Drug WarRant

Reading my Facebook feed this morning, I saw a number of references to John Legend’s acceptance speech at the Oscars last night: Oscars 2015: John Legend Makes Slavery Comparison in Acceptance Speech

“We live in the most incarcerated country in the world,” Legend said. “There are more black men under correctional control today than there were under slavery in 1850.”

And PolitiFact was on Twitter, verifying that it was, in fact, true.

And there was a part of me inside screaming, “Yes! Those of us in drug policy reform have been trying to tell you things like this for years! Haven’t you been listening?”

It was a similar internal reaction to when there was massive public response to the police shooting (and subsequent police overreaction) in Ferguson, Missouri.

But I think it’s important to understand that moving a public discussion in a population of hundreds of millions with entrenched views and self-interests is like placing pebbles in the path of a glacier. It can be a painfully slow process at times, but it is essential to get that process started.

Sometimes it can seem like you’re making no progress at all. Yet those of us who have been working on it for years can see the dramatic difference if we step back and view the entire picture — how significantly our overall mass trajectory has been altered.

And that makes it worthwhile (while also pointing out that we cannot stop our efforts).

Unlikely Cause Unites the Left and the Right: Justice Reform

Usually bitter adversaries, Koch Industries and the Center for American Progress have found at least one thing they can agree on: The nation’s criminal justice system is broken.

Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the conservative Koch brothers, and the center, a Washington-based liberal issues group, are coming together to back a new organization called the Coalition for Public Safety. The coalition plans a multimillion-dollar campaign on behalf of emerging proposals to reduce prison populations, overhaul sentencing, reduce recidivism and take on similar initiatives. Other groups from both the left and right — the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, the Tea Party-oriented FreedomWorks — are also part of the coalition, reflecting its unusually bipartisan approach.

This is pretty huge. Getting such diverse players from all parts of the political spectrum, including groups that normally hate each other, all working together for criminal justice reform, that gives it a lot of weight.

In the past, reform efforts have often been hamstrung because of politicians afraid of being targeted for “soft on crime” ads, but with institutional political support on both sides of the aisle, that’s less likely to happen.

Here’s their website: The Coalition for Public Safety

It’s not going to do everything that needs to be done, but it sure could help get us moving in the right direction.

Safe Streets: Our Lawsuit to Block the Legalization of Marajuana

Yep, that’s how they spelled it.

Together with several of its members and others who have been injured by the commercial marijuana industry in Colorado, Safe Streets filed suit in federal court to vindicate the federal marijuana laws. The suit alleges that state and local officials in Colorado are violating federal law by promoting the commercialization of marijuana. Safe Streets is asking the federal courts to order Colorado officials to comply with federal law and stop issuing state licenses to deal illegal drugs.

In addition to suing Colorado officials for giving comfort to the marijuana industry, Safe Streets and the other plaintiffs are also directly suing several prominent participants in the industry itself. Federal racketeering laws give private plaintiffs injured by the operations of a commercial drug conspiracy the right to an injunction, treble damages, and attorney’s fees. In addition to shutting down the operations targeted in its suit, Safe Streets hopes that its use of the federal racketeering laws will serve as a model for other business and property owners who have been injured by the rise of the commercial marijuana industry.

What are they doing? Suing on behalf of the Mexican drug-trafficking-organizations? Seems to me that they (and others who profit from prohibition) are the only ones being harmed by legalization.

And, of course, love the beginning:

“America is Committed to Being Drug Free”

and the side-bar

“Commitment to Drug Free Youth”

Um, no. America has never been drug free, and never will be drug free. That’s just a nonsensical proposition, like saying that America is Committed to Being Sugar Free, or Bug Free, or Oxygen Free, or Clothes Free.

In fact, American is pretty firmly committed to drugs – lots of them. We buy a third of a trillion dollars worth of legal prescription drugs each year. (yes, that’s with a “T”), over 100 billion on alcohol, and over 80 billion on tobacco. And, while the numbers for the next fact are from 2007-2008, one out of every five children reported using at least one prescription drug in the month prior to being surveyed.

So peddle your drug-free somewhere else. It’s not welcome here.

Vanity Fair has a pleasant piece by Micah Nathan: A Nice Bowl of Weed

When I think about my experiences with cannabis, I find no fewer than 10 outstanding rules for enjoying the perfect bowl of weed. Orwell had 11 rules for his cup of tea, and he claimed at least four were controversial; I have no comparison. Controversy, as one would expect among marijuana enthusiasts, is soon lost in a warm, smoky haze. Or vapor, if I’m being literal.

The guidelines seem quite appropriate, to me. You may have differing opinions…

Interesting approach…

Remember the NHTSA study from last week that showed no significant increase in crash risk from using marijuana? It didn’t fit their narrative, so, while they had to release it, they did it on a Friday afternoon (in government terms, that’s called “putting it out with the trash”) in the hopes of getting decreased coverage, and then they used such weasel-wording in the release, that useful idiots like Ashley Halsey III managed to completely screw it up.

Contrast that with this tweet from Kevin Sabet today:

There will be a BIG study released from embargo tomorrow about marijuana. Stay tuned!

Whatever it is, it’s likely to be something negative about marijuana (even if it’s a bad study of the kind that has been regularly debunked before). They already know what the study says, but are waiting until Monday to release it, in order to get as much publicity mileage on it as possible.

Whatever you call this, it’s certainly not science.

Update: Yawn….

It turns out it’s more of the same psychosis nonsense, acting like links are the same as causation. The pure truth of the matter is that they keep coming up with this kind of “data” without knowing enough about psychosis to have a clue as to what caused it in any individual.

Update 2: Good analysis by Suzi Gage at the Guardian: So smoking skunk causes psychosis, but milder cannabis doesn’t?. She makes the point that this research could be useful if it wasn’t getting manipulated, exaggerated, and misstated by prohibitionists to be some kind of smoking gun against the normalization of cannabis use.

And, as Transform and others have noted, if anything this study may give more reasons for having regulated and legal cannabis, rather than having the black market control the structure of cannabis products.

Stolen from Twitter…

Roses are crispy,
Violets play hockey.
I’m thinking those mushrooms
Were not shiitake.

OK, so I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to refine various aspects of the site to adapt to changes in WordPress and the Atuahalpa Theme.

In order to adapt to interests of readers, I’ve added a few new throw pillows on the couch and cleaned a couple of the old ones.

1. The two buttons on the upper right of the screen are for subscribing to RSS feeds (usually using a news reader — I use Feeddler on my iPhone and iPad, and Vienna on my Mac). This allows you to see the posts and the comments within your newsreader without even coming to the website. There do seem to be problems with these buttons in some browsers. If you want to subscribe and are unable, let me know. The subscription addresses are: https://www.drugwarrant.com/feed/ (for posts) and https://www.drugwarrant.com/comments/feed/ for comments.

2. Some readers have been using those to see a list of recent posts or recent comments, without using a reader. I can’t guarantee that those buttons can work that way anymore.

I have, however, added a widget on the right side (just below the Google Ad) that shows the beginning of the 10 most recent comments regardless of post (clicking on them takes you to that comment), and links to the 7 most recent posts.

I can adjust the number of comments/posts shown, or the number of characters of the comment shown, so let me know if this is useful for you, and if you’d like any adjustments.

Tom Angell is unstoppable in his dogged determination to ask pointed questions of the powerful. Over at Marijuana.com, he discusses the Facebook chat conducted by NIDA’s Nora Volkow, where he got her to admit that there are barriers to research on marijuana.

This is why most people supporting the prohibition regime don’t like to get into public discussions. It’s very hard to maintain the lies under determined knowledgeable questioning.

Go to Tom’s article for more.

Richard Branson: Abolishing the death penalty

One area of particular concern to death penalty opponents like me is the so-called war on drugs. At least 32 countries still prescribe the death penalty for various drug offences. […]

One of these countries is Iran, which has in recent years seen a dramatic increase in drug-related death sentences and may execute more drug offenders than any other country in the world – over 300 people in 2014 alone. Most recently, Indonesia executed six drug offenders and plans to execute more – including the Australian leaders of the group known as the “Bali Nine” – in the coming weeks.

Both countries claim that executions are an important and effective deterrent. Nothing could be further from the truth. Drug use is a daily reality in Iran and Indonesia, with a dramatic increase in the illicit drug market observable especially in Indonesia. Tough law enforcement and draconian sentences, including executions, have failed entirely to change this status quo. Overall, there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that the death penalty has a deterrent effect on those using and trafficking drugs.

Like Branson, I am opposed to the death penalty in general, for a variety of practical and moral reasons. And to use it as a tool of prohibition seems somehow even more heinous, given the destruction caused by prohibition.

It’s an additional reason to push for legal regulation of drugs, and in the meantime, at the very least, we need to stop incentivizing it — which is what happens when we provide financial assistance to these countries for their drug war.