Drug WarRant

Nice little segment on The Daily Show tonight — Jon led it off with the illegal media pieces by the Drug Czar and segued into the Dept. of Education payola scandal. And had a little fun with it as always.
Stewart:

ONDCP – That’s the Office of National Drug Control Policy, voted least fun Christmas party 12 years running.

Interesting column in the New York Daily News by Denis Hamill

In 1969, as a hippie kid at Woodstock, I sat in the mud with a score of Brooklyn pilgrims from Prospect Park’s Hippie Hill listening to festival organizers shouting over the loudspeakers to the 400,000 zonked-out druggies, “Beware of the brown acid, man! If you’ve dropped the bad brown acid, report immediately to the medical tent, man!” …

Judging by recent events, you get more truth from drug culture than pharmaceutical companies and the Food and Drug Administration.

On three separate holiday-related occasions, I was sitting around gabbing with friends in Brooklyn and Queens and one of the first topics to arise was the reluctant revelations by the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies that they are literally killing us by the tens of thousands with these deadly prescription drugs they are hawking with less conscience than streetcorner dope pushers.

Scott comes through for me (as always) with the full details of the Jam Cruise 3 drug bust (including, bizarrely, photos of all those arrested and video of the news coverage).
“Jam Cruise 3” Lands Twelve in Jail Before Ship Ever Leaves The Dock

The scenario was the same, over and over. As more than 1,200 passengers passed through the Jaxport terminal, they stopped for a photo, then proceeded on to Customs for a pre-boarding inspection.
Over a span of six hours, a dozen of those passengers were ‘outed’ by a proficient U.S. Customs and Border Protection drug dog named Megan.

So these were all people in the U.S., boarding a boat in Jacksonville, Florida and going through U.S. customs.
Now I’m trying to understand this. Isn’t it the job of Customs to prevent things from coming in to the United States? Yes, I know that the cruise goes outside our national waters, so Customs gets involved, but shouldn’t that be when the boat returns?
Is this at all an appropriate use of Customs personnel? We don’t have the resources to check more than a small percent of the cargo containers coming in to the country (any of which could contain terrorist weapons). But we can have Customs personnel checking for cruise passengers with some pot hidden in their crotch?
That’s criminal use of our homeland security forces.

“bullet” Loretta Nall’s debate last night turned out relatively non-controversial as her “opponent” was mostly in agreement. (It’s hard to get the real prohibitionists to debate since their position has so little factual base.) You can get the story (and listen to the show) at Loretta’s blog.
“bullet” John at High: The true tale of American Marijuana has completed the first part of his rebuttal of the Drug Czar’s ridiculous publication: “Marijuana Myths & Facts: The Truth Behind 10 Popular Misperceptions”. The rebuttal of the intro is a good start and I look forward to see where he goes from here. Here’s a couple of brief observations I made on that publication back in November (and if you look at the comments on that post, you’ll see that Lorax has started work on a different kind of refutation.) Of course, for the real Marijuana Myths and Facts, you can go to Zimmer and Morgan’s Marijuana Myths Marijuana Facts – an excellent book.
“bullet” Power and Control has a little piece on a drug bust at a Carnival Cruise which caught my attention. Unfortunately, the news on it is very spotty, and I haven’t been able to find more details (such as whether there was any legitimate legal cause/justification to do a search). But the notion of using a “captive” location (like a cruise) to do random drug searches is disturbing to my view of what’s left of the constitution.
“bullet” And finally, Happy Birthday to Libby at Last One Speaks.

In yesterday’s Houston Chronicle, defense attorney Brian Samuelson has written an outstanding piece: Lawyer’s Plea on Pot Penalty.
Basically, he’s calling for decriminalization and gives quite a number of excellent practical reasons for it. He also, though, lays on the line the truths that are seldom told in public.
Here’s a taste:

In fact, the overwhelming evidence available today strongly indicates that marijuana use is not nearly as harmful as once believed, and actually has therapeutic and medicinal values. Unlike nicotine and alcohol, marijuana is not physically addictive. There is no convincing scientific evidence that marijuana kills brain cells, impairs long-term memory or causes mental or physical illness.

The only “harmful” effects from the use of marijuana that have been proven are that an individual under the influence of marijuana will realize a loss of short-term memory, difficulty learning and recalling new information, and a temporary impairment of psychomotor function.

Yes, marijuana temporarily dulls the senses. But, unlike alcohol, a person who intends to operate a motor vehicle after smoking marijuana can immediately eliminate the loss of perception, and its other temporary effects on the brain, by eating a small meal.

As a criminal defense attorney, I can assure you that arrests for driving under the influence of marijuana are extremely rare.

Every serious scholar and government commission that has examined the relationship between marijuana use and crime have reached the same conclusion: Marijuana use does not lead to crime. Almost all human and animal studies indicate that marijuana decreases rather than increases physical aggression.

Not bad. I hope a lot of people read it.

“bullet” At 8 pm (ET) tomorrow, Loretta Nall will be debating Western Carolina University Police Chief McAbee on the Free Speech Radio program at Western North Carolina University.
“bullet” At Grits for Breakfast, Scott has a guest blogger who will be covering the Tom Colemen perjury trial.
“bullet” This week’s Drug War Chronicle is a fascinating read. The first two items point out the challenges involved in Afghanistan, where the war on terror and the war on drugs are incompatible and are coming to a collision.

So I guess I should feel honored. Drug Czar John Walters picked my question to answer in the White House chat yesterday. I tried to frame it in a way that would be critical, yet not too critical (so he wouldn’t answer it). So here’s what ended up:

Pete, from Bloomington, Illinois writes:
Isn’t there a problem with giving kids misleading information regarding marijuana that overstates the actual dangers? I worry that when they find out we’ve been lying to them about marijuana that they’ll stop believing us when it comes to more dangerous drugs. After all, when you call Canadian pot the “crack cocaine of marijuana,” the message kids may hear is that crack must not be too bad.
John Walters
Actually Pete, you’ve got the question exactly backwards. Marijuana is a much bigger part of the American addiction problem than most people — teens or adults — realize. There are now more teens going into treatment for marijuana dependency than for all other drugs combined. And there are more teens now seeking treatment for marijuana than for alcohol. Today’s marijuana is also twice as strong as it was in the mid 80’s. One of the reasons we have such a serious problem with marijuana in our country is because of the misinformation that has been spread about it over the past 30 years — that marijuana is “harmless” or a “soft drug” or a “rite of passage.” These are all myths — and for too many Americans they are costly myths. We need to educate Americans about the real harms of marijuana if we want to sustain the gains we’ve made over the past three years.

We’ve recently released a report entitled “Marijuana Myths & Facts: The Truth Behind 10 Popular Misperceptions” to help get the facts out about marijuana.

So I accuse Walters of downplaying the dangers of other drugs by hyping marijuana, and in his answer he does exactly that. He again overstates the dangers of marijuana (which leads to lack of confidence by teens that they’re getting the truth). And he significanly downplays the dangers of alcohol.
Of course, he pulls the same stunt that his office has been doing ad nauseum — the false implication regarding treatment. The truth is that treatment percentages connect to referrals, not addiction, so the reason that marijuana numbers are high has nothing to do with the danger of the drug (marijuana only has mild dependency capability), but rather that people go into treatment to avoid expulsion from school or as a condition for a positive drug test on the job, or to avoid jail.
As for the Drug Czar’s “report” — “Marijuana Myths & Facts is a joke. One of the commenters here is working on a detailed rebuttal to that publication — I’ll post a link to it when it’s available.
Of course, this was not a good format for me. I ask a question and he gets to answer it any way he wants to without rebuttal. So, for the record, I’ll state once again — I’ll debate the Drug Czar anywhere, any time. I’ll even pay my own way. Just let me know and I’ll be there.

And editorial in The Oregonian titled Stop Blocking Marijuana Research

The bottleneck for legitimate researchers is that the agencies that are hostile to medicinal marijuana are the gatekeepers of its supply. Two suggestions:

Federal agencies such as the DEA should stop blocking legitimate research that is conducted with proper security.

Until the agencies stop erecting unreasonable barriers, the Supreme Court and federal appeals courts should recognize that FDA approval is not currently a viable option, so patients need to be afforded full protection of their states’ laws.

At BuzzFlash

Democratic leaders in Congress today called on President Bush to stop the alarming use of illegal covert propaganda to promote government policy after two new accounts of such activity surfaced today. In a letter to the President, they pointed out that the use of covert propaganda has been revealed through independent investigations by at least three separate federal agencies. …

The letter was signed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, Rep. David Obey (D-WI), the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the outgoing Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Senior Democrat on the Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources Subcommittee.

The letter was in reaction to two reports today. USA Today disclosed that the Department of Education paid $240,000 to conservative political commentator Armstrong Williams to routinely promote the No Child Left Behind Act on his broadcast shows without revealing that he was being paid by the government to do so. Rep. Miller separately today requested that the Department’s Inspector General investigate this contract with Williams.

And the Washington Post and New York Times reported today on a General Accounting Office report to Rep. Waxman and Rep. Obey that found the Office of Drug Control Policy violated the law when it used video news releases to promote an anti-marijuana message without revealing to television news viewers that the on-camera “reporter” was really an actor, not a journalist. In May, the GAO found that the Department of Health and Services also violated the law by producing and distributing similar video news releases regarding Medicare policy.

It seems to me that the drug czar’s use of propaganda would normally have received less public awareness (it’s almost the status quo). But since the report come out at the same time as the Armstrong Williams issue, there may be some attention paid.
I doubt that a lot will come of this, but the public statement by these Representatives will help long-term.

Via Loretta at US Marijuana Party — White House anti-drug videos violate propaganda ban, GAO says.
Not that this is news to us, of course — the ONDCP is nothing but a propaganda mill that depends on misdirection, misleading, and outright lies.

Videotape footage of people using drugs and interviews with federal officials discouraging their use that was produced by the White House drug control policy office, violate a legal ban on official propaganda because they were presented to the public without any indication they were produced by the government, according to a decision released Thursday by the Government Accountability Office.

GAO, in response to a request from Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., examined a series of “video news releases” prepared by the Office of National Drug Control Policy from 2002 to 2004 to determine whether they violated a legal prohibition on “covert propaganda.” The ban was included in the appropriations legislation that funded ONDCP’s media campaign to lower drug use among American youth.

The videotapes were complete, prepackaged new stories, GAO found. They were sent to media outlets to be used “as news reports, without the need for any production effort,” the agency wrote in its 17-page decision.
…

ONDCP’s estimates show that the video footage reached more than 22 million households, GAO noted, “without disclosing to any of those viewers – the real audience – that the products they were watching, which ‘reported’ on the activities of a government agency, were actually prepared by that government agency, not by a seemingly independent third party. This is the essence of the ‘covert propaganda’ violation.”

Of course, the Drug Czar’s office claims they’ve done nothing wrong — most likely because they truly believe that they are entitled to use any tactic, including lying to the American people, in order to achieve their aims.
“bullet” White House Drug Czar to Discuss Teenage Drug Use Tomorrow

White House: John Walters, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, will answer your questions about the 2004 Monitoring the Future study and the decline in teenage drug use Friday at 1:30pm (ET). Submit questions now.

Go ahead and submit a question — of course they’re all screened in advance, so he’s not likely to answer any questions that seem like a criticism. Still, you could ask him what he thinks about lying to teens about drugs.

Update: I’ve asked my question. Now I just have to wait and see if it gets picked.