Drug WarRant

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.

You may have already seen this one by now, but I couldn’t resist…

Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy — almost impenetrable forests of marijuana plants 10 feet tall.
General Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defense staff, said Thursday that Taliban fighters were using the forests as cover. In response, the crew of at least one armored car had camouflaged their vehicle with marijuana.
“The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It’s very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices. … And as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don’t dodge in and out of those marijuana forests,” he said in a speech in Ottawa, Canada.
“We tried burning them with white phosphorous — it didn’t work. We tried burning them with diesel — it didn’t work. The plants are so full of water right now … that we simply couldn’t burn them,” he said.
Even successful incineration had its drawbacks.
“A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those [forests] did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action,” Hiller said dryly.
One soldier told him later: “Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I’d say ‘That damn marijuana’.”

Update: [Photo added] As Hope notes in comments, we’re really talking about a hemp field here.

“bullet” At the Drug War Chronicle, in Pinellas County, Florida, it is now illegal to sell something that you reasonably should know would be used for consuming drugs.
“bullet” Interesting article on Dutch coffee shops at AlterNet.
“bullet” Ed Rosenthal has got to do it all over again. Fed Jury Slaps Guru of Ganja With New Pot Charges
“bullet” An editorial in South Dakota: Medical Marijuana Measure Should Pass

At Regulate Marijuana:

I showed up at the TV studio this morning and was greeted by dozens of secret service agents. The drug czar is traveling with a huge security detail, clearly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money just to be here. The interview went very well. Predictably, Walters made some outrageous statements about Question 7. And unbelievably, he announced on NBC this morning that he’s here in Nevada to hand out taxpayer dollars to local opposition groups because they can’t raise enough money on their own to put up TV ads opposing Question 7. This is an outrageous abuse of taxpayer funds by a federal agency. How do you like knowing that your tax dollars are going toward funding groups who oppose passing Question 7?

And, of course, the Drug Czar is giving away money in Colorado as well (the other state with a major marijuana legalization initiative).
I’m calling up my Senator’s office and asking why my federal tax dollars are being used to interfere with a local election. If the federal government has no more important financial needs than that, can I please have those dollars back?
Time to de-fund the Drug Czar.

The Illinois State University Daily Vidette has quoted me two days in a row now.

1. An article about M.A.S.H./S.S.D.P — the student group for which I am faculty advisor. (Formerly Mobilizing Activists and Students for Hemp, but transitioning into an SSDP chapter)
2. An article about marijuana’s potential to help with Alzheimer’s.

I thought it would be a good idea to do a little follow-up on my earlier post today. As has been noted, I was pretty harsh about an article that was actually suggesting reducing the number of incarcerated drug offenders by 50%. Shouldn’t I be celebrating?
Well certainly, that would be incredible. And if I heard something like that from a politician, I’d be doing a happy dance — despite the fact that I would consider it only a partial step toward what needs to be done to reform drug policy.
The problem is that this is, once again, a “scholarly” piece from extremely intelligent, extremely well-informed academicians whose recommendations are considered to carry a certain weight by policy-makers. And once again, these “experts” have told only part of the story. When they do this, they make both the public and policy-makers operate from a position of, ultimately, ignorance. And this is traitorous to academic scholarship and the pursuit of knowledge (something I value and understand to a small degree since I work in a university).
This isn’t just one article. The willful absence of any mention of the “ending prohibition” option from academic discussions of drug policy is typical and rampant.
Take a look at other major works by Jonathan P. Caulkins and Peter Reuter. The first thing that comes to mind is their outstanding work in AEI’s “Are We Losing the War on Drugs?
An Analytic Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy” (David Boyum and Peter Reuter) and RAND’s “How Goes the ‘War on Drugs’?
An Assessment of U.S. Drug Problems and Policy” (Jonathan P. Caulkins, Peter H. Reuter, Martin Y. Iguchi and James Chiesa) — both of which I talked about here. At the time, despite the fantastic information and powerful indictments of current policy contained in those reports, I noted:

In both cases, the studies are grossly flawed in that they operate under the assumption, for the purposes of the study, that prohibition can be the only model. Therefore they almost completely ignore:

• Side-effects of prohibition itself such as prohibition-fueled violence
• The impact of other potential models, such as legalization and regulation, on their recommendations.

Or consider Mark Kleiman’s CRS Report for Congress: Illicit Drugs and the Terrorist Threat: Causal Links and Implications for Domestic Drug Control Policy (pdf) — a report that Kleiman felt was strong: “I was somewhat better-pleased with the product than I am with my average product.”
In this report, after showing how drug trafficking can connect to terrorism (but without ever mentioning the contribution of prohibition to that connection), he goes on to (as all the academicians do so well) properly trash the current drug war efforts. He points out that all three of the conventional wisdom approaches to drug policy — increasing price, shrinking demand, reducing availability — have failed to actually… uh… work. But of course, again no mention of other options such as ending prohibition. His conclusion?

…the institutions of drug abuse control would be wise to factor the impact of their activities on the terrorist threat into their decision-making. Such a focus could
involve employing enforcement to reduce the opportunities that drug trafficking
provides to terrorist groups, and focusing the demand control effort more on the
issue of hard-core user-offenders.

In other words, just modify the failed approach slightly. No need to consider other options. And this is his report to Congress!
Why do they do this? It’s not like they’re unaware of the realities. All of them have written enough to show that they are extraordinarily knowledgeable. And their academic credentials are outstanding.

Jonathan P. Caulkins is a professor of public policy and operations research at Carnegie-Mellon University’s Qatar Campus and Heinz School of Public Policy and Management. Peter Reuter is a professor in the School of Public Policy and Department of Criminology, the University of Maryland, and codirector of RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center.

Well, as some commenters have noted in the previous post, researchers are often thinking about who will fund them, and writing things that don’t agree with funders can keep you from getting paid. That may, unfortunately, be true, and if it’s simply it’s a matter of what overall topics you research, then I can accept that. However, avoiding reporting a valid answer to the question of your research simply to not offend funders is dishonest scholarship. Pure and simple.
Imagine, for example, that I was a medical researcher considering the question: “How can people avoid getting lung cancer?” but was unwilling to include quitting cigarettes as an option in my paper to avoid pissing off my tobacco company patrons. Dishonest scholarship, as is scholarship that considers the question of drug policy and notes prohibition’s failures without even bringing the drug policy option of ending prohibition.
Of course, I don’t know for sure the actual reasons behind the writing of these individuals. I suspect Kleiman’s reasons go beyond funding and into a prejudice against the notion of legalization (that, based on some of his earlier statements, may include a personal animus against some of early legalization personalities). Caulkins and Reuter? Keeping sponsors happy, I suppose. Although I bet they’d tell you that it’s more to do with political realities — that there’s no point bringing up options that people are unwilling to consider politically.
And yet, these academicians have a great opportunity to lead the way in actual valuable drug policy recommendations, and not just in drug policy criticism. Sure, it can be scary out on the political edge, but that’s no reason to stop knowledge.
The motto of my university is “Gladly we learn and teach.” Maybe that’s easier for me because I’m not dependent on research grants or tenure. I just write a blog.

Via Mark Kleiman, comes this piece at Issues in Science and Technology Online: Reorienting U.S. DrugPolicy, by Jonathan P. Caulkins and Peter Reuter.
The article is packed with useful and/or interesting research and conjecture as the authors conclude that “money can be saved and justice improved by simply cutting in half the number of people locked up for drug offenses.” The problem with the piece is less with what they include (although there are some rather gross generalizations), as with what they completely ignore.
In a detailed 4,000+ word “academic” piece about drug policy, that dissects decades of policy and analyzes supply reduction, demand reduction and even coerced abstinence, what is pointedly left out is astonishing:

1. The difference between use and abuse is completely ignored (the words are used as if they mean the same thing and no indication is given that responsible use of any illicit drugs is even possible)
2. The negative consequences (other than incarceration and its financial costs) connected with prohibition are not mentioned at all (while negative consequences of drug use/abuse are mentioned often). The failure of drug policy to impact drug use/abuse is mentioned often. But black markets? Corruption? Fueling criminal enterprises? Nothing.
3. There is no mention of legalization or any notion that an alternative to prohibition exists.

These are not trivial items. To ignore these elements in an “academic” essay is like writing a piece about mathematics and pretending that there are no odd numbers.
If this was a single example of such an approach used in the incestuous clique of self-proclaimed academic drug policy experts, I would call it shoddy scholarship. But it’s not. It’s typical. These folks know that they’re leaving out critical elements. (We’ve told them often enough.) And that, in my mind, makes it dishonest scholarship.