Drug WarRant

by John Jonik at the Washington Free Press

Here’s this week’s issue.

And don’t miss thehim’s Drug War Roundup at Daily Kos: Driving Under the Influence — He’s got more on the recent “study” in Canada.

2002:

Open Thread — I’ll be busy rooting for the Bears, so you’re on your own.
I bow to the clear superiority of the Colts’ play today (although the first 14 seconds was pretty awesome). I still like Chicago better.

Check out this wonderfully fascinating article by Dean Kuipers in the L.A. City Beat: A Change in the Weather. Go and read the whole thing — it’s worth it.
No big surprises, but a lot of interesting material — most of it has to do with the fact that some of the most sympathetic people to drug policy reform in Congress are now in leadership positions, and the ONDCP is no longer going to get a free ride.
It’s not all great —

Sources close to the appointment, who asked not to be named, say that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of the Democratic leadership have effectively embargoed major crime or drug policy legislation for the next two years, to avoid looking soft on crime in the 2008 election.

Boy, if that doesn’t describe Democrats… For once, I’d like them to understand that the policy of avoiding looking weak, makes them look… weak.
But Kucinich promises to have some fun.

‹We want to explore the federal government‰s policies and the Department of Justice‰s policies on medical marijuana, for example. We need to also look at the drug laws that have brought about mandatory minimum sentences that have put people in jail for long periods of time. […]
‹No, this committee does not have control of the budgets, but it does have control of the policy, and it can ask questions and get documents that others couldn‰t get.Š

According to Fred Rosen in the Mexico News, despite Calder÷n’s military-style crackdowns and the extradition of drug cartel leaders, things may not be going all that well for him, with an increase in the price of corn, and a decrease in the price of drugs.

Many people are significantly reducing their caloric intake. And many are blaming the government. Within a week of the onset of the corn shortage, Calder÷nÇs approval rating had dropped 20 points to 50 percent.
And now, the results of the drug-war incursions into the states of Michoac½n, Baja California and Guerrero are coming under question. Initially, it was announced that marijuana fields were burned; cocaine, heroin and synthetic drugs were confiscated; major capos were arrested and extradited; professional executioners were killed, arrested or forced to flee the states under siege; and a major dent was put into drug exports and domestic sales. Calder÷n said the operation had brought “peace and certainty” to Mexico.
But the press now reports that no cocaine (the number-one export to the United States) was seized in any of the raids and that many of Michoac½nÇs destroyed marijuana fields, having been planted with a pesticide-resistant strain of cannabis, are making a quick comeback.
And El UniversalÇs always-perceptive columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio reports that aside from the extradition of a half dozen drug barons, the cartels have not taken such a hard hit. “The cost of a joint of marijuana on the streets of Mexico City,” he reports, “is 15 pesos, compared to 25 pesos in December, while Ecstasy tabs, whose producers were also supposedly targets of the crackdowns, have fallen to half of the 50 pesos they cost at the end of the year.”
If the operations had been a success, reasons Riva Palacio, the logic of supply and demand would have produced a reverse effect. The low price suggests there are more drugs on the street than before the anti-drug operations began.

Brian Bennett’s new post: Face It: You’re a “Legalizer” at the anti-drugwar czar blog and Peter Christ’s Why is it easier to sell ‹Drug LegalizationŠ than ‹Medical MarijuanaŠ? at LEAP blog.
Discuss.

“bullet” I must have been asleep or something, because I missed the fact that Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) has a group blog! I’ve subscribed to their RSS feed in my newsreader, so I won’t miss out again. (For those who use newsreaders, you do know that Drug WarRant has an RSS feed, too, right?)
Anyway — go visit the LEAP blog. I’ve just read a few of the entries and they’re quite good, including entries from all the LEAP stars. And leave them a comment or two to give them some encouragement.

Remember how all the drug warriors always harp on the fact that marijuana can’t be medicine because it’s smoked? It’s been their way of glossing over the fact that there are so many studies that definitely demonstrate that marijuana has accepted medical value (and that would, by definition, remove marijuana from Schedule 1). So they say “Well, there’s no such thing as smoked medicine” (conveniently ignoring that you can ingest it in numerous ways, while dismissing the fact that smoked marijuana is more effective than Marinol, in part due to its fast delivery system).
In fact they try to make it sound ludicrous:
At a DEA site:

There are no smoked medicines. Have you ever heard of anyone who smoked medicine? After all we know about the dangers of cigarette smoking, why would the scientific community approve smoked marijuana?

John Walters:

I don’t support decriminalizing marijuana use. I do not support assertions that marijuana is a proven-effective medicine. We have the most sophisticated medical system in the history of humankind in Western civilization. Not a single one of the medicines used in that system is a smoked medicine.

But now, we have this enthusiastic press release of a Reuters news story: “Smokable” pain drugs promise faster action

For Alexza Pharmaceuticals Inc., which is developing drugs for migraine, pain, panic and agitation, “fast” has to mean “within seconds.”
The Palo Alto, California-based company is developing drugs that can be “smoked,” and, like nicotine in cigarettes, pass through the lungs and into the bloodstream almost instantly.
Investors like the idea.

So maybe smoked medicine is only medicine if it’s promoted by a pharmaceutical company…

“What makes this an exciting story is how broadly applicable the technology could prove to be,” said Charles Duncan, an analyst at JMP Securities, which helped take the company public for $8 a share a year ago.

The “technology”?

Alexza was formed by biotechnology entrepreneur Alejandro Zaffaroni, who also founded nicotine-patch developer Alza. His latest venture is not the only company that is developing inhaled therapies: Nektar Therapeutics and Alkermes Inc. develop powdered insulin.
But Alexza’s idea of heating up a drug to create a vapor, or smoke, is unique. [emphasis added]

WTF!??
You mean like what this company has been doing for 10 years? Or what this study was trying to accomplish for years while being blocked by the DEA and NIDA?
The fact that the Reuters article doesn’t even mention marijuana is downright ridiculous. Is reporter Toni Clarke completely clueless? Has she never heard of marijuana, or is she working for the pharmaceuticals?
When is a major reporter going to connect the rather obvious dots, and ask John Walters to explain how smoked medicine is OK for Alexza, but not for marijuana?
I’ll wait.

This is slightly off-topic, but I wanted to address this bizarre suggestion by Mark Kleiman in his mostly sensible article

If someone is convicted of drunken driving, or drunken assault, or drunken vandalism, or repeatedly of drunk and disorderly conductÖif, that is, someone demonstrates that he is either a menace or a major public nuisance when drunkÖthen why not revoke his (or, much more rarely, her) drinking license?
Of course, the ‹personal prohibitionŠ imagined here, like the current age restriction, would have to be enforced by sellers of alcoholic beverages, who would have to verify that each buyer has not been banned from drinking, just as they now have to verify that each buyer is of legal age to drink. Obviously, such a ban could not be perfectly enforced. But reducing the frequency and flagrancy of drinking behavior by problem drunks somewhat is far better than not reducing it at all. A ban on drinking by bad drinkers (unlike the current ban on drinking by those under 21) would have an obvious moral basis. Evading it, for example by buying liquor for someone on the ‹Do Not DrinkŠ list, would be clearly wrong and worth punishing. Moreover, offenders would not easily be able to drink in bars, restaurants or other public places, which means they would be less likely to drink and then drive or cause public disturbances.

Out of all the good stuff in Mark’s article, it was this bit of nonsense that attracted Matthew Iglesias, who, in an otherwise sensible post calls Kleiman’s license proposal “clearly on point.”
Just take a moment to think through the logistics. Mark admits that it could not be “perfectly enforced,” but the question is rather how it could be enforced at all.
With a driving license, since the licensing agency checks for age when issuing it, the license become a reasonably good proof of age for most purposes. And when people check it to see if you’re old enough to do something, they don’t know (or care) whether that driving license has been revoked. If it has been revoked, that doesn’t change what your age is, so it doesn’t matter. On the other hand, if you get pulled over by a cop on the highway, he’s not going to just look at your license — he’ll enter it into a computer to see if, among other things, your license has been revoked.
So picture a drinking license regime. Everybody who wants to drink or buy alcohol has to have a drinking license. And not only does every grocery store and liquor store checkout line, plus every bar and restaurant have to check to see if someone has a drinking license with them, but they also need to verify that it hasn’t been revoked (or the whole point of the system is worthless). This means that they have to compare it against a national database, most likely involving an expensive network of terminals placed in all those locations (including, of course, the beer vendors at football games and street fairs and the flight attendants on airlines, and….) Or, alternately, they have to use some kind of system of recording all purchases (like the registry in pharmacies) with your name and address to be later verified so you can be arrested later if you purchased alcohol on a revoked drinking license.
Does anybody really think that a system like this makes sense for alcohol?

For the third time in a week, Human Events Online has a drug war piece. I’m wondering if the new one is an attempt to repair their image after the John Hawkins disaster.
This one is Big, Big Government by John Stossel, and what a breath of fresh air it is after what we’ve been getting.

Whatever happened to America’s federal system, which recognized the states as “laboratories of democracy”? […]
The constitutional plan presented in the Federalist Papers delegated only a few powers to the federal government, with the rest reserved to the states. The system was hailed for its genius. Instead of having decisions made in the center — where errors would harm the entire country — most policies would be determined in a decentralized environment. A mistake in California would affect only Californians. New Yorkers, Ohioans, and others could try something else. Everyone would learn and benefit from the various experiments.
It made a lot of sense. It still does. Too bad the idea is being tossed on the trash heap by big-government Republicans and their DEA goons.
Drug prohibition — like alcohol prohibition — is a silly idea, as the late free-market economist Milton Friedman often pointed out. Something doesn’t go away just because the government decrees it illegal. It simply goes underground. Then a black market creates worse problems. [emphasis added]

Update: Oh, no. I spoke too soon. Here’s another extraordinarily stupid drug war article in Human Events, this time by Mac Johnson, titled Libertarians on Drugs. According to this idiot, the drug war is the only thing preventing us all from becoming slobbering addicts, since none of us have free will when it comes to drugs.