Drug WarRant

If you’re going to read one article this week to gain a new perspective on the drug war, you must read this one by Dan Gardner in today’s Edmonton Journal.
It’s about one of those notions in the drug war that has been so ingrained into our consciousness by the drug warriors that we have a hard time wrapping our minds around the most effective reform.
My friends will tell me, “OK, I can see what you’re saying regarding legalizing marijuana, but what about the hard drugs? What are you going to do about heroin?” My response: “Give it away for free” is meant to shock them. However, it’s also the truth. It is, in fact, the only approach for some heroin addicts that has historically been shown to be effective. In some cases, it is the best approach to reduce crime, increase the life-span of addicts, reduce new addictions, and eliminate the profit incentive for dealers.

Conservative Switzerland set up the first modern experiment with heroin prescription in the mid-1990s, producing results so promising the Swiss expanded the program and made it a permanent facet of health care. Holland followed with a more rigorous study that ended in 2001 — again producing positive outcomes and government approval to continue the research. Germany, Spain, Italy and Australia have planned or launched their own projects. The United Kingdom is working on a scheme to expand the prescription of heroin by individual doctors, even general practitioners.

Whether courageous or outrageous, the idea of prescribing illicit drugs to addicts has spread with astonishing speed, leading the media and the public to assume it’s a revolutionary new idea. It’s not.

The continuing prescription of drugs such as heroin to addicts — or “maintenance” as the practice is often called — is actually a very old medical technique that was dropped in North America when drugs were criminalized early in the 20th century. The story of how this medical technique met its demise is the story of how law enforcement snatched the issue of drugs away from medicine, turning what had been a health issue into a crime problem. It’s the story of how the cops beat the doctors.

This article gives an amazing detailed history of heroin maintenance efforts and the political pressures that have often forced governments to scrap effective programs.

By 1920, as historian David Musto wrote in The American Disease, “advocacy of maintenance was repressed as sternly as socialism” in the U.S. Doctors and pharmacists were arrested. Clinics doing the same work the Swiss and Dutch would experiment with 70 years later were raided and shut down. A total ban on heroin in medicine followed.

Desperate addicts looked elsewhere for drugs, and a criminal black market in narcotics blossomed.

Finally, in recent years, some countries have again been gradually looking at maintenance for extreme cases, and finding phenomenal success. Of course, people like our drug czar have never let facts stand in their way.

Opposition to such clinics has been fearsome. John Walters, the White House’s top anti-drug official, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that patients at these clinics, far from being “productive citizens,” are “demoralized zombies seeking a daily fix.”

In response, Barends points through the window of a meeting room where a seemingly ordinary woman in her late 30s talks with a counsellor. “Does that look like a zombie to you?” he asks, grinning.

Heroin use is an odd thing. Most people who take the drug do so for a short time, or sporadically, and never become addicted. Of those who get hooked, most stop using the drug without any formal treatment within a few years. Of the rest, most can ultimately be helped off the drug with treatment or at least be stabilized with regular doses of heroin’s chemical cousin, methadone.

Just a small fraction of users ultimately falls into the classic profile of a broken-down junkie whose addiction keeps a fierce grip as years and decades crawl by. Unfortunately, that fraction tends to be made up of the addicts who are most damaged and alienated. They tend also to be the heaviest users of heroin and the likeliest to commit crimes to pay for their drugs. They are the wretched of the inner cities, the junkies who populate the ghettoes, prisons and morgues.

Dr. Martin Schechter, chair of epidemiology at the University of British Columbia and some of his colleagues, are pushing to add clinics in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.

“In Canada, we are discussing trying things, like safe injection sites, like medically prescribed heroin trials, that we would never have dreamed of talking about five or 10 years ago. And I will predict this will continue, and we will eventually, I don’t know when, but the issue of decriminalization and the conversion of drugs into a public health and medical situation will be on the front burner in this country in the future.

“That debate will occur. There is just no escaping it.”

Read the article.

Walter in Denver has been continuing his great coverage on the bizarre case in Colorado that’s pitting a judge against DEA agents.
The latest: The U.S. Attorney’s office went to a federal judge to get the charges dropped.
To recap again:

1. GRAMNET – the Grand, Routt and Moffat Narcotics Enforcement Team (which included a DEA agent) raided a Hayden, Colorado home in mid-October.
2. They seize some marijuana and some pipes.
3. It turns out Don Nord is a medical marijuana user and that was his medicine (legal in Colorado).
4. No charges are filed against Nord, and the judge orders the pipes and 2 ounces of marijuana returned for his medical use.
5. The officers had given the marijuana to the DEA, and the DEA refused to return it.
6. The judge cited the officers for contempt and directed them to appear in court at 1:30 pm February 2 “to show why they should not be punished for defying the court order.”
7. The U.S. Attorney’s office is using taxpayer money and sending lawyers to defend the DEA agent against the contempt citation… and now
8. The U.S. Attorney’s office is trying to get the case moved to federal court and contempt charges dropped.

TalkLeft has also commented on the case, including:

In a society based on the rule of law, the proper response to a court order the government considers to be flawed is to appeal the order, not to disobey it.

One of the nice things about MAP is the ability to see such a large number of articles on the same subject, and Oh boy, are they coming out of the woodwork regarding the re-classification of marijuana in England. In addition to what I’ve already given you:
Neil McKeganey is Professor of Drug Misuse Research at the University
of Glasgow (or was that Professor of Drug Research Misuse?) has a bizarre notion that completely ignores established science on gateway effects:

It is not simply the reclassification of cannabis, though, which might cause concern.æ Mr Blunkett’s stated intention of focusing on heroin and cocaine might also engender a sense of gloom on the part of those working in the drug prevention field.æ Why is this? For the simple reason that hardly anybody starts their drug-using career with heroin or cocaine.æ What they start with, even if they don’t progress to these harder drugs, is cannabis.

Huh? (And I read it twice!)
Tory leader Michael Howard got in some hot water by calling the decision to downgrade marijuana “absurd,” while refusing to say whether he had smoked pot himself. Oops.
Alice Thompson, writing for the Telegraph suddenly sees psychotics and schizophrenics behind every joint (Is that perhaps a factor of British pot? Or just perhaps related to the conflict between the English reserve and pot’s relaxation? Because there’s no science that really supports this, yet this week you can find a British psychotic anecdote at every turn!)
Simon Jenkins with The Times sets things straight a bit with his Drugs Turn the Brains of Politicians into Marzipan, where he lampoons the political waffling and posturing and ends up noting.

My parents were appalled at the thought of a betting shop on every corner.æ It would surely lead to “addiction”.æ Somehow they got over it. The same must be done with drugs, all drugs.æ They must be removed from criminal distribution and their sale controlled and taxed like nicotine and alcohol.æ Such a proposal is not ideal, merely vital.

The Guardian gave a strong positive editorial:

[The independent commission in 2000] rightly concluded that the decision to place cannabis in the middle category of harmfulness 30 years ago did not reflect current scientific, medical or sociological findings.æ They did not say it was risk free.æ There is a danger with all drugs.æ But they concluded: “When cannabis is systematically compared with other drugs against the main criteria of harm ( mortality, morbidity, toxicity, addictiveness and relationship with crime ), it is less harmful to the individual and society than any of the other major illicit drugs, or than alcohol and tobacco.” The policing of the old law – 300,000 stop and searches a year – has done far more harm than the drug.

And finally, John O’Farrell in the Guardian decides to just laugh at all of this with his entertaining article: Just Say No To Echinacea

Yesterday, before the world’s media, a peace treaty was signed between the British government and cannabis.æ Hardliners had insisted that there should have been no talks with cannabis supporters until all joints had been put beyond use, until they had laid down their bongs and stopped giggling. …

Now cannabis will be placed on the same level as prescription drugs, with the result that hundreds of people will rush to their doctor’s surgery saying: “I’m going to the Glastonbury festival at the weekend, and I wondered if you could prescribe me something to help me relax?” …
Until recently, 90% of all arrests for possession of drugs were for cannabis.æ At last our bobbies will have time for more important tasks, such as using their highly sophisticated methods for searching out drug dealers by pulling over any black man driving a nice car. …

It is the more pernicious drugs that the police should be concentrating on.æ I don’t mean heroin or cocaine or ecstasy, I mean the real social menace: echinacea and arnica and all the herbal remedies that are sold at great expense and don’t do anything whatsoever.

All over Britain traumatised children are being forced to take fish oil while the callous pushers in the health food shop buy another gold-studded collar for their rottweilers and laugh at the gullibility of the liberal middle classes.æ “Wanna score some more St John’s wort man? It’ll cost you, brother, this is good shit, I ain’t cutting in no low-grade marigold.” Armed police burst in.æ “This is a raid! Hand over your royal jelly!”

Delightful.

Sound like some kind of perverse pedophiliac pecuniary pursuit? No, it’s the President of the United States, putting forth the notion that the world will be a better place if we spend $23 million to force children to pee in a cup.
Stupid.
If you really feel you have to spend that money, you’d be better off giving each state $460,000 to put into after-school programs. It may not seem like much, but heck, the way budgets are today, some schools would be happy with $20 to buy a couple of basketballs.
But the President has spoken, and you can be sure there will be a push for drug testing in schools across the country. After all, there’s federal money to be had! Who cares if drug testing doesn’t work?

Fortunately, Drug Policy Alliance and the ACLU have stepped up to the plate with Making Sense of Student Drug Testing: Why Educators Are Saying No (pdf — also available here), written by Fatema Gunja, Alexandra Cox,
Marsha Rosenbaum, PhD and Judith Appel, JD
Here’s a segment:

Comprehensive, rigorous, and respected research shows that there
are many reasons why random student drug testing is not good
policy:

• Drug testing is not effective in deterring drug use among young people;
• Drug testing is expensive, taking away scarce dollars from other, more effective programs that keep young people out of trouble with drugs;
• Drug testing can be legally risky, exposing schools to potentially costly litigation;
• Drug testing may drive students away from extracurricular activities, which are a proven means of helping students stay out of trouble with drugs;
• Drug testing can undermine relationships of trust between students and teachers and between parents and their children;
• Drug testing can result in false positives, leading to the punishment of innocent students;
• Drug testing does not effectively identify students who have serious problems with drugs; and
• Drug testing may lead to unintended consequences, such as students using drugs that are more dangerous but less detectable by a drug test, and learning the wrong lessons about their constitutional rights.

There are alternatives to drug testing which emphasize education,
discussion, counseling, extracurricular activities, and
build trust between students and adults.

The pamphlet then goes on to explain each of these points in detail, with facts, studies, quotes from educators and much more.
Read the whole thing, and then pass it on to your K-12 teachers, bring it to the PTA, send it to the school board, offer it to your newspaper, involve your city council.
If we aren’t proactive, very soon we will be teaching our children a bad lesson: that their rights don’t matter. And for what? An expensive program that doesn’t work.

From the Oregon Register-Guard:

[Kari] Rein, 42, and her husband James Jungwirth, 41, a U.S. citizen, have lived in Williams, near Grants Pass, for 15 years. They run an herb and seaweed
harvesting business and have a 14-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son.

11 years ago, Rein was convicted of growing six marijuana plants for personal use and received probation and community service. The judge at the time said he was confident it was for personal use,

“And I’m also satisfied that the two of you are people who are capable of
being productive and are being productive in society,” the judge continued,
“and I don’t think at this point that jail really serves any benefit to
anyone.”

Here’s the tragedy —
Kari Rein is an immigrant, and immigration officials now (11 years later) want to send her back to Norway.

According to Rein’s attorney, immigration officials say the conviction
qualifies as an aggravated felony and mandates deportation under 1990s
immigration rules that have received souped-up enforcement since the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

Six pot plants over a decade ago, and you send a wife and mother away from her home? Does this government have ANY sense of morality?

Be sure to check out this week’s DrugSense Weekly
Lots of interesting information and a review of the most relevant newspaper articles of the past week. Also a great letter of the week and, DrugSense Weekly was nice enough to include my analysis/rant on the President’s SOTU.
Just a reminder that DrugSense and MAP are an incredible resource in drug policy reform.
They’re a great way to get involved. Sure, you read something on this site and it gets you pissed off. What do you do? Well, you could write your own rant and submit it to me for Guest Rants. Or, go to MAP, where you’ll get assistance in writing letters to the editor in newspapers all over the world, where you can make a real difference and reach thousands of people with your words. They’ll even give you current alerts with suggestions for writing letters.
Or you can donate and, for a short time, have your donation matched.

“bullet” Reason’s Jacob Sullom asks in Bush on Steroids, “Why must sports by drug-free?

The irony is that legal restrictions and league bans on steroids discourage athletes who use them from seeking medical guidance, so they’re more at risk than they would be if steroid use were permitted. As with recreational drugs, prohibition makes steroids more dangerous, not less.

An interesting article, and Sullom, as usual, is not afraid to ask the “taboo” questions.
“bullet” Talkleft has a couple of posts worth checking out, including

• Los Angeles is the latest city — and the largest one — to reject the Patriot Act
• Informants Who Set Up Fake Drug Busts Get a Sentence Break

“bullet” As most people know by now, Art Garfunkel was busted for pot possession. I really don’t have much to say on this, other than the fact that he’s one of over 600,000 people in the United States who should not have been arrested in the past year for marijuana possession.
“bullet” Damn Foreigner has an excellent post on US Ambassador giving unsolicited advice. Essentially Ambassador Paul Cellucci is threatening Canada again with border troubles if they don’t dispel the “perception” that getting marijuana is Canada will be easier.
One of the most bizarre parts of this is that he suggests something that would help: putting in criminal provisions for marijuana possession near schools — this in conjunction with decriminalization. So, if your house is within x feet of a school you could go to jail for smoking pot in your own home, but your neighbor would just get a fine. Yeah, that works. It would be interesting to see if that would raise or lower property values near schools.
“bullet” Vice Squad is on top of Chicago cops, drugs, and corruption.
“bullet” Mark Kleiman talks about the disturbing trend in drug abuse research — that all the funding is going toward the information that the warriors want to present — in Opting for Ignorance: ADAM program killed
“bullet” The fabulous Libby at Last One Speaks has the humorous story of the Detective who was ruled “too cute” in a drug bust!
“bullet” The new issue of Drug War Chronicle is available with some interesting items, including more on the hysteria in the UK that I’ve been reporting, and a Minnesota Sentencing Commission report that says the state could save $30 million per year with treatment instead of prison.

With just a few days until marijuana is downgraded from class B to class C in England, the attempts to scare people can get downright silly.
Yesterday as I reported, various papers covered the suddenly revealed inquest results (from over a month ago) that claimed to have found the first death from marijuana overdose (extremely unlikely).
Today, BBC News reports on a group calling for health warnings to be issued regarding schizophrenia, and other forms of psychosis, from cannabis use!
The Telegraph came out yesterday with How dangerous is Dope?, which included this ridiculous story:

The inquest last week into the death of Robert Dickinson, who shot dead his neighbour in a dispute over a garden hedge and then committed suicide in prison, heard that he had been “drunk and drugged” and had smoked “up to five cannabis cigarettes a day”.

The coroner told jurors: “I would want to stress…æ that cannabis is not a harmless drug and this case demonstrates how devastating its effects can be.” Outside the court, Det Insp Peter Bray, of Lincolnshire Police, said: “It does nobody any good to use cannabis and can lead to these sorts of things.”

Oh my God, cannabis causes garden hedge disputes!
This was the same media source that back in November ran CANNABIS USE CAUSES ‘HUNDREDS OF DEATHS A YEAR’, CORONER WARNS with the amazing:

Cannabis also contributed to the death of Dragan Radoslavjevic, 42, from Paignton, Devon.æ He died earlier this year after using a power tool to drill a hole in his head. An inquest in Torquay heard that he suffered from depression and relied on drugs such as cannabis and heroin.

[I’ve got to go to the UK and attend some inquests — they sound like a lot of fun.]
In yesterday’s article, however, the Telegraph provided some balance by quoting Dr Zerrin Atakan of the National Psychosis Unit, who rebutted the assertions in the BBC report with:

Cannabis psychosis is a very vague term.æ If we ever use the phrase, it is only to describe very short-term effects immediately following smoking, and it certainly doesn’t refer to users having a psychotic disorder.æ People may feel frightened or paranoid, but these feelings pass in a matter of hours or, more rarely, days, and practically never require treatment.”

and added this positive thought:

Children need to be taught the hazards at an early age, and it needs to be regulated so people know what they are getting.æ This can only happen through legalisation.”

We already know that the feds just go crazy over the issue of medical marijuana — they’re that afraid of it. Whether it’s federal armed raids on medical marijuana groups operating legally under state law, or the DEA’s refusal to return seized medicine, it’s clear that we have to remove the federal government from medical marijuana.
Here’s how surreal this gets. A school board in California is opposing local medical marijuana proposals under the excuse that they’re afraid of losing federal funding!

Board President Mary Scott said the proposed ordinance could affect schools’ federal funding.æSchools are required to abide by the federal Safe and Drug Free Schools Act, which mandates strict policies regarding employee use and possession of drugs and requires that schools teach students that illegal drugs are wrong and harmful.

Federal law does not recognize marijuana as legal in any circumstances.æ Schools which violate the federal law could risk losing federal funding, Scott said.

School districts are also federally required to certify “drug-free school zones,” meaning that there are no illegal drugs within 1,000 feet of school sites.

Get the feds out of medical marijuana in one easy step: Reschedule.

Ted at Women’s Hoops has some additional perspective on the State of the Union steroid section and why Bush would never go after supplements.

Orrin Hatch is one of the most powerful Republican Senators and also ahuge backer of the supplement industry. Many supplement companies are based in Utah, Hatch’s home. The industry has donated over $100,000 to Hatch over the past decade. And Hatch’s son runs a lobbying firm with supplement industry clients, who have paid the firm millions.

Hatch wrote in his memoirs: “I have taken dietary supplements almost my entire adult life and can attest to the benefits they provide.” He has argued that adults should be able to decide for themselves whether to ingest these chemicals, and that government regulation shouldn’t get in the way.

Ironically, Hatch is also the leading elected official fighting the War on Drugs. Unclear why he thinks adults should be able to decide for themselves whether to ingest kava, e.g., without any government regulation, but shouldn’t be able to decide to ingest marijuana, e.g., at all.

I’ve always watched Hatch carefully. He’s smart and articulate, with no conscience, particularly in his behind the scenes work regarding the drug war and civil liberties.