Drug WarRant

For some reason, I just can’t get too excited about the release of the new Monitoring the Future data.
“bullet” The Drug Czar is all agog at the “dramatic declines in teen drug use” except, of course, for the increase in teens using other drugs.
“bullet” DARE Generation Diary has an amusing chart showing a correlation between the Drug Czar’s media budget and teen drug use… as the Drug Czar’s budget decreases, so does teen drug use. Hey, it’s as legitimate as most of the correlation attempts that the Drug Czar uses in justifying the drug war.
“bullet” Eric Sterling notes that the story of increased prescription drug use should include better warnings about drug interactions with common dangerous drugs like acetaminophen (which, unlike illegal drugs like marijuana, has serious risk of fatality in certain interactions).
“bullet” Alex at the Drug Law Blog points out that increased prohibition is likely to drive teens to the more risky prescription drug experimentation.
A variety of interesting points and articles, but ultimately Monitoring the Future seems a lot to me like governmental masturbation — to images of fantasy numbers that they desperately imagine actually love their… policies.
Here’s the reality.
First, some teens will experiment with things that are not good for them (or would be better for them if they waited until later in life). No matter what you do. People who believe in a drug-free America need to be placed in padded protective custody where they can’t hurt anybody and where they can have extended conversations with the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte about the dragons lurking at the edge of the world.
When I was in High School, two ridiculously stupid classmates died from huffing kerosene. This was well before the creation of the Darwin Awards but even then I unconsciously grocked their truth. And yet I, a minister’s son and a goody-two-shoes, was also tempted by friends in a cemetery (don’t ask) into trying an illegal (for me) drug called “beer.” Now I don’t know if the kerosene huffing would have been avoided if something safe like marijuana had been available to them. But I do know that drug laws/policies/advertising did nothing to prevent me or my thankfully-removed-from-the-gene-pool classmates from experimenting.
So, minor fluctuations in “teen drug use” as a gauge of drug policy are pretty much meaningless to me. And the classifications of drugs in Monitoring the Future are unhelpful.
Here’s three things I’d like to see to get a real picture of teens and drug problems (and only one could be accomplished within the current structure of Monitoring the Future data).

1. A comparison of trends in relation to the actual dangers of specific drugs. This is the one thing that could be done now to some extent with MtF data. Create a realistic and truthful ranking of drugs (both illegal and “legal”) in terms of their actual health and safety threats and find out whether trends of teen use are gravitating to the more dangerous or to the safer drugs. This could be useful information for policy analysis (of course, this will never happen because of the political resistance to calling any illicit drugs “safer”).
2. Ending the conflation of “use” with “abuse.” Someone who uses a drug casually without ill effects (other than legal effects) is much different than someone who completely disappears into a world of drug abuse, and general “use” statistics tells you nothing about the extent of real problems. We need real, concrete distinctions between use and abuse (and not the deliberate misdirection of “treatment admissions” that the Czar likes to use).
3. Provide a real laboratory. Again, this is something that the government will do everything it can to prevent because it doesn’t want useful data — only its masturbatory fantasies. What I mean by a real laboratory is letting states or countries follow their own citizens’ wishes and legalize a drug. See what happens. It won’t be the end of the world. And it might give us a chance to do some meaningful comparisons of data over time and see what real policy changes might do.

But no, every year, the Drug Czar anxiously awaits his advance copy of MtF and retreats into the back room where he can thumb through the figures over and over again until an picture forms in his mind that makes him feel good.
But it doesn’t do a damned thing for the teens.

It doesn’t happen that often here, unfortunately, but I’m actually noting that a prosecuting attorney is doing the right thing.

A cancellation of a proposed demonstation and locker search using drug dogs at Luther L. Wright High School has school officials fuming.
Citing a “no-tolerance” drug policy, Ironwood Schools administrators and board members want the district’s schools drug free. At Monday night’s school board meeting, members expressed anger when they heard the Dec. 1 demonstration had been canceled without any “apparent explanation” by Gogebic County Prosecuting Attorney Richard Adams.

These school officials wanted blanket suspicionless dog searches of all lockers in the schools.

“I told them: ‘No, you don’t do a blanket search. It does not set a good message to the students,'” Adams said. “The courts are already on line questioning the use of dogs in the schools at all.”
“Blanket searches are not allowed.” […]
Adams said Michigan State Police officials also told him they would not allow their dogs to be used in the demonstration. […]
Adams did specify he would approve the use of dogs if ( Kolesar ) “has reasonable suspicion and targets the lockers that the suspicion leads directly to.”

But that doesn’t satisfy the rabid ravings of a psychotic school administrator.

“Those dogs could help us, if there are any drugs in our building,” Kolesar said. “It’s a matter of zero-tolerance. We don’t ever want students to even think about drugs being in the school.” [emphasis added]

Would it be easier to find the drugs in your schools if you let dogs search everywhere? Yes. Would it be easier to prevent drugs in your schools if you made all the students strip and walk around naked after having full cavity searches? Yes. Could we catch more drug users if police could search every car and every person and every home without a warrant? Yes. But we don’t live in that country.

This is an incredible article by Mike Caesar in the Christian Science Monitor: New coca spat leaves Colombia flying solo. It really paints a picture of how much we’ve screwed up things in Latin America.

A decision by Colombia’s conservative President lvaro Uribe to restart the country’s aerial fumigation of coca leaf plantations near the border with Ecuador appears to have further isolated him in a region increasingly unfriendly to Washington’s war on drugs.
Last week’s move has sparked a diplomatic row, with Ecuador recalling its ambassador to Colombia and vowing to file an official complaint to both the Organization of American States and the United Nations. Ecuador’s leftist president-elect Rafael Correa, a close friend of Venezuela’s anti-American president, Hugo Ch½vez, has even started recruiting other Latin leaders to oppose aerial fumigation.
“It’s simply unacceptable that they continue spraying from the air with glysophate,” Mr. Correa said this week, referring to the herbicide used, a more concentrated version of Monsanto’s Round-Up. “It kills legal crops on the Ecuadorean side and, apparently, also kills farmers.”
Ecuador has activated its air defense system to monitor the fumigation planes, many of which are piloted by Americans.
[…]
Correa has also said he opposes the presence of the US military base at the Ecuadorean port of Manta – a key support for the US drug war in neighboring Colombia.
All of this leaves Uribe – and Washington – increasingly isolated. Many Latin Americans have long resented the US drug war, which they say forces them to bear the burden of America’s vices.
Shifter says that Latin American hostility toward the drug war shows “a growing dissatisfaction with a policy that has failed.”

Interesting times. Scary times.
There’s a big part of me that’s very anxious to get rid of the moronic drug warriors that are putting us and the rest of the world in such danger. But there’s a small part of me that almost wishes we could have Walters and Tandy, et al for another 4-6 years in the almost certain knowledge that they would make the drug war completely explode in their faces and trigger real revolution internationally.
From my perspective in the past few years, it seem to me that the drug policy reformers have made huge gains in the respectability, believability, breadth and permeation of our message. This has scared the piss out of the drug warriors and forced them into a pushing back mode, where they try to shove the genie back into the bottle through repressive actions and propaganda. This further alienates and arouses a formerly apathetic population, helping our side. The drug warriors could end up pushing themselves back into a corner.

thehim has an excellent discussion going on about meth over at Blog Reload (Part one and Part two).
The discussion centers around the role of meth in crime and the extent to which the crackdown on local meth production has increased crime levels (in part due to the fact that eliminating local labs brings in organized criminals to take on the supply role, and that can result in increased violent crime).
I pretty much agree with thehim’s conclusions in part two, although I’m actually a little less pessimistic regarding the challenges of dealing with meth in a legalization model. To a large extent, I believe that a proper legalization and regulation approach to all drugs will cause meth to mostly go away. The availability of regulated “clean” amphetamines will dramatically reduce the demand for meth. There will be some hard-core users who will need some treatment or maintenance programs, and the problem will be greater than it would have been had we not gone down this path in the first place, but meth (as we know it today), will eventually disappear just like the backyard moonshine still.

Further information on the “conversion.” Bob Barr, interviewed by Charles Goyette on KFNX (Phoenix), on the drug war:

There‰s a lot of room to work on that issue. For example, on the issue of medical marijuana and the states‰ rights issues involving that. I‰m very supportive of states‰ rights. I am also very supportive the concept of legitimate testing for the use of medical marijuana and I‰m very disappointed that the government has stood in the way of that. So there‰s a lot of room there. I‰m working through some of those individual liberties issues…

And something that should be entertaining coming January 18 at Fordham Law School:

The Donald & Paula Smith Family Foundation Presents a debate: Medical Marijuana: Should the sick be able to smoke?
Featuring
Bob Barr, Former Congressman, 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the American Conservative Union
V.
Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director, Drug Policy Alliance

There are indications that we may be seeing an beginnings of an upswing in violent crime in the U.S. Pat at Left Independent blames the drug war.
… and not just in the U.S.

Have a nice Christmas thought for the poor drug warriors. They try to use the drug war to control other countries, but they’re not getting anything nice in their stockings for doing so. Maybe they should just take the rest of the year off.
“bullet” Peru’s president recommends coca

Mr Garcia’s culinary suggestions did not stop at a simple salad.
“You can put coca leaves in your roast dinners, in the oven, you can make many things which it will give a special taste to.”
The president likened coca leaves to the herb rosemary and to rocket, adding that he personally had cooked with coca leaves.
He also said that coca leaves could be used to treat sore throats, suggesting that other world leaders who suffer from hoarseness should take a little moist coca.
The coca plant has been used for centuries in Andean cultures
“You will see how it cleans the throat,” he advised.

“bullet” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Accuses U.S. Ambassador of Lying About Drugs

“A little while ago, the U.S. ambassador in Caracas told a big lie. He should retract it if it’s really true that (U.S. officials) want good relations like they’ve been saying,” Chavez told reporters who questioned him during an unrelated event on Wednesday.

“bullet” Mexico troops find hybrid marijuana plant

Soldiers trying to seize control of one Mexico’s top drug-producing regions found the countryside teeming with a new hybrid marijuana plant that can be cultivated year-round and cannot be killed with pesticides. […]
The plants’ roots survive if they are doused with herbicide, said army Gen. Manuel Garcia.
“These plants have been genetically improved,” he told a handful of journalists allowed to accompany soldiers on a daylong raid of some 70 marijuana fields. “Before we could cut the plant and destroy it, but this plant will come back to life unless it’s taken out by the roots.”
The new plants, known as “Colombians,” mature in about two months and can be planted at any time of year, meaning authorities will no longer be able to time raids to coincide with twice-yearly harvests.
The hybrid first appeared in Mexico two years ago but has become the plant of choice for drug traffickers Michoacan, a remote mountainous region that lends to itself to drug production.
Yields are so high that traffickers can now produce as much marijuana on a plot the size of a football field as they used to harvest in 10 to 12 acres. That makes for smaller, harder-to-detect fields…

Just like the drug war created innovation in developing eradication resistant coca plants in Colombia, the same is true of marijuana plants.
Drug eradication is, in the current situation, the ultimate in job security. Drugs cannot be eradicated. There is a demand. There will be a supply.
It used to be that the U.S. “foreign aid” drug war bribes were enough to get these little countries to sell themselves into destruction. But some of them are saying “enough” and it may not be long before it gets prohibitively expensive for the U.S. to keep the rest of the world in line.

Here’s a few things worth checking out:
“bullet” Radley Balko does a really fine job explaining the meth “crisis” to the uninformed in his latest FOX news column: Government’s Drug War Fuels Meth Problem

So Americans’ access to cold medicine has been restricted, we’ve embarked on questionable sting operations that likely ensnare innocent people, and the FDA is allowing a useless medication to be sold to U.S. consumers. And to what end? Meth is more available and more potent than it ever was.
Typical drug war folly. This is probably the place to point out that drug war itself is the bad government policy gave us the crude form of methampehtamine that’s so popular today in the first place.

“bullet” Bruce Mirken has a good piece at AlterNet: Why Smoking Marijuana Doesn’t Make You a Junkie. He discusses the science that has put to rest the particular gateway theory that marijuana causes people to use other drugs.

The lie that marijuana somehow turns people into junkies is dead. Officials who insist on repeating it as a way of squelching discussion about common-sense reforms should be laughed off the stage.

“bullet” Economist David R. Henderson explains the economics of the drug war in South and Central America in ways that a Kindergartner could understand (but would be totally over the heads of most politicians) in How to Undercut Ch½vez Peacefully With Less Military, Not More

The raw cocaine price in Colombia is only about 1 percent of its street price in the United States, because of the risk premium added on to prices at each stage of the distribution. Therefore, tripling the raw price would cause the U.S. street price to rise by 2 percent.
There’s a better way to go. The U.S. government should stop pressuring Colombia’s government to destroy its cocaine industry, and we the people should demand it. Then Colombia’s government can decide whether to do that or not, and I predict that it won’t. If, in the extreme, Colombia’s government legalized the cocaine trade, production would increase and the price would fall. But even if the Colombian price fell to zero, clearly impossible, the U.S. price would fall by only 1 percent. Meanwhile, the leftist insurgent’s funds would dry up š why pay for protection when you don’t need it? […]

“bullet” Transform Foundation Blog has good coverage of the recent discussion in England regarding the drug trade and the murder of prostitutes in Ipswich. The positive thing is that a real discussion is happening, and the notion of legalization as a form of harm reduction is getting serious play. Also nice to see articles like Prohibition: a crippling habit by Nick Davies:

There are really only two kinds of people who support the prohibition of drugs: those who know the truth and, for some political reason, refuse to admit it; and those who genuinely have no idea what they are talking about.

I’ve never really felt the need to explain the position that libertarians should have regarding the drug war. In fact, in my FAQ, all I say is:

Well, duh! If you need to ask, you’re probably not a libertarian.

One particular recent event, however, is muddying the waters… the conversion of Bob Barr to the Libertarian party. And as Mona notes, this is the same Bob Barr who was once a Congressman Drug Warrior:

Suggesting the depth of hostility toward the notion of legal drugs, Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., asked whether anti-racketeering laws could be used to prosecute people conspiring to legalize drugs.

That’s right. He suggested that the government use RICO to go after people like… me.
And now he’s a spokesperson for the Libertarian party. What a conversion!
Or is it?
Jacob Sullum at Hit and Run notes that Barr avoids the topic in his recent interview with David Weigel and says:

… But it’s hard for me to see how a libertarian (or Libertarian) can support drug prohibition. Contrary to what he says in the interview, this is no “minor disagreement.” Not only does the war on drugs directly violate the basic right to control one’s body and mind; it leads to exactly the sort of wide-ranging civil liberties violations, especially in connection with Fourth Amendment rights, that so concern Barr when it comes to the war on terrorism…

I believe it’s possible to be a pro-life Democrat. You could even be a gay Republican. But a pro-drug war Libertarian? It’s oxymoronic.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens if Barr is pinned down on this issue.

Link (Via Hit and Run)

For years, activists in the marijuana legalization movement have claimed that cannabis is America’s biggest cash crop. Now they’re citing government statistics to prove it.
A report released today by a marijuana public policy analyst contends that the market value of pot produced in the U.S. exceeds $35 billion Ö far more than the crop value of such heartland staples as corn, soybeans and hay, which are the top three legal cash crops.

Now, first it should be noted that there are all sorts of problems with valuing illicit crops, including the methods of estimating quantity, the inclusion of non-viable crops, and the computation of street value. However, as an point of discussion, this report by Jon Gettman is probably as accurate as exists out there.
And his point is that with such a huge activity out there, clearly prohibition doesn’t work and can’t contain it, so it would make a whole lot more sense to bring it into the regulated market.
Naturally, the drug czar’s office was asked to weigh in…

Tom Riley, a spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, cited examples of foreign countries that have struggled with big crops used to produce cocaine and heroin. “Coca is Colombia’s largest cash crop and that hasn’t worked out for them, and opium poppies are Afghanistan’s largest crop, and that has worked out disastrously for them,” Riley said. “I don’t know why we would venture down that road.”

No, Tom, you ignorant slut. The whole point is that if it’s your biggest cash crop, it doesn’t make sense to give that over to criminal control. You should legalize, tax and regulate. You’re making our point for us.