Drug WarRant

I chased criminal plants. I tore up fields of hemp. … I started a war to repress the people of Bolivia and Columbia … I contributed to the loss of Bill of Rights for all Americans … I turned some neighborhoods into shooting gallerys where armed bands fought over marketing rights in various territories. … I worked hard to get children to inform on their parents. … And while making war on 5 to 10% of all Americans I ignored any warnings of terrorist threats and concentrated on the civil war against users of the wrong kinds of drugs. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. …

M. Simon of Rockford, Illinois first had this piece published on December 15, 2001. But as he says: “It’s still true.”
Read it.
He also adds:

This weeks saying:

What is the difference between drug prohibition and alcohol prohibition?
Seventy four years so far.

Ask a politician:

Do you support drug prohibition because it finances criminals at home or because it finances terrorists abroad?

I’ll start watching debates when they’re ready to talk seriously about drug policy. Odds are, that won’t happen.
Let me know if I’m wrong.
I’ll be coming out with my endorsement and analysis of the Presidential race sometime in October so watch for it. I’ll also be working on more state voting guides.

Thanks to Scott (of course), comes this amazing piece in the Houston Press. It’s a five (web) page article on medical marijuana by Michael Serazio called Reefer Madness.
I’m just going to quote extensively from it (although this is still just a brief taste of the article).
Along with the tape from the Montel show, this is required reading for people considering the pros and cons of legalizing medical marijuana.

When he emerged from 13 straight months in the hospital and rehab, Jones choked back a steady diet of assorted pills: Demerol, Vistaril, Valium, Halcion and Lioresal, among others. He describes the feeling in his back “like somebody’s got an ice pick and they just keep jabbing it in and out of that same damn spot, constantly.” The pills, he found, didn’t work well enough.

“I was at the point that I was taking 280 milligrams of baclofen,” or generic Lioresal. “And the maximum dosage on that is 80 milligrams a day,” he says. “Just to try to control spasticity. I’d be sitting in my wheelchair. I would get a spasm out of nowhere. Next thing I knew, I was trying to block my head from hitting the ground. It just threw me right out of my chair. Threw me over backwards.”

He says that in the early ’90s his doctor recommended, unofficially, trying marijuana for the pain. Nowadays, Jones needs only a strong aspirin, a Benadryl for his sinuses and most critically — he points to the table — cannabis. …

_______

Dr. Alan Robison, who chaired the pharmacology department at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston before retiring, conducted some of the earliest research on marijuana’s toxicity level.

“That was the first and only drug I ever studied in my career that was so nontoxic that no matter how much of it you gave to a mouse or a rat, you couldn’t kill the damn thing,” says Robison, the founder of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas. “As an industrial chemical, it’s a real loser, because you can’t even kill a cockroach with it.” …

_______

The self-described “straight-edge” teen had seen cocaine wreck her mother’s life and initially shied away from medicating with cannabis. When her cancer returned, though, in the midst of a painful chemotherapy run, she gave it a shot. It worked, at least for her depression and nausea.

“Without smoking pot, I don’t eat. At all.” She pauses. “Just, I don’t eat at all.” She later adds, “The marijuana works with the pain. It actually, like, relaxes — like, when you’re in pain for so long, your body gets so on edge and you get so tense and it just makes the pain worse. And usually it results, when you’re in that kind of pain, you have to go to the ER and get IV pain medication.” …

_______

A 2001 Pew Research Center study found the public supports prescription marijuana by a more than three-to-one ratio, and a Time/CNN survey one year later had it at 80 percent. But despite the fact that marijuana’s medical use enjoys widespread and consistent public support, it’s a source of a paralysis on the part of elected officials — perhaps the strangest paradox in politics. Both conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr.’s writings and the NORML Web site, odd bedfellows in the fight to legalize, lament this pervasive fear of looking “soft on drugs.”

“You know why it’s not legal,” says Paul. “It’s because people are afraid to vote that way. You know, people get hysterical” — he fakes a shrieky voice — “Oh, I can’t do that. I agree with you, but the people’ll think I’m pro-drugs… The whole thing is just carried away. So Congress is way behind what the people are thinking. If this were a really, really bad position, I couldn’t be in office, because it’s been used against me continuously.” The point is salient not only to Paul, but it speaks to a second, perhaps stranger paradox: Despite the issue’s volatility, no one can think of a single case of someone significant losing their seat because of a stance on medical marijuana.

“Ron Paul should’ve been gone 20 years ago if that were the case,” says Alan Bock, author of Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana. “I think partly what this is, most people, early in their political careers, some consultant told them: ‘Don’t touch that. Your career’s over.’ And they’ve never rethought it. Even if they’ve had fairly serious questions about it.”

None of this is particularly new to those who follow drug policy reform closely — you’ve heard me talk about the problem with politicians being afraid of being considered “soft” on drugs again and again — but it’s powerful to see this kind of article in the press.

Flash animation at Drug Policy Alliance. Go watch.

Via Vice Squad comes news that the US Coast Guard has seized 56,000 pounds in two recent interdictions.

Total amount of cocaine seized by the DEA since 1986: over 1,000 tons.
The degree to which that has reduced availability: approximately 0.

DEA’s Failed Battle To Ban Hemp Food is Over

San Francisco — Three years after the Bush administration tried to ban food products made with hemp, the government surrendered that front in the war on drugs, attorneys for the hemp industry said Monday.

The Justice Department, these attorneys say, will not challenge a federal appeals court ruling that overturned the ban – a victory for more than 200 companies that make such things as energy bars, waffles, milk-free cheese and veggie burgers with the plant that contains only trace amounts of THC, the key ingredient in marijuana.

Monday night was the deadline for the government to challenge a federal appellate court’s February decision to the Supreme Court that the United States cannot ban the domestic sale of hemp foods. …

The trade group Vote Hemp said it would begin lobbying Congress to allow industrial hemp production in the United States, said Alexis Baden-Mayer, the group’s government affairs director.

I expressed some misgivings regarding the proposal in Chicago to switch to fines for marijuana possession. It’s in the Tribune again today (an interesting article) and reader Brian suggests:

Consider the number of new articles about what a waste of resources it is to prosecute pot charges let alone trying to enforce them. I wonder if they are trying to create some forced recognition of the issue as it exists today. I agree with you that tickets are not perfect, but it is a step in the right direction. I think the biggest issue here is that the topic is being debated at all and the fact that the it is in front of all people.

Excellent point.

Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, and Kansas are now complete, bringing the total to 15 states. I’ve still got a ways to go to get them all done before the election, but I’m plugging away.
The interesting story this time is the Libertarians in Arizona and Kansas. Without the Libertarian Party in those states, I’d have been hard pressed to come up with very many endorsements (in Kansas in fact, for the first time so far in these state guides, one party swept the endorsements).
Here are some additional statements from Libertarians in those states:

John B. Crockett (Arizona 1st) “All drugs should be Freely available to all Adults without a prescription.”
Powell E. Gammill (Arizona 2nd) “People have a right to do whatever to themselves, those who forcefully oppose this are the criminals”
Mark J. Yannone (Arizona 3rd) “The federal government is not authorized to regulate drug use.”
Craig B. Stritar (Arizona 6th) “The War on Drugs is unconstitutional and therefore illegal.”
Jack W. Warner (Kansas 1st) “The purchase, sale, or possession of drugs is a personal freedom issue and there should be no laws of prohibition”
Joseph K. Bellis (Kansas 3rd) “Once again the federal government has no constitutional mandate to carry on a war on drugs. Regulation of drug use is the responsibility of the individual states.”

I also enjoyed this write-in candidate in Arkansas:

Vernon ‘Gene’ E Mason (Arkansas Senate Write-in) “There are more than 25,000 products to be manufactured from the hemp plant. The hemp industry could employ every single Arkansan.”

Here are all the state guides so far:

Alabama Marijuana Party’s Loretta Nall spoke on Saturday on the steps of the Alabama State Capital as part of a Freedom March, to focus attention on Alabama’s Habitual Offender law, harsh drug laws and prison overcrowding.
A small, but enthusiastic crowd apparently reacted very well to the speeches, at least until the cops came and shut the event down over controversy over the permit.
Read all about it here. Go to page 3 for pictures from the event.
Update: Video of the march available at POT-TV.

I want to take a moment to comment on a few recent political news items that aren’t specifically related to drug policy, but have undeniable drug policy implications.
“bullet” I Pledge Allegiance…
The House of Representative just passed a bill that says: “No court created by Act of Congress shall have any jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court shall have no appellate jurisdiction, to hear or decide any question pertaining to the interpretation of, or the validity under the Constitution of, the Pledge of Allegiance . . . or its recitation.”
Now this is silly-season lawmaking. The House loves to pass these kinds of bills that they know the Senate will wisely squash, just so they can score political points.
But it’s bad law, and bad precedent.
In the drug reform community, we depend on every possible protection from government overreaching devised by the framers. For example, we cannot rely on the legislature. They have consistently worked against science and the will of the people when it comes to medical marijuana. So in addition to trying to change the law, we have to pursue other avenues — voter initiatives and court challenges, including the medical marijuana cases working their way to the Supreme Court regarding the federal government and the commerce clause.
Well, just suppose, due to the large campaign contributions from pharmaceuticals, Congress decided to pass a law stating:

“No court created by Act of Congress shall have any jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court shall have no appellate jurisdiction, to hear or decide any question pertaining to the interpretation of, or the validity under the Constitution of, the Controlled Substances Act . . . or its enforcement.”

Freedom depends on checks and balances on government power.
Regardless of your views regarding the Pledge of Allegiance, tell your Representative that you don’t appreciate them messing with traditional separation of the branches of government.
“bullet” Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism… Act
The Patriot Act is rearing its ugly head again via the newly formed Coalition for Security, Liberty and the Law (see National Review item.
The Coalition has prepared a letter about the Patriot Act, signed by a ton of important sounding people (although seeing William Bennett and Edwin Meese’s names was enough to lose any respect I might have had for the group). Their position:

we ask that no provision of the Patriot Act be allowed to expire and the temporary provisions be made permanent.

The rest of the letter has its share of distortions and outright lies.
As Hit and Run notes, the most hilarious line in the letter:

In passing the Act, Congress extensively debated the commonsense updates in the law and provided safeguards for civil liberties.

That one really had me rolling on the floor.
The Patriot Act has a few minor things in it that could be good. Overall, as a tool for fighting terrorism, it’s not that great. Most everything the country needed to fight terrorism it already had. Federal law enforcement didn’t need more tools — they just needed to focus on the problem rather than spending so much of their resources on the drug war.
There just wasn’t time before passing the Patriot Act to properly develop a set of tools specifically for fighting terrorism (heck, there wasn’t time to read it). The Patriot Act was primarily a Justice Department wish list that they already had lying around to give them more power and reduce the rights of the individual.
Already for decades, the federal government had worked tirelessly, chipping away at individual rights through the courts in the name of the drug war, always using the “compelling government interests” of “dangerous drugs” and “protecting children” but never being forced to prove that

1. their assertions were true
2. the drug war was the best way to solve the problem
3. the drug war even worked at all
4. the drug war didn’t actually increase the problem

Hence we got civil asset forfeiture, and no-knock warrants, and loosened restrictions regarding searches and evidence, and military-style attacks on our own citizens.. Remember what the 4th amendment used to look like?

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.

Ah, those were the days. Freedom and democracy.
When Ashcroft promoted the Patriot Act, he said that we shouldn’t worry about it. It’s things we’re already allowed to do in the War on Drugs and we just want to add them to the War on Terrorism (why doesn’t that make me feel better?). Of course, if that’s true, the strange thing is that the Patriot Act has since been actually used for more drug convictions than terrorism convictions.
We must not give in to fear. We can be strong and resolute without giving up our rights. Ashcroft wants you to give them up.

It’s to fight the terrorists. Really. We won’t use the powers for inappropriate purposes. You’ll have nothing to worry about. Trust us, we’re the government.

“bullet” The Exquisite Cacophony of Freedom
Recently there’s been a lot of talk about the inappropriateness of government criticism. Some have gone so far as to equate criticism of government policies with treason or aiding the enemy. I find this troubling — in part, because I know it so well.
For decades, the drug policy reform community has operated under a virtual gag order because we’re at war — in the War on Drugs. Ordinary people have been afraid to question drug laws because they might be perceived as druggies. Even today, I have people tell me that they agree with me, but are afraid to speak up, and I’ve had readers email me from anonymous remailers because they’d lose their job if they were seen to be favoring drug policy reform. And I’ve had people tell me that I personally should be held responsible for the deaths of overdose victims, because of what I say on this blog.
It is dangerous (and should appear suspicious) whenever one group is so entrenched in their position that they don’t even want a different view to be heard, and are willing to make outrageous accusations to silence it.
During a June, 1999 Congressional Hearing, Rep. Benjamin A.æ Gilman, from upstate New York declared:

“[Legalization] cannot and ought not be any topic of serious discussion in our nation’s debate of the challenges of illicit drugs.”

In the same hearing, Rep.æBob Barr asked whether anti-racketeering laws could be used to prosecute people conspiring to legalize drugs.æ
It is not only my free speech right to speak out when I disagree with government policies; it is my responsibility as a citizen in a democratic society.

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…