Drug WarRant

Library volunteers say no to drug testing.
Update: The question that comes to mind is — what kind of moron do you have to be to think that drug testing library volunteers makes any sense? And, according to the article, they don’t see their stupidity and are just trying to come up with a different means of testing!

Via Scott Morgan (read what he has to say) comes this:

The Chicago Crime Commission will hold its Stars of Distinction, 2006 Awards Dinner to recognize outstanding individual and organizational contributions in fighting crime. DEA Administrator Karen P. Tandy will accept the Education Award along with Museum for Science and Industry partners responsible for bringing “Target America: Opening Eyes to the Danger Drugs Cause” to Chicago.

Sigh.

Everybody in the entire world is in agreement that the international effort to deal with opium in Afghanistan has been a colossal failure. Everybody is blaming everybody else and nobody has a clue what to do about it, with one exception: The Senlis Council (a European think-tank) has developed and promoted concrete and workable plans, including: Opium Licensing for the Production of Essential Medicines: Securing a Sustainable Future for Afghanistan.
So when you have a complete failure on your hands, have no clue how to turn it around, and a bunch of very smart people come up with a comprehensive plan to solve your problems, what do you do?

The Afghan government has ordered the closure of all offices of a group that wants to promote new ways of dealing with the global drugs problem.
The Interior Ministry said the Senlis Council, had been “confusing farmers” and had been a factor in the increase in poppy cultivation.

Idiots!

Maybe I should say I want a new computer. My current laptop is still working, and I hope to get it to limp along until January at least, but it’s missing a couple of keys and is held together with tape. My 12″ Mac Powerbook has been phenomenal — it has been my workhorse for years, going everywhere with me (including Europe). I’ve dropped it, kicked it, done everything to it and it has been continually reliable. But it’s getting old, starting to feel a little slow, and also cannot handle some of the new photography and design software I need to use.
No, I don’t need a high-powered laptop to blog, but I use my one computer for everything I do, which includes blogging, photography, graphic design, and website management.
So I’m looking for some help. Check out the options I’m weighing and consider donating to the Drug WarRant laptop fund. I’m hoping to have enough raised to get a new computer by January or February (and I’ll have both a birthday and Christmas in between for added reasons to donate).
There are a lot of small costs that regularly come up with Drug WarRant (including server fees, domain fees, and research costs, etc.), but I’ve never been interested in doing much fundraising (and I don’t have any advertising revenue). I don’t do this for compensation (I have a day job that I love as well), but I could use help with a major purchase like the laptop.
Don’t feel obligated — if you can’t afford to donate, please don’t. If you think your donations could be better used to help a drug policy reform candidate or an established drug policy reform organization, please do so. But if you’ve got $5 or $50 or $500 sitting around with no plans…
Thanks.

Via Americans for Safe Access,
Senator James Jeffords (Vermont) sent a letter (pdf) to Michael Leavitt, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, asking why they hell it’s taking them so long to do their job in the legal process of evaluating a petition to reschedule marijuana (he worded it a little different than I did, but the polite language barely covers his annoyance).

follow-up on your answer to a question I asked during your
confirmation process. … the law requires the Secretary to conduct this evaluation “within a reasonable time.” … you stated that you “would make every effort to complete
the evaluation by August 2005.” Needless to say August 2005 has long since
passed … and yet no action has been taken … Please describe the factors that have led to this delay …

It’s good to have a Senator paying attention to the foot dragging by HHS. Eventually that agency is going to have to actually come up with something due to the accumulated political pressure or through a court order. Of course the problem (from the perspective of HHS) is that they’ll no choice but to

1. show that medical marijuana is viable, or
2. they’ll have to lie with specific detail that can be publicly and scientifically refuted.

Over at the Drug Czar’s “blog,” they have crafted an Ask the Expert “interview” with “Doctor” David Murray on needle exchange. This is their own pet doctor who they trot out whenever they want to sound like they have something medical to say.
It’s as bizarre as most of what comes out of the Drug Czar’s office. Though full of verbiage intended to sound erudite, in the end, it makes no sense at all.
Check out this passage, where Murray essentially says that, unless needle exchange actually reduces drug use, it doesn’t matter whether it saves lives.

We are faced with two epidemic diseases that destroy the health of individuals and communities. The first is the spread of blood-borne pathogens such as HIV/AIDS or Hepatitis C through the sharing of contaminated injection equipment or by engaging in high-risk behaviors. The second is the scourge of drug use itself. An effective public health intervention must address both of these epidemics. The evidence is mixed as to whether needle exchange programs actually reduce the transmission of blood-borne pathogens; some studies have argued that they do, others argue that they demonstrably fail. But as to the second epidemic, the evidence is clear that distributing needles to enable continued drug injection does not reduce the continued drug injection. Finally, there is increasingly clear evidence that drug use itself, whether by injection or not, is associated with high-risk behaviors that lead to blood-borne pathogen transmission. The most comprehensive public health solution must be to reduce the incidence and prevalence of drug use.

Of course, I’m not sure why I even get worked up about any of this. I’m guessing that drug policy reformers like me looking for a laugh or something to get worked up about are pretty much the only ones who read Pushing Back.

Congratulations to Radley Balko for his new gig as a senior editor at Reason. Sounds like a good fit to me.
Radley, of course, is the author of Overkill, has done incredible research in the area of the militarization of the drug war, and is The Agitator who brought the Corey Maye case to national attention.

What a great editorial!
After spending several paragraphs detailing the arguments of those opposed to Amendment 44 (legalizing marijuana), they respond with this:

BW position: Opponents are full of bull, and a large percentage of Boulder County readers knows it. Why? Because they smoke pot and lead healthy, functional lives. The war on pot is a waste of money and a waste of lives. Prohibition has never worked and never will. If alcohol and cigarettes, which are demonstrably more costly and harmful to human beings and to society, are legal, then ganja should be legal, too.
End the hypocrisy. Vote YES on Amendment 44.

Now that’s refreshing.

Depending on data from surveys is always an iffy proposition. Even more so when it involves asking people about illegal activities. Anonymity may help people feel like they can be honest, but it also means there’s nothing preventing them from lying. And a school setting actually encourages “pranking” such surveys (when I was in school, a lot of students pranked the tests that determined whether the school was doing a good job of teaching, often purposely selecting incorrect answers and driving down the entire school average).
That leads to this astute observation by a student:

Most people are quick to attribute the drop in cigarette, alcohol and drug use among Southwest Allen County Schools students to the random drug-testing program that has been placed in the school system’s two middle schools and one high school. However, common sense from a student taking those very drug surveys that led to drug testing can prove otherwise.
In middle and high school, the anonymous drug surveys given to students are seen as a joke. Not only do kids say they have done drugs that they have not heard of, they fill in the corresponding bubble saying they used cocaine more than 50 times a week as a sixth-grader. Until now, these drug surveys have shown ridiculous numbers of drug users in the district resulting from the anonymity of the test.
After the random drug testing was implemented, however, everything changed. Middle and high school students began to see that these surveys, while still anonymous, were finally being used for something: numbers to verify the need for drug testing.
Drug testing is not the Holy Grail to preventing drug use. It has actually done very little to stop drug use in the district ( only 1.9 percent of tested students tested positive ). The huge decline in drug and alcohol use in these surveys can be attributed to the clever students seeing that if they are honest, federal grants will not continue to be poured into the district for drug testing and the program will not be renewed by the school board at the end of the 2008-09 school year.
Drug and alcohol use should not be as widespread as it is in schools, but administrators and employees should quit letting students fool them with a survey and look for something that actually works, and spend some money on education. After all, that is what school is for.

Canada

Judges cannot issue probation orders requiring people to provide blood or urine samples to check if they are obeying conditions to abstain from drugs or alcohol, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Friday.
In dismissing a Crown appeal of a B.C. Court of Appeal decision, the country’s top court ruled that probation orders compelling people to provide bodily samples were contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.[…]
“Compelling blood tests, absent a statutory framework governing such tests, is not consistent with the charter and random drug testing at a probation officer’s discretion could become highly arbitrary,” the court said.

I used to think that the U.S. Supreme Court believed in such concepts as well.