Drug WarRant

In USA Today.

One of the most closely watched decisions involves whether states can shield medical marijuana users from federal prosecution on drug charges. The case, which was heard last November, pits the conservative anti-drug interests of the Bush administration against conservative principles of states’ rights. […]

While many believe the court will back the federal government in the marijuana case, its delay in issuing an opinion so far offers states’ rights advocates hope that justices are wary of further extending federal authority, said Pepperdine law professor Doug Kmiec, a former Justice Department official under President Reagan and the first President Bush.

“It may suggest that the expansive assertion of government power asserted by the Bush administration was deeply troubling to the justices, or at least that the issue is so close that the wording of opinions is being examined and negotiated with far more than the usual care,” he said.

I never understood the assumption held by many that the Supremes would overwhelmingly side with the government in Raich. If they were only looking at it as a marijuana issue, or only noting what happened in the oral arguments, there’s reason to look at it that way. However, if you read all the briefs, it’s almost impossible to see it as a slam-dunk for the government — in fact, it’s pretty obvious that the Supremes would have to be very creative to rule for the government at all.
Now that the decision is taking so long, people are starting to pay a little more attention to the complexities.

Reported in the Knox News Sentinel. In Gatlinburg last week, DEA Head Karen Tandy claimed that the drug war was making progress, but complained “that the media doesn’t report the issue fairly.”

“Good news doesn’t sell,” Tandy said. “You won’t read about it in the press.”

Fortunately for her audience, though, she assured them that the drug war isn’t doing too well…

Tandy said that drug seizures are “on track this year to hit $1 billion” and predicted that amount will eventually climb to $3 billion a year.

“And that’s more money, by the way, that will be going back to you,” she told the assembly of hundreds of law enforcement officers in a reference to state and federal laws that allow funds seized during drug busts to be returned to the agencies that confiscate them.

Ah, so that’s what she means by progress. More money for drug warriors.

Pot Bill is Out of Time

JUNEAU — The governor’s attempt to outlaw at-home marijuana appears dead for this legislative session.

With the Legislature scheduled to adjourn for the year on Tuesday, lawmakers said Saturday the bill is out of time. The news came just two days after Gov. Frank Murkowski declared it one of his “must have” bills.

Perhaps the legislature realizes that the bill is embarrassing?

The Drug Czar’s office has been hosting a series of Drug Testing Summits in select cities to push its profitable random drug testing regime in schools. Fortunately, despite constant claims of success (May 9 entry), their propaganda has not been given without opposition.
For those who don’t know, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) is a fabulous organization of committed students, and they’ve been on the case.
Tom Angell and Ross Wilson of the SSDP attended the Summit in Pittsburgh on Thursday.

Our objective was simple: prevent the ONDCP from being
able to present itself as all-knowing and authoritative on the topic of
student drug testing in front of an audience of open-minded educators and
school officials who are rightly concerned with preventing substance abuse
among their students.

They brought handouts that countered the propaganda and got involved in the discussions.
Here’s some more of Tom’s report:

Reformers should be aware that the ONDCP has fully adopted rhetoric about
drug abuse as a public health problem. Since it is a pediatric onset
communicable disease (like tuberculosis), they say, we must test young
people. They claim that testing is nonpunitive and confidential and that
they just want to be able to identify those that need help.

But testing students who want to participate in extracurricular activities
only deters students who do use drugs from joining the activities in the
first place because they don’t want to be tested. In this way, the stated
aim of drug testing is undermined because the very students who ONDCP says
they want to help won’t be identified since they aren’t putting themselves
in the position of being tested.

Ross asked a question to this effect and got a complete nonanswer from a
researcher at Ball St. University (who conducted one of the three studies
commonly cited by ONDCP). The educators in the audience must have
noticed.

Earlier in the day, when deputy drug czar Mary Ann Solberg finished her
opening remarks, I followed members of the media (who were following her)
into the ONDCP’s press room. Before she began taking questions, I
announced to the room that if any members of the press wanted to hear from
opponents of drug testing they could talk with me to learn SSDP’s
perspective. All of them immediately raised their hands and expressed
interest in talking to me after the depty drug czar finished. So I sat
down, interested to hear how she was going to answer reporters’ questions.
But as soon as I did, two gentlemen from the ONDCP asked me to leave the
room because, apparently, only credentialed reporters were allowed there.
So I left and waited in the hallway.

As journalists trickled out of the ONDCP’s interview room, each came up to
me, very interested in what I had to say about the topic. I ended up
doing interviews with two television network affiliates, the two largest
papers in Pittsburgh, a smaller community paper, a college paper, and a
radio news broadcast that is syndicated on 13 stations.

Read this article and imagine how it would have been reported had Tom not been there to provide counter info.
Great job, Tom!

At
the conclusion of the summit, an official from the Department of Education
asked how many folks were thinking of taking advantage of the federal
grant money that’s been made available for student drug testing. Only
five or six people in the room raised their hands.

If anyone’s available, or already planning on attending the summit in Portland on Wednesday, please get in touch with Tom to strategize.

A must read: Backing for Colombia Drug War Criticized, by Andrew Selsky, Associated Press Writer (in New York Newsday).
Fascinating article — even more so because it’s AP, which is often likely to follow the government line in drug war issues. Are the cracks starting to show?
First, note how Andrew describes the location of the U.S. Ambassador in reporting his comments (emphasis added):

In a conversation at his guarded residence, U.S. Ambassador William Wood said the efforts must persist if Colombia’s rebels, who have been at war in Colombia for 40 years, are ever to be defeated.

“In Colombia, terrorism without narcotics is a much more vulnerable target,” Wood told reporters from The Associated Press and another news agency. “If you take away drugs, you reduce incentive, the power to corrupt, the ability to buy weapons.”

But criticism of the costly effort is mounting.

The reporter, in this case, hardly needed to point out the absurdity of the U.S. Ambassador’s actual words. The notion that we can actually take away the drugs is as unrealistic as overturning the law of gravity. And unless we can actually take them all away (impossible), our efforts just fuel the black market profits.
Andrew lets others make the point, starting with…

In an editorial this week, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said Colombia “has turned into a sinkhole of money and military resources over the past five years.”

“The Congress should scrap Plan Colombia now, rather than throw more good money after bad,” the newspaper said, pointing out that availability of Colombian cocaine and heroin on U.S. streets appears undiminished.

John Walsh, a senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America think tank, said recently that “the drug war is failing to achieve its most basic objectives.”

Andrew then lists several embarrassments to the efforts in Colombia (corruption, etc.) and goes on to allow the normally unspeakable to be spoken:

One foreign drug agent recently stationed here said he personally believed the solution was to legalize drugs, so trafficking would not be so hugely profitable. The FARC and their paramilitary foes control much of the drug trade in Colombia, which produces most of the world’s cocaine and much of its heroin.

“We should recognize that by criminalizing drugs, we are allowing outlawed groups in Colombia to earn a vast amount of money,” said the agent, who did not want to be further identified.

The Monitor, a daily in McAllen, Texas, said in a recent editorial that the drug war is “a demonstrated failure,” and argued for legalization.

Of course, it’s a shame that the fear is so strong that the former drug agent had to be unidentified, but still, this to me is a huge step in reporting.
And finally, Andrew notes that the administration is not likely to be part of reality (emphasis added)…

“There is no sign that in FY 2006 that we’re going to take a cut,” Wood said, relaxing near a crackling fire in the mansion that serves as his official residence.

Thank you, Andrew Selsky
Update: Looks like this AP story is getting some circulation. Libby had already covered it on Saturday, based on its appearance in another source.

I haven’t had time to post for the past few days due to end of the semester commitments, but there’s been a lively discussion in the comments that I’ve enjoyed reading.
Tomorrow (Monday) morning at 9:00 am (CST), I will be the guest on Freedom Rings Radio (Kenneth John’s call-in show) WRMN 1410 AM, Elgin, Illinois, and streamed on the internet here.
I’m really looking forward to it, and I hope some of you will listen in (or even call).
Update: Fun interview — I hope I get invited back. And thanks to the callers.

Pot: the Sina Qua Non of a Drug War by Sam Smith, Progressive Review, gives a potent perspective on the recent Sentencing Project Report detailing how the war on drugs has been primarily a war on marijuana.

The war on drugs was the first major test by the country’s elite to see if Americans would willingly surrender their constitutional rights. It turned out that they would and so for the past twenty years invasions of civil liberties increased, America threw more and more of its young people into prison, while exploding drug war budgets did nothing to stem the growth of the drug industry. Further, the drug war was a useful testing ground for repressive measures instituted following September 11.

But to make all of this work you need a sufficient quantity of drugs, they had to be easy to find and a sufficient number of people had to use them. This is where marijuana came in. Although marijuana is far less danger than just legal drugs as cigarettes and alcohol and, even as a medical prescription, far less hazardous than ones routinely given out by doctors, it had the constituency, physical bulk and ubiquity to make it just the thing for adding to police budgets and taking away from human rights.

The war on drugs will undoubtedly be regarded by historians as a crucial precursor of the end of the First American Republic. It tested the waters of repression and found Americans willing to accept it. Even liberals outside of strong civil liberties advocates proved disastrously indifferent to what was going on. …

Nobody’s Business’ take-down of an incredibly stupid article is a delightful, funny, and smart read.

According to this article in the Guardian, which quotes an editorial in the British Medical Journal,

Thirty thousand Britons a year might eventually die from cannabis smoking, doctors claimed.

In other news, the physicians insisted that the sky might eventually turn green with purple polka dots, and also that they’ll soon achieve cold fusion using only an umbrella and a two-pound bratwurst.

Read the whole piece.

Several people today have been sending me a variety of articles out there that have combined the story of how the government’s war on drugs has turned into a war on marijuana (that I reported earlier) and a report from the Drug Czar’s office that supposedly demonstrates a brand new link between marijuana and mental illness!
Yahoo: Feds Sound New Warning About Marijuana Use

Government officials say recent research makes a stronger case that smoking marijuana is itself a causal agent in psychiatric symptoms, particularly schizophrenia.

“A growing body of evidence now demonstrates that smoking marijuana can increase the risk of serious mental health problems,” said John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy.

Administration officials pointed to a handful of studies to make their case. One, from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, found adult marijuana smokers who first began using the drug before age 12 were twice as likely to have suffered a serious mental illness in the past year as those who began smoking after 18.

CNN: Research: Youths risk mental health with pot use. Lots of the same stuff (and note the funky generic “drug” picture for illustration), but CNN’s Paul Courson at least gets a point for this paragraph:

Walters did not directly address the possibility of confusing cause and effect — that is, that people with mental problems might be more inclined to use drugs.

The thing is, this is not a new study — the release was timed to disrupt the other news today (the Sentencing Project report and the press conference about the States’ Rights to Marijuana Act). This is merely another crunching of numbers in another way from the SAMHSA datasets (see my earlier report.
Here is the entirety of the information that they have put together in this “report”.

1. 18.5 million Americans (over 8 percent) apparently have a Serious Mental Illness.
2. Those who are now over 18, but first tried marijuana before the age of 12, were twice as likely to be classified as “having a serious mental illness” in the past year as those who didn’t try marijuana until they were over 18.
3. This was based solely on asking people questions in a survey.

Yep. That’s the startling “growing body of evidence now demonstrates that smoking marijuana can increase the risk of serious mental health problems” that Walters was talking about.
I call Shenanigans (and a whole lot more).
First, there is absolutely no evidence of causality here. Is it any surprise that kids who are in a family, peer, and community situation that allows or encourages the use of marijuana at age 10 or 11, might also, for reasons totally unrelated to marijuana use, have self-esteem issues later in life?
But the Czar is just humping data trying to get something to fall out in another way that he can use (and naturally I had to go dig through that data again today when I had much better things to do). And of course, there was plenty he avoided, such as:

Although SMI [Serious Mental Illness] is somewhat correlated at the individual level with past month use of an illicit drug, the correlation at the State level among persons aged 18 or older was fairly low (0.11). The correlation at the State level between SMI and past month use of cigarettes was slightly higher (0.27). This finding is consistent with literature that shows some correlation at the individual level between smoking cigarettes and SMI (Arday et al., 1995; Kessler et al., 2003; Romans, McNoe, Herbison, Walton, & Mullen, 1993; Woolf, Rothemich, Johnson, & Marsland, 1999).

That’s right. A higher correlation with smoking cigarettes than using drugs. Still a bunch of useless information when it comes to showing causality.
But wait — what’s this business about 18.5 million people having a Serious Mental Illness? Wow! With those odds, that means a lot of my friends are seriously mentally ill. (By these odds, there’s at least someone in the Drug Czar’s office that’s seriously mentally ill, but Duh!) So what is the definition of someone who is seriously mentally ill?
Well, the reports that the Czar uses dances around it a lot with such language as:

Serious mental illness, or SMI, is defined in this report according to the definition stipulated in Public Law (P.L.) 102š321, that is, having at some time during the past year a diagnosable mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder that met the criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV) (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 1994) and resulted in functional impairment that substantially interfered with or limited one or more major life activities.

Then I discovered that “SMI was assessed… using the six-item K6 scale.” Ah, and what is the K6 scale? A series of six questions that interviewers asked as part of this overall drug survey.
And here they are:

Most people have periods when they are not at their best emotionally. Think of one month in the past 12 months when you were the most depressed, anxious, or emotionally stressed. If there was no month like this, think of a typical month.

1. During that month, how often did you feel nervous? (All of the time, Most of the time, Some of the time, A little of the time, None of the time)
2. During that same month… how often did you feel hopeless?
3. During that same month… how often did you feel restless or fidgety?
4. During that same month… how often did you feel so sad or depressed that nothing could cheer you up?
5. During that same month… how often did you feel that everything was an effort?
6. During that same month… how often did you feel down on yourself, no good, or worthless?

One of the things that absolutely makes my head explode is that these people have the audacity to claim that medical marijuana doesn’t have sufficient scientific studies to validate its use, and then they try to feed us this junk pseudo science to justify their stupid, petty, taxpayer-funded rape of the American people.

Jacob Sullum notes in Where Have All the Drug Warriors Gone? (at Hit and Run) an oddity about the drug war segment at CPAC in February.

Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, just sent me a link to the tape of his “debate” with journalist Richard Poe at last February’s CPAC conference. It’s only eight minutes long and is worth a listen because otherwise you might not believe me when I say there was no controversy whatsoever about the war on drugs, the ostensible topic of the exchange.

The audience was confused.

Given my own difficulties in finding people willing to debate me on the drug issue, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that no one wanted to go up against Nadelmann except a guy who agreed with him. Still, it’s remarkable that the organizers of a major conservative conference apparently could not find a single person who was willing to publicly defend the war on drugs.

Drug warriors can’t handle a debate. They’ll lose. The only way they can operate is through lies, incomplete information, and unsupported correlations. That doesn’t mean that somebody like Walters isn’t facile with words — he can talk a good game and impress reporters who aren’t informed. But in a decent match-up (with someone knowledgeable), he’ll lose big time. And he’s probably the best they’ve got.
When a state representative challenged Andrea Barthwell to debate medical marijuana, she replied, “I have no need to engage in street theater.”
When a Chicago TV station was trying to develop a new debate-style TV show, the producer told me they were having a real hard time finding people on the prohibition side willing to do it.
In September, 2003, John Walters called for a national debate about marijuana policy.

“The real issue is should we legalize marijuana,” Walters said. “Let’s have a debate about that.”

Rob Kampia immediately offered to oblige him — as did I.
We’re still waiting.