Drug WarRant

A ghoulish shade from the past has come forth to haunt us once again. Yes, it’s John P. Walters! [cue: cheesy scary music]

Former ‘drug czar’ warns against marijuana use

Walters, the former Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy from 2001 to 2009, gave a presentation titled “Pot: Hot or Not? The Young, American Democracy, and the Drug Problem,” addressing the effects of marijuana and illicit drugs and their potential legalization.

As usual, he has this wonderful way of taking one of the destructive elements of prohibition and pretending it’s a feature:

“The use of court-mandated treatment has helped get people the care they need,” Walters said.

Walters presented statistics that showed the the criminal justice system is the largest reason people enter treatment.

“It would be nice if people could be educated by family members or friends, but ultimately the single greatest source of intervention and treatment begins with the criminal justice system,” Walters said.

You see, the criminal justice system is simply helping people. They should be grateful when they’re arrested and put in jail.

Yes, the criminal justice system is the largest reason people enter treatment, but that’s because it sweeps up a whole lot of people who don’t need treatment.

I’m playing the piano this week for a production of Noël Coward’s high-farce-comedy-of-manners Hay Fever at Illinois State University, and having a delightful time. Pre-show, intermission, and a few things directly involved in the show, playing music from the 1910’s and 1920’s. Kept me a bit busy.

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I did get a chance to see a little bit of the new show “Gotham,” and was struck by a quote in it. Mob boss Carmine Falcone is explaining to young detective Jim Gordon why he “supports” the work of the police.

“You can’t have organized crime without law and order.”

I found that telling, and it connects in so many ways to this terrible drug war, where we’ve often seen either an intentional or unintentional symbiotic relationship between the black market and law enforcement.

That doesn’t mean that law and order is bad, but that, usually through bad policy or laws, it can be co-opted to help criminal enterprise (often without its own officers realizing their role).

Aaron Malin has a rather disturbing article at Reason: Drug War Propaganda Counts as State Police Training

In Missouri, sworn law enforcement officers are required to take 48 credit hours of Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) continuing education every three years. While some specific courses are required for all officers, such as mandatory firearms classes, the majority are elective courses that simply must add up to a minimum of 48 credit hours. […]

As it turns out, some of the classes offered aren’t exactly what you might consider official law enforcement training. At the annual conference this past March, one course was titled, “Marijuana Legalization: The Issues.” It was taught by Tom Gorman—a drug cop from Colorado who travels the country on what seems to be a never-ending anti-legalization crusade.

Read the article to see the table of contents from the course and some of the really outrageous things that Gorman teaches as part of that course. Reefer madness, indeed.

I think it’s great that police officers are required to complete ongoing education, but not if it’s taxpayer-funded propaganda.

It would be nice if they had courses like: “How To Interact With Unfamiliar Dogs Without Using A Gun” or “The Fourth Amendment: It’s Not A Myth.”

What other courses would you recommend?

Drug paraphernalia is one of the truly absurd subplots of the drug war. Its mere existence seemed to infuriate prohibitionists and resulted in a hodge-podge of strange and hard-to-enforce laws.

I remember when Chicago Alderman Robert Fioretti tried to ban small baggies (I also remember him getting really pissed off when I satirized his reasons.)

In some places, little “rose tubes” sold in convenience stores are outlawed because the tubes can be used as crack pipes.

Of course, we all know that Tommy Chong spent time in prison for the crime of making pretty glass art that could be used to smoke pot, and yet apple orchards are left to grow perfectly fine pot pipes without interference.

My favorite line in the drug paraphernalia wars came from a Wilmington Morning Star editorial:

It was as if the massed forces of Eliot Ness had busted one of Al Capone’s speakeasies and confiscated the little umbrellas that went in the tropical cocktails.
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Fortunately, no officers were harmed in the making of this media event.

Now I had always known that the beautifully designed little McDonald’s coffee-stirrer spoon had been controversial because of its use as drug paraphernalia, but I never heard the whole story until now: The McDonald’s Cocaine Spoon Fiasco

According to minutes from the hearing, one [Paraphernalia Trade Association] representative attempted to make a mockery of the proposed law. “Look at this,” he facetiously told the panel, thrusting a McDonald’s coffee stirring spoon above his head. “This is the best cocaine spoon in town and it’s free with every cup of coffee at McDonalds.”

With its long, thin handle and tiny stirring head, the McDonald’s spoon had, indeed, amassed a cult following among drug dealers and aficionados. Light, cheap, and inconspicuous, it could be concealed easily — and best of all, as its scoop held exactly 100 milligrams of product, it doubled as a measuring device.

While the representative’s intention was to deride the anti-drug crusaders’ attack, his stunt fell on the wrong ears — those belonging to former President of the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth, Joyce Nalepka. Though Nalepka left the hearing without a chance to testify, she spent her whole drive home “searching for some way to counteract [the PTA’s] McDonald’s spoon statement.”

Then it hit her: she’d contact McDonald’s, inform the company of its utensil’s bad rap on the street, and demand they discontinue it.

And thus, the elegant McDonald’s spoon came to an end.

Who decides what a serving size is? And are they talking about real people who actually eat food?

I’ve been reducing carbs in my diet and watching what I eat a bit. So I find myself checking those nutritional information labels. So often, I’ll look at the label and say “Oh, look — only 5 grams of sugar per serving – that’s not bad.” And then I’ll look at the number of servings per container and realize that I just ate 5 servings… as a snack.

It gets a whole lot trickier when you talk about marijuana edibles.

Here’s a great example. Somebody came up with what sounds like a brilliant idea at first: cannabis pizza.

Some Genius in LA is Selling Weed Pizzas

Yeah, it sounds like a great idea, but look at the size of that pizza. What is that? 5″? That’s like a large canapé. A small pizza (10″) will give you about four times as much pizza, and I have no problem eating a medium pizza. So what good is a 5″ pizza?

But it gets worse.

Here’s the big problem with the pizza: It is insanely strong. One personal pizza has 250 mg of weed. For those of you who have never combined eating narcotics and math before, High Times recommends about 25 mgs per dose of edibles to have a safe, good time. To put that into layman’s terms, that means that even cutting this tiny pizza into eighths might lead you to pass out in the nearest bed, too afraid to even watch The Simpsons, because what if they’re real?

The label suggests eating a quarter of it.

What’s the point?

We waited about 45 minutes, and then we just got hungry—y’know, for fucking pizza. […] Basically, Stoned Oven Gourmet’s weed pizza is the perfect thing to eat if you wanna be high in an hour and go get some pizza.

I really don’t understand the movement in the industry to have such concentrated edibles. It seems like you might as well take a pill.

Maybe I’m showing my age, but I seem to remember back in the day, that you’d make a nice large pan of pot brownies for 3 or 4 people and you’d each have several brownies and get comfortably high while having had a satisfying dessert, and you didn’t have to divide a single brownie into 8 pieces.

I have no idea if this ad is going to be effective (or for what audiences), but I enjoyed watching it. Yes on 2 (medical marijuana in Florida)

Catchy ad from Marijuana Policy Project promoting their new Consume Responsibly campaign and website.

Reason.TV has a new piece: “Anal Probes Run Amok: Drug-Sniffing Dogs Must Be Stopped”

Yesterday I talked about some pathetic things happening on campuses. Today, I want to talk about some better things.

I am an administrator and teacher at a university, and there was a time when even discussions about drug policy reform were considered risky.

Now, I’m teaching an entrepreneurship class and I have a student who decided to interview a medical marijuana entrepreneur in Illinois. An absolutely wonderful idea – talk about entrepreneurship, and the potential risks and rewards. Cannabis is the newest front in entrepreneurship and a perfect topic for various discussions in college.

Tomorrow, I’m taking part in the university’s Human Library project. This is where people with interesting or different views/knowledge base make themselves available like a book to be “read” through people asking questions and learning more about them. I was approached by university staff to participate specifically because of my work in drug policy and the idea that a “book” about legalization would be a good “book” to “read.”

That’s a good sign.

There is change happening at universities. Like everywhere else, it’s slow, but it’s another place where we’re making progress.

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For those who missed it, there was a particularly ugly and fact-free editorial in the Washington Post opposing legalization, using S.A.M. speculation as their “evidence.” The folks on the couch here have been doing a first-rate job in responding. For more, read the comments section of this recent DrugWarRant post.

This is just another of the despicable side-effects of the drug war.

Undercover students used in drug busts at some University of Wisconsin campuses

Yeah, you bust some college kid of selling pot to his friends, and threaten him with a felony, which would kick him out of school, unless he turns on his friends and buys drugs from them for the police.

Informants have a useful place in the criminal justice system, but this isn’t one of them.

“We don’t use the informants in a targeted, careful way of going after organized crime,” she says. “We use informants the way that a bad cook uses salt.”

Exactly.

Fortunately, this article brought up Rachel Hoffman.

Rachel Hoffman, a 23-year-old Florida State University graduate, was pressured in 2008 to be an informant after Tallahassee, Florida, police searched her apartment and found a small amount of marijuana and ecstasy. But the buy turned out to be an armed robbery, and the robbers killed Hoffman after discovering her recording device, says Lance Block, a Florida attorney. […]

“The police are supposed to protect us from harm, not subject us to harm,” Block says. “And when law enforcement intentionally expose untrained civilians into these highly dangerous operations, they’re not protecting them from harm … It’s one thing to get information from people secretly and confidentially. It’s another thing to throw them to the wolves, like they did with Rachel.”