Drug WarRant

Stupid laws.
Langley City, BC

Sell a glass crack pipe or bong in Langley City and you’ll have to tell police who you sold it to, including the person’s name and address. […]
If the bylaw receives final reading, the retail sellers of hash pipes and bongs will be required to ask ID of all their purchasers. The owner then has to record and report all information of the buyers. The information given to police can be hand-delivered to the detachment or sent via fax or e-mail the day of the sale.

At least they don’t have a five-day waiting period.
Hmmm… I wonder what the police will do with that information?

Brian Doherty (of Reason Magazine) explains in today’s LA Times how little effect the changed drug law in Mexico would have had, and notes the U.S. Government’s disproportionate response, concluding with:

Americans angry about Mexican immigration complain that the country is exporting its troubles to us. In fact, with our drug-war bullying, we’re exporting our enforcement troubles back to Mexico, adding to the problems that make so many people want to come here to begin with.
The White House’s disproportionate panic can’t be explained by any actual damage the law could have caused. Maybe U.S. drug warriors realized that if we saw firsthand, right across the border, just how unnecessary are the laws against drug possession, the futility of making 1.7 million drug arrests each year would be exposed, and that’s never a happy thought for any bureaucrat. In Amsterdam, where pot, hash and mushrooms can be sold freely in certain shops, surveyed use of most drugs is lower than in the United States, illustrating that legalization does not equal everyone getting high. The social order still stands.
Experienced drug users have an ethic: You don’t force other people on your trip against their will. Pity that U.S. drug policymakers can’t be that sensible.

The U.S. Government has worked very hard to export its drug war around the world. Not only to protect the drug war itself, but to use it as a tool to control or influence other countries. This fact made DEA head Karen Tandy’s opening remarks at the DEA conference in Montreal earlier this week seem especially chilling to me.

We have come a long way in 24 years. It is staggering to think that back then, we all fit around a single conference table. And look at us now. [..]
We have amassed the largest IDEC contingent ever with 76 countries. Stretching from the southern tip of Africa to northern Europe to the Far East, 7 new countries became members this year, (Afghanistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa and United Kingdom) and 6 are joining us for the first time ever (Denmark, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan, Sweden, UAE and Vietnam).

Although there are countries (particularly in Europe) willing to begin to stand up to U.S. drug-war bullying, it’s a tough thing to do, particularly when you face both the unfair label of being soft on drugs, and pressure from the world’s superpower.

I was browsing through the DAWN report, and I came across the somewhat startling notation that marijuana was the 2nd most implicated illicit drug in drug-related suicide attempts.
Wow, I thought — who are all these people who are trying to commit suicide by marijuana? It’s a pretty tough challenge since nobody has ever died from an overdose of marijuana. It would be like committing suicide by drinking water. Oh, wait, you actually can overdose from water (you’d have to drink almost a gallon all at once), while you can’t fatally overdose from marijuana.
But of course nobody is actually attempting suicide by bong. The way DAWN works is that if you swallow a bottle of sleeping pills and smoke a joint, that’s a marijuana-related suicide attempt. Or if you smoked a joint yesterday and today you jump off a bridge, that’s a marijuana-related suicide attempt.
It’s really hard to understand how DAWN has any meaning at all. Let’s go to the DAWN report:

Suicide Attempts
DAWN estimates 121,585 (CI: 108,955 to 134,215) ED visits for drug-related suicide attempts in 2004 (Table 15).
It is important to remember that DAWN includes only those suicide attempts that involve drugs, but these attempts are not limited to overdoses. Also included are persons who attempt suicide by other means (e.g., by gun) when drugs are involved. Excluded are suicide attempts not involving drugs (e.g., by gun alone) and those documented as something other than an attempt (e.g., suicide ideation, gesture, thought, and so forth).
Nearly two-thirds of ED visits for drug-related suicide attempts involved multiple drugs (64%) (Table 16). Alcohol was the most frequently implicated drug and was involved in nearly a third (31%) of the ED visits for drug-related suicide attempts. Since DAWN excludes visits for adults when alcohol is the only drug, the role of alcohol in suicide
attempts is probably larger. The most frequent illicit drugs were cocaine (11% of visits) and marijuana (8% of visits), but the margins of error for the illicit drugs are quite large and the numbers are relatively small when compared with the pharmaceuticals.

There’s no indication as to whether they count you if your head explodes from reading the DAWN report.

It’s that time again — it’s DAWN — the Drug Abuse Warning Network. Their latest report is out, and as the results are manipulated and analyzed, you’ll start to hear dire reports in the media about how some drug or another is particularly of concern in connection to emergency room visits.
The full 80 page pdf report is available here (Thanks to The Drug Update for the link).
You need to go to page 61 of the report to really understand how this works.

Under the current methodological design, medical charts for all ED visits within the selected hospitals are reviewed retrospectively to find the drug-related cases for submission to DAWN. DAWN includes ED visits associated with substance abuse and drug misuse, both intentional and accidental. DAWN also includes ED visits related to the use of drugs for legitimate therapeutic purposes. To be a DAWN case, a drug needs only to be implicated in the visit; the drug does not need to have caused the visit. Only recent drug use is included; the reason a patient used the drug is irrelevant, and the case criteria are broad enough to encompass all types of drug-related events, which include, but are not limited to, explicit drug abuse. This approach, which finds ED visits related to drug abuse only indirectly, recognizes that medical records (the source of DAWN data) frequently lack explicit documentation of substance abuse, and distinctions between use, misuse, and abuse of drugs are often subjective.
DAWN uses the data from the visits classified as DAWN cases in the selected hospitals to calculate various estimates of drug-related visits for the Nation as a whole, as well as for specific metropolitan areas. To calculate these estimates and measure their precision, the DAWN survey requires the application of sampling and weighting
methodologies. [emphasis added]

It then goes on for seven pages to describe how the results are tweaked in the attempt to provide representative data based on the hospitals that were selected.
Now it’s possible that there is useful information that can somehow be gained from such an analysis.
However, unlike the conclusions sometimes drawn in news reports, what DAWN does NOT demonstrate is any connection between the use of a drug and the likelihood that it will send you to the emergency room.

Syndicated columnist Froma Harrop has a nice OpEd out today:

America’s war on drugs is actually a Raid on Taxpayers. The war costs an estimated $70 billion a year to prosecute, and the drugs keep pouring in. But while the War on Drugs may have failed its official mission, it is a great success as a job-creation program. Thousands of drug agents, police, detectives, prosecutors, judges, anti-drug activists, prison guards and their support staffs can thank the program for their daily bread and health benefits.
The American people are clearly not ready to decriminalize cocaine, heroine or other hard drugs, but they’re well on their way to easing up on marijuana. A Zogby poll found that nearly half of Americans now want pot legal and regulated, like alcohol. Few buy into the “demon drug” propaganda anymore, and for a simple reason: Several countries have decriminalized marijuana with little effect on public health.
Americans could save a ton of money doing the same. …

I’ve talked about the case of 17-year-old Mitchell Lawrence who got a 2 year prison sentence for selling a teaspoon of pot to an undercover officer in a “school zone.”
Drug Policy Alliance is unveiling a new flash presentation about the case today. It’s a good one, with some startling statistics, including:

• 98% of people arrested in “Drug-Free School Zones” weren’t selling drugs to children.
• 95% of all sales aren’t near any schools, and most of those arrested didn’t even know they were in a so-called school zone
• 97% of all people arrested in “Drug-Free Zones” aren’t white.

It’s good to see this case generating some heat against out-of-control prosecutors.

In the Letters section of today’s Wall Street Journal, Souder responds to an earlier article:

Mary O’Grady argues that we will never eradicate drug use. One wonders what other vices Ms. O’Grady proposes we surrender to. Child abuse? Spousal abuse? Rape? We may never eradicate any of these crimes either, but that doesn’t mean that we simply give up on them.
Not coincidentally, by the way, all of those crimes, and many others, are frequently linked to drug and alcohol abuse. It’s a tired old canard that drug abuse is a victimless crime.
Furthermore, where is the evidence that legalizing and taxing a substance causes organized crime to disappear? It sure didn’t after Prohibition — criminals just no longer focused on alcohol. Unless everything is legalized, including cocaine and heroin, of course the thugs would merely move to the more potent substances. Where does it end?

Tired old arguments devoid of logic.
Comparing drug use to rape? Oh, yeah, and this is from the guy who made a law denying financial aid to anyone with a drug conviction, but not if they were convicted of child abuse, spousal abuse, or rape.
Take his first statement above and try replacing “drug use” with “having sex” or “eating dessert” or “dancing,” and you’ll see how devoid of logic is his statement. And comparing it with other “crimes” as a reason to keep it a crime is circular reasoning.
Note also how he conflates “drug use” (first paragraph) with “drug abuse” (second paragraph).
Then, in his final paragraph, he uses some pretty dishonest arguments. First, he implies a lack of any value in legalization’s affect on organized crime unless organized crime disappears completely, ignoring a potential reduction in organized crime, ignoring the reduced profits available to criminals, and ignoring the reduced incentive for new players to enter the criminal world. Second, the notion of “thugs” merely moving on to more potent substances makes no sense unless legalization of marijuana would create a dramatically increased demand for those substances (otherwise there would be a glut of criminals working in the same arena). [Of course, we know that those substances should also be legal and regulated to reduce crime and the danger of unregulated drugs.]
For a much better letter than Mark’s, read David Bergland’s on the same page, which includes this list of the “unintended and undesirable consequences of criminalizing drugs”:

1. The price of the illegal commodity is higher than it would be in a legal, competitive, market. High black-market prices encourage low-level crime. Unlike alcohol and tobacco users, illegal drug users commit crimes to raise the funds to buy their high-price drugs.
2. Peaceful drug users, by definition, become criminals, ruining the lives of those prosecuted and thus stigmatized.
3. High black-market drug profits attract the most ruthless and violent criminals to the business. Alcohol prohibition created organized crime. Today’s drug prohibition keeps it going.
4. The illegal drug market corrupts the criminal justice system as cops, courts and prison guards find it hard to resist getting in on the high returns.
5. Law enforcement becomes more expensive for the taxpayer and is misdirected away from violent crime.
6. The products in illegal markets are of lower quality and more likely to contain impurities than they would be if legal, thus endangering consumers. No “truth in labeling” here.
7. Unnecessary illness and death result. Users spending money on high-priced drugs ignore their health. They share needles, spreading AIDS and other diseases. Cancer and MS sufferers are deprived of pain-relieving marijuana.
8. Competition in the illegal drug market is based on violence, not peaceful competition under the rule of law. Thousands of murders every year occur as a result.
9. The War on Drugs is a war on civil liberties. Your property may be seized without trial on a mere allegation that it was used in a drug deal.
10. The Drug War is racist. Although minorities use drugs at about the same rate as whites, they make up a greatly disproportionate percentage of those prosecuted and convicted.

Well said.

I have often complained that neither side of the political spectrum has been willing to consider reform in any serious way, despite the fact that drug policy reform is a benefit to both traditional conservative and traditional liberal goals.
While that’s still true in the traditional party structure, the internet is changing everything.
We’re already seeing that the blogosphere has the burgeoning capability of revolutionizing political structures (particularly on the left), with the power of sites like Daily Kos (and Markos’ successful Crashing the Gate.
And we have Glenn Greenwald (who has demonstrated a strong anti-drug-war viewpoint — see here and here) taking the internet and the publishing world by storm, with the unprecedented runaway pre-sales of his book How Would a Patriot Act, which was marketed only on the blogs.
This could lead one to believe that the issues that become part of the conversation on the internet have the potential to demand a much larger hearing.
This brings us to a post at Eschaton today that struck me as remarkably important.
Atrios, responding to Kevin Drum, noted:

But I think the “liberal netroots” does have a fairly clear consensus on a number of issues. I’m not going to claim every liberal blogger or blog reader agress with everything on this list – that’d be ridiculous – but nonetheless I’d say there’s a pretty obvious general consensus on the following:

…and included in that list was:

Leave the states alone on issues like medical marijuana. Generally move towards “more decriminalization” of drugs, though the details complicated there too.

“Obvious general consensus.” Of course, such a weak statement has been obvious to us all along, but to see this listed in one of the top-read liberal blogs as being part of the obvious general consensus of the liberal netroots is pretty impressive.
This has to have been due, in no small part, to the constant efforts of all the drug policy reform organizations and individuals who have worked so hard to educate the internet community (and has made the internet almost exclusively the dominion of reform).
Now of course, there is also strong drug policy reform sentiment among the conservative blogosphere, although in recent years many of the former freedom-loving conservative factions (such as conservative libertarians) have all-too-willingly ceded power to the big-brother, big-government social conservatives. Additionally, the conservative blogosphere has not yet shown an ability to challenge the traditional party platform and structure. But I still have hope there as well.

Link

NEW YORK, May 8 (UPI) — In a preliminary study, U.S. researchers failed to find damage to the developing adolescent brain had occurred in those who had used marijuana moderately.
Lynn DeLisi and colleagues from the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research and New York University School of Medicine used diffusion tensor imaging to scan the brain of 10 young people who had smoked cannabis during adolescence.
The participants were between 17 and 30 years old, and they said they had smoked at least two to three times a week for one or more years during adolescence and had no personal or family history of mental-health problems.
The study subjects were matched for sex, age and social class of parents with 10 controls who had not smoked marijuana regularly as teenagers.
DeLisi and colleagues found no significant differences in brain integrity and brain volume between cannabis smokers and non-smokers, but the study authors warn more research is necessary, both in a larger group of people and to see the effects of heavier use.
The findings are published in Harm Reduction Journal.

It’s important to note that this is preliminary and not comprehensive enough to rule out damage to adolescents completely, but this is interesting — particularly as the drug warriors are currently fond of claiming exactly this kind of damage.
It’s also important to note that the drug warrior argument that marijuana causes damage to adolescent brains is a red herring — marijuana legalizers generally do not favor unrestricted use of marijuana by adolescents (some kind of age restrictor is usually advocated). And legalization actually would likely reduce the use of marijuana by adolescents, given the experience in other countries and the better ability to create age restrictions for legal products.

It’s the last weekend of the semester, and I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do today, so talk amongst yourselves. Here’s some interesting reading…
“bullet” For an entertaining rant, read Kent Welton’s Drug Pogrom – On The Cruel, Fascist, Idiocy Of Prohibition II

The People who drink grains are in the statehouse while the people who smoke plants are in the jailhouse. Does this make any sense?
What we have with the war on drugs is clearly a pogrom. A pogrom is defined as “an organized massacre of helpless people.” A drug war carried on by self-righteous, grain-drinking, zealots against hapless and non-violent plant smokers surely qualifies as a pogrom… not to mention a massive violation of human and natural rights.

“bullet” In the New York Times, John Tierney compares Rush Limbaugh with Richard Paey (Times Select article, also available here or here)
“bullet” Lester Grinspoon (author of “Marijuana, the Forbidden Medicine”) takes on the FDA in Puffing is the Best Medicine.
“bullet” thehim posts a letter to Calvina Fay over at the The General (for those not familiar with Jesus’ General, it’s a site that mocks morons by pretending to agree with them)