Drug WarRant

Complaints about the concentrations and strengths of active ingredients in commercial grades of marijuana are being raised by cannabis critics such as Malcolm Ferguson who appears to confuse marijuana’s THC with potentially lethal mind-affecting drugs. Much as Ferguson would have people smoke rope instead of dope, too many politicians and public officials need to educate themselves about toxicity and the history of medicine before speaking publicly about marijuana.

Toxicities of dangerous drugs are measurable and comparable. In toxicology, the LD-50 is defined as the lethal dosage of a chemical needed to kill 50-percent of a test population of some unfortunate lab rats. For humans, multiplying the LD-50 for rats by a person’s body weight in kilograms gives the approximate lethal dosage for that person. For morphine, the LD-50 is 200-300 milligrams per kilogram (mg/kg) of human body weight. For cocaine the LD-50 is 96 mg/kg, for methamphetamine it is 55-57 mg/kg, for heroin it is 21.8 mg/kg, and for fentanyl it is 2.61 mg/kg. The LD-50 for marijuana is considered out of reach for a fatal dose, with an estimate of 20,000 to 40,000 marijuana joints needing to be smoked in quick succession. There has never been a documented case of a fatal overdose from marijuana in the 12,000 year known history of its use. In contrast, over-the-counter aspirin resulted in 20,000 overdoses in 2004 that killed 43 American citizens.

And recently a meta-analysis of various published papers raised a prohibitionist red flag by stating that marijuana use can lead to a greater number of head and neck cancers. Marijuana ingredients tested on lab rats are not cancerous. However, when it’s burnt its combustion products can create health problems. Cancerous byproducts include tars, carbon monoxide and other chemical compounds found in tobacco smoke. Bypassing the problem involves doing what chronic smokers have always done by changing the means of ingestion using bongs, hookahs, vapes and cartridges, or by using small amounts of concentrated and more potent forms of marijuana such as oils, hashish, or edibles that reduce or avoid burning the vegetable matter and hemp fibers that produce toxins.

Ancient Mediterranean people and their physicians had a better drug classification system. They divided medications into two categories. One category included deadly drugs like opium and hemlock (Latin: venenum), with the second category consisting of herbs and medications which were never fatal (Latin: remedium). Under the Greek and Roman classifications opium was sharply distinguished from cannabis. Safe use of opium could require careful supervision by a physician familiar with dosages and tolerances. Hashish didn’t.

The early Greek and Roman physicians and scholars who wrote about cannabis included Galen, Oribasius, Aëtius of Amida, Dioscorides, a Greek travel writer named Pausanius, the historians Strabo and Herodotus, and the Roman military commander and naturalist writer Pliny the Elder. Byzantine Greek texts known as the Hippiatrica contain the medical manual of the veterinary surgeon Apsyrtus providing cannabis information for treating horses. Nearly everyone grew marijuana for personal use and no record has been found claiming it created health or social problems. Growers made distinctions between two types of marijuana. Wild cannabis was called indica while the much preferred backyard cultivated and bred variety was called sativa. All the writings present clear evidence to justify a laid back and realistic approach to classifying marijuana.

A new and improved drug scheduling system would reflect the wisdom of the Ancients. It would scrap the current classifications in favor of new ones bearing distinctions based on a drug’s actual toxicity. Had this been done in 1970 when the drug schedules were created and implemented under President Richard Nixon and John Erlichmann, cannabis sativa and indica and magic mushrooms would never have fallen into the same category as heroin. The confusion over switching marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III could have been averted.

Ohio Republican Senator JD Vance is running his Vice-Presidential campaign on an anti-marijuana platform that promotes old and worn-out fallacies about cannabis that were debunked before he was born.

Vance says marijuana causes violence and that it bears a direct relationship to violent crime, despite numerous refutations from historical and scientific studies. His attitude toward marijuana is depicted in a movie made of his life and directed by Ron Howard, Hillbilly Elegy, that portrays his mother’s heroin addiction. The picture’s focus is on her drug use rather than any information that might be useful in determining her overall mental condition. A mental disorder could explain her non-drug-related misbehavior in addition to her drug problem. Based on her movie depiction, one possible diagnosis might be bipolar disorder.

The movie script also reinforces a common marijuana myth. It has young JD refusing to try marijuana while telling his teenage stepbrother that marijuana is a gateway drug. If a gateway exists, it is drug illegality, not another drug. Legal alcohol or legal aspirin alone typically do not lead to heroin use. Illegal connections are needed to buy heroin.

Being anti-marijuana doesn’t benefit Senator Vance now that his home state of Ohio has legal recreational weed. His emphasis on prohibition alienates voters when he says that immigrants smuggle fentanyl into the U.S. where it’s used as a genocidal weapon aimed at MAGAs, and that Joe Biden ordered it to happen with his open border policies.

Senator Vance ignores the fact that fentanyl and methamphetamine trafficking arrests consist primarily of red state American citizens who own the expensive equipment and connections needed to move contraband. Given the lure of easy drug money, and with immigrants conveniently shouldering the blame for smuggled drugs, immigration is not their immediate concern. However, by linking legal or illegal immigrants to fentanyl ODs in the U.S., Vance promotes Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and the building of Trump’s ill-fated border wall.

Political novices and science illiterate demagogues like JD Vance are encouraged by moral mythologies that reinforce tribal fears of the other, and with it a fanatical desire to magically simplify political and social issues by prohibiting marijuana or supporting and voting tyrants into public office. Vance doesn’t get the idea that tyranny never lasts, that old tyrants die off, that the Big Lie has a time limit, and that it’s difficult in a democracy to predict how long a big lie will be believed. The shelf life of marijuana fallacies expired decades ago. Recent Pew Research polls indicate 88-percent of Americans believe marijuana should be legal for medical or recreational use.

Project 2025 is a creation of The Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has a longstanding position of being anti-marijuana. Their latest work is a political blueprint that sets forth its vision of America should Donald Trump win the presidency in November. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said Project 2025 is designed to “institutionalize Trumpism”. New drug policies and additional drug enforcement priorities are briefly mentioned that could be activated in a second Trump presidential term:

The National Drug Control Program agencies represented a total of $41 billion in fiscal year 2022. […]

ONDCP grant-making activities have been controversial over the years, particularly within conservative Administrations concerned that the White House lacks the expertise to oversee such programs directly. The ONDCP administers two grant programs: the Drug-Free Communities Support Program and the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program. While it makes sense to transfer these programs eventually to the Department of Justice and Department of Health and Human Services, respectively, it is vital that the ONDCP Director ensure in the immediate term that these grant programs are funding the President’s drug control priorities and not woke nonprofits with leftist policy agendas. Thus, the President must ensure that the ONDCP is managed by political appointees who are committed to the Administration’s agenda and not acquiesce to management by political or career military personnel who oversaw the prior Administration’s ONDCP. […]

Reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start. The FDA failed to abide by its legal obligations to protect the health, safety, and welfare of girls and women. […]

To avoid future moral coercion of the sort experienced with the COVID-19 vaccines, the FDA and NIH should require the development of drugs and biologics that are free from moral taint and switch to cell lines that are not derived from aborted fetal cell lines or aborted baby body parts. […]

The good news is the words “marijuana” and “psychedelics” appear nowhere in the 922-page document. The bad news is that Mexican drug cartels are eagerly awaiting the new rules to unfold so they can smuggle abortion pills and morally-free aborted baby parts.

The belief that smoking marijuana can lead to gratuitous acts of violence among young adults (18-34) was resurrected in April of this year thanks to a science publication by NIDA director Nora Volkow.

In it Dr. Volkow and her colleagues gathered data from the National Surveys on Drug Use and Health featuring 113,454 participants who revealed increases in associations with violent behavior in women ranging from 1.0 to 1.4-percent when correlated with various levels or categories and frequencies of cannabis use. For men, the increases ranged from 1.2 to 1.4-percent. News of the findings was seized upon by prohibitionist and Smart Approaches to Marijuana founder Kevin Sabet who gleefully announced that the data showed “nearly twice the violent behavior rate of non-users.”

So how did smoking marijuana—the weed that gave rise to popular use of the expression “mellow”—end up getting blamed for causing violence? In Dr. Volkow’s paper it happens because she uses data collected within the category defined as drug abuse with no consideration of any medical use.

With all cannabis use considered an abuse, the NIDA lumps medical users into single categories along with recreational users. Medical cannabis use in the U.S. comprises 50-percent of the total number who medicate with cannabis for anxiety and 34-percent who medicate for depression. Anxiety and/or trauma can trigger PTSD and depression. Unchecked, the maladies can sometimes impair the emotional regulation associated with aggression and violence. Anxiety triggers the fight or flight response. Marijuana in many cases can treat depression and anxiety disorders so its users would include those seeking a medication to cope with depression or being overstressed. They would stand out in studies in which the sole intention is to discover and quantify violent behavior among marijuana consumers. Such behavior facilitates the creation of anti-marijuana propaganda.

That the NIDA functions in many cases as a propaganda mill should come as no surprise to anyone who’s followed its act since the agency was first established in 1974 to advance the science of drug use and addiction. Instead of doing useful research, the NIDA emerged as a toxic brew of politics masquerading as science. By creating and publicizing misleading information and false alarms about cannabis and psychedelics it has succeeded in little more than preserving its own agency while adding to a large commercial and taxpayer-funded cash flow falling into the hands of drug enforcement grifters and profiteers.

Inept efforts by the DEA to assign two psychedelic drugs to Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act have backfired thanks to a granted request for a restraining order that stalls the scheduling process for 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine (DOI) and 2,5-dimethoxy-4-chloroamphetamine (DOC).

In addition to the scheduling controversy, DEA Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) Paul E. Soeffing has cordially acknowledged a challenge to the legal authority of his court in a constitutional test of the ALJ process itself. The lawsuit filed by Panacea Plant Sciences, Inc. (PPS), a company researching DOI/DOC and related compounds, argues that DEA ALJs lack the legal authority to override a President’s implementation of policies encouraging research on medicinal applications of psychedelic drugs:

On April 8, 2024, PPS filed a motion in the DEA ALJ proceedings to request: a) the ALJ/judge to issue an injunction against the DEA to stop the rule-making due to errors/violations under the Administrative Procedure Act, Regulatory Flexibility Act and Tribal Consultation Executive Orders, b) a stay of the proceedings and halt to all Drug Enforcement Administration activity on rulemaking regarding DOI and DOC … and c) an impending challenge to the constitutionality of the DEA ALJ process. […]

9. The hearing and scheduling poses a significant threat to the company. PPS conducts research and development on medical technologies which include the use of DOI or DOC for development and as products themselves. Currently, DOI and DOC are not controlled.

10. Under the Controlled Substances Act and its implementing regulations, PPS will be required to turn over to law enforcement or destroy our stock of DOI and DOC which means the rule-making acts as an effective taking of property.

11. As a result, when PPS received the hearing notice from DEA, it was faced with a stark choice: either default and lose automatically or defend itself against the DEA’s attempts to schedule DOI and DOC and its use of an ALJ-overseen adjudication. PPS is thus compelled to participate in the DEA’s adjudicatory proceedings. […]

12. That does not mean the ALJ proceedings should go forward. Under binding precedent, those proceedings violate Article II of the Constitution of the United States. As the Fifth Circuit held in Jarkesy v. SEC, 34 F.4th 446 (5th Cir. 2022), the two-layer, for-cause removal restrictions applicable to ALJs impermissibly impair the President’s constitutional charge to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. The same restrictions on for-cause removal at issue in Jarkesy are at issue here. Specifically, Sections 7521(a) and 1202(d) of Title 5 of the United States Code prevent the President and Attorney General from removing DEA ALJs unconditionally. Rather, ALJs may be removed only for “good cause” as “determined” by the Merit Systems Protection Board (“MSPB”), whose members themselves can be removed by the President only on certain limited “good cause” grounds. This degree of insulation is unconstitutional. Indeed, because DEA ALJs do not satisfy either narrow recognized exception to the President’s unrestricted removal power, any degree of insulation is unconstitutional.

13. The DEA’s scheduling hearings has stakes that extend beyond PPS. DOI and DOC are widely used in research and development for pharmaceutical drugs related to the mind and other bodily systems. They are also key compounds for the research into schizophrenia and other related illnesses. Removing access to these compounds through legal channels and/or making their access more difficult would severely limit science and reduce the reproducibility of experiments and ability to compare to past research. This would lead to reduced development of new treatments and less understanding of medical conditions, which could lead to increased deaths and suffering in the United States and beyond over time. In addition, the unconstitutional taking of property by the government without access to an Article III court would set an illegal, and dangerous precedent. […]

Should Panacea Plant Sciences’ lawsuit prevail we could finally see an end to the offices or functions of the DEA Administrative Law Judge as well as any further DEA interference in the drug scheduling process. We might even see the beginnings of an American judicial system which recognizes that science-based remedies save the sick, not words.

Former ONDCP Director John P. Walters is at it again, only this time he has help from Donald Trump’s former US Attorney General, prohibitionist William P. Barr. Barr joins Walters in authoring a Hudson Institute publication claiming that marijuana is dangerous and its legalization was a big mistake. Their announcement was quickly debunked online here and here.

The Hudson Institute was originally founded by a nuclear war strategist named Herman Kahn who later became the inspiration for the character portrayed by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr. Strangelove. John Walters became the Institute’s CEO in 2021, and William Barr joined in 2022 as a “distinguished fellow.” What distinguishes Barr and Walters is an attitude common to the Nazis who viewed marijuana as “polluting the Aryan immune system.”

Blood pollution (or purity) and decadent foreign bodies were top priorities for Nazis. It’s why pot smokers were sent to concentration camps along with Jews, Roma, intellectuals, writers who criticized the Reich, private citizens who grumbled about the Reich, and other social outliers such as opioid and cocaine addicts. Identity cards carried by drug users incarcerated in the camps were colored red while ID cards for Jews were purple. Since the Second World War little has changed for people like former KKK leader David Duke and American Neo-Nazis who accuse Jews of working hard to get America stoned. They say Jews control the marijuana industry. They don’t. The US cannabis industry is democratically authorized by a voter majority and it’s defined and controlled by state governments and local laws.

Fascism seeks to redefine freedom. Under fascism people are free to do as they are told and the government is free to do as it wants. One way of creating a fascist society—other than engaging in drug wars—is to imitate Barr, Walters and the Nazis who dumb down their dialog and message to prevent their listeners or readers from engaging in complex and critical reasoning. Lies become the rule. Relevant science and research gets ignored or suppressed. For tyrants seeking political or social dominance drug hysteria is an easy effective tool that can be used against unproven enemies of the state or society.

Rumors that the CIA orchestrated the meth and heroin trade in Southeast Asia during the Viet Nam War have been examined in Patrick Winn’s excellent new book, Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel that Survived the CIA.

During the Viet Nam War the CIA was faced with a critical choice. The agency could undermine the drug trade of a Burmese tribal people called the Wa who occupied land next to the Chinese border, or they could leave the Wa alone to block Communist China’s expansion into the mountainous Golden Triangle area of Burma and beyond. Being the CIA, they threw their full support behind the Wa and their illicit drug activities.

The Wa were a simple, primitive people. They wore loin cloths and practiced head hunting, decapitating unwelcome intruders entering into their territory and proudly displaying the severed trophies nailed to skull posts. Wa occupation of the mountains of the Golden Triangle discouraged the inward migration of people from China and thus any Chinese national expansion. China in turn supplied the Wa with chemicals and the instructions needed to produce crystal meth, as well as materials to produce heroin from the opium harvested in the Wa’s local poppy fields. As a result, wartime US military personnel serving in Thailand and Viet Nam had easy access to nearly-pure heroin for a mere seven dollars per generously filled vial container. One-in-six American military service members were estimated to have used China White heroin and many became addicted.

When the DEA entered the scene the agency sought to capture and formally execute the leader of the Wa drug empire, Wei Xuegang. However, the Wa drug kingpin was considered an important ally by the CIA in the US battle against Asian Communists. In a spy versus spy series of events, the slick culprit always managed to elude captivity with a little help from his friends in Langley, Virginia.

By the end of the Viet Nam conflict the DEA had proven no match for the CIA and its version of a drug war. The Wa retained a drug empire that generates $60 billion in worldwide meth sales. It’s defended by 30,000 well-equipped Wa fighters. Winn attributes the DEA/CIA performance mismatch to differences in the recruitment tactics between the two agencies. The CIA prefers Ivy League types or members of top universities, while the DEA typically hires former law enforcement officers and

the sons (and sometimes daughters) of working class stock. Straight shooters by nature, they never smoked pot in high school. Their worldview skews monochrome: we’re the good guys, drug dealers are “scumbags”….

The US Department of Justice wants us all to know that internet swindlers are impersonating DEA agents and scamming money from people online. Unfortunately, the warning doesn’t include a similar public concern about the DEA’s own scams.

Actual DEA agents in plain-clothes are mugging airline passengers at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport by tricking disembarking passengers into being searched for cash when the passengers don’t know they are legally free to reject the search and simply walk away. Any cash seized by the agents disappears into a quagmire of red tape while returning the money to the traveler is made complicated. Passengers with a darker skin color make up 68-percent of the targeted travelers.

Recently the DEA repeated an unsuccessful attempt to prohibit certain psychedelic drugs by failing again to get them placed on Schedule I before researchers can discover any new medicinal information about the drugs. Allowing the DEA to arbitrarily choose what it prohibits or regulates can result in major conflicts of interest that benefit only the DEA. A Schedule I drug ranking can always be expected to extend the bureaucratic tenure of the DEA by encumbering new research for a drug and by arresting people who need it as a medicine.

For all this and more the DEA’s operations cost the American taxpayer more than $2.4 billion each year. Any progress toward winning the drug war should result in defunding the DEA and the socioeconomic complex it created. In some cases it might be possible to minimize the DEA’s impact by transferring the agency’s present duties to the Food and Drug Administration – like the scheduling of drugs – but these changes and any others designed to diminish the drug war won’t be encouraged by law enforcement agencies or the federal government. It would mean giving up their authority to mug airline passengers.

Candace Owens (aka Candace O) conflates trans Native Americans with cannibalism and drugs:

…I don’t know what you’re talking about with Two-Spirit people. Is this like a Native American tribe, like high smoking and talking about your spirit? I’m asking you seriously, because when I think of Native American tribes talking about their spirits, I know that they used to smoke a lot, they used to do drugs, they also were cannibals who used to eat people, so I don’t know if we should be taking our cues from cannibals…I don’t think that there were trans Native Americans….

Criminalizing drugs weaponizes them. Since drug crimes typically lack victims who voluntarily act as plaintiffs against themselves, a law enforcement apparatus was created that can target just about anyone with planted evidence or accusations originating from personal enemies or a corrupt government. Famous drug suspects include Joan of Arc who was questioned by the Inquisition about her drug use prior to being burned at the stake in 1431 for wearing men’s clothes.