Drug WarRant

I’ve been asked to be the moderator for “Tough Trade-Offs: The Drug Legalization Debate”
This debate will take place on Wednesday, November 15 at the College of Law Auditorium at 504 E Pennsylvania Ave in Champaign, Illinois and will feature William Otis, JD, Counselor to the Administrator of the DEA and Bryan Brickner, PhD, author and Illinois drug law reform activist.

William Otis, JD, is a graduate of Stanford Law School and former Special Counsel to then- president George H.W. Bush. After law school, he worked in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice for seven years before becoming head of the appellate division of the U.S. Attorney‰s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. He was also an informal advisor on criminal justice issues to President Bush when he was Governor. For the past three years, he has been Counselor to the Administrator of the DEA, the official capacity in which he will speak next Wednesday.
Bryan Brickner, PhD, graduated from University of Illinois in 1988 and was a walk-on for the UIUC basketball team. He was commissioned as an Army officer through the Illinois ROTC program and served in Saudi Arabia in 1991. In 1997, he received his doctorate in political science from Purdue University. In addition to NORML, he co-founded IDEAL Reform, a group that is working to pass a medical cannabis bill in Illinois. He is the author of several books including Article the first of the Bill of Rights.

The debate is sponsored by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Federalist Society and the Coalition of Student-Professionals for Social Change.
I’m really looking forward to this — we so rarely get a chance to see debates on this subject. Of course, as moderator, my job is not to debate (I’ll get that chance some other time), but rather to help both parties get the chance to make their case, so the audience can decide.
If you’re in the area, why not get over to Champaign on Wednesday and check it out. There will be a time for questions from the audience as well. It’ll be a nice intimate setting — the room only seats about 100 people. It’s free and I’m told there will be free food as well.

Link

Rolling Stone magazine began publication in San Francisco, giving away a free marijuana cigarette (roach) clip with the first issue.

Hmmm… Things have changed.
On this day in 2006, Rolling Stone reported

The soon-to-be-former Mr. Spears has taken no time in retaliating against Britney for suddenly filing for divorce earlier this week.

At least that’s what you might think if you were mayor Bill Edner, Hughesville, Pennsylvania.
Here’s what actually happened.
Reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s efforts to get children to inform on their parents, a daughter has turned her parents in to school officials for… That’s right. Smoking pot.
That led to a police search of the house and the discovery of… pot. And pipes.
The girl’s father is Mike Rhodes, Hughesville council member and established local businessman. And apparently, while others in town like to wind down at night with a martini, he and his wife like a bowl of marijuana.
Now here’s the reaction from the mayor:

“Charges of corruptions against so many high level officials. It’s tough to take when it comes down to the local level,” the mayor added.

Corruption?
I’m sorry, Bill, but corruption is accepting bribes. Corruption is dishonest or fraudulent conduct to gain power. Smoking pot may be illegal, but it certainly isn’t corruption.
Try this out, Bill. Walk up to anybody and ask if they’d rather have a council member who is corrupt, or one who smokes pot at home. Go ahead. I’m guessing you’ll find quite a bit of support for the pot smoker.
One more point. The whole business of the daughter snitching on her parents is disturbing, and of course the news reports don’t go into much detail, there. But it got me wondering if there might be a connection to school activities. I noticed that at least one of the elementary schools in the East Lycoming School District was celebrating Red Ribbon Week in October. Hmmm…. I’d really like to know whether the school actually encouraged turning in parents.
Oh, and Bill — while you’re asking people about corruption versus pot smoking, you might want to ask whether it’s better for a young person to be raised in a family (even if their parents sometimes smoke pot or drink cocktails at home), or in foster care while their folks are in prison.
—-
For a story from a slightly different perspective, see this disturbing one about parents informing on their children.

Although the Colorado marijuana legalization initiative lost 60-40, it actually won in some counties:

• Boulder – 53%
• Clear Creak – 54%
• Denver – 56%
• Eagle – 56%
• Gilpin – 61%

On the other hand, the people in Baca county voted 82% against the initiative.
Some major geographic and demographic splits on this issue.
In Nevada, the geographic differences were there, but less pronounced. However, there were some clear demographic differences.
Our least receptive audiences in Nevada?

• African Americans
• Old people
• Rural residents
• Conservative Republicans who support Bush and approve of the war in Iraq

We have the opportunity here to identify some audiences who need to be educated, and start the process.

OK, call me a glass half-full kind of guy. I know a lot of people are really disappointed by the loss of all three major initiatives (legalization in Nevada and Colorado; medical marijuana in South Dakota), and I am disappointed, too. But it’s not the end of the world, and in fact, there’s quite a lot to be pleased with in the results of those initiatives.
Despite the full weight of the federal government using taxpayer money to oppose the initiatives; despite various local and state officials improperly (perhaps illegally) using their offices to campaign against and spread falsehoods; despite the fact that voters knew this would create a conflict with federal law; despite the decades of propaganda…

• Combined, close to one million people voted in favor of these initiatives (in a midterm election in not highly populated states).
• All three initiatives got respectable percentages in the 40’s (unlike drug warrior Earnest Istook, who only got 34% in the Oklahoma governor race).
• The South Dakota medical marijuana initiative lost by only 16,000 votes.
• As daksya notes, the demographics look to be on our side long-term.

Not bad. And in the process, there was even some national coverage and discussion of these issues. Seeds were sown.
Kudos to those who worked so hard on those initiatives. It’s got to be particularly hard for you right now, but be proud of what you did.
And kudos also to those independent candidates around the country tilting at windmills and getting more people to talk about drug policy reform.
Now we’ve got to do our job to continue to educate and motivate people, stripping away the layers and years of lies, softening up the masses for the next round.
Update: See this chart for information on all the marijuana-related initiatives, including a number of smaller ones that we won in Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Santa Monica (California), Missoula County (Montana), and four districts in Massachusetts.

With the Democrats taking the House, the biggest thing to happen is a shift in committee chairs. The new head of the House Government Reform Committee (which includes Drug Policy) will most certainly be Henry Waxman (CA).
Waxman voted in favor of the Hinchey Amendment to prevent the feds from interfering with medical marijuana states. He also voted to cut funding to Plan Colombia, and voted against increasing Byrne Justice Assistance grant funding.
Representative Waxman has also been an outspoken critic of the Administration’s use of propaganda, raising “concerns about whether Administration officials improperly used taxpayer funds to pay for efforts to influence public opinion.” Hmm… seems like a match made in heaven for investigating the ONDCP’s interference with state initiatives.
I don’t know who will be the Chair of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, but it won’t be Souder any more! (although he did win re-election to the House)
Via Scott at StopTheDrugWar.org, I see that Oklahoma moron first class Earnest Istook, who dropped out of the House to run for Governor, was demolished and will have to give up on his attempts to destroy the constitution in the name of the drug war.

Talk about the results here. CNN’s results page is a start for getting info.

A good discussion on yesterday’s voting post, so I thought I’d continue it here (these are my own thoughts — your mileage may vary). And since third party candidates are still mostly excluded by the system, I’m going to focus on the majors.
First of all, obviously if you’ve got a candidate from either party who is strongly in favor of drug policy reform, that’s great. But for the vast majority of this country, this option doesn’t exist. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve gone to a candidate’s website (when researching voting guides) and found nothing regarding drug policy.
Why? Because of us, mostly. Drug policy reform doesn’t even show up on polls as an issue people care about. I was recently polled by an independent company and I had to select “other” and write it in, despite a list of about 30 issues from which to select. The public visibility of this issue, in my mind, is lower than the public interest. And the reason is that people won’t talk about it.
How many of you are still afraid to tell your friends, your family that you support drug policy reform — an end to prohibition — even, gasp, legalization? How many other critical issues today cut this way? Can you imagine someone expressing an opinion that they are pro-choice, or pro-life — “but don’t use my real name — I need to keep my job”? Oh, sure, it probably happens, but not nearly to the extent that people stay in the closet on ending prohibition.
Until we get a larger percentage of the population willing to go public about reform, we’ll have a really tough time getting politicians of any flavor to do very much for us.
Given that reality, what can we expect from the two major parties? Both have been horrible in drug policy. Republicans through their law-and-order and moralizing planks, and Democrats from their Oh-yeah-well-I-can-be-just-as-law-and-order-as-you and protect-people-from-themselves planks (see Tip O’Neill).
Since we don’t have the clout (or the will) to get the politicians’ attention directly yet, we sometimes need to find ways to get in sideways. (This is why I think the state initiatives have been good things — they bypass, to some extent, the politicians, and let the people actually have a greater voice than they are publicly willing to have, thereby sending the politicians a message and building public confidence in the issue.)
What does this mean with the parties?
Democrats
The sideways approach is probably all that is politically viable at this point. I have had Democrats tell me that they agree with me on drug policy, but it would be political suicide for the Democrats to support it and it would undermine their ability to protect a woman’s right to choose.
However, as the old saying goes, organizing Democrats is like herding cats, and there’s a whole lot of issues they love that can be exploited and made to connect to drug policy. The environment, health care (affordable health care), racism, the poor, the machinery of war, seniors, foreign policy, AIDS, etc. This allows a lot of possibilities for them to cast votes that are favorable to incremental drug policy reform without worrying about the attack ad showing they’re soft on drugs.
Additionally, if the public ever gets to the point where they’re willing to speak out in large enough voting numbers and demand reform, the Democrats, in my opinion, will go along.
Republicans
I, quite frankly, don’t know what approach will work with the Republicans today other than a wholesale purge of the party leadership (which this election may precipitate). I’ve had plenty of Republicans tell me that they agree with me on drug policy, but these Republicans no longer have any power in their party.
There used to be all sorts of great sideways approaches to the Republicans — limited government, states’ rights, fiscal responsibility, individual responsibility, keep the damned gov’mint off my land, gun rights, foreign policy. But the current Republican leadership has completely scrapped all of those bedrock conservative principles in favor of the use of authoritarian and theocratic measures to maintain power.
Additionally, if the public ever gets to the point where they’re willing to speak out in large enough voting numbers and demand reform, I’m not sure if the current Republican leadership would go along. If they think they need to buck the public to appeal to the theocratic base or protect the interests of the pharmaceutical contributors, they’ll ignore the public’s wishes.
Conclusion: This means that at this point in time it appears that the Democrats are the best choice.
A big win for the Democrats today means

• split government for the next two years
• better chance for things like the Hinchey amendment to pass
• a potential shake-up in the Republican party that could mean a return to more traditional conservative roots, or cause libertarian conservatives to split off entirely

So for now, a Democratic win is good news for us.
Now, I know many of my loyal readers are unhappy when I talk about incremental reform, and I understand that, but I believe that major reform would require getting that majority of the population out of the closet and demanding it. Incremental reform softens up the population to counter decades of propaganda — it gets them to start the process of questioning what they’ve been taught all their lives. It’s hard to get a massive population to completely change overnight.
I would love to see major reform happen now without all the piecemeal efforts. I’m just not sure how.

VOTE!

Over at the Drug Czar’s “blog”, they say

A new autopsy report from Florida gives us another reason to continue our focus on reducing the non-medical use of prescription drug

Say what? Your focus? This, from the office that’s been spending all its time in Nevada, Colorado, and South Dakota trying to defeat marijuana initiatives?
So I thought I’d take a closer look at the figures in Florida. Not a lot of surprises that I can see.

Drug Tracked	# of Cases	a cause of death	present only
Cocaine	927	348	579
Methadone	428	312	116
Alprazolam	489	194	295
Oxycodone	377	185	192
Ethyl Alcohol	1,754	160	1,594
Morphine	289	106	183
Hydrocodone	346	106	240
Other Benzodiazepine	484	62	422
Diazepam	285	59	226
Fentanyl	85	51	34
Propoxyphene	155	38	117
Carisoprodol/Meprobamate	148	36	112
Heroin	36	29	7
Tramadol	59	18	41
Hydromorphone	63	13	50
Other Opioid	133	12	121
Methamphetamine	58	9	49
Meperidine	25	3	22
Amphetamine	51	3	48
MDMA	25	2	23
Nitrous Oxide	1	1	0
GHB	3	1	2
Other Methylated Amphetamine	5	1	4
MDA	18	1	17
Ketamine	1	0	1
Phencyclidine (PCP)	1	0	1
Cannabinoids	471	0	471

The vast majority of these 3,595 cases involved more than one drug listed in the report. The state’s medical examiners were asked to distinguish between the drugs being the “cause” of death or merely “present” in the body at the time of death.

Notice the item at the bottom of this list? At least the medical examiners are honest enough to know that cannabis is not going to be the cause of death. The fact that it’s even included in the list is silly.
Gee, I wonder why the Drug Czar didn’t simply say:

Once again, Cannabis was not the cause of any drug-related deaths.

In fact, it’s the safest drug on that list. By a long shot.