Drug WarRant

Work and out-of-town visitors have kept me busy, but there’s still a lot going on…

Why Congress Might Legalize Marijuana This Time by Rep. Earl Blumenauer in Salon

“It’s just come to a head,” he told Salon Thursday afternoon. “This is largely going to be resolved in the next five years.”

Blumenauer, along with Colorado Democratic Rep. Jared Polis, introduced legislation this week to make the federal government treat cannabis like alcohol and let states decide whether to keep it illegal. And they think they have a real chance of getting somewhere this time. […]

“I think we are in a position now to have a group of members of Congress who are able to spend a little more time and energy in a focused way on this. I think we’ve got a little bit more running room; I think our coalition is broader, and we’ve got people who have not normally been involved in this,” he added, pointing to more conservative members from Colorado who now care about marijuana after the state legalized it in the fall.

On top of his and Polis’ bills (which tax marijuana and end the federal prohibition on it, respectively), he said he anticipates “about a dozen” different pieces of legislation dealing with drug policy reform moving forward. With “a number of folks” already working together in an informal working group, he explained, “We’ve got more people working more systematically.” He declined to elaborate on other members, saying they would be making public statements in the coming months. […]

The long-term goal, however, is to get the federal government to end the prohibition on marijuana and leave it to states to regulate the drug, just as Congress did when the prohibition on alcohol ended, something that two-thirds of Americans seem to support. “I honestly think that in their heart of hearts, most members of Congress would support that,” Blumenauer said.

I’m not going to get carried away with optimism — after all, I’ve been following the attempts by Hinchey et al since 2003, but still, this sounds good.

The slow death of the 4th Amendment at Daily Kos.

A lot of really old news to us, but still good to see progressives getting the message.

U.S. Representative Massie
Introduces Industrial Hemp Bill in Kentucky — with 28 original co-sponsors!

“Industrial hemp is a sustainable crop and could be a great economic opportunity for Kentucky farmers,” said Rep. Massie. “My wife and I are raising our children on the tobacco and cattle farm where my wife grew up. Tobacco is no longer a viable crop for many of us in Kentucky and we understand how hard it is for a family farm to turn a profit. Industrial hemp will give small farmers another opportunity to succeed.”

Who Will Legalize Pot Next? in The Nation.

Increasingly, people realize that the country’s exorbitantly expensive, excessively harsh prison system has been more costly than it has been successful at making us safe. The question is whether Congress and the White House will recognize this and use their powers to expedite, rather than impede, change.

Discovery Channel debuts new prohibition-porn series.

Exclusive: New Discovery Channel series ‘Pot Cops’ chronicles marijuana crackdown”

“Pot Cops” will give audiences an unprecedented look at what it takes to conquer growers who are running a large weed farm in the Redwoods and shooting at local children on a reservation, as well as a bizarre, slow-speed chase of a stoned grower and investigations into parents who may be putting their own children at risk while hiding a huge grow somewhere in the surrounding hills.
But what Musson anticipates viewers will be most surprised to learn more about is the heavily-debated “medical marijuana” issue, and he claims that in his decade-long career as a law enforcement officer, he can “count on one hand the amount of legal growers” he has encountered.

Note the scare quotes around “medical marijuana” and the one-sided perspective.

In the National Conference of State Legislatures online magazine, a detailed article by Suzanne Weiss: The nation is watching closely as Colorado and Washington put new pot laws in place.

It’s a well-written article laying out the background of legalization in Colorado and Washington and essentially preparing the legislatures of other states to start thinking about regulating marijuana.

With two states blazing the trail by legalizing marijuana, and public acceptance of the drug on an upward trajectory, it’s clear state lawmakers will be grappling with the social, economic and political ramifications of cannabis for some time.

…

This reminds me of the fact that it wasn’t so long ago that legalization wasn’t even considered worthy of serious discussion. In 2005, Peter Reuter and David Boyum wrote a detailed analysis of the drug war for the American Enterprise Institute (my article about it here).

At that time, they said:

Nor do we explore the merits and demerits of legalizing drugs, even though legalization is perhaps the most prominent and hotly debated topic in drug policy. Our analysis takes current policy as its starting point, and the idea of repealing the nation’s drug laws has no serious support within either the Democratic or Republican Party.”

They couldn’t even imagine the notion that change would come about despite the Democratic and Republican parties.

Kentucky and industrial hemp. Here’s a video of a hour-long discussion on TV about industrial hemp in Kentucky, including the agriculture commissioner and police commissioner.

And there is significant political support. Mitch McConnell Joins Rand Paul In Supporting Industrial Hemp In Kentucky

“I am convinced that allowing its production will be a positive development for Kentucky’s farm families and economy,” McConnell said in a statement. “The utilization of hemp to produce everything from clothing to paper is real and if there is a capacity to center a new domestic industry in Kentucky that will create jobs in these difficult economic times that sounds like a good thing to me.”

McConnell joins fellow Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R), half of the state’s six-member congressional delegation and the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce in supporting the push.

Of course, there’s the usual push-back from law enforcement leadership who seem convinced that their officers are just too stupid to be trained to tell the difference between 10 acres of hemp and a marijuana grow-op.

Kentucky is going to be a battle to watch.

Call them the Pot People

Over in Washington, even local newscasters are coming to grips with the notion that marijuana can be a normal business concern complete with lobbyists, just like everything else.

http://youtu.be/GIjsHR5jYiU

Check out this excellent website with tons of articles about drugs and drug policy, as well as opportunities to share your own stories. Put together by Release.

Talking Drugs

Some new bills being introduced in Congress, starting tomorrow. The DEA won’t be happy.

Effort building to change US pot laws

Polis’ measure would regulate marijuana the way the federal government handles alcohol: In states that legalize pot, growers would have to obtain a federal permit. Oversight of marijuana would be removed from the Drug Enforcement Administration and given to the newly renamed Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Marijuana and Firearms…

Oh, I like that. Don’t see much reason for a federal permit (seems like guidelines for state permits would be sufficient), but I really like getting the DEA out of the business.

Of course, this is still just a bill being proposed by a couple of Representatives and doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing… yet, but knowing that it’s being discussed in Congress? That’s huge.

Michelle Alexander in the New York Times: Why Police Officers Lie Under Oath

Mr. Keane, in his Chronicle article, offered two major reasons the police lie so much. First, because they can. Police officers “know that in a swearing match between a drug defendant and a police officer, the judge always rules in favor of the officer.” At worst, the case will be dismissed, but the officer is free to continue business as usual. Second, criminal defendants are typically poor and uneducated, often belong to a racial minority, and often have a criminal record. “Police know that no one cares about these people,” Mr. Keane explained.

All true, but there is more to the story than that.

Police departments have been rewarded in recent years for the sheer numbers of stops, searches and arrests. In the war on drugs, federal grant programs like the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program have encouraged state and local law enforcement agencies to boost drug arrests in order to compete for millions of dollars in funding. Agencies receive cash rewards for arresting high numbers of people for drug offenses, no matter how minor the offenses or how weak the evidence. Law enforcement has increasingly become a numbers game. And as it has, police officers’ tendency to regard procedural rules as optional and to lie and distort the facts has grown as well.

We give law enforcement an extraordinary amount of power over citizens. Because of that, it is even more essential that their integrity be beyond reproach.

If there was no other reason to end the drug war, this would be sufficient — to reduce the culture and incentives that lead to law enforcement corruption and that break down the sense of trust between police and community.

Item 1: Los Angeles Times publishes an excellent editorial: The DEA’s marijuana mistake

But guess who bears responsibility for this level of ignorance? The DEA itself, which through its ultra-tight restrictions on marijuana has made it nearly impossible for researchers to obtain the drug for study, and the National Institute for Drug Abuse, which controls the availability of the tiny quantity of research-grade marijuana that is federally approved for production.

Item 2: The DEA responds: The DEA’s pot defense [Blowback] by Robert Bonner – full of deceptions and misdirections.

And yet the editorial is based on the myth that the DEA has made it “nearly impossible” for researchers to obtain marijuana for such scientific studies. To the contrary, not a single scientifically valid study by a qualified researcher has ever been denied by the DEA or, for that matter, by the National Institute of Drug Abuse. And there is ample government-grown marijuana, specifically for research, available at the marijuana farm run by the University of Mississippi. More surprising, as your editorial points out, is that there is still no scientifically valid study that proves that marijuana is effective, much less safe, as a medicine. […]

Essentially, I invited those who advocate marijuana use as a medicine to conduct research and then present it to the DEA. I laid out a road map for what they needed to do. If scientifically valid studies demonstrated that marijuana was “effective” and “safe,” as the FDA defines those terms, the agency would reclassify marijuana into one of the other schedules. It is amazing that 20 years later there is still no such scientific study establishing that marijuana is effective as a medicine. And yet in the interim, the well-funded marijuana lobby, including the National Assn. for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and others, have spent tens of millions of dollars on convincing voters to pass medical marijuana initiatives based on anecdotes but not science. […]

One can only conclude the marijuana proponents did not go this route because doing so would have shown that cannabis is not an effective and safe medicine. Alternatively, we are left to conclude that their agenda was not about marijuana to help sick people, but rather was getting voters to pass medical marijuana initiatives as a wedge to legalize the drug for “recreational” use.

Item 3: Noted scientist Rick Doblin (of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)) responds.

I have put my full energies for the last 20+ years into trying to conduct FDA-approved medical marijuana drug development research. Unfortunately, my experience, to which I hope you will give some credence, is exactly opposite of the open door to research that you claim exists. MAPS has obtained FDA and IRB approval for three different protocols to which NIDA refused to sell any marijuana, preventing the studies from taking place. In addition, NIDA refused for 7 years to sell MAPS 10 grams (!!) of marijuana for laboratory research investigating the vapors that come out of the Volcano vaporizer, compared to smoke from combusted marijuana.

Furthermore, MAPS has been involved for the last decade in litigation against DEA for refusing to license Prof. Craker, UMass Amherst, to grow marijuana exclusively for use in federally regulated research. In 2007, DEA Administrative Law Judge Bittner recommended, after extensive hearings with witness testimony, that it would be in the public interest for DEA to license Prof. Craker to grow marijuana under contract to MAPS, ending the NIDA monopoly on the supply of marijuana legal for use in FDA-regulated studies. DEA waited for almost two years and then rejected the ALJ recommendation just six days before the inauguration of Pres. Obama. On May 11, 2012, oral arguments took place before the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in a lawsuit by Prof. Craker challenging DEA’s rationale for rejecting the DEA ALJ recommendation. A ruling is currently pending from the 1st Circuit. From my perspective, DEA’s rationale for rejecting the DEA ALJ recommendation is arbitrary and capricious, but of course what matters is what the 1st Circuit will eventually decide. […]

My conclusion is opposite of yours, when you said, “One can only conclude the marijuana proponents did not go this route because doing so would have shown that cannabis is not an effective and safe medicine.”

Rather, one can only conclude that privately-funded medical marijuana drug development research is being aggressively and actively obstructed by DEA/NIDA/PHS because they know it can be scientifically proven that marijuana, smoked or vaporized, is both safe and effective.

They used to want to watch kids pee in a cup. Now school officials have moved on to voodoo. They want a lock of kids’ hair in order to control them.

High School To Collect Students’ Hair For Mandatory Drug Testing

The school will collect 60 strands of hair from the student and test for several types of drugs, including marijuana and cocaine. If a student comes back with a positive drug test, that student will have 90 days to get drug-free.

Via Glenn Greenwald, who noted:

Training high school students to be meek subjects of authoritarian power: mandatory hair collection for drug tests http://t.co/I8qQorjn

The excellent Maia Szalavitz takes on Project Sam: The New Weed Whackers

In fact, I can’t really get my head around why people who have suffered addiction would support criminalization—especially people like Kennedy whose top talking point is that addiction is a disease. For one, isn’t the very fact that they themselves got addicted evidence of the failure of current drug policy? If prohibition worked as prevention, illegal drug addicts wouldn’t have a story of their own to tell.

Second, if arresting and incarcerating users is essential to effective treatment, why argue that addiction is a disease? No one says we should arrest diabetics for failing to take their insulin or heart patients who don’t exercise. Nor is anyone calling for jailing obese people caught within 500 feet of a McDonald’s or criminalizing the possession of non-diet soda, despite New Yorkers’ complaints about Mayor Bloomberg’s “nanny state.”

I know we’ve already pretty thoroughly dismantled Sabet and Kennedy’s efforts here, but it’s still nice to see this particular take-down.

An excellent post at the New Amsterdam Psychedelic Law Blog: The meaning of the DEA’s recent victory in ASA v DEA

The article posits that petitioners made a mistake by attempting to show that the DEA’s requirements for determining that marijuana had an established medical use had been met, when in fact, the DEA makes that threshold impossible to meet through a procedure that is not legal. They should have instead attacked the DEA’s capricious rules.

Once you accept the standard designed by the DEA to keep cannabis and other psychedelics prohibited forever, just give up. Such an approach is a disaster, as the Court’s holding demonstrates. The DEA operates in a parallel universe of legal sophistry, a labyrinth of obfuscation and denial, the purpose of which is to maintain cannabis prohibition as an expression of an ideological position as to the nature of “mental health” and “mental illness.” […]

The DEA promulgated a regulation requiring that a petition to reschedule cannabis show that there is a CAMUIT [currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States]. There is no basis whatsoever for that standard anywhere in the Controlled Substances Act. The DEA created it out of thin air. It is actually directly contrary to the CSA. The CSA does not require proof of medical use before conducting a hearing. It’s an obvious matter of logic: whether there is a medical use is determined at the hearing on the petition and therefore it cannot be the threshold issue in the petition for initiating the hearing. It is the conclusion to be reached through consideration of evidence.

Interesting. Worth doing a little more reading on the subject. I’d love to see the DEA challenged directly on the arbitariness of it procedures in a willing court.