Drug WarRant

John P. Walters in Politico: Why Libertarians Are Wrong About Drugs

The drug user’s freedom to consume costs his community not only their safety, but also their liberty.

No, I’m pretty sure you did that.

The Partnership at Drugfree.org is changing its name.

The Partnership at Drugfree.org announced today that it has changed its name to the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids. The name and a newly expanded website reflect the nonprofit’s ongoing commitment to reducing teen substance abuse and supporting families impacted by addiction.

What this reflects, of course, is that their fundraising model will work better if they focus on kids. It’s a retrenching from ridiculously broad impossibilities.

And, of course, I’d have no problem with them focusing on keeping kids drug free if they’ve given up on meddling with responsible adult use (they haven’t) and if they only provide information that is honest and science-based (they don’t).

An interesting article over at Reason on the legalization of a drug called alcohol: How Not to Legalize a Drug

Basically, the article talks about the three-tiered system of producers, distributors, and retailers that was set up with the repeal of Prohibition 1, and how that structure still affects the market today.

Fascinating reading, and worth keeping in mind as we determine models for the emerging legal cannabis industry.

Legalization of cannabis in Colorado has not solved the issue of marijuana being considered an element in child-endangerment cases.

Legalizing Marijuana: Changing laws Prompt Child-Protection Review

“The legal standard is always the best interest of the children, and you can imagine how subjective that can get,” said Jess Cochrane, who helped found Boston-based Family Law & Cannabis Alliance after finding child-abuse laws have been slow to catch up with pot policy. […]

“We moved here across the country so we wouldn’t be criminals. But all it takes is one neighbor not approving of what we’re doing, one police officer who doesn’t understand, and the law says I’m a child abuser,” Barnhart said.

The presence of pot alone should never be a factor in these cases. Taking children away from their parents is actual abuse, compared to the imagined horrors emerging from the specter of mellow parents.

I know I harp on this a lot at Drug WarRant, but I consider it important – the war on stoned driving has had little to do with highway safety, but rather functions as a back-door way to punish marijuana users, and as a scare tactic to prevent legalization.

Yes, being stoned can affect your driving, and so can texting, or being tired, or being upset, or being distracted by a passenger, or… It’s important to keep relative dangers in perspective, and go after actual impairment.

Nice to see The Truth About Driving While Stoned by Abby Haglage. She also dismantles the dishonest piece in USA today by Matt Schmitz and Chris Woodyard.

And while I certainly have had my disagreements with Mark Kleiman, he does a fairly nice job here:

“You shouldn’t be driving stoned,” says Kleiman. “But there are many things that will degrade driving just as much if not more—having a 4-year-old in your back seat, sleepiness, texting.”

Beyond the relative risk associated with marijuana, Kleiman says blood is not a good proxy for how stoned you are. “It’s almost impossible not to be guilty of driving while stoned if you smoke. The fact that THC is fat soluble and then comes back out in your bloodstream means you can be THC positive when you’re not impaired at all,” he says. “There’s no way to tell if you’re breaking the law—that seems unjust.”

Naturally, Kevin had to chime in with his usual nonsense, misusing statistics that sound scary, but are anything but.

In Sabet’s eyes, it’s anything but safe. “Science has determined that cannabis intoxication doubles your risk of a car crash. Despite this scientifically valid fact, people are not getting this message,” he says. […]

But NIDA’s claim that marijuana use increases the likelihood of an accident is contradicted in some of the government’s own research.

Jamaica Poised to Decriminalize Marijuana Possession, Approve Medical and Religious Use, and Expunge Past Offenses

On Friday, Jamaican Minister of Justice Mark Golding released a statement announcing government support for a proposal to decriminalize the possession of up to two ounces of marijuana and the decriminalization of marijuana use for religious, scientific and medical purposes.

“The objective is to provide a more enlightened approach to dealing with possession of small quantities and smoking, while still meeting the ends of justice,” Minister Golding said. “The proposed changes represent an approach which will ensure to the benefit of the persons concerned and the society as a whole, and reduce the burdens on the court system.”

Good step. I’m pretty sure just about all ganja use in Jamaica is religious. They practically worship the plant.

The DEA: Four Decades of Impeding and Rejecting Science

Today, members of Congress, scientific experts, medical marijuana patients and others will join a teleconference that will accompany the release of a new report co-published by MAPS and the Drug Policy Alliance called “The DEA: Four Decades of Impeding and Rejecting Science“.

There will be a time when the political landscape has changed sufficiently that the DEA will no longer be able to act without accountability. Is that time now? We’ll see. There are specific concrete recommendations in the report related to taking away powers from the DEA, based on their documented past abuse. And I think more political leaders are straying from the traditional belief that the DEA is some kind of sacred cow.

Research from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (DOT HS 810 637) has shown that you are roughly three times as likely to be killed on the highway if you’re traveling in a car with the headlights on.

This should be a wake-up call to legislators who have long been hoodwinked by auto industry claims that headlights are “harmless” or even beneficial.

Yeah, this would be an insanely silly news story. And yet, it is the level to which so much reporting on marijuana and driving has sunk. The truth is, of course, that you are three times more likely to be killed on the highway with the headlights on, but that’s because you’re three times more likely to be killed on the highway at night than in the daytime. It isn’t at all because you have headlights on.

[See: Matt Schmitz and Chris Woodyard at USA Today exemplify dishonest reporting on drugged driving.]

Marijuana playing larger role in fatal crashes by Matt Schmitz and Chris Woodyard at Cars.com and USA Today.

This article is just another example of blatantly dishonest reporting (or, just as bad, ignorant reporting).

It may be that Matt Schmitz and Chris Woodyard are experts at cars and don’t know anything about marijuana, but if that’s true, they shouldn’t be writing articles about the two together without getting some help.

Columbia University researchers performing a toxicology examination of nearly 24,000 driving fatalities concluded that marijuana contributed to 12% of traffic deaths in 2010, tripled from a decade earlier.

Nope. They concluded nothing of the sort.

Nowhere did they say that marijuana “contributed” to traffic deaths. In fact, they went out of their way to note: “the prevalence of nonalcohol drugs reported in this study should be interpreted as an indicator of drug use, not necessarily a measurement of drug impairment.” That’s because the study measured those who tested positive, whether they were impaired or not, and that could include those who ingested marijuana days earlier.

Let’s see what else Schmitz and Woodyard have to say:

A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study found that 4% of drivers were high during the day and more than 6% at night, and that nighttime figure more than doubled on weekends.

Nope. They never found that at all.

Nowhere did they say that the drivers were “high.” In fact, they went out of their way to note: “The reader is cautioned that drug presence does not necessarily imply impairment. For many drug types, drug presence can be detected long after any impairment that might affect driving has passed.”

All of us care about the safety of roads and realize that all kinds of things can affect drivers in different ways, and learning more of the actual facts about driving impairment is a good thing.

But irresponsible reporting that merely plays on fears with unsupported conclusions doesn’t help us make good policy decisions and therefore can actually lead to less-safe roads.

Maybe Matt and Chris should stick to telling us about carburetors.

[See: Use of headlights linked to traffic fatalities]

When I was in college my Freshman year, my roommate and I decided to get really drunk for the first time. Yes, I had led a bit of a sheltered life, and, while I had consumed alcohol once or twice before, I didn’t know much about it.

Not being complete idiots, we decided to do it under safe conditions, in our dorm room, with the bathroom right across the hall, and having friends check up on us. We knew nothing about types of alcohol, and so our choices for the evening were: Boones Farm Apple Wine, Southern Comfort, and Bacardi 151 Rum! We got drunk, we got sick, and learned a couple of lessons.

Many young people have some similar kind of rite of passage when it comes to alcohol, that often seems particularly stupid in retrospect. If I hadn’t been so ignorant of alcohol, I might have avoided that particular experience — who knows?

There’s a similar introduction to getting high that’s involved with marijuana. For my generation, that usually involved getting passed a joint at a party and having absolutely nothing happen the first time, and then gradually getting to appreciate the effects in further experiences.

But now, we have legalization in Colorado, and businesses are promoting edibles. And so, idiots (like Maureen Dowd), are going in and saying the equivalent of “I’ve heard alcohol gives you a nice comfortable buzz – give me a glass of Bacardi 151,” and then are terrified when the experience seems overwhelming.

That, unfortunately, makes marijuana legalization look bad.

Personally, I think first-timers to marijuana should smoke or vaporize – edibles should be reserved for those who already know the effects. With smoking/vaporizing, you get the gradual sense of the marijuana high, while with edibles, it all comes on at once, and if you’ve accidentally consumed too much, then it’s a bad (though never life-threatening) experience.

Though Dowd’s latest column has got a lot of objectionable parts, I agree with Tom Angell:

“One major reason I got involved in the movement was so that consumers could have basic access to information about the products they’re consuming, which was totally impossible under the prohibition that created the black market,” said Tom Angell, the founder and chairman of Marijuana Majority. “So it’s particularly disappointing to see that some companies in the legal marijuana industry — which our years of advocacy allowed to exist — are falling short of those principles. It seems basic labeling and consumer information hasn’t been a chief priority, but hopefully now it’s starting to change.”

He wants budtenders behind the counter to be trained so they can give customized guidance to customers of varying tolerance levels.