Drug WarRant

One of the things we have slammed Kevin Sabet and S.A.M. for repeatedly is claiming to have a policy when they won’t even address the largest part of it – what to do with all those marijuana users who don’t need treatment if you’re not going to legalize it.

Recently, Kevin has said that he thinks recreational users should be fined rather than arrested, and finally, Kevin was forced to answer the bigger question by Oregon Senate Judiciary Chairman Floyd Prozanski.

Prozanski also pressed Sabet on where recreational users of marijuana would get the drug. Sabet has said occasional consumers should not be arrested and prosecuted.

“They should be able to do that but they have to go to the black market?” the senator asked.

“Yes,” said Sabet, who called marijuana prohibition and legalization bad policies.

“The cons of legalization are more than the cons of prohibition,” he said. “That is the con of prohibition: that you have to go to the underground market.”

Go to the underground market? That sounds so chic. “Put on your scarf, dear, we’re off to the underground market. They have truffles.”

And… that is “the con” of prohibition? That’s like saying “that is the con of murder; that you die.” That’s a pretty big con.

Having to deal with the black market means a host of destructive things to society, from the large violent criminal organizations that literally get away with murder to the non-violent low-level dealers who get swept up with outrageous sentences, to the corruption of law enforcement, to over-incarceration, to an unwieldy and broken justice system, to destroyed families and communities, to dysfunctional foreign policy, to wasted federal, state and local dollars, to unregulated and potentially unsafe product, to gateway effects, and a lot more.

The idea that this should be less of a concern to us than some unsupported believe that huge numbers of people will suddenly go wild with smoking the evil weed and be unable to care for themselves… ridiculous.

This New York Times article from 1997 (thanks, Erowid), is a hoot.

Seductive Drug Culture Flourishes on the Internet

Even as parents, teachers and government officials urge adolescents to say no to drugs, the Internet is burgeoning as an alluring bazaar where anyone with a computer can find out how to get high on LSD, eavesdrop on what it is like to snort heroin or cocaine, check the going price for marijuana or copy the chemical formula for methamphetamine, the stimulant better known as speed.

Teen-agers need only retreat to their rooms, boot up the computer and click on a cartoon bumblebee named Buzzy to be whisked on line, through a graphic called Bong Canyon, to a mail-order house in Los Angeles that promises the scoop on ”legal highs,” ”growing hallucinogens,” ”cannabis alchemy,” ”cooking with cannabis” and other ”trippy, phat, groovy things.” […]

”We’re really losing the war on the Internet,” said Kellie Foster, a spokeswoman for the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, which hopes to establish its own Web site next month. ”We’ve got to get out there, and we’re not.” […]

”I’d have to agree that the status quo folks are pretty much being hammered,” said Mark Greer, a director of the Media Awareness Project, which uses the Internet to lobby for the weakening or repeal of drug laws. ”They don’t seem to even be trying to compete with us on the Web.” […]

A Vast Warehouse Of Misinformation […]

The Internet also abounds in casual advice like the ”suggestions for first-time users” of ”ecstasy,” a hallucinogenic stimulant that has been found to damage the brains of monkeys in research at Johns Hopkins University.
[there’s some irony for you]

Drug policy reformers always owned the internet. Shut out of government and shut out of traditional media outlets, reformers turned to the internet as the fertile ground for reform to take root and flourish.

There are parts of this country that would never even have seriously discussed legalization, but that’s changing…

Politicians may soon have to take marijuana legalization seriously – Kansas City Star

In our area, the chances of overturning marijuana laws by legislative action seem remote, for now. It’s a tough vote for a politician in an election year.

But change is coming, just the same. Like the dispute over same sex marriage, the public’s attitudes about legal pot appear to be outpacing the views of the legislators they elect.

“We’ve had 80-plus years of failed policy, billions of dollars wasted and untold numbers of lives ruined in the name of controlling a substance that is no more harmful (and probably less so) than alcohol,” one emailer wrote this week. “The Colorado approach is a sane, sustainable policy option.”

State lawmakers will be getting more letters like that, from clear-eyed voters.

I almost missed him. Almost.

Our old nemesis John Walters shows up in this series in the New York Times. Room for Debate: Should Drug Enforcement be Left to the States

He starts out in classic style:

Government of the people, by the people and for the people cannot be indifferent to growing addiction and self-destruction. Where addiction and self-destruction exist, democracy and freedom do not. The Obama administration behaves as if this obvious truth were trivial.

If it is not already, marijuana and other drug use and abuse will soon be one of the fastest-growing health threats in America. The forces are known and predictable.

Federal drug laws and national leadership on this matter arose because anything less was dangerously inadequate.
For decades we have seen that drug use and the disease of addiction are not victimless fun.

The whole thing is a work of beauty by this evil mastermind. The way he invokes government of/by/for the people as a reason to oppress them is breathtaking.

The other articles in the debate are much better (as in grounded in the real world as opposed to Walters’ fantasy world) including good pieces by Glenn E Martin, Kabrina Krebel Chang, Vanita Gupta, and Alex Kreit. Beau Kilmer goes off on the now tired screed that people are just too weak to withstand the power of commercial advertising and must be protected from consumerism.

He’s back, part 2. Speaking of the return of old nemeses, Scott Burns (former assistant director of the ONDCP under Walters) popped up in an article I was reading on NPR: How Long It Too Long? Congress Revisits Mandatory Sentences

The article talks about how, as a nation, we’re finally seeing the destruction of decades of extraordinarily long sentences, particularly for drug crimes, with bipartisan support for reform. But not everyone agrees:

“The real power and efficacy of federal minimum mandatory sentences is our ability to hold them over certain peoples’ heads in solving kingpin drug cases, or major murders,” says Scott Burns, head of the National District Attorneys Association.

What a self-indictment of our justice system!

The always excellent Maia Szalavitz has another great article at The Fix: Don’t Believe the (Marijuana) Hype – What most people think they know about marijuana—especially media columnists—is just years of unscientific, paranoid, and even racist government propaganda.

But why are we so gullible in this area, when reporters are supposed to be skeptical? One reason has got to be the fact that over the last 40 years, the government has spent billions of dollars on advertising and even planted media articles and messages in TV shows aiming to get us all to “just say no.” While these campaigns are often ineffective at preventing use, they do seem to work at clouding perception.

And the truth is seen as immaterial in the drug war. Written into the job description of the “drug czar” by Congress is that whoever heads the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) must “take such actions as necessary to oppose any attempt to legalize the use of a substance (in any form)” that is currently illegal, regardless of the facts. When asked about its distribution of “misleading information”—by a Congressman, in fact—ONDCP cited this provision to justify doing so, saying that this is “within the statutory role assigned to ONDCP.” In other words, they have to lie. […]

The truth is that our perceptions of marijuana—and in fact all of our drug laws—are based on early 20th century racism and “science” circa the Jim Crow era. In the early decades of the 20th century, the drug was linked to Mexican immigrants and black jazzmen, who were seen as potentially dangerous.

Excellent job.

He’s back, part 3. Scott Takes Worker Drug Testing To Supreme Court. Rick Scott just won’t give up until he gets to drug test everyone (and profit handsomely from it). Based on past Supreme Court rulings, I find it highly unlikely that they’ll even take the case, but I always get a bit nervous with what the Supremes might do.

It’s time to put a stake in this national desire to drug test and really reverse the trend, but also getting it out of schools and the workplace in general.

Speaking of drug testing… Drug Tests Don’t Deter Use, But School Environment Might

A survey of high school students found that the possibility that they might face drug testing didn’t really discourage students from alcohol, cigarettes or marijuana. But students who thought their school had a positive environment were less apt to try cigarettes and pot.

Treating your students like criminals who must prove their innocence probably doesn’t foster a positive environment. Same thing is true in the workplace.

Here’s the study.

There has been so much hype over concerns regarding “all the drugged drivers on the road” once marijuana is legalized, and it has been just plain dishonest. Sure, driving impaired is a bad idea regardless of the impairment. But there are many kinds of impairment and many degrees of impairment, and it’s important to know where on the risk scale this lies in order to craft useful public policy.

Driving angry is a terrible impairment, yet we are unlikely to develop a national policy of enforcing a zero-tolerance no-drive rule after getting in an argument.

We know that heavy alcohol use results in some of the highest risks of driving impairment, so it is fitting that we focus efforts on reducing drunk driving and enforcing drunk driving laws. It would be irresponsible to pull resources away from that clear danger toward a much lower risk factor.

And yet, that’s exactly what we’re doing by pushing for zero-tolerance per se laws for cannabis.

This latest study from the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs once again points out quite clearly this fact.

Drugs and Alcohol: Their Relative Crash Risk – Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Report by Eduardo Romano, Pedro Torres-Saavedra, Robert B. Voas, John H. Lacey

Results: For both sober and drinking drivers, being positive for a drug was found to increase the risk of being fatally injured. When the drug-positive variable was separated into marijuana and other drugs, only the latter was found to contribute significantly to crash risk. In all cases, the contribution of drugs other than alcohol to crash risk was significantly lower than that produced by alcohol.

Conclusions: Although overall, drugs contribute to crash risk regardless of the presence of alcohol, such a contribution is much lower than that by alcohol. The lower contribution of drugs other than alcohol to crash risk relative to that of alcohol suggests caution in focusing too much on drugged driving, potentially diverting scarce resources from curbing drunk driving. [emphasis added]

Exactly.

In reading the full article (yes, I shelled out the $30 for it – let me know if you have any questions about the article itself so you don’t have to), it was interesting to read the article’s authors’ astonishment at discovering that cannabis had so little effect on its own to crash risk. They pointed out the possibility (of which we’ve known for a long time) of drivers who have used cannabis being more aware and thus cautious.

They also pointed out that the government data from which they drew counted any amount of the drug showing up in tests and therefore likely included many drivers who had not recently consumed cannabis. But that’s perhaps an appropriate population to have in your sample when pointing out the stupidity of a public policy that promotes zero-tolerance per se laws.

Scientific American: Pot Smokers Might Not Turn into Dopes after All

This won’t be a surprise to anyone here, but it is an important rebuttal to all the prohibitionists who have been citing the New Zealand longitudinal “Dunedin” study as proof of the harmfulness of cannabis.

Cannabis rots your brain — or does it? Last year, a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggested that people who used cannabis heavily as teenagers saw their IQs fall by middle age. But a study published today — also in PNAS — says that factors unrelated to cannabis use are to blame for the effect.

Prohibitionists are constantly searching for some kind of smoking gun that they can use against cannabis legalization, and so they use science not to discover the truth, but to find any kind of evidence of what they want to be true. And naturally, they find it.

This is a clear form of confirmation bias. If they took more time (and willingness) to actually study the science, in most cases they would find other possible explanations for the same results, and would also question why this didn’t show up elsewhere.

Mitch Earleywine, a psychologist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, says that Røgeberg’s analysis definitely supports the idea that links between adolescent cannabis use and drops in IQ are essentially spurious, arising from socioeconomic differences rather than any sort of pharmacological action. John Macleod of the University of Bristol, UK, who works on the ALSPAC data, points out that Meier and her colleagues acknowledged in their original paper that the results might be caused by confounding factors. He adds that the modelling in Røgeberg’s paper shows that within a set of reasonable assumptions, this is indeed possible.

Colorado’s legal marijuana industry has been in operation for a full week now, and despite long lines, the cannabis stores have been able to serve local residents as well as tourists from around the country.

So it was with some surprise that it was discovered that Richard Silverman, a Denver resident who lives less than a block from one of the new stores, had failed to purchase any cannabis.

Authorities are baffled.

Channel 7 Action News caught up with Mr. Silverman to try to clear up this mystery.

Channel 7: We’re naturally curious as to what happened to you this week that prevented you from purchasing cannabis. Were you ill, or going through some kind of emergency?

Silverman: No, I was fine, actually. I saw the open store and could have gone, but I wasn’t interested.

Channel 7: What do you mean?

Silverman: I’m just not all that interested in cannabis. I’ve tried it, but it’s not my thing.

Channel 7: You realize that it’s legal now?

Silverman: Oh, yes. And I have no problem with others choosing to buy it. I think it’s great that it’s legal. I just didn’t want any.

Channel 7: I don’t understand.

Others find the case of Richard Silverman more than just puzzling…

Kevin Sabet, spokesperson for Smart Approaches to Marijuana (S.A.M.), an organization well-known in the media for pretending to have an alternative policy approach to marijuana, believes that “there’s something really fishy there.”

“You don’t just say ‘no’ to Big Marijuana,” said Sabet. “Silverman is clearly lying and should probably be referred for treatment.”

In related news, Colorado officials announced today that the all-out disintegration of society is unlikely to occur until after the second week of legal marijuana sales.

As someone who was raised in the church and spent a lot of time studying Christianity, I am constantly bewildered by the number of idiots who somehow think that Christian morality is achieved through secular law.

Larry Tomczak with the Christian Post brings us 4 More Reasons to Reject Legalizing Marijuana

It’s an OpEd full of hypocrisy and random nonsense. Love the argument by anecdote:

Matthew Leahy was in the newspapers a short time ago where it stated he started smoking marijuana at 14, experienced a drop in grades and then eventually ended up in a mental hospital, where he hung himself. A more uplifting testimony is the one I heard personally of a ninth-grader who regularly smoked pot, which he said “really messed up [his] mind,” but he was grateful to God that he had been set free from the addiction that was ruining his life.

But this is the kicker. Check out this defense of alcohol and see if you can find the evidence for keeping marijuana illegal.

Many marijuana advocates will tell you that we already allow alcohol, so why shouldn’t we allow pot? Granted, beer and wine and adult beverages have been around for thousands of years, and unfortunately some people abuse them. Scripture speaks of moderation and obeying the governing authorities (Rom. 13:1-8) regarding laws. Adult beverages are a cultural reality, and it was foolishness when people tried to prohibit their usage because, in fact, the Bible doesn’t prohibit their responsible use.

Just because some people overindulge and do harm due to alcohol, that is not a valid reason to exacerbate the situation by adding dope to the mix! I’m sure you’ve heard the adage “Don’t point to bad behavior to justify more bad behavior.”

Here’s the deal:

• 33,000 Americans are killed yearly in traffic accidents, one-third because of drunk drivers. How many others are left impaired or paralyzed for life?
• 1.2 million drivers are arrested annually for drunken-driving. The highest number is among 21- to 25-year-olds.
• One in three people will be involved in a drunk driving crash in their lifetime.
• Car crashes are the leading cause of deaths for teens. Teenage alcoholic use kills over 4,700 every year.
• Drunk driving costs you and me $132 billion a year.

Be honest with yourself: In light of the above, do you want to compound these sobering statistics by making marijuana freely available?

A deterrent to drinking and driving is the alcohol aroma on one’s breath. That basically goes out the window when people think they can smoke a few joints outside, drive “high” down the highway and never dream of one day standing before a judge with a weeping father who lost the love of his life and three children via an intoxicated driver. Think about it, along with the prison term and lifetime of guilt that follows.

Ironically, the author obliviously ends the OpEd with a plea to consider the violence in Mexico!

(Also ironically, he claims that pot makes you stupid.)

Here’s a wild one. Emily Miller — a senior editor for the Washington Times.

MILLER: Obama’s cultural legacy is legal marijuana blowing through America. Stoned citizens will further burden the dependency society

This demonstrates how activists are totally uneducated about the severe consequences of smoking pot.

Cully Stimson was a prosecutor in drug court in San Diego and has served as a military trial judge.

“There’s already a significant number of D.C. residents involved in the criminal justice system,” the senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation told me in an interview. “By telling them that marijuana is a medicine and not a drug, then legalizing it, you’re going to have a stoned, dependent community that is even worse than today.”

Mr. Stimson, a former defense attorney, has written extensively on drug policies and the dangers of marijuana. He predicts that Colorado’s social experiment will fail badly.

“Nothing positive will come out of it,” he stated. “You’re going to have lower test scores and a class of people who are unemployable because they are stoned all the time. People are going to die on ski slopes, on the roads.”

The think tank expert further explained, “Countries that have legalized marijuana have experienced negative social effects. They’ve seen more dependency — marijuana is highly addictive and a gateway to harder drugs — and more crime and a bigger black market because the drug cartels undercut legal sellers and also target youth.”

Marijuana proponents who claim that pot is no different than alcohol are ignorant of the science. The body can process alcohol, and in many studies, a few drinks have been proven to have health benefits. Marijuana, on the other hand, is simply a toxin. Pot is more similar to heroin and cocaine than alcohol in how it affects the body.

Prohibitionists in the U.S. and around the world are reeling from the recent cannabis developments in Washington, Colorado, Uruguay, etc., resulting in truly pathetic attempts to defend their position.

Before long, they may have a new headache…

Bolivia urges internationally legal coca leaf

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales has assumed the chairmanship of the Group of 77 nations and said he would use his new international platform to have coca leaf, which can be refined into cocaine, removed from the list of internationally banned drugs. […]

Bolivia was chosen head of the G-77, which actually groups 133 developing nations, by consensus, and Morales was at the United nations on Wednesday to take over the chairmanship from outgoing Fiji.

At a news conference, Morales took pride in saying that “Last year, we achieved recognition of traditional consumption of the coca leaf,” a mild stimulant chewed to relieve altitude sickness and to elevate the mood in Andean nations.

Bolivia had pulled out of the Vienna Convention anti-drug treaty in 2011, but last year it was allowed to rejoin with the reservation that it would not prosecute coca leaf chewing. Bolivia regards its readmission as an international concession of the legality of the traditional social use of coca leaf.

“Our next task will be to remove the coca leaf from the list of prohibited substances,” he told reporters, speaking through a translator.

Nice.

Can’t wait until Kevin Sabet hears we’re opening a coca tea shop.