Drug WarRant

Students for Liberty have a new website focused on ending the war on drugs. Good for them!

Marijuana Legalization Has Researchers Wondering If Traffic Deaths Will Rise

Why are they wondering? Because there’s no clear evidence that it’s going to happen and that’s frustrating them.

It’s not, however, stopping them from speculating…

What worries highway safety experts are cases like that of New York teenager Joseph Beer, who in October 2012 smoked marijuana, climbed into a Subaru Impreza with four friends and drove more than 100 mph before losing control. The car crashed into trees with such force that the vehicle split in half, killing his friends.

Of course… because that’s what you do when you smoke pot. Pot smoking makes you buy a Subaru, causes friends to get into the car with you, and then makes you drive 100 mph and crash into trees. That’s why, no matter where you look, you see nothing but split-in-half Subaru Imprezas everywhere.

Now, I once heard of a reporter who wrote an article for the Huffington Post and then had sex with a goat. It makes me wonder if we’re doing enough to protect the goat population from Huffington Post authors.

Admittedly, studies of Huffington Post article-authorship and goat-rape risk are “highly inconclusive.” Some studies show a two- or three-fold increase, while others show none. Some studies even showed less risk if someone was a writer.

Still, this should be a reason to be concerned for anyone who cares about the safety of our goats.

Without disclosing DuPont’s financial interest in the drug testing industry, the Washington Post published this piece of trash: Pot is becoming legal in more places, but we should drug test employees anyway by Robert L. DuPont.

Meanwhile, marijuana advocates are targeting drug-testing policies of major employers, including launching a petition to pressure the New York Times to trash its drug-testing policy. If successful, this movement will damage the safety and productivity of U.S. workplaces and take away one proven way to reduce substance abuse.

Workplace drug testing has largely been a scam since its beginnings, complete with wholly invented statistics on worker productivity and absenteeism, to the point where it’s almost impossible to sort out any actual truth in the claims.

What it’s really been about is building a very lucrative drug testing industry that depends on marijuana (since it stays longer in the system) resulting in penalizing people for what they do on their own time, creating a negative employment atmosphere, and doing nothing to create a safer workplace.

Transform has come out with yet another useful publication: Debating Drugs: How to Make the Case for Legal Regulation

In it, they’ve assembled all the standard prohibition arguments with effective responses to each of them in a variety of areas. Very handy tool for those looking for well-crafted responses.

I’m not always in agreement with Transform – sometimes the degree of regulation they seem to desire goes a little far for me – but they’re doing absolutely wonderful work.

Study: Medical pot might reduce drug overdose deaths

This is really going to piss off Kevin Sabet…

Access to medical marijuana appears to have saved thousands of lives over the past few years by reducing accidental overdose deaths from drugs like Vicodin, Percocet and OxyContin, a new study says.

States with legalized medical marijuana saw, on average, 1,700 fewer deaths a year from prescription drugs than they would have otherwise, says the study led by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Oh, wait. It already has…

Kevin Sabet, director of the Drug Policy Institute at the University of Florida College of Medicine, said he has many concerns about how the study’s authors collected and analyzed the data. He said they failed to differentiate between states with strict and lax medical marijuana laws, and didn’t examine emergency-room admission and prescription data, and failed to see what impact methadone clinics might have had. He said it’s hard to believe there was such an across-the-board reduction in predicted deaths.

“In today’s supercharged discussions, it could be easily misunderstood by people,” he said

Just because we have a time-honored tradition here of not letting her get away with it…

Barthwell maintains call for tough-minded drug policy

Former federal drug policy official Andrea G. Barthwell, MD, who now directs addiction treatment centers in Illinois and North Carolina, pulled no punches in an Aug. 24 talk at the National Conference on Addiction Disorders (NCAD) when discussing today’s policy landscape. While Barthwell’s talk sought to make sense of the many changes occurring in substance use service delivery and payment systems, she left no doubt that she sees harm reduction and legalization initiatives as a significant threat to the field and the families it serves.

Citing data about the negative consequences of marijuana use among young people, Barthwell used several stages of her presentation to criticize initiatives to legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use.

Of course, she did.

She said the mindset of legalization supporters can be summed up as, “We intend to legalize all drugs.”

Well, yeah. As opposed to what? Supporting the unregulated black market like she does?

Sponsors cancel drug summit in Madras after facing criticism from marijuana legalization advocates

Good for them. Apparently somebody realized that a taxpayer-funded “educational” summit about the evils of marijuana just before a vote on legalization might not appear… ethical.

The sponsors of the legalization initiative, Measure 91, charged this week that it was wrong for summit organizers to use federal funds to help pay for an appearance by Kevin Sabet, a former White House drug adviser who has formed an organization opposing marijuana legalization.

Sabet was also scheduled to appear in 12 other Oregon cities as part of an “Oregon Marijuana Education Tour” following the summit. Sabet had said that, at the request of organizers, he would not talk about the ballot measure at either the Madras event or on the tour.

Rick Treleaven, the executive director of BestCare Treatment Practices and the organizer of the Madras summit, said he decided to cancel the summit because he “could see from an outside perspective that it could look like a conflict.”

Time for the other cities to cancel as well.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.: Marijuana vs. Scotch and a Low IQ

Wow. How can a founder and editor-in-chief write something so ridiculously idiotic?

This is an anti-marijuana article presumably aimed at readers who never tried marijuana, never read anything about it, and never had any friends who used it.

Rather small target audience.

I’d take it apart, but Jacob Sullum has already done a fine job: Because Bob Tyrrell Prefers Scotch, Marijuana Should Be Banned

I find myself fairly consumed recently with the events in Ferguson. It certainly does seem to be a defining moment, connecting a whole lot of puzzle pieces — militarization of police, racially unbalanced enforcement, the drug war, lack of accountability of authorities, a dysfunctional justice system — all things we’ve discussed here on a regular basis.

And from reading my Facebook news feed, it appears that it’s getting some major traction with the general public (finally). I’ve also been sadly chuckling a bit with some of the developments – progressive sites taking on the charge of fighting over-militarization as if they discovered it… and today, news that the SWAT lobby has approached Congress saying, essentially: “please don’t take away our toys – how about if we agree to better training and policies?”

I wrote a general piece of Ferguson and policing for my Facebook friends, which you can read if you’d like…

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