Drug WarRant

Jacob Sullum at Hit and Run discusses it, and there’s much more detail in releases from MPP and Drug Policy Alliance:
The Marijuana Policy Project release headline lays it out in a powerful way:

DEA Ruling Makes FDA Approval of Medical Marijuana Impossible:
State and Federal Legislation Now Only Hope for Patients

This headline was clearly a rebuke of Justice Breyer’s suggestion in Raich v. Ashcroft that systems exist to get FDA approval that might be more appropriate than going to the Supreme Court.
Here’s the case in a nutshell:

æOn June 25, 2001, Dr. Craker, director of the university’s Medicinal Plant Program, filed an application with the DEA for approval to establish a facility that would produce marijuana for FDA-approved research. Currently, all marijuana for research in the U.S.æmust come from a National Institute on Drug Abuse-contracted farm in Mississippi. NIDA’s marijuana has been only inconsistently available to researchers and cannot be used for prescription sale. This makes FDA approval of marijuana effectively impossible unless an alternative source is made available, since testing would need to be done on the same product that is sold to patients.

æææææThe DEA’s Dec.æ10 letter to Dr. Craker said that approval of the application “would not be consistent with the public interest.”

One of my favorite lines in the denial letter:

Marijuana is the most heavily abused of all Schedule 1 controlled substances, and limiting the supply of marijuana under these circumstances is reasonable.”

This is absolutely ludicrous and they should be embarrassed to put it in a document. “Most heavily abused”? That’s only because their definition of abuse includes using something that’s illegal. And the notion that adding a controlled and guarded growing facility for research is going to somehow affect the availability of illegal marijuana nationally is also absurd.
They managed 3 1/2 years of stalling to write this stupid 6 page letter.
The good thing is that one more hurdle has been jumped so they can move to the next stage, which is an appeal to… drum roll please… the DEA.
Yep, now they can, within 30 days, file with the Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration a request for a hearing.
Of course, the idea of all of this is for all the sick people who could be helped by medical marijuana to die before the governnment finishes stalling.

“bullet” Go to Last One Speaks for the news that investigative reporter Gary Web has died. Also an update on Tommy Chong and a strange case of long-distance drug possession.
“bullet” Martin at Media Crapola has an interesting post about a recent NY Times article on the drug war.
“bullet” decrimwatch brings us an excellent article by Stanley Crouch.

What we need to do is legalize all the drugs and face the consequences. That’s right. With drug dealers put out of business, I am sure those consequences would be much less dangerous – and much less expensive – to our society. Legalization could not even begin to approach the downside in the illegal dope world – torture, murder, beatings and sexual exploitation.

John Walters, Drug Lord Czar extraordinaire, will be continuing for another term. The only thing that makes this bearable is that Walters is such a polarizing figure that his statements often serve to mobilize drug policy reformers.
He will undoubtedly continue his bizarre offensives against sick people, Canadians, and school children.
Baylen has more at D’Alliance.
Also check out Baylen’s fun little experience with the TSA.

On September 13, 2003, John Perry Barlow was arrested on a flight he boarded in San Francisco (after attending Burning Man), and charged for possession of drugs found in the bottom of a bottle of Ibuprofen in his checked luggage.
While this type of thing happens a lot, the difference here is that John Barlow believes that the 4th Amendment still has some power left in this country.

There is a lot at stake here. Although, as I say, the 4th Amendment is in rough shape, it remains quite clear in its prohibition of “general warrants,” which are searches of unspecified members of the public for evidence of random illegal activity. But, whether by design or “mission drift,” this is what TSA’s checked baggage searches increasingly resemble. They’re not just looking for explosives, folks.

John is fighting the charge and finding that the government is trying to stall or claim national security every time the attorneys try to get information, and the Department of Homeland Security has instructed the private security company that discovered the alleged drugs to stonewall.
However, 15 months later, there will finally be a court hearing this Wednesday on the motion to suppress evidence.
This is one I’ll be following.
Read John Perry Barlow’s story A Taste of the System at his blog.
And just a reminder:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Certainly not our government. Take a look at the latest piece in the New York Observer (via Hit and Run), on homeland security funding in New York.
Not only does the funding across the country have little to do with the likelihood of attacks, but the funding within New York State doesn’t focus on New York City! In fact, some expenditures have had nothing to do with homeland security:

“Officials in Yates and Madison counties said they had strengthened defenses against illicit drug labs.”

The government’s love of the drug war left us unprepared for 9/11, has negatively affected our ability to fight terrorism, and is leaving us less safe every day. For a reminder of some of the other stupidity in this area, see my article from this summer: The Drug War and our response to Terrorism.

I warned you:

The Supreme Court has now dissolved the emergency stay issued last week suspending an injunction forbidding the government to interfere with the rituals of the UdV [O Centro Espirita Beneficients Uniao Do Vegetal], the American branch of a Brazilian church that uses a DMT-containing potion called hoasca or ayahuasca as its sacramental drink.

If you want to understand this further, read Mark Kleiman’s or Marty Ledermans’ posts.
I mention this largely because I earlier reported that this case is likely headed to the Supreme Court. The significance of the lifting of the stay is that this controlled substance can be used in religious ceremonies at least until the government gets the case to the Court (a year). It may then be hard for the feds to show that there’s an imminent threat to their international treaties and law enforcement abilities.
Just another tiny crack in the government’s prohibition efforts.

Kudos to Representative Sam Farr. He had the same reaction to Mark Souder’s proposed “Safe and Effective Drug Act” as I did.
According to today’s Drug War Chronicle:

Skepticism about Souder’s motives has extended to Capitol Hill, where Rep. Sam Farr Tuesday circulated his own “dear colleague” letter. “I would urge all Members to cosponsor this legislation, IF it were truly designed to produce an honest evaluation of the scientific data,” wrote Farr, who earlier this year cosponsored the Patients’ and Providers’ Truth in Trials Act, which would allow a medical necessity defense in federal medical marijuana busts. “I am, however, skeptical that this will be the case, given that the bill only refers to ‘smoked’ marijuana and is proposing that the examination be carried out by NIDA, an agency which is actively blocking medical marijuana research while consistently highlighting and exaggerating the drug’s negative consequences.”

Yep, the two things that just jump right out of Souder’s letter, exposing it as a sham.

Farr also mentioned [a] vaporizer study blocked by NIDA. The blocked study is worth mention, Farr argued, because in his “dear colleague” letter, Souder specified a study of smoked marijuana. “Why should we think that NIDA, under the Souder bill, will study what it has already been able to study for the last year and a half, but wouldn’t?” Farr asked.

An honest evaluation of marijuana, wrote Farr, would reach the same conclusion as DEA chief administrative law judge Francis Young, who, after a two-year study, found in 1988 that “marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known… It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance.”

Farr accused the federal government of “obstructionism” in blocking medical marijuana research, but said it couldn’t stop the truth. “Despite this obstructionism, there is still ample evidence to show that marijuana is a safe and effective medicine. I applaud Rep. Souder for seeking the truth — but the truth must come from objective sources, not an agency already proven disposed to blocking the truth about marijuana.”

Nice to see that someone’s not letting Souder get away with this blatant manipulation.

Take the time to read Feds vs. Meds by Dean Kuipers. It’s worth it.
A couple of months ago, I told you about a little known new law that allows people to challenge scientific information disseminated by federal agencies.æ The law demands that agencies respond to petitions within two months. Americans for Safe Access (ASA) filed such a challenge just over two months ago regarding the government’s refusal to accept scientific evidence regarding medical marijuana. The Department of Health and Human Services has now filed for a two month extension. It’s another stalling tactic, but they will have to respond at the end of the next two months. And no matter how they respond, they will either have to admit marijuana benefits, or make legal statements that can be attacked by lawyers in court.
While this particular move only started in October, it is the culmination of over 30 years of effort.
Dean Kuipers does an outstanding job of explaining the entire situation, along with the history of stalling done by the federal government. Here’s an excerpt:

Consider the first petition, filed in 1972. Only two years after marijuana was lumped with LSD, heroin, and mescaline in Schedule I, NORML filed the first petition with the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, the predecessor to the DEA, which stalled for three years and then denied to hear the petition. A court forced them to hear it, then the DEA (formed in 1973) killed it without any hearings. A higher court of appeals again forced them to hear it, but it was easily killed off once more. Finally, in 1986, after another exhaustive, grinding court fight, the DEA caved in and assigned the investigation to its own DEA Administrative Law Judge, Francis L. Young.

Young spent two years hearing the testimony of scores of scientists, doctors, medical marijuana patients, law enforcement officers, agents, corrections officials and the like, and in 1988 came back with a stunning verdict. In one of the most celebrated documents in the history of pot activism, Young issued a ruling of over 100 pages, saying not only that the DEA must move pot to Schedule II, to have controlled medical use like cocaine and opium, but that “the evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for the DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence of this record.”

…

Of course, the DEA swept it all under the carpet. It decided that Young had applied the wrong standard, that the testimony of doctors and patients didn’t show “a currently accepted medical use.” The record had to show controlled scientific testing – which neither the FDA nor the DEA would allow by law.

That decision went through five appeals before it was finally dead, in 1994, 22 years after the petition had been filed. But the movement to reschedule saw cracks in the feds’ armor and picked up steam. Dr. Jon Gettman, then the director of NORML, filed a new rescheduling petition in 1995. This was finally denied in 2001 – it only took seven years this time – but the reasons why it was denied were more specific and easily attacked. The phrase “arbitrary and capricious” began to resonate. It’s a magic one among lawyers, especially those fighting regulatory agencies.

Read this and you realize how silly Supreme Court Justice Breyer was when he asked, in Raich v. Ashcroft, why medical marijuana patients didn’t just follow the procedure for re-scheduling, rather than taking it to the Supreme court in a commerce clause case.
The federal government will use every drop of deceit, stalling, and legal maneuvering it can find. We’ll have to use the courts, the laws, the states, public opinion and more to drag the feds, kicking and screaming, to admitting the truth.

Mark Souder’s “Safe and Effective Drug Act” has been introduced in the House (see my post earlier this week). It’s HR-5429
The short description:

To require the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop a meta-analysis of the available scientific data regarding the safety and health risks of smoking marijuana and the clinically-proven effectiveness of smoking marijuana for medicinal purposes, and to require the Food and Drug Administration to promptly disseminate the meta-analysis.

Now, other than the obvious flaw of specifying “smoking” as the only way to use medical marijuana, the concept of this description is positive. Gathering and disseminating scientific data is something that drug policy reformers support whole-heartedly.
But let’s go a step further. In the language of the bill, there is a small part about the method for this “meta-analysis.”

(a) In General- The Director of the National Institutes of Health, acting through the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (referred to in this Act as the `Director of the Institute’), shall develop a meta-analysis of the available scientific data regarding the safety and health risks of smoking marijuana and the clinically-proven effectiveness of smoking marijuana for medicinal purposes.

OK, now the sham is exposed. It will be the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse that will gather the information. And NIDA has a historic reputation of being one-sided in its approach, susceptible to political pressures to re-inforce the drug war (and was at the very least a passive co-conspirator in the Ricaurte MDMA scandal). Current director Nora Volkow has tried to change the perception of the agency, but it’s got too much baggage and too much of an agenda built in to its mission.
NIDA is the wrong place for this analysis. This bill should be opposed unless it can be amended to change the means of collecting scientific data, and to change the wording that repeatedly infers that “smoking” is the only means of taking medical marijuana.

So New York lawmakers finally voted to scale back (somewhat) the harsh Rockefeller drug laws, after years of hard work and lobbying by tons of dedicated drug policy reformers.

Two longtime goals of drug law reformers — giving near-total sentencing discretion to judges and allowing some offenders to avoid prison entirely in favor of treatment — are not included in the agreement.

But the Governor has it figured out…

“Now we put in a new law that will rationalize that sentencing (structure) and make the punishment fit the crime,” [Governor Pataki] said.

Right. Jim at Vice Squad has a few choice words for the Governor, regarding how you determine when a punishment fits a drug crime.
I’d take it a step further. This “reform” is a joke and yet the drug policy reformers don’t dare turn it down. To ease the sentences of even a few is better than nothing.
But this is what it feels like: After years of forcing New Yorkers to buy contaminated eggs for $20 a dozen, the legislature has finally reduced the price to $12.
Pass the salt.