Drug WarRant

Michael C. Barnes is a Washington lawyer who formerly served as counsel in the Office of National Drug Control Policy. He wrote this OpEd in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution yesterday:
Don’t Get Sucked In By Hemp-Laced Foods
Notice the inflammatory language even in the headline with the word “laced.” And then he’s off:

Kudos to Georgia state senators who voted in favor of a bill to prevent the sale of marijuana-flavored candy. Members of the Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Committee realized that the availability of hemp candy on store shelves is harmful to our children and undermines Georgia’s anti-drug laws.
Senate Bill 511, which did not win final legislative approval this year, only scratched the surface. Next session’s bill must be more protective.
Hemp is low-potency cannabis, i.e., marijuana. Hemp products are being freely sold to anyone who walks into certain specialty food stores. These stores carry items such as cereals, salad dressings, protein powers and dietary supplements that contain small amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol ( THC ), a hallucinogenic substance. Anyone with a credit card can go online to purchase these same products.
The sale — and marketing — of hemp food products raises several concerns. First, medical research tells us that even low levels of THC can build up in the body’s tissues, posing particular health risks, including nerve impairment and hormone disruption, to developing fetuses, young children and teenagers.

That’s right. He’s going after hemp. One of the safest and most nutritious products available in the world, and due to government regulations already in place, if you were to actually find any THC, the amounts would be ridiculously low. “Nerve impairment and hormone disruption”? Reefer madness stuff. Somebody show me the science on those claims!
You see, the DEA already tried to ban hemp food products back in 2001 through a back-door regulatory move, damaging a lot of small businesses who import hemp foods from Canada. The hemp industry had to spend a lot of money fighting it in court, but they won, and in 2004, the DEA finally gave up, realizing that they didn’t have a case.

Second, any drug prevention message could easily get lost on young people if they think it is OK to buy cannabis products at a grocery store or online. Children are already experimenting with marijuana at a young age. According to a 2004 University of Michigan study, 16 percent of eighth-graders, 35 percent of 10th-graders and 46 percent of 12th-graders have admitted to using marijuana at least once during their lifetimes.

The usual. Anytime I hear the words “message to the children” I start putting on my bullshit boots. Eating hemp granola bars is going to cause kids to want to smoke marijuana. Right. No — what causes kids to want to smoke marijuana is: first of all, that they’re kids; second, that prohibition encourages the sale of drugs to children; and third, our current prohibition scheme makes it attractive. As Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said Monday in the Associated Press:

In fact, Volkow fears anti-drug programs that attempt to scare teens may inadvertently spur drug experimentation.
“It is that notion of ‘I dare you,'” she says. “It may be appealing to an adolescent because they are seeking for danger in many instances.”

And so, back to the stupid anti-hemp OpEd:

Third, efforts at random drug testing can be circumvented. High school students who undergo drug tests, for instance, or the nation’s 12 million safety-sensitive transportation employees who likewise undergo drug screenings, can defend a positive drug test by claiming ingestion of one of these hemp products. Several scientific studies ( one of which is published in the Journal of Toxicology, ) have shown that eating hemp foods can cause positive results in urine specimens.

And so can eating poppy seed muffins, or taking Ibuprofen, or getting novocaine at the Dentist. But quality drug testing systems can deal with that — there’s a difference between a positive test and one that clearly shows use — and it is (and should be) up to the drug testers to figure out how to tell and prove the difference. Otherwise, we’re going to have to outlaw a whole bunch of innocuous or useful products. Even eating large amounts of hemp foods has very minimal effect on drug testing, and most hemp food products today have much less THC than was assumed in that study.

Fourth, permitting foods that contain hemp to be marketed, sold and consumed in the United States creates a slippery slope to the dissolution of our nation’s anti-drug laws. The Congressional Research Service has reported that the pro-hemp movement is spurred by drug legalization advocates, including Jack Herrer and High Times magazine.

This is the part I always enjoy. When they come after us. But let’s take a look at the slippery slope: How long have poppy seed muffins been legal? Well, then, there must be legal opium dens everywhere now, right? Hmm… I’m having a hard time finding my neighborhood opium den.
If, in fact, there is a slippery slope between legal hemp and legal marijuana, it’s because, through awareness of hemp and its true value, some people may realize that the prohibitionists have been lying to them about the entire marijuana plant and all of its properties. This isn’t really a slippery slope — it’s more of a greasy, cover your ass, prohibitionists slope.

These advocates argue that if hemp can be marketed, sold and consumed in the United States, it should be cultivated in the United States. Where low-potency cannabis may be grown as hemp, high-potency cannabis can also be grown as a drug of abuse.

Yep, we do argue that first part. However, the second sentence is… stupid. Where low-potency cannabis may be grown as hemp, that’s the last place that you’d want to grow high-potency cannabis. Any farmer or other human being with a brain and an education will tell you that cross-pollenization would be disastrous for either one.

Public officials at all levels of government play a role in reducing the availability of cannabis in the United States. At the national level, the Food and Drug Administration must strictly enforce the current laws on the books; companies that include hemp in their food products are in direct violation of FDA regulations. At the state and local levels, willing legislative bodies, like the Georgia Senate, should adopt more thoroughly protective bills that ban all cannabis plant derivatives from grocery store shelves.

Actually no, the food products are not in any violation of FDA regulations. FDA food regulations were put in place to regulate chemical additives, not traditional herbal ingredients. And the court ruled that the portions of the plant used for hemp foods are not subject to FDA regulation under the Controlled Substances Act.

If no action is taken, we as a society, it seems, are implicitly endorsing the sale of cannabis and effectively rendering our nation’s drug laws obsolete.

Ah, if only.
You know, reading this article made me realize that I need to buy some more hemp. Shelled hemp seeds are extremely tasty and very high in nutrition, including Omega-3 fatty acids, which have been shown to be beneficial for the prevention of heart disease and cancer. And there are tons of other useful hemp products.
Here’s a quick buying guide I put together a little over a year ago. It may be a little out of date, but it’ll give you some suggestions of places to start looking.
Update: Oh, why am I not surprised by this? Take a look who Michael C. Barnes is in bed with.

A couple of readers have pointed out articles with connections to the drug war that you might find interesting.
“bullet” Who Rules the Medicine Cabinet discusses a potential class action suit in Canada to prevent schools from intimidating parents into making their children take drugs — provoked by the case of the 12 year old boy suspended from school when his mother refused to give him Ritalin.
“bullet” Of ‘generational wars’ old and new is a mixed bag in terms of structure, but there’s some fascinating (and scary) material regarding the use of drug war asset seizure money and homeland security grants to fund an increasingly comprehensive network of surveillance on American citizens. (I remember when “1984” was in the future.)

Luis R. Flores of DesMoines, Iowa agreed to help his cousin Felix Calderon. Felix was going to a shipping house to pick up some packages of marijuana that had been shipped to him, and Luis would keep an eye out and let him know by cell phone if he saw any police.
Felix accepted the shipment and the police grabbed him. They also grabbed Luis Flores in his truck for being a lookout.
Flores pleaded guilty to “aiding and abetting another in possessing a controlled substance” and got probation.
A month later the police tried to seize Flores’ $30,000 truck, a gun and $2,700 in cash. The courts shut them down, ruling that he had “played a relatively minor role.”
A month after that the Iowa Revenue department went after Flores for unpaid marijuana taxes on the shipment for which he had merely been lookout. The total bill: $181,677.00 (this would cause him to lose his home). And if he wants to fight the charge, he has to post a bond.
This isn’t about justice. It’s about going out of your way to destroy people.
Link

So now that purchases of medicines containing pseudoephedrine have to be purchased in the pharmacy, and forms have to be filled out and signed, how will that change enforcement?
Well, in Phoenix, the law’s been in effect since December, and those purchase log sheets got sent to the police, who dutifully read them to see if anyone was using the system to buy lots of pseudoephedrine, a little at a time. Sure enough, one name and address kept coming up. So the police went out to nab their meth lab.

Instead, they found a big family that had been racked by the flu.
The members of this family weren’t stocking up on pseudoephedrine. They were buying cold medicine.
“The way the log reads, the amount purchased can be deceiving,” Sherrard says. “All we see is that the mother’s name appeared four or five times — what it doesn’t tell you is that she’s buying Children’s Tylenol.”
(And if mom had wanted to make meth, five boxes of Children’s Tylenol was hardly going to do the trick.)
Needless to say, Sherrard says dryly, “we closed that case.”

Maybe next time, the police should bring some chicken soup with them.

The Drug Czar’s latest news release made me laugh out loud.

WHITE HOUSE DRUG POLICY BLOG RECIEVES [sic]
OVER ONE MILLION HITS
Federal Government’s Effort to Use New Technology as a Tool for Cultural Change Begins to Make an Impact
(Washington, D.C.)–John P. Walters, Director of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), today announced that www.PushingBack.com, the Federal Government’s first Web blog, has received over one million hits since going live in March of last year. Pushing Back was created to take advantage of the popularity of “blogging” to convey information about the latest National efforts to reduce the harms that illegal drugs cause to the United States. The blog provides daily updates on the White House “Drug Czar,” highlights community efforts that “push back” against drug use, and showcases new research that serves to inform policymakers and anti-drug leaders throughout America.

OK, that’s interesting. 1 million hits in a year. Well, he knows all about “blogging,” and he’s got the entire resources of the federal government, so why not? But of course, the actual statistical proof is not given.
So let’s see how realistic this is, by comparing John’s blog with mine. His has been up for a year. Mine for close to three years.
So let’s see what Google says about links to our blogs.
John’s blog: About 17 links (including Narcosphere, Stop the Drug War, Drug WarRant, Drug Policy Alliance, and an old parody blog of the ONDCP that I used to write. Pretty much the only pro-drug-war links to the site are from… the actual ONDCP. As far as I can tell, we’re the only ones reading him!)
My blog: About 4540 links.
OK. How about Technorati — the blog searching site?
John’s blog: 4 sites currently link with only 18 posts that linked to his blog in the last 298 days (mostly from us, of course).
My blog: 813 current links from 214 sites
So how many hits have I had? Well, that depends on what statistics you use — different systems come up with different results, depending on what they count (story pages and archives, etc.) In over 2 1/2 years, SiteMeter says I’ve gotten 493,225 page hits, and SalonBlogs says that I’ve gotten 815,617. That’s great! In fact, it’s pretty incredible for a single-issue blog that only covers drug policy.
But of course, the drug czar got a million hits in one year.
Right.
Come on, John. Show us the proof.
Who knows? It could be true. Maybe he sits at home clicking on the page over and over and over and over…

After deliberating more than 20 hours over the course of three days, jurors found that the deputies illegally detained and searched Arnetta McCloud, her then-15-year-old daughter, Cynthia, and a cousin, Marcus Frazier, in a midnight traffic stop and drug investigation that stretched for more than four hours in July, 2001.

The mother claimed that she was strip searched and that even her daughter was forced to pull down her pants for a female deputy.
Apparently there were six deputies involved in pulling the family over, detaining them, searching the car and their persons for drugs without finding any and then taking them to the home of relatives they were visiting and searching that residence.
The deputies’ defense?
1. On searching the relatives’ house:

Deputies said they did so only at the invitation of the McCloud parents. The family claims they were forced back to the home against their will…

The family invited them? After being strip searched? Right.
2. On making the 15-year-old drop her pants for a female deputy:

Former Leon County Sheriff’s Deputy Evelyn Anderson testified that she did not strip-search Arnetta or Cynthia McCloud, but she said she was surprised when the girl volunteered to lower her pants.

With her mother present, a 15-year-old girl volunteers to drop her pants. Right.
I’m surprised it took the jury 20 hours. Must have been to decide on the roughly $2 million in damages.

“bullet” Via TalkLeft and NORML
The Ohio House and Senate passed a per se “drugged driving” bill, that is expected to be signed by the Governor. A “per se” law is one that is “in and of itself” — in other words, by testing positive, the person is assumed to be intoxicated by definition, regardless of any actual effect or impairment (or lack thereof).
With marijuana, of course, since the metabolites stay in your system well beyond any effects, this is simply a way to go after marijuana smokers — it has absolutely nothing to do with safety on the roads.
“bullet” Cincinnati passes regressive pot law. The City Council on Wednesday passed an ordinance re-criminalizing marijuana possession with up to 30 days in jail and a $250 fine (as opposed to just a fine). According to Stop the Drug War:

The measure was pushed by Law & Public Safety Committee Chair Cecil Thomas, who argued that elevating marijuana possession to a misdemeanor would make it easier for police to arrest and search more people. But only certain people — Thomas said he did not expect police to target medical users or college students. “That’s not who they’ll be going after,” he said. “I’m not concerned about that because crime is occurring in our troubled neighborhoods.”

And, of course, we know what that’s code for.
“bullet” Then with my previous story, Ohio, on the take…
So again, I ask — What’s up with Ohio?

The stereotype of heavy pot smokers lacking motivation is fairly universal (think just about any movie with a stoner character). And yet, how true is it?
Fred Gardner at Counterpunch reports that a graduate study has been completed on that very subject, and while the article points out some of the limitations of the study, still it’s very interesting to discover that the conclusion was:

“Participants who used cannabis seven days a week demonstrated no difference from non-cannabis users on indices of motivation. These findings refute hypothesized associations between heavy cannabis use and low motivation”

Interesting.
Sure, we can all probably come up with the unmotivated stoner example, but if we thought about it, we could just as easily come up with the unmotivated non-smoker. And the reverse is also true — One of my top former students, who graduated with honors with a double major and several leadership positions in university organizations, later confided to me that he had smoked pot pretty much every day during his four years in college. Not something I’d recommend, and for some people it would be disastrous, but it does help show that marijuana by itself is not anti-motivational.

Via Tom and Dare Generation.
DEA head Karen Tandy responded to the Washington Post’s piece on Marc Emery with this letter.

A Drug Dealer’s Toll on Americans

Wednesday, March 29, 2006; Page A18

Marc Emery, who distributed millions of marijuana seeds throughout the country, admits the accuracy of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s charges against him, but he denies harming Americans [“High Crimes, or a Tokin’ Figure?” Style, March 18].
Like all dealers, Mr. Emery turns a blind eye to marijuana’s victims — people like Victoria Rogers, a mother driving with her children when she was killed by a marijuana-intoxicated motorist.
Marijuana feeds thousands of addictions — so many that more teenagers enter treatment for marijuana dependency than for all other drugs combined. Thousands of adolescents whose brains are still developing also suffer from depression, memory impairment and diminished judgment because of marijuana. Users destroy their lungs because marijuana smoke contains 50 to 70 percent more cancer-causing chemicals than tobacco smoke.
That Mr. Emery sees no consequences of his actions does not change the fact that they destroy innocent American lives and that he should and will face legal consequences as a result.
KAREN P. TANDY
Administrator
Drug Enforcement Administration
Arlington

Well, let’s take a closer look.
How about “Victoria Rogers… killed by a marijuana-intoxicated motorist.” I’ve seen this one used before, and the online record is a little sketchy. But what I’ve gathered is that a Thunderbird side-swiped a truck and then hit Victoria Rogers’ car, killing her. Also that there was some confusion or controversy over who was driving at the time of the accident. But let’s take a look at Karen Tandy’s own words from this speech:

Drug use causes tragic accidents on our roads, such as the one in Springfield, Ohio last February. One Saturday morning, a drugged driverÖhigh on a virtual drug cocktail of marijuana, cocaine, and opiatesÖstruck another car and killed a 31-year old mother, Victoria Rogers

Now that’s a little different than a “marijuana-intoxicated motorist,” isn’t it? It’s like saying someone who had a six-pack of beer and a bag of potato chips was a “Ruffles-intoxicated motorist.” Sure, marijuana can cause impairment, but all the studies show that it’s extremely mild and actually increases caution.
Karen Tandy, in her letter, gives us some pretty amazing proof. Here we have the head of the Drug Enforcement Agency, with all the resources of the federal government at her disposal, and tons of government records, with staff to sort through them and analyze and compile data. And the best example she can come up with for the danger of marijuana is a complex crash with a driver that had also taken cocaine and opiates? This is practically a neon sign flashing “Marijuana is safe.”
Next part:

Marijuana feeds thousands of addictions — so many that more teenagers enter treatment for marijuana dependency than for all other drugs combined. Thousands of adolescents whose brains are still developing also suffer from depression, memory impairment and diminished judgment because of marijuana. Users destroy their lungs because marijuana smoke contains 50 to 70 percent more cancer-causing chemicals than tobacco smoke.

OK, I’ve done these before, but let’s have at them.

1. …addictions… The Institute of Medicine found that marijuana was not physically addictive and had dependency rates far lower than any other drug, including alcohol and tobacco.
2. …more teenagers enter treatment… See Treatment Statistics, or The Drug Czar is Lying to You
3. …depression… See Marijuana users less depressed
4. … memory impairment… Most intoxicants, including alcohol, can cause some memory impairment. It seems clear that marijuana causes short term memory impairment, but beyond that, there are lots of conflicting studies.
5. … diminished judgment… This is code for “marijuana will make you have sex” and is much more likely to be true from alcohol.
6. … cancer causing chemicals… Note that she doesn’t say “marijuana causes cancer.” That’s because it doesn’t. Everything has cancer causing chemicals in it, but it takes a whole lot of complex things to happen for cancer to occur. And no study has yet been able to find any causal link between marijuana and cancer. Zero.

Karen Tandy is just continuing to use the standard tired, discredited propaganda.
Also, don’t forget that when the DEA told their subordinates (the Canadian police) to arrest Marc, Karen bragged about how his arrest would cut down on funding for the legalization movement:

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on.

And of course, it’s so appropriate in our democracy to have government agencies gloating about cracking down on political speech.

Now I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but… As someone who has studied drug policy for years and the Bill of Rights most of my life, I continue to be astounded by people who fail to understand the concept and importance of rights in a free country that is run by the people.
I see the same stupidity over and over again.

• People who have never read (or understood) the quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
• People who fail to realize that giving up liberty doesn’t even work in terms of providing safety.
• People who think that rights are for criminals, when in fact they are for citizens, and to give them up is to give up government by the people.
• People who one day will find themselves accused of something they didn’t do and wonder what went wrong.

Check out Bruce P. Murchison – a political science teacher who needs to go back to school and re-take the constitution test.

By reclassifying all drug dealers and gang members as domestic terrorists, the Patriot Act could be utilized to rid our great state of these thugs. Currently, many of these criminals are being freed due to loopholes in the law. The Patriot Act would make it easier to round up and neutralize this destructive group.
Of course, the American Civil Liberties Union and its allies would decry this as an infringement on the terrorists’ “rights.”
While the ACLU has done some good in keeping the government at bay in some instances, it needs to rethink its position on this issue. Remember, giving aid and comfort to the enemy is a crime, also. It’s called treason.

I think the ACLU would also object to us dropping a nuclear bomb on Arizona. The difference is that the bomb would actually eliminate drug distribution in the state, whereas your approach wouldn’t. You wouldn’t object, would you, Bruce? I mean, you wouldn’t be wanting to give aid and comfort to the enemy by objecting to us dropping the bomb, would you? It’s called treason.
I can’t believe that a teacher has his head so far up his ass that he actually sees:

1. Violating the Constitution of the United States and taking away the rights of individuals is a good idea.
2. The ACLU standing up for the Constitution of the United States is treasonous.

Now when it comes to the ACLU, I haven’t always agreed with all of their decisions and emphases, but overall the notion of an organization that has, as its primary mission, protecting the Bill of Rights is incredibly useful and important. When I hear people bash the ACLU, I am reminded of the speech given by President Shepherd in The American President

For the record, yes, I am a card carrying member of the ACLU, but the more important question is “Why aren’t you, Bob?” Now this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question, why would a senator, his party’s most powerful spokesman and a candidate for President, choose to reject upholding the constitution? Now if you can answer that question, folks, then you’re smarter than I am, because I didn’t understand it until a few hours ago.
America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.” You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

Stirring and patriotic words.
Which brings me to another idiot. Jay Stephenson has made a crusade out of bashing the ACLU with his Stop the ACLU blog.
Due to an erroneous news report, he mistakenly believed that the outstanding DVD Busted (it really is outstanding — get a copy and show it to everyone you know), made by our good friends at Flex Your Rights was instead made by the ACLU. So he lit into it with his post ACLU Teaching Children How to Be Good Criminals.
He seemed to have the odd notion that it was OK for people to know their rights (imagine my relief!), but we shouldn’t really tell people their rights without some kind of obligatory “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” or “Drugs are bad, mmkay” message attached.

So remember people, the best way to avoid getting busted by the authorities is to do the responsible thingánot break the law. And the best way to avoid responsibility is to call the ACLU. With all the terrorists they are defending they are sure to find some kind of loop hole for a measly bag of grass.

His big complaint was that the video served to help people who were breaking the law (smoking pot, for example) evade getting caught.
Well, Jay, has anyone ever told you to be careful not to speed on a particular stretch of road because the police have a speed trap there? Isn’t that evading your responsibility to follow the law? After all, you don’t ever actually break the law by going over the speed limit…. Do you? (And before you say that’s silly and you can’t compare the two, consider that many more people have been killed by speeding than by smoking pot.)
So yes. Just like we warn friends that the cops like to catch speeders at a particular place, we inform our friends of their rights when it comes to drugs. After all, if we care enough about our friends to want them not to get a $100 speeding ticket, wouldn’t we want them not to end up in prison for pot possession? How are these different?
Until we can get rid of these unjust laws, we can at least help some people avoid their destructive effects. 110 million Americans over age 12 (46% of the population) are drug criminals (have used an illegal drug at some point in their lives). Some will get caught and end up ass raped in jail. Others won’t get caught and will become Senator or President.
So when it comes to considering showing a film like “Busted,” I suppose you do have a choice of deciding which future your audience deserves (and just maybe Jay and Bruce shouldn’t watch it).