Drug WarRant

“bullet” Garden of Weedin’ — this is a really fascinating article by Zach Dundas about the medical marijuana in Oregon. It’s uplifting, but it also makes you realize just how much time we’ve lost in the potential advancements and research that could be happening in medical marijuana.
“bullet” Let Them Have Their Pot by Manuel S. Klausner in the Los Angeles Times.
“bullet” Medical Marijuana: Justice goes awry – editorial in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Here’s this week’s issue.

About two years ago, former ONDCP staffer and con-artist Andrea Barthwell put together a series of lectures in Illinois to attack our medical marijuana efforts. I was able to catch her falsifying sponsorship information, which marked essentially the end of the lecture series. Today, the original IllinoisMarijuanaLectures.org website, apparently being allowed to die through expiration, became a spam advertising page.

Link

Rebuffing months of U.S. pressure, Afghan President Hamid Karzai decided against a Colombia-style program to spray this country’s heroin-producing poppies after the Cabinet worried herbicide would hurt legitimate crops, animals and humans, officials said Thursday.

Turns out Canada’s not too thrilled about it either…

A senior State Department official says troops from NATO nations must provide security for opium crop-eradication projects, including new plans for chemical spraying of poppy fields Ö which is something Canada rejects. […]
Plowing up poppy fields angers Afghan farmers who rely on the crops for their livelihood, and fosters a climate of grievance that helps the Taliban in their recruiting efforts.
Canadian commanders in Kandahar have said that any direct involvement by their troops in eradication programs would put their soldiers at risk, and impede their efforts to win the ‹hearts and mindsŠ of the Afghan people.

Anybody else? The UK has some concerns…

THE Afghan government is to launch a poppy eradication campaign in Helmand province which UK military commanders fear will antagonise farmers and drive them into the arms of the Taliban. […]
British commanders have distanced themselves from the initiative, but still fear a backlash against the 5200-strong UK garrison because the Kabul authorities have ruled out compensation for crops.
One said: “The whole thing is being driven by the US, which has become impatient with the lack of progress in cutting poppy cultivation and opium production.
“Our concern is that local villagers tend not to differentiate greatly between armed and uniformed strangers sent by their own government and armed and uniformed strangers from abroad. All they can see is someone in authority destroying their livelihood.
“When that happens, everyone perceived to be involved becomes a target.”

Could it be that other countries are beginning to understand that U.S. drug policy is not only moronic, but is likely to get them killed?

Ryan Grim at The Politico reports on the efforts of the National Institute on Drug Abuse to remove the Wikipedia information about them that is controversial, and replace it with glowing propaganda.

In late August, someone with an IP address that originated from the National Institutes of Health drastically edited the Wikipedia entry for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which operates within NIH. Wikipedia determined the edit to be vandalism and automatically changed the definition back to the original. On Sept. 18, the NIH vandal returned, according to a history of the site’s edits posted by Wikipedia. This time, the definition was gradually changed, presumably to avoid the vandalism detector.
NIDA spokeswoman Dorie Hightower confirmed that her agency was behind the editing. She said in an e-mail that the definition was changed “to reflect the science.”
A little more than science-reflecting was done to the site. Gone first was the “Controversial research” section that included comments critical of NIDA. Next went the section on the NIDA-sponsored program that grows marijuana for research and medical purposes. The next slice of the federal editor’s knife left all outside references on the cutting-room floor, replaced with links to government Web sites.

One of the things they cut, by the way, was a link to Drug WarRant that was on the page.
Today, much of the original material is back up — Wikipedia doesn’t react well to censorship.
If you’d like to see what the page looked like at various stages, you can actually see its history (scroll down on each page past the two columns of change indications to see the look and content of the page at that time).

1. Page after NIDA’s first blatant attempt to wipe it clean
2. Page restored as it was
3. Page at one point when Drug WarRant was listed as an outside resource
4. Page after later gradual attempt to turn it into a pro-NIDA propaganda page.
5. Page as it currently exists (which, as of this moment, even includes a section with links to today’s articles regarding NIDA’s attempt to take over the page.)

They saw an opportunity. Nobody wants to go to the drug warrior sites and read their propaganda, so they decided to make Wikipedia’s entry over in the way they wished. It doesn’t work that way.

“bullet” Grits for Breakfast notes that, in Texas, a conservative GOP senator who is a medical doctor has filed a bill authorizing local governments to implement needle exchange programs. It’s going to be a tricky one for the prohibitionists. I wonder how they’ll try to demonize him?
“bullet” Blame the Drug War has been following the Yorkton vigilante case in Canada, where a father went over to his daughter’s drug-dealing boyfriend’s house and shot and killed him. Start here, then here.
“bullet” The ONDCP yesterday claims that legal opium from Afghanistan can’t work because there’s an oversupply of opium based products. But on the same day…

Afghanistan’s opium poppies should be used to alleviate a shortage of painkillers in the NHS, the British Medical Association has said. […] Diamorphine, which is derived from opium poppies and which is also known as heroin, is used to relieve pain after operations. But there is a critical shortage of the drug in Britain, forcing doctors to use more expensive and less effective alternatives.

Phillip Smith has more.
“bullet” Transform Drug Policy Foundation blog has been doing an outstanding job of following the recent political maneuverings regarding drug policy in the UK. Their most recent post discusses the ways in which the policy of prescribing addictive drugs for the purpose of reducing crime is being… considered.

“Did you know that the State of the Union Address and Dark Side of the Moon synch up perfectly?”

– Jon Stewart

What a buzz kill that would be.

An interesting post from last week over at Marginal Revolution about a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Political Economy on how elasticity affects the market for illegal goods.

In an important new study, world-renowned economists–including a Nobel Prize winner and a MacArthur “genius”–argue that when demand for a good is inelastic, the cost of making consumption illegal exceeds the gain. […] The authors demonstrate how the elasticity of demand is crucial to understanding the effects of punishment on suppliers. […]

“This analysisáhelps us understand why the War on Drugs has been so difficult to wináwhy efforts to reduce the supply of drugs leads to violence and greater power to street gangs and drug cartels,” conclude the authors. “The answer lies in the basic theory of enforcement developed in this paper.”

A good discussion in comments at Marginal Revolution, with most of the best comments coming from daksya.
Update: Apparently, the year recently became 2007, so this January 2006 post is actually a year old, not a week. Still, the points are valid, just more aged and wise…

I’ve been working on the new laptop fund for awhile, and I’d like to thank all the wonderful folks who have chipped in. I’ve raised a significant amount toward the cost from some incredibly generous donations from readers.
I’m getting an educational discount and I’m taking advantage of a promotion that ends January 30 that will save me a few bucks, so I’ll be buying it next week.
And so, I’m putting out one last push for donations. I can cover the remainder from my savings, and I certainly don’t want donations from anyone who can’t afford it, but if you missed out on donating already, and would like to be part of the laptop, here’s your chance.

This shouldn’t be a very remarkable bill, but it is in a way. The Utah House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee voted 7-1 to reduce drug-free zones from 1,000 feet to 500 feet and to remove places such as parking plazas.

Ideally, the revised zones will restore the focus on protecting the children in the places they most frequently congregate, said the sponsor of HB231, Rep. Wayne Harper, R-West Jordan.
Since the drug-free zones were created in the 1980s, they have been “diluted” by expanded definitions that have made entire cities drug-free zones, Harper said.

In fact, drug free zones have been nothing more than an extra charge for prosecutors to pile on in the cities and have had nothing to do with protecting children.
Now I think drug zones are a pretty stupid idea, and a 500 foot radius still ends up covering more than four Manhattan-sized city blocks, but at least this is a small step in reversing the lemming-like trend of politicians mindlessly and incoherently increasing every drug-related penalty or prohibition they can find.