Drug WarRant

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.

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.