Drug WarRant

Whenever you hear over-the-top rhetoric like this, you know that they’re really interested in protecting their drug war budget. Check out The Bahamas’ Minister of Foreign Affairs:

Minister Mitchell noted that resources are essential to winning the drug war.
“Retrenchment is not an option. If we retrench, then the forces of darkness take over,” the minister said.
“We have a daily struggle in this country to convince… especially the young that it pays to be on the side of the good. Fortunately, the resources that we employ help to ensure that, for the majority, they support good over evil.”
Retrenchment refers to the reduction of expenditures in order to become financially stable. Mr. Mitchell was advocating at the least the maintenance of the current level of expenditure on joint US-Bahamas drug interdiction efforts.

Well, they didn’t really go that far, but they did put a good provision in the final ONDCP reauthorization bill (via Drug Policy Alliance)

(e) Prohibitions- None of the amounts made available [for the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign] may be obligated or expended for…partisan political purposes, or express advocacy in support of or to defeat any clearly identified candidate, clearly identified ballot initiative, or clearly identified legislative or regulatory proposal.

This is great news — and it signals, perhaps, that Congress was not so amused by the Drug Czar and his minions flitting around the country in October to campaign against the initiatives in Nevada, Colorado, and South Dakota.
I don’t know, however, if this is only specific to the Media Campaign fund and whether the Drug Czar can use other money for this purpose. Anyone able to help out on that?
I did find another really annoying bit within the bill (Go to Thomas and search for HR 6344)

1. FINDINGS- The Congress finds the following:
   1. 60 percent of adolescent admissions for drug treatment are based on marijuana use.
   2. Potency levels of contemporary marijuana, particularly hydroponically grown

   marijuana, are significantly higher than in the past, rising from under 1 percent of THC in the mid-1970s to as high as 30 percent today.

   3. Contemporary research has demonstrated that youths smoking marijuana early in life may be up to 5 times more likely to use hard drugs.
   4. Contemporary research has demonstrated clear detrimental effects in adolescent educational achievement resulting from marijuana use.
   5. Contemporary research has demonstrated clear detrimental effects in adolescent brain development resulting from marijuana use.
   6. An estimated 9,000,000 Americans a year drive while under the influence of illegal drugs, including marijuana.
   7. Marijuana smoke contains 50 to 70 percent more of certain cancer causing chemicals than tobacco smoke.
   8. Teens who use marijuana are up to 4 times more likely to have a teen pregnancy than teens who have not.
   9. Federal law enforcement agencies have identified clear links suggesting that trade in hydroponic marijuana facilitates trade by criminal organizations in hard drugs, including heroin.
   10. Federal law enforcement agencies have identified possible links between trade in cannabis products and financing for terrorist organizations.

I love the way Congress avoids having to actually consider facts — they just make them up and call them “findings.” I guess they find them in that big box where they keep the Easter Bunny and their integrity.

Canada’s Tory government seems anxious to attach the strings and start dancing to John Walters’ tune.
Internal documents show U.S. involvement in Canada’s national drug strategy

”The Harper government favours a U.S.-style approach to drug problems, which is to lock more people up and don’t treat it as a health problem, treat it as a criminal law problem of morality,” Boyd said.
”That’s very much at odds with what’s going on in Europe and there’s really no good evidence to suggest that it’s going to be terribly useful.”
New Democratic Party MP Libby Davies, whose Vancouver East riding includes the supervised injection facility, said the Harper government appears to be ”taking orders”from the American drug czar and other top officials of the Bush administration.”

Related: The North Shore News editorial Missing the Point

THE RCMP’s decision to weigh in with an internal report criticizing Vancouver’s supervised injection site is an indication that more work is needed – not so much on the injection site itself but on long-held beliefs about drug use.
Produced this summer when the Harper government was considering Insite’s licence, the report voices the opinion that anything that lowers the perceived risk of drug use is bad, because it could encourage both addicts and potential new drug users, who no longer have to worry about overdosing or contracting HIV/AIDS.
That kind of ideological analysis, based on next to no actual evidence, would be laughable if it wasn’t apparently being given consideration in Ottawa.
Leaving aside the question of whether addicts are usually carefully weighing their situations before sticking needles in their arms, the report misses the point of Insite, which isn’t to make drugs either scary or not, but to reduce the harm associated with them. So far all the studies – as opposed to anecdotal observations cited by the RCMP – – have suggested that it’s working.
Addicts are rarely scared into quitting. Prohibitions – on drugs or booze – have also been largely failed experiments.
The injection site is an attempt to try a new approach – one that considers addiction as a medical, rather than criminal, issue. It deserves a chance, and it deserves to succeed or fail on its own merits unencumbered by institutional prejudices.

Thanks to The Liberator for including Drug WarRant on his “If you were stranded on a desert island with a laptop and a wireless connection, and God limited you to 10 blogs, which ones would you read?” list.

I briefly mentioned the MPP report on Monday (Laws don’t curb teen marijuana use), and I wanted to point out a couple of less-than-stellar reviews that it got from drug policy reform fans.

• Jacob Sullum has a thoughtful analysis at Reason
• The Drug Law Blog takes me to task for being inaccurate with my characterization of the report, and does a fine job of criticizing the report for its reliance on big-picture rather than specific statistical support.

Thing is, I agree with both of them and yet still stand by my approval of the MPP report.
How can this be, you ask?
Here’s my thinking.
First, there’s no real way to definitively answer the question as to whether laws reduce or increase or have no affect on marijuana and teens, for a number of reasons.

1. It’s an impossible question, given that a myriad of factors can be involved, including trends, fads, effects of education, substitution factors, etc.
2. Reporting data is extremely unreliable. Survey results when getting people to self-report illegal behavior are prone to intentional error (in both ways).
3. The definitions are ineffective — since the government allows no difference in the definition of use and abuse, someone who uses occasionally with no ill effects (the equivalent of wine with a dinner) is treated the same statistically as a heavy or problem user).
4. No laboratories. The federal government has, through international treaty, and interference with state initiatives, actively worked to stop any attempt at a current day laboratory situation in a country or state to have a situation where we could legitimately compare the effects of marijuana laws versus marijuana regulation only.

The fact that there is no way to definitively answer the question has not prevented the government from doing so — at every opportunity, and largely unchallenged. And its answer has been that drug laws reduce marijuana use. Period. That has become the de-facto assumption that everyone operates under, despite the fact that the onus of proof should be on the government, and they have been unable to prove it. Sure, they trot out meaningless micro-statistics (like “Marijuana use from 2002-2004 went down 4% by teens aged 15-17 — a clear indication that the drug laws are working” [note: don’t check that figure, I just made that one up]) And so every time the Drug Czar puts out one of those figures, the press eats it up and dutifully reports that the drug war is working.
It is in this context that the MPP report must be viewed. On its own, it has minimal statistical value or confidence. However, it was never intended to be viewed as a stand-alone item. Note the press release when MPP issued the report on Monday:

A new report from the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) in Washington, D.C., challenges the key assumption underlying present U.S. marijuana laws: that marijuana must be prohibited for adults in order to deter teens from using it.
MPP’s report, available at www.mpp.org/teenuse, comes as the federal government prepares to release its annual “Monitoring the Future” survey of teenage drug use, which is traditionally released in mid-December. [emphasis added]

It’s clear that the purpose of the MPP report is to provide context to the federal government’s misuse of data.
We cannot continue to allow the government to establish the factual base when it is, in fact, not factual. One thing that we can do is convince the press to question the underlying assumption. I believe that was the purpose of this report, and it works.
No, MPP did not come out with any startling new information, or clear data results that say “Look! Marijuana laws cause marijuana use!” nor did they specifically represent it in that way. Sure, they were perhaps a little over-confident in their interpretation (though not even close to what comes from the federal government [no excuse, I know]), but again the way this report is to be used is primarily to force the press to question, and it’s particularly aimed at the press who don’t otherwise know enough to question the government’s contentions.
Now, when a member of the media prints the regurgitated data from the ONDCP, they have the ability to add “although critics contend that drug laws have limited effect on teen marijuana use, and may even have a reverse effect in some situations.”
This report isn’t for Jacob Sullum — he knows a lot more by himself than is revealed in the report. It’s for the reporter who has only a peripheral view of drug policy and assumes that what the government puts out must be true.
One additional note: On the “Gateway” effect. Drug Law Blog notes:

I’m also kind of amazed that the MPP in this study invokes the so-called “gateway effect” of marijuana when, in other contexts, I’m quite sure that they would deny (reasonably) that the use of marijuana is necessarily a gateway to harder drugs.

MPP in this situation invokes the gateway effect of black-market prohibition, which is different than the gateway effect of marijuana. The marijuana gateway effect says that marijuana use leads to other drugs. The black-market prohibition gateway effect says that the prohibition of marijuana puts people who use marijuana in greater proximity with other drugs since they have to buy it on the black market. There is absolutely no evidence for the marijuana gateway effect — if there is a gateway effect at all (uncertain), it’s more likely to exist as a black-market prohibition gateway.
Of course, the word “gateway” is a problematic one, since its definition has become so muddy. Some assume that it means “causal condition” while others use it to simply refer to an “anecdotal sequence.”

I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but it’s true.

It’s a busy week for me, so I’m just going to send you to some other reading today. Here are a few highlights that I wanted to talk about and are definitely worth checking out:
“bullet” Drug Law Blog has the first part of its Top 10 Drug Law Stories of 2006 and I’m thrilled to have made number 10.
“bullet” Kevin Zeese channels Milt Friedman in The Futility Of Drug Prohibition
“bullet” Neal Peirce has another great OpEd — The other war we can’t win
“bullet” Brooke De Lench has an OpEd in a number of papers around the country: Let Them All Play about putting resources into sports activities for kids rather than drug testing.
“bullet” Nick Gillespie has a good piece on the “infantilization of adults” in The Race to Ban What’s Bad for Us
“bullet” For an interesting international politics take, check out Garry Leech in the Colombia Journal: How the EU and Canada could work for peace in Colombia (essentially by rejecting the U.S. drug war approach to foreign policy)
“bullet” Update: Almost forgot — Bill Piper does a really nice job with his OpEd Anti-drinking ads: Give it to ’em straight

Dennis announced his candidacy for Presidency in 2008. That’s good news because it means there’s a chance that the drug war will be a topic for discussion.
As a reminder to folks, here’s some information about Kucinich from 3 years ago.

Via Scott Morgan comes this in the Miami Herald

A federal jury in Miami found the Drug Enforcement Administration discriminated against Sandalio Gonzalez, the former second-in-command of the DEA’s South Florida field office, by retaliating against him with a transfer to another job in Texas in 2001.

This is significant for a number of reasons. It validates Gonzalez’ earlier whistleblowing and verifies the DEA’s method of dealing with it. Gonzalez was also the whistleblower in the House of Death scandal in Texas (the DEA probably really regrets the transfer). This court decision also is going to make more people pay attention to the House of Death.
An interesting side note: speculation by Bill Conroy at NarcoNews as to why DEA head Karen Tandy cancelled her plans to testify on behalf of the DEA at this trial.

It continues to amaze me how much the Drug Czar and his puppets are willing to bend and mutilate data in order to attempt to make a case for the dangers of drugged driving.
The drug czar’s “blog” touts some supposedly important new information:

But in West Virginia, the regular testing has enabled the CDC to determine that drugs are found in 25.8 percent of people killed in wrecks. That’s similar to the percentage of victims found with a blood alcohol level above the legal limit — about 27.7 percent.
“These results suggest that drug use contributes substantially to driver impairment in West Virginia,” the report says.
President Bush has declared December National Drunk and Drugged Driving Prevention Month.

Notice how they attempt to conflate the drugged percentage with the above the legal limit alcohol percentage?
OK, now note that this is a complete crock. And you don’t even have to read the study. Just read the linked article with more than a 5 year old comprehension and you discover the following:

• In this study, drugs were found in 25.8 percent of those killed in wrecks. That includes passengers, pedestrians, drivers who weren’t at fault, etc. There’s no way of knowing how many of the drivers (or for that matter if any at all) were drugged.
• The most prevalent kind of drugs found were prescription drugs.
• There was no way to identify whether the prescription drugs were legally obtained or prescribed.
• The fact that marijuana was the most commonly found illicit drug is not a surprise at all — it’s the most commonly used and stays in the blood the longest. The fact that it came in well below prescription drugs just shows how prevalent prescription drug use is in the population.
• The study had no information about impairment, and therefore could not offer a single, solitary bit of evidence regarding the connection between drug use and fatal car accidents.

Once again, the drug czar lies.
And yes, I am at war with government officials who technically say truthful things with an intent to deceive. That practice is lying, pure and simple.