Drug WarRant

This is a rallying call, and it’s one challenge we’re ready to meet.
Radley is right.

Consider this a challenge. If you blogged about Raich today, give us at least three posts a week for the next three months aimed at making Hinchey-Rohrabacher and the Truth in Trials Act law. Let’s find out what Congressmen are standing in either bill’s way. Let’s shame them. Let’s pursuade those on the fence to come down off of it. If you lean Republican, and your Congressman is a GOPer who has voted against bills like these, explain their hypocrisy to them. Ask them what happened to federalism, the Tenth Amendment, and the right of states to set their own rules and policies when it comes to medical treatment.

I’ll take the pledge.
And for those of you who aren’t bloggers? Same thing goes. Here’s how you can find out how your Congressperson voted in 2003 and 2004 (An ‘Aye’ vote is good — means stop spending federal money to harrass patients in states where medical marijuana has been legalized by the state. A ‘No’ vote means to continue to go after medical marijuana patients.)
Once you find out, write them and either encourage them to continue voting Aye or change from No to Aye. If they voted No in the past, also write a letter to your paper, wondering why your Congressperson wants to waste your community’s tax dollars by going after sick people in California, and encourage a change in vote. Or, if you live in California or one of the medical marijuana states, ask why your Congressperson doesn’t care about the laws and the will of the people of their own state — do they care more about Washington DC than [your local town]?
We’ve waited for too many months hoping for the Supreme Court to solve our problems with Congress’ Reefer Madness. We have to make it clear now that we will no longer allow them to act this way — and we need the active and loud support of ordinary people.
We also need to continue to apply pressure on the re-scheduling efforts (which includes peripheral efforts like ASA’s challenge of HHS under the Data Quality Act). This is particularly important since the Raich decision did leave some potential warnings by the court…
Again from Radley, via Mark Moller at Cato:

Stevens, in footnote 37, suggests that “evidence proferred by respondents . . . if found credible after trial, would cast serious doubt on the accuracy of the findings that require marijuana to be listed in Schedule I.” I think that’s a clear signal to lower courts to give a serious hearing to any medical marijuana proponents seeking review of a DEA reclassification hearing under the current Controlled Substances Act–and a warning to the DEA to take those arguments seriously.

Interesting.
And while I’m touting Radley’s coverage of Raich (which has been outstanding), I’ve got to say that I agree with his criticism of Raich coverage from portions of the left. Shameful.

COURT’S RULING ON MARIJUANA REEKS OF ‘REEFER MADNESS’

… The Court’s 6-3 decision was a stretched interpretation of the clause in the Constitution that gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce.

Under Monday’s ruling, growing marijuana at home for medicinal purposes, with no money changing hands, is somehow now a form of interstate commerce. It makes you wonder what the majority was smoking. As Justice Clarence Thomas said in his dissenting opinion, “If Congress can regulate this … under the commerce clause, then it can regulate virtually anything.”

That warning ought to be a rallying cry for conservative members of Congress elected under the banner of small government and respect for states rights. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the court’s majority, told Monson, Raich and anyone in a similar fix that their recourse is to get Congress to change the 1970 federal law that bans possession or distribution of marijuana.

Given the “reefer madness” in Washington that has led to an overemphasis on marijuana prosecutions in the war on drugs, the prospects for early congressional action seem remote. In the meantime, surely federal prosecutors and drug-control agents have better things to do than to swoop down on critically ill people who are abiding by state law and haul them off to court.

So for weeks now, I’ve been arranging my work schedule to be around at the time when decisions were announced. But today, no. This trip to New York had been scheduled for over a year, and naturally the Supremes decided to release it today.
So then, I spent all day in an airplane on the ground parked in O’Hare airport waiting for clearance to LaGuardiia. Finally made it to my hotel room.
I’m exhausted, and don’t feel like discussing Raich today. Sorry. Please feel free to continue to discuss in the comments.
Since I missed the opportunity to give the quick response, I’ll take my time reading the decision and comment in greater detail later this week.
However, a couple of quick notes:

• Raich was always only one effort among many in this, and it served to give a lot of publicity to the issue.
• We must go after Congress. Period. They have the power to change all of this. Which means grassroots support. Which means people talking. It means supporting the States’ Rights to Medical Marijuana Act and similar provisions.
• Remember that this ruling does not invalidate any of the current or future state medical marijuana laws. It only means the Feds can go back to looking really silly locking up sick people.
• We’ve got a lot more work to do.

Today is a possible day for the Supreme Court to hand down an opinion on Raich v. Ashcroft.
Unfortunately, at that time I will be on a bus, and then in an airport, and then on a plane to New York. So I probably will not be able to give you updates in as quick a manner as you have come to expect.
So, head over to SCOTUSblog for the freshest Supreme Court news. They’ll post the information on what decisions are handed down by about 10:30 am Eastern (they blog live, so watch for their post to change as more decisions are released).
Then use this as an open Raich thread. If Raich comes down today, you can bet I’ll be blogging about it tonight from NY.

Well, I’m off to New York, taking about 80 folks for a week of Theatre and walking tours. Should be a good, and exhausting, time. We’re seeing 6 shows (and every one of them won at least one Tony award last night- can I pick them or what?) Posting will be light during the next week. I’ll be checking email when I can, so continue to send me stuff.

At LewRockwell.com:
A Letter to My Friend Who Supports the Drug War by James Muhm
Nicely organized points.

[Link]

The Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil, aged 62, said that he smoked marijuana until he was 50. In addition he defended the decriminalization of drug’s consumption.
Gil took part in a press conference with journalists of Folha de SÑo Paulo on Monday (May, 30). During the interview the Brazilian minister asked:”Why do they [drugs] should be forbidden?” He added that the drugs problem should be handled as a matter of public health.

What? An honest politician?

Out of Joint by Jeff Hornaday, in today’s New Times San Luis Obispo. It’s a really wonderful article about a man and his dad, searching for answers to deal with his severe medical problems.

Dad tried about every combination of prescription and over-the-counter drugs we could get away with, including Vicodin, Oxycontin, Dilaudid, and a host of other dangerous narcotics.

But then Dad got real cloudy in the head. I can’t say whether the drugs did anything to alleviate his pain, because it was so hard to get a straight answer out of him, even when he was awake – which was seldom.

Pretty soon Dad’s side effects got even worse. He developed severe constipation, which led to an incarcerated umbilical hernia, several trips to ER, and, well, you get the idea.

Where to turn?

That’s when it hit me: magic brownies. A few days later we whipped up a delicious batch of Alice B. Toklas brownies (my 64-year-old dad prefers that term to the derogatory “pot brownies”), and he ate them with gusto. It was the best night’s sleep he’d had in weeks, and now no evening meal is complete without his chocolate brownie.

Nobody claims that we’ve found the panacea to eliminate my dad’s spasms, tremors, and chronic pain – we’re still searching for alternatives – but with the cannabis cookies, he already sleeps better and consumes far fewer pharmaceuticals. And the only side effect: euphoria.

The article continues with the trials of getting the medicine that helps his dad. I really enjoyed it the whole story.
And it brought back to mind one of my frustrations… no. It brought to mind how pissed off I get at the drug warriors and their arguments against medical marijuana:

• A cruel hoax
• Insufficient medical evidence…
• Medicines are supposed to cure you, not just make you feel good

Bull.
Here’s the story. Marijuana (as it’s being used by medical marijuana patients) has never been touted as a cure for disease. It’s not like laetrile – a drug that was touted to have the ability to cure cancer, and was widely believed to be dangerous quackery because people would follow that course of treatment instead of ones that had scientific support.
While there is promising research on the ability of marijuana extracts or chemicals to be used to cure a variety of illnesses, smoked medical marijuana is generally used not as a cure, but for the relief of symptoms… eg., relief of pain or nausea or to stimulate appetite.
Whereas there was the need to “prove” that laetrile could cure cancer in order to justify allowing it as a form of treatment, there is no such need in proving relief of symptoms. The proof is self-evident. You have pain and you take something and the pain stops. You have nausea and you take something and the nausea stops. You have wasting syndrome and you take something and your appetite increases. If it doesn’t work, then you try something else. For very many people, marijuana works. Period. If it was a sugar pill that you took and it made your pain go away, then fine, take a sugar pill.
But the drug prohibitionist says, “Oh, you feel better? Well, that’s a cruel hoax.”
No. It’s truth. It can be nothing else.
The whole notion that medicine is supposed to cure you is ridiculous. Sure, that would be nice, but a great portion of the pharmaceutical field is just there to change how you feel. If you feel better, then the other treatments you are pursuing for a cure are more likely to work. Or maybe your pain is not curable, but the medicine makes you feel better so you’re able to have an active life.
If a substance works to relieve symptoms, then all that remains is whether that substance is dangerous. Clearly marijuana is safer than any other drug that the doctors will prescribe for you.
The only cruel hoax is telling patients that they must not use a safe treatment that eases their pain.

First there was this bizarre article about how Andrea Barthwell and John Pastuovic (who just happen to represent GW Pharmaceuticals, makers of the liquid version of marijuana called Sativex¬) happened to offer their services to promote drug testing in a school in Virginia.
Then Charles Darlington responded in a very well-written letter.
Well, yesterday, the paper printed a letter by… DeForest Rathbone, Chairman, National Institute of Citizen Anti-drug Policy.
Wow — they brought out the big guns. Except I had never heard of him or of National Institute of Citizen Anti-Drug Policy (would that be NICAP?) So I did a little research. Well, it’s definitely not NICAP. Turns out DeForest and his organization have been around for some time (although they’re a bit slow in developing their own web site), advocating for DeForest’s personal obsession — having young children pee for them.
Rathbone was involved in the Supreme Court case that allowed additional drug testing in schools. In reference to that hearing, he said, “Thanks be to almighty God, who has guided us, protected us and comforted us in this effort.” Apparently God is also in favor of peeing in a cup to prevent people from using one of His plants. Rathbone’s group also worked with Mark Souder to sneak a provision into a 700 page education bill that allows block grants for drug testing. As reported by Mark Boal in Rolling Stone Magazine:

It was months before anybody in the drug reform movement noticed it was there. “We snuck it by those druggie liberals!” gloats Rathbone.

“Druggie” appears to be Deforest’s favorite word.
So now that we know who he is — back to the letter in yesterday’s paper.

We also agree with Barthwell that smoked pot will never be anything other than another snake-oil medicine to cheat desperate sick people. That is also our rationale for defeating the Illinois bill to virtually legalize smoked pot as medicine, which was proposed by drug legalizers. It is not hypocrisy to support the official evaluation of Sativex by FDA while opposing unapproved smoked pot snake-oil medicine.

It is also a phony claim that Barthwell ducks public debate on so-called “drug law reform.” She and I and many other drug prevention activists are more than willing to debate drug legalizers and their legal profession supporters at any time, […]

So what else have we learned here?

• Rathbone also likes to say “snake-oil.”
• Despite his apparent friendship with Andrea Barthwell, he hasn’t discussed debating with her recently. Ever since she got her ass handed to her on the Montel show, she’s avoided any kind of debate.
• Rathbone has had some run-ins with the “legal profession.”

Of course, he never addressed the real issues that Darlington brought up in his letter, but that’s par for the course.
But I appreciate his letter. For now I feel like I know one more character in this circus.

… and gain an additional $2.4 billion to $6.2 billion if they taxed it. That’s a budget swing of close to $14 billion a year at a time when we’re broke.
The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition, by Boston University professor of economics Jeffrey A. Miron (June 2005)
Check out the long list of economists who have endorsed this letter:

An Open Letter to the President, Congress, Governors, and State Legislatures

We, the undersigned, call your attention to the attached report by Professor Jeffrey A. Miron, The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition. The report shows that marijuana legalization — replacing prohibition with a system of taxation and regulation — would save $7.7 billion per year in state and federal expenditures on prohibition enforcement and produce tax revenues of at least $2.4 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like most consumer goods. If, however, marijuana were taxed similarly to alcohol or tobacco, it might generate as much as $6.2 billion annually.

The fact that marijuana prohibition has these budgetary impacts does not by itself mean prohibition is bad policy. Existing evidence, however, suggests prohibition has minimal benefits and may itself cause substantial harm.

We therefore urge the country to commence an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition. We believe such a debate will favor a regime in which marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other goods. At a minimum, this debate will force advocates of current policy to show that prohibition has benefits sufficient to justify the cost to taxpayers, foregone tax revenues, and numerous ancillary consequences that result from marijuana prohibition.

Update: Forbes has the story this morning.

MILTON FRIEDMAN: LEGALIZE IT!

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – A founding father of the Reagan Revolution has put his John Hancock on a pro-pot report.

Milton Friedman leads a list of more than 500 economists from around the U.S. who today will publicly endorse a Harvard University economist’s report on the costs of marijuana prohibition and the potential revenue gains from the U.S. government instead legalizing it and taxing its sale. […]

At 92, Friedman is revered as one of the great champions of free-market capitalism during the years of U.S. rivalry with Communism. He is also passionate about the need to legalize marijuana, among other drugs, for both financial and moral reasons.

“There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana,” the economist says, “$7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven’t even included the harm to young people. It’s absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.” […]

“I’ve long been in favor of legalizing all drugs,” he says, but not because of the standard libertarian arguments for unrestricted personal freedom. “Look at the factual consequences: The harm done and the corruption created by these laws…the costs are one of the lesser evils.”

Nice. When you get people of the stature of Milton Friedman talking about legalization in Forbes… Well then maybe a few more people will sit up and realize “Hey, this isn’t just about some stoned hippies — there appears to be more to it.”