Drug WarRant

“bullet” Steve at Transform takes on the recent rash of media madness with More shoddy reefer madness reporting of cannabis risks

When you are in the midst of a fully fledged media cannabis panic, as we currently seem to be, you can be quite sure that any new research on the drug:

• will be pounced upon by lazy journalists
• will be trawled for any vaguely shocking sounding statistics (by non-scientists and non-statisticians)
• will have these statistics spun into sexy ‘shock’ headlines
• will have any negative findings, statistical ambiguity, commentary on confounding factors/ context / significance etc conveniently glossed over
• will see politicians responding to the media coverage of the research rather than the research itself *insert daft quote from David Davis*

“bullet” Radley Balko: FBI to Congress: Murder, Wrongful Imprisonment May Be Necessary to Preserve Drug Investigations
Assistant Director of the FBI Directorate of Intelligence Wayne Murphy in testimony before Congress….

The context: Lundgren and Delahunt have cited incidents in the past in which the FBI has covered up evidence that its confidential drug informants have committed violent crimes (including murder) in order to protect their identities, so that they could continue providing the bureau with information. They’ve cited other incidents, including the case above, in which the FBI has hidden exculpatory evidence, and allowed innocent people to go to prison. Lundgren and Delahunt want Murphy to assure them that the FBI has instituted policies to ensure that these sorts of incidents won’t happen again–that murderers won’t be protected and innocent people sent to prison in order to preserve drug investigations.
Remarkably, Murphy refuses to make such assurances.

This kind of attitude on the part of public servants is the reason why the Stop Snitchin’ movement is gaining steam.
“bullet” In the context of the latest medical marijuana raids in California, Jacob Sullum explores the positions of the Presidential candidates in this area and finds the Republican field, for the most part, lacking: Spliff Split.
He has an interesting conclusion:

These partisan tendencies do not mean Democrats have greater respect for the division of powers between the federal government and the states. When it suits them, they’re happy to support federal involvement in policy areas the Constitution leaves to the states. It’s just that Democrats are, by and large, more comfortable with the therapeutic use of cannabis than Republicans are.
It’s hard to find a logical explanation for this split. Republicans, conservatives especially, are traditionally critical of overly cautious regulators who prevent people from using drugs that could relieve their suffering safely and effectively. They have a record of supporting the freedom to use herbal home remedies without unreasonable bureaucratic interference.
The prevailing Republican stance on medical marijuana, which is at odds with what most Americans tell pollsters they think about the issue, can be understood only in light of the connotations that cannabis acquired as a result of its accidental association with the 1960s counterculture. In fighting a symbol of their opponents’ principles, conservatives have sacrificed their own.

So the feds had another massive raid yesterday serving a warrant…

Federal law enforcement agents raided […] home in Girdwood on Monday, hauling off undisclosed items from inside and taking extensive pictures and video. […]
Neighbors said agents showed up between 11 a.m. and noon and that a commercial locksmith was called to open the front door.

Locksmith? When did they start using locksmiths? Feds know what a locksmith is? And that a locksmith isn’t a battering ram? Where’s the tank knocking down the door? Where’s the 4 a.m. surprise raid with flash-bombs and shooting the dog?
Oh, I see — this is simply a corrupt U.S. senator who is suspected of violating his oath to the Constitution, committing high crimes and misdemeanors, and stealing millions of dollars from taxpayers, not some dangerous pot smoker.

When the media isn’t demonizing marijuana, the best they often can do is snicker at it. They love to make “funny” comments about pot — it’s like it’s their chance to be… cool?
Well I think I’ve found a candidate for The Longest Stretch to Make a Pot Joke in an Article award. It’s Gareth McGrath in the Wilmington Morning Star.
Now this is merely an article about the use of sandbags along the North Carolina coast and how biodegradable materials (such as cotton, flax, or hemp) are being considered in order to allow the bags to naturally disintegrate over time.
So how did he write the story? Check out the completely irrelevant opening and closing.

Call it the Cheech and Chong bag.
As the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission wrestles with what to do about the proliferation of sandbags along the state’s coastline, one idea that’s been floated is to make the bags biodegradable. And one of the materials under consideration is hemp – the industrial, non-hallucinogenic cousin of marijuana.
In short, that would be one way to make sure the sandbags get rolled up instead of becoming semi-permanent structures along the North Carolina coast. […]
“There are a lot of unknowns out there right now,” Geiss said of the practicality of using biodegradable sandbags.
Or as Cheech and Chong might say, there’s still a good chance the concept could go up in smoke.

Heh.

“bullet” I have often said that the leadership in the African American community need to speak up more against the drug war. Well, here’s the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
“bullet” Earl Ofari Hutchinson speaks out in Pleas on Larry King for Lohan, But What About Other Drug Offenders?
“bullet” Radley Balko has an update on the death of innocent Issac Singletary at the hands of cops for protecting his own property.
“bullet” Bill Conroy has coverage and questions about corruption and the disappearance of federal funds in the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program.
“bullet” And now for something completely different: DEAsy Pickings. Operation Low-Hanging Fruit, indeed.
If you’re looking for more news, check out The Speakeasy — They’ve got a number of good posts there.

It really is pathetic the way the drug czar is forced to look for damaged goods in the press to get excited about in its “blog.”
The latest?

More reporting from the UK’s Independent newspaper on this serious issue: “A poll of more than 50 of the world’s leading authorities on drugs and mental health confirms that most believe cannabis, and particularly its stronger variant, skunk, pose significant health risks and increase users’ susceptibility to psychosis and schizophrenia.”

Although the ONDCP provides no link, they’re referring to this story by Jonathan Owen and Suzi Mesure. It’s full of all the unsupported reefer madness hysteria, for paragraph after paragraph, almost blatantly supporting the re-classification. Buried near the end, they do finally look at another perspective:

Professor Tim Kirkham, a psychologist at Liverpool University, argued: “Cannabis has been used safely for many thousands of years,” and says there have been “concerted efforts to demonise the drug’s use.” Dr Trevor Turner, former vice president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, says: “I don’t think it causes mental illness. I have never seen a case of so-called cannabis psychosis.”
Dame Ruth Runciman, the chair of UK Drug Policy Centre who set in motion the downgrading of cannabis, disputes that the drug of today is any different to the weed that Ms Smith would have toked back in early 1980s.
“How do you know it’s stronger?” she said, adding: “There is indubitably some skunk that is stronger about the place, but the evidence has been hugely exaggerated and does not support such an alarmist view… Cannabis as Class C is exactly where it should be.”

Of course, the drug czar isn’t interested in that part of the story. Nor are the reporters interested in any kind of factual balance. They’re looking for the reefer madness — it sells papers. So they lead with the bad reporting.
The real tipoff is in that opening paragraph:

A poll of more than 50 of the world’s leading authorities on drugs and mental health confirms that most believe cannabis, and particularly its stronger variant, skunk, pose significant health risks and increase users’ susceptibility to psychosis and schizophrenia.

Notice the omissions?
Who conducted the poll? Who was polled? Where is the poll data? What were the questions? What constitutes significant health risks? What constitutes “increase[d] users’ susceptibility”?
Did they make it all up? Who knows? Nobody else is reporting this “poll” that I can find.
But the drug czar likes it.

The occasion of my fourth blogiversary naturally sets me to thinking about what I do on this blog, and what I might be doing in the future here.
Of course, it’s a relatively stress-free analysis. After all, I am a blogger. I have no boss. I am not subject to the wishes of a Board of Trustees or other organizational structure. I have no editor, publisher, or clientele of paying consumers to dictate what I write.
Oh, sure, there’s the desire to have readers read my work. But bloggers learn quickly that the best way to have your blog fail is to be false to yourself in order to “please” your readers.
So I’ll continue to write about what interests me. My decisions will be fairly arbitrary (I can’t possibly write about everything, but I’m grateful for every tip regardless). Those who know me realize that I’m a bit of a geek for things like Constitutional law and the Bill of Rights, so i’ll definitely talk about those things.
My eventual goal is legal regulation of current black-market drugs worldwide, but I also have no problem with helping people a step at a time along the way. If someone doesn’t believe in medical marijuana, I’ll try to convince them of its value. If they believe in medical marijuana, but not legalized and regulated recreational value, I’ll try to convince them of that next step and so on. If I can help people make the full jump without the steps, that’s preferable, but not exclusive.
Here are a few random things that have me thinking right now.

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.

– Bertrand Russell (via Anonymous Liberal)

This is why the drug czar’s propaganda works. It takes advantage of the gullibility of those who have already been taught to believe in prohibition. To overcome that, our evidence must be overwhelming (and that takes time to convey).

Recently a blogger I greatly admire — Glenn Greenwald — wrote this about the importance of blogging (and while it wasn’t specifically about drug policy, I think the overall thoughts are still relevant).

Given how systemic and deeply rooted all of these political and media failures are, what is the point of writing about them day after day, and complaining on a case-by-case basis about them? The corruption and dysfunction is, by now, obvious to those who are able and willing to see it. Why beat the same drum every day?

As frustrating as it can be, this sort of day-to-day pressure on individual journalists and political figures is the most effective weapon possessed by blogs, websites and other organizations devoted to forcing into our public discourse various perspectives and narratives which are otherwise excluded. Given how energized, engaged and active blog readers are, virtually all journalists, editors, pundits and political figures now hear the criticisms launched at them, and usually hear them quite loudly.

Through this process, many became aware of objections to what they do that they otherwise would not have realized. At the very least, they are conscious, when they go to write the next article or give the next interview, that they can trigger very vocal and negative reactions by repeating their errors.
Even for those who are not driven by rationality and who are not operating in good faith, this process can still affect how they behave. Everyone is potentially affected, to some degree, even if subconsciously, by substantial amounts of anger directed at them. Journalists in general have thin skins for criticism and when they are subjected to it, they remember it.

The point here is that changing our public discourse is a slow, grinding, difficult process. Any changes that occur, any progress that is made, will be made only incrementally, one day after the next. Each individual change is usually so slight as to be imperceptible, but aggregated, those changes can be substantial. The real success of blogs comes not from single, easily identifiable spectacular achievements (“we defeated this bill/candidate” or “we uncovered this fact”), but rather, by the gradual re-shaping of the dominant political narratives, by changing how political and cultural issues are discussed, by influencing (either through pressure or competition) how the media conducts itself in covering our political process.

I believe that there has been a significant payoff in this area in recent years. In my own very conservative heartland hometown paper, some of the most discussed stories are drug war-related and while plenty of comments exhibit prohibition-blindness, there are now huge numbers of intelligent comments armed with facts and reason to dispute the propaganda.

(This is also an area where MAPinc.org shines.)

We’re re-shaping the political narrative, but not from the top. It’s from the ground up.

Phillip Smith is also doing some navel-gazing today in his post: Taking it to the Drug Warriors — Is it Time for Direct Action?

You know, a guy gets tired fighting for decades for the right to do something which should be our right anyway. Yeah, I know the litany: We’ve got to play the game…if you don’t like the law, change it…the political process is slow…we can’t be impatient…we have to educate politicians and cultivate law enforcement….blah blah blah.

Well, in the face of the no-progress Hinchey-Rohrabacher vote and the continuing defiance of the will of California voters by the DEA, not to mention all the other drug war horrors, I’m prepared to once again make inciteful (if not insightful) calls for direct action against these downpressors.

And I agree with him as well. But as one who has actually protested outside a DEA museum exhibit, I know first hand the difficulty of convincing large (or even small) numbers of people to actually take that kind of direct action.

I agree that the Hinchey-Rohrabacher vote has increased my pessimism about expending extensive efforts in convincing politicians, or even in convincing indivduals to vote for specific politicians. While I went through a lot of effort to create voting guides in 2004, and a mildly successful effort to implement a wiki-based voting guide for 2006, I think that Drug WarRant in 2008 will simply provide a basic useful guide for how individuals can find out the drug policy views of their candidates.

My efforts will continue to focus on reaching and convincing people. One at a time, if necessary.

And my view of direct action is that, if practical, it will succeed not by trying to change the minds of politicians and bureaucrats, but rather by affecting the views of large numbers of individual people in positive ways.

Regular readers of Drug WarRant probably assume that the main blog page is the most visited. It’s not.

I’ve recently started tracking site information with Google analytics and some of it is quite interesting. In the past month, the top four visited pages on this site were:

• 51.67% — Why is Marijuana Illegal?
• 31.40% — Drug WarRant
• 2.86% — Drug War Victims
• 1.39% — Bong Hits 4 Jesus

And while I’m sure that other months might have slightly different results (I’ll keep tracking it), the point is clear — people really like having an easy-to-use, focused factual piece with strong visceral elements, and I happened upon the right idea combined with the luck for it to turn viral. I see that page all over the place on messageboards (the Drug War Victims page, while less popular, has a similar effect, and receives significantly higher numbers of visits at other times).

I hope to create some additional tools of this nature — something to help all those people who know the propaganda is crap but need an easy way to explain it (or link to it).

What are your deep thoughts? (they don’t actually have to be deep)

“bullet” Drug Sense Weekly — get your round-up of the news.
“bullet” Drug Warriors are the real threat to Americans

Our government has created a black market in which a common weed, cannabis, is worth more than its weight in gold. This artificially created, incredibly lucrative market is responsible for the violence and death associated with much of the drug dealing around the world. The problems associated with marijuana didn’t exist prior to the 1930s, when our government made the plant illegal. To solve this problem of its own fabrication, our government created an army of paramilitary drug warriors, armed them with military weapons and equipment, and unleashed them on us.
If drug czar Walters is looking for ‹armed, dangerous, violent criminal terrorists,Š he need look no further than the drug warriors that he and others of his ilk have created. It’s time to address the real terrorist threat, and demand that our government end this war against its own people.

“bullet” This has already made the rounds pretty quickly. It’s hard to get more outrageous.

Tampa’s Mark O’Hara was released from prison this week. He was serving a 25-year sentence for possession of 58 Vicodin tablets. Prosecutors acknowledge he wasn’t selling the drug. They acknowledge that he had a prescription for it. […]
This is simply stunning. The man was sentenced to 25 years for possessing 58 pills for which he had a legal prescription.
Prosecutors then arguedÖand the trial court agreedÖthat the jury was not allowed to consider the fact that O’Hara had a prescription because Florida statutes governing painkillers don’t allow for a “prescription defense,” […]
O’Hara is free after an appellate court rightly deemed the trial “absurd” and tossed out the verdict. Prosecutors are apparently still considering what to do next.

“bullet” This seems to indicate that the ASA data quality act lawsuit has run into a dead end. I need to read more, though to see if that’s true.
“bullet”

“bullet” Ilya Somin at Volokh has an interesting post noting the gaping hole in Fred Thompson’s endorsement of reducing the federal government’s role in certain areas of law enforcement:

However, there is a major elephant in this federalism room that Thompson doesn’t mention. He is right to note the massive growth in the federal prison population over the last 20 years, but fails to point out that most of that growth is due to the War on Drugs.

Of course, we all know that the bizarre propaganda item I posted yesterday (Smoking just one cannabis joint raises danger of mental illness by 40%) is inflammatory nonsense.
There wasn’t an ounce of legitimate reporting in that story, and just about every media source that has picked it up has been infected by junk reporting as well (even though many of them, later on in the piece, indicate that there is no real evidence of any causation at all).

“The researchers said they couldn‰t prove that marijuana use itself increases the risk of psychosis, a category of several disorders with schizophrenia being the most commonly known.
There could be something else about marijuana users, ‹like their tendency to use other drugs or certain personality traits, that could be causing the psychoses,Š Zammit said.”

Daksya gave it to us straight in comments:

To clarify:

1. This isn’t an original study. It’s a review or more precisely, a meta-analysis of existing studies. Regarding psychosis, 7 longitudinal observational studies are pooled to generate the odds ratio of 1.41 i.e. the 40% increase in risk.
2. The 7 studies did not all measure the same thing. Some looked for the presence of any psychotic symptom; others looked for presence of symptoms necessary to diagnose schizophrenia (and schizophreniform disorder in one study). So, one may infer about odds of experiencing psychotic symptoms but not the odds for schizophrenia or any other clinical diagnosis of a disorder.
3. Continuing the usual mathematical ignorance displayed in journalism, the analysis does NOT suggest that smoking cannabis even once or ‘infrequently’ increases odds of schizophrenia by 40%. First, the study does not report on odds of schizophrenia. But relevantly, the 40% increase is for the whole group of those who ever used cannabis compared to those who never used cannabis viz. the former contains all users i.e. experimenters, occasional smokers, regulars and dependents. The risk specific to experimenters or infrequent users is not reported.
   To illustrate the mathematical point, take two groups of 1000 people, same in all relevant ways, except for cannabis use history. In Group A, we have 1000 people with a history of 0 joints i.e. non-users. Let the baseline rate of psychosis be 4% or 40 cases out of 1000. So, in Group B, consisting of 1000 people, all with some history of cannabis use, there will be 64 56 cases of psychosis out of 1000. But these 64 56 cases aren’t spread out uniformly over all categories of cannabis users (just once, weekly, daily..etc). As the analysis authors state, there is a dose-response effect. So, in Group B, which includes all sorts of users, the heavy users will have a disproportionate higher share of the cases, and the other groups, consequently, disproportionately lower. So, the odds for the other users have to be sufficiently lower, so as to “balance” the 2.09 odds for heavy users, in order to obtain the average of 1.41 for the whole group. Just how much is that, depends on the internal prevalence of each category within Group B.

Of course, that’s too much actual science for most reporting, and it doesn’t provide anything flashy and scary, so they go with nonsense.
And naturally, there are idiots out there who want to believe it.
Here’s one that I found who was particularly amusing at Blogs 4 Brownback. This guy lays out the stuff from the Daily Mail as gospel with his added comments…

One joint = brain damage. Don‰t stick that in your pipe and smoke it or you‰ll go crazy. It‰s been proven. […]
There is much more in the article that drug apologists should read, including a Rogue‰s Gallery of violent criminals who just got a little high, only to launch into horrific violent crimes. […]
We really need to get serious about the war on dangerous drugs. We need more prisons, more prosecutors and stronger sentences with teeth that bite. It‰s time to send a message to casual drug users and dope peddlers. If you use or sell drugs you will do time. Hard time. No exceptions. Caught, prosecuted, punished. And no leniency. Dope fiends need to be locked up, not coddled.
Your brain is not a toy. So don‰t stick things in your nose or ears and try to play with it. Any questions?
I trust that a President Sam Brownback would do the right thing and put us on a path to ultimately and with finality at long last win the drug war. It‰s the right thing to do.

That was funny enough, but then his first commenter — a Mrs. T.D. Gaines-Crockett wrote:

I believe that pot smoking is just another symptom of Liberalism. Once someone goes out of his or her way to accept the immoral and unholy as the norm, they just open the door to drug abuse and criminal activity. Anyone who is smoking that stuff might as well have a loaded gun in their mouth; it is just as dangerous.
Jesus, come quick! America is killing itself.

Reading the comments is a surreal experience in itself (including a moron who basically duplicated the brownie-eating-cop-calling-911 stunt), although finally one or two sane adults step in to inject some reality into the discussion.
It’s a minor site and probably not worth our attention, but what is interesting is that even there people finally started to question and correct the nonsense, and that’s worth noting.
People are getting better informed. We’re helping to do that. And every day, it’s getting hard to pawn off that stale reefer madness. Oh, sure, the tabloids eat it up, and the politicians love it, but the ordinary, intelligent, informed citizen knows better. They’re smart enough to think “where are the bodies? where are the millions of slobbering psychotics? why do prohibitionists act crazier than potheads?”
Update: Mark Kleiman responds to the hysteria nicely:

If cannabis caused schizophrenia, we ought to see rates of schizophrenia correlated with rates of cannabis use, both across countries and over time. […]
So far, there is exactly zero cross-section or cohort evidence showing a link between cannabis and schizophrenia.[…]
But the null hypothesis doesn’t make headlines, so I doubt we’ll hear much about cohort effects in the press.

2nd Update: Ben Goldacre in The Guardian straightens out the British tabloids.

Now I don’t like to carp, but it’s interesting that the Daily Mail got even these basics wrong, under their headline “Smoking just one cannabis joint raises danger of mental illness by 40%”. […]
But what’s really important, of course, is what you do with this data. Firstly, you can mispresent it, and scare people. Obviously it feels great to be so self-righteous, but people will stop taking you seriously. After all, you’re talking to a population of young people who have worked out that you routinely exaggerate the dangers of drugs, not least of all with the ridiculous “modern cannabis is 25 times stronger” fabrication so beloved by the media and politicians.
And craziest of all is the fantasy that reclassifying cannabis will stop six million people smoking it, and so eradicate those 800 extra cases of psychosis. If anything, for all drugs, increased prohibition may create market conditions where more concentrated and dangerous forms are more commercially viable. We’re talking about communities, and markets, with people in them, after all: not molecules and neuroreceptors.

Today Drug WarRant turns four years old.
Four years ago today, I started this blog with the notion of maybe posting something once a week or so. 2,378 posts and 1.7 million page views later, I guess it’s fair to say that this is an important part of me.
It’s unfortunate that Drug WarRant’s blogiversary seems to coincide with the annual loss of the Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment, and there’s no doubt that there are times I get depressed by the entrenched virulence and power of the prohibitionists — of course, what do you expect when they have the budget and information control of the entire United States Government behind them (not to mention the United Nations and various world governments).
And yet, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic. While we’ve had limited success in changing government, we’ve done a lot to educate the people. And, see, that’s our advantage — while they have to lie and propagandize to support prohibition, all we have to do is educate and tell the truth. Invariably, if you have the facts and the time, you can convince almost anyone (who isn’t already corrupted by the profits of the drug war) of the value of drug policy reform. Our handicap has been the reluctance on the part of the public to talk openly about the truth of drug policy, but even that is changing.
The fact that the prohibitionists are getting desperate is obvious — they’ve been pushed into acknowledging us as a movement and they’ve been pushed into forcing their propaganda.
Four years ago, there were plenty of drug policy reform websites, but Libby and I were about the only dedicated bloggers. Since then, there has been a dramatic increase in drug policy blogging, both from dedicated bloggers and from bloggers who give a strong emphasis to drug policy within a larger context of criminal law, libertarianism, regional issues, etc.
And in many ways, the grassroots movement within drug policy reform has matured and become more — I hesitate to say — respectable. Cheech and Chong, while still important icons, are no longer the only face of reform. Now it’s lawyers, and cops, and judges, and doctors, and scientists, and economists, and writers, and teachers, and students…
I am extremely grateful to all the support I have gotten from…

• the people who send me articles and tips, making me look like a better researcher than I am
• all those who participate in comments or on the messageboard, sometimes correcting me, always inspiring me
• the other bloggers and websites who provide me with links and with alternate views on the issues.
• those who have generously contributed to special projects such as the new laptop, or the printing for the museum protest (if you feel you must, you can always buy me a present, or make a small contribution — but only if you can easily do so — I don’t need it to continue my work.)

I’m going to probably start a discussion this weekend on where we go from here — nothing profound, just some general thoughts I’ve been mulling. But today, let’s celebrate.
Thanks for a great four years. Have a brownie.

Oh, this one is a gem — it comes from Fiona Macrae and Emily Andrews in the Daily Mail (UK).
The headline:

Smoking just one cannabis joint raises danger of mental illness by 40%

The Anslinger elements are astonishing. Note the certainty of health danger, the promotion of increased criminalization, and…. YES! We have maniac marijuana killers!!!

A single joint of cannabis raises the risk of schizophrenia by more than 40 per cent, a disturbing study warns.
The Government-commissioned report has also found that taking the drug regularly more than doubles the risk of serious mental illness.
Overall, cannabis could be to blame for one in seven cases of schizophrenia and other life-shattering mental illness, the Lancet reports.
The grim statistics – the latest to link teenage cannabis use with mental illness in later life – come only days after Gordon Brown ordered a review of the decision to downgrade cannabis to class C, the least serious category.
The Prime Minister is said to have a ‘personal instinct’ that the change should be reversed, with more arrests and stiffer penalties for users.
Cannabis has been implicated in a string of vicious killings, including the recent stabbing of fashion designer Lucy Braham.

Take special note of the picture with the caption:

Prolific cannabis user and killer: William Jaggs

Wow.