogant about their forfeiture approach, hardly seeming to even realize or care that they have become a mercenary force whose decision-making is driven not be protecting and serving, but by the booty they can grab.

“The DTF can’t survive without dope dealers’ money,” [head of the DTF, Muncie police Sgt. Jess] Neal said. […]
“We’ve had to make adjustments, be more aggressive with asset forfeitures, more aggressive targeting bank accounts, vehicles, tangible property, things we can sell in auctions,” Neal said. […]
Neal can’t recall a time that the DTF ever forfeited surplus funds to the state treasurer for deposit in the common school fund. […]
“Their workout room is out of this world,” [city Controller Mary Ann] Kratochvil said. “It’s a very nice facility.”
Neal said of the workout room in the basement of city hall: “For its size, it’s one of the best in the state. It was purchased by our local dope dealers. We use their money to get in shape so we can chase them around.”

Quite a deal they’ve got going there.
And note that they do everything they can to prevent the money from getting in the education fund, but then they use if to give donations to local youth groups, which acts as positive PR for the task force.
I’ve said it before — drug task forces, as a concept, are a cancer on our society, working to continue the drug war for their own benefit. And even worse are those funded through forfeiture. When law enforcement is motivated by greed, corruption, mismanagement, poor priorities, and even tragedy are likely (see the case of Donald P. Scott).

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