Drug WarRant

Don’t think I’ve heard this one before…

Miss America Contestant Opposes All Marijuana Use That Isn’t Recreational or Medicinal

… OK. Interesting wording choice.

Or as the gawker article wryly notes:

Finally, someone willing to stand up to the hemp-rope-industrial-complex.

So much talk and so many articles out there about the Project SAM nonsense. It seems that most people are somewhat skeptical about the ridiculous supposed “new direction” of no incarceration and yet no legalization. All it is, of course, is a weak variation on decrim that still focuses on law enforcement harrassing those who are causing no problems, and doesn’t address the black market at all.

It’s not serious policy — it’s merely sound bites in an attempt to give people a way to oppose legalization if they’re not actually, you know, thinking.

Fun with Twitter

Beau Kilmer: Can we please get some more research on THC:CBD ratios? http://t.co/5fyj70ba #marijuana #mjRAND

Kevin Sabet: @BeauKilmer Indeed! I just used the word “CBD” on national TV today. Wonder if it was a first!? We need much more discussion of it though.

Drug WarRant: @BeauKilmer Agreed. Would like to see much more research. Some is being done in the MedMar community, but overall, Schedule 1 status hurts.

Beau Kilmer: Wow @DrugWarRant and @KevinSabet agree on something : )

Fun with Twitter, part 2

Same Facts: Legalizing drugs tempts people into drug abuse. Banning them tempts people with drug dealing.

Drug WarRant: .@SameFacts @MarkARKleiman “Hey, now it’s legal. I have a sudden urge to abuse it.” Really?

Mark A.R. Kleiman: @DrugWarRant @SameFacts Yes, Pete, you can take a serious argument and make it sound stupid by misstating it. Good for you!

Lee Rosenberg: @MarkARKleiman @DrugWarRant How did he misstate it? He precisely re-stated the logical outcome of your thought.

I was, of course, immediately hit with that first statement: “Legalizing drugs tempts people into drug abuse.” How absurd. There’s no evidence that legalization even leads to increased drug abuse, let alone the bizarre notion that legalization itself somehow tempts people into drug abuse.

Although Mark didn’t note it until after this exchange, he was apparently referring to this post, which still didn’t in any way support that statement, even if it was hyperbolic.

Fun with Twitter, part 3

Mark A.R. Kleiman “Cannabis kills no one”? How about “Tobacco kills no one?” Same logic. http://t.co/TQwQBIgo

Drug WarRant “@MarkARKleiman: ‘Cannabis kills no one’? How about ‘Tobacco kills no one?’ Same logic. http://t.co/m8Faz67z” // Texting kills.

I think this particular exchange (and the referenced post) goes a long way toward understanding the thinking of Kleiman and others like him.

Mark was coming down on Andrew Sullivan for saying that marijuana has killed nobody.

My point in comments was an attempt to understand the different way of looking at things that comes from the paternalist.

Pete Guither says: “I think there is a legitimate difference in how people approach culpability.

If you smoke cigarettes for a long period of time, there’s a certain chance that that the chemicals in the cigarettes will cause your death. Drinking too much alcohol over a long period of time can damage your liver, and lead to death. As Mark said, there is no firm evidence of similar proximate causation when talking about marijuana.

Drinking alcohol does not cause traffic fatalities. Drinking alcohol AND THEN doing something really stupid leads to traffic fatalities. The difference between what Andrew Sullivan is saying and what Mark Kleiman is saying is that Andrew blames the doing something stupid. Mark blames the alcohol.”

In which I thank Mark Kleiman…

In the linked post above, Mark is nice enough to give a shout out to our group here. It’s appreciated!

There are plenty of places for anti-drug-warriors to vent in peace; Pete Guither runs one.

I might not have chosen the term “anti-drug-warriors” due to the potential referential vagueness, but we know what he means.

Yeah, you heard that right.

The United States lost a drug war battle in the UNODC.

Phillip Smith at StoptheDrugWar.org

Bolivia will rejoin the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs after its bid to rejoin with a reservation that it does not accept the treaty’s requirement that “coca leaf chewing must be banned” was successful Friday. Opponents needed one-third of the 184 signatory countries to object, but fell far, far short despite objections by the US and the International Narcotics Control Board. […]

“The objecting countries’ emphasis on procedural arguments is hypocritical. In the end this is not about the legitimacy of the procedure Bolivia has used, it is not even really about coca chewing,” according to Martin Jelsma, coordinator of the Transnational Institute’s Drugs and Democracy program. “What this really is about is the fear to acknowledge that the current treaty framework is inconsistent, out-of-date, and needs reform.”

The Institute noted that Bolivia’s success can be an example for other regional countries where traditional use of the coca leaf is permitted, including Argentina, Colombia, and Peru, to challenge the Single Convention on coca. It also called for the World Health Organization to undertake a review of coca’s classification as a Schedule I drug under the Convention.

“Those who would desperately try to safeguard the global drug control system by making it immune to any type of modernization are fighting a losing battle,” according to John Walsh, director of the Washington Office on Latin America drug policy program. “Far from undermining the system, Bolivia has given the world a promising example that it is possible to correct historic errors and to adapt old drug control dogmas to today’s new realities.”

I can’t stress enough how big this is. Once again, the United States snapped its fingers and told the rest of the world to get in line and oppose Bolivia’s move. But this time, while the UK joined them, most of the rest of the world just said “no, thanks.”

Conor Friedersdorf has a delightful retort to David Frum’s nonsensical article that we discussed here.

Would Legalizing Marijuana Be Too Hard on Simpletons?”

Conor takes apart Frum’s seeming need for simple social rules like “Just Say No,” and points out that the Project SAM approach isn’t about simplicity at all.

There are several problems with his argument.

1) Most obviously, under every proposal for legalizing marijuana it would remain illegal for minors, and perhaps for adults up to age 21. Parents won’t be deprived of the ability to say, “Marijuana is illegal, stay away,” until their adolescents are in college or living in an apartment and working.

2) Legalization advocates actually favor the simpler policy apparatus: everyone understands that you can vote at 18 and that you can drink at 21. Making marijuana legal for all adults, or all people 21 or older, is about as simple as it gets, and its laughable to compare a standard age rule to zero-down-adjustable-rate mortgages or the complexity of an open sexual relationship.

3) Using illegality as a heuristic for “most dangerous” is itself going to turn out badly for some people who aren’t very smart. Marijuana abuse isn’t anything to take lightly, but the substance is less dangerous than alcohol in many ways, less dangerous than huffing paint, less dangerous than lots of prescription drugs, and less dangerous than hang gliding.

We’ve made fun in the past of Cliff Kinkaide, a rabid, foaming at the mouth conservative prohibitionist writing at the ironically-named “Accuracy in Media.”

Unfortunately, Cliff has been relatively silent about drug policy for some time (I subscribe to his RSS feed), but the new Patrick Kennedy nonsense and Project SAM has brought Cliff out again: A Kennedy Shocks the Pro-Dope Liberal Media

Yeah, that’s the way he writes.

The major media do not want to cover the issue of marijuana causing mental illness. But because a prominent Democrat, Patrick Kennedy, has raised it, the media have nowhere left to hide. […]

The paper said Kennedy wants “to shift the debate from legalization to prevention and treatment—despite what appears to be a growing social acceptance of the drug.”

That “growing social acceptance” is being driven by the drug-friendly media, the pro-drug entertainment industry, and a dope lobby led by the Drug Policy Alliance that is mostly funded by billionaires such as George Soros. […]

However, the pro-marijuana movement is on the move, with the state of Oregon sinking so low as to authorize the use of “medical marijuana” for a 7-year-old child with leukemia. The child’s father, who is divorced from the girl’s mother, reported the marijuana use to child welfare officials and said that he found the little girl “stoned out of her mind.” […]

The dope lobby never expected a certified liberal—and the son of a liberal icon—to lead a new charge against them.

It’s fun to read his spewings again. Somehow, oddly, it just makes me feel that all’s right with the world.

It’s sort of like when you see one of those unkempt radical preachers on the quad of the campus raving about satan, and you look around him and see smart young people walking past on their way to learning and doing great things, the sight of the lunatic reminds you just how far outside reality he truly exists.

Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske responds to the latest petitions regarding legalizing marijuana.

Thank you for participating in We the People and speaking out on the legalization of marijuana. Coming out of the recent election, it is clear that we’re in the midst of a serious national conversation about marijuana.

We’ve been in a serious national conversation for some time, and your boss was laughing at us. Now, he’s not laughing so much.

Tom Angell, of Marijuana Majority writes:

“I guess it makes a difference when marijuana legalization gets more votes than your boss does in an important swing state, as happened in Colorado this last election. From ‘legalization is not in my vocabulary and it’s not in the president’s,’ as Gil Kerlikowske often used to say, to ‘it is clear that we’re in the midst of a serious national conversation about marijuana’ is a pretty stark shift. Of course, what really matters is to what extent the administration actually shifts enforcement priorities and budgets, but I sure do like hearing the US drug czar acknowledge the fact that marijuana legalization is a mainstream discussion that is happening whether he likes it or not.”

It’s clear that we have forced a shift in the tenor of the national conversation, and that’s pretty sweet.

…

Note: Some have previously pointed out this page at Huffington Post, that shows Obama getting more votes than marijuana in Colorado in the final count, but the official results from the Colorado Secretary of State show that marijuana came out on top.

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Side note:

Some reactions to the various legalization articles out over at The Reality Based Community. Mark Kleiman uses his usual “pox on both your houses” approach, convinced that his opinion is the one and only factual approach. He’s right, of course, to ridicule Patrick Kennedy’s ideas, but for the wrong reason. It’s not that Kennedy’s approach is lacking in facts, but rather that it’s wrong. Simply stating more facts (or more uncertainties) doesn’t necessarily make your argument correct.

Keith Humphreys, on the other hand, gives a glowing review of the Kennedy nonsense. Keith is dumb enough to agree with Kennedy, but smart enough to realize that he’d be skewered in comments, so naturally, for that post, comments are closed (Update: comments now open).

By the way, the Project SAM website is now live: LearnAboutSAM.com

This is basic economics that we’ve been aware of, well, forever, but it’s rarely discussed in mainstream media regarding the drug war.

The economic case for decriminalizing heroin

Here’s the kicker: if drugs sold for that price after taxes in an environment where drugs are legalized, they’d still be cheaper than drugs sold on the black market. So the legal market would drive illegal producers out of business, there wouldn’t be any of the enforcement costs — including huge social costs like mass incarceration — that come with drug prohibition, the government would gain considerable new tax revenue, and because the price is the same, consumption of drugs wouldn’t be any different than under prohibition. In short, the best form of prohibition is still worse than legalize-and-tax.

The wording needs some minor tweaks, but the principle is absolutely on track.

Nice to see something like this in the Washington Post.

David Frum’s latest — Marijuana use is too risky a choice — is probably his most bizarre yet.

I loved the fact that when I got to the article this morning, all I had to do was glance down at the comments and see all sorts of familiar commenters who hang out here properly taking it apart.

This disjointed mess is a perfect example of the intellectual void that exists within this so-called third way.

The new group rejects the “war on drugs” model. It agrees that we don’t want to lock people up for casual marijuana use — or even stigmatize them with an arrest record.

If they really support that, yet oppose legalization, the only thing that makes sense is that they favor alcohol-style prohibition, where it’s legal to consume, but not to sell. After all, that worked so well.

And yet, the reason given for keeping it illegal is to make it a use deterrent.

Yet as a parent of three, two exiting adolescence and one entering, I’ve found that the argument that makes the biggest impression is: “Marijuana is illegal. Stay away.” I think many other parents have found the same thing.

So there’s no coherent thought whatsoever.

And the fact that Frum wants the government to help him raise his kids is just pathetic. When they were younger, did he tell them that stoves were illegal to keep them from burning themselves?

He follows that paragraph with:

When we write social rules, we always need to consider: Who are we writing rules for? Some people can cope with complexity. Others need clarity. Some people will snap back from an early mistake. Others will never recover.

“Just say no” is an easy rule to follow. “It depends on individual risk factors, many of them unknowable in advance” — that rule is not so easy.

Wow. “When we write social rules,… who are we writing rules for?” That sends a chill down my spine.

And then this stupid notion that today’s prohibition is a simple rule, compared to regulated legalization, is pure idiocy. “Just say no”? Yeah, how did that work, David?

So far, I haven’t seen a shred of intelligent thought in the leadership of Project SAM. I certainly don’t want them writing social rules for me.

In our system of government, there are designated checks and balances designed to protect the individual from abuse, so that when one area fails, citizens can look to another branch. When it comes to the drug war, however, all bets are off.

Both the executive and legislative branches have been, for the most part, so corrupted by the drug war (or neutered by it) that they’re intractable despite scientific and public policy evidence. And they have maintained their position in the electorate in part through spewing decades of drug war propaganda (although that is now finally wearing thin).

The Supreme Court has long had a significant drug war exception to the Bill of Rights and has never really challenged the government to prove its blatantly false assertions that limiting rights will actually succeed in reducing drug problems.

That leaves the jury system. Nullification is a legitimate way to deal with bad laws, but even there, the Justice system has gone out of its way to try to convince juries that they don’t have that basic innate power.

Even still, the jury system could come into play. Lots of folks have noted there are so many drug cases, that if all drug defendants demanded a jury trial as entitled under the Constitution, the entire court system would collapse. And it’s true.

But here’s where the almost unlimited power of the prosecutor comes into play.

The legislatures have given prosecutors a virtual smorgasbord of charging options, almost all with steep minimum penalties — possession, sale, intent, conspiracy, school zones, gun laws, money laundering, etc. Without even batting an eye, they can pile up enough charges to put you in prison for eternity. (Some years back, one enterprising prosecutor even tried to use a terrorism law against weapons of mass destruction on a meth lab case.)

So going to court is no longer about determining guilt or non-guilt, but rather about negotiating with the prosecutor.

Jacob Sullum has a good piece about Chris Williams, the Montana medical marijuana grower: Plead Guilty or Go to Prison for Life

Yet five years is a cakewalk compared to the sentence Williams originally faced, which would have kept the 38-year-old father behind bars for the rest of his life. The difference is due to an extremely unusual post-conviction agreement that highlights the enormous power prosecutors wield as a result of mandatory minimum sentences so grotesquely unjust that in this case even they had to admit it.

Of more than two dozen Montana medical marijuana providers who were arrested following federal raids in March 2011, Williams is the only one who insisted on his right to a trial. For that he paid a steep price.

Significant reform of the Justice system is required if we’re going to salvage any meaning from our Constitution. But that won’t happen until we end this damned drug war.

I’ve done a bit of an update on the theme for the site. Please let me know if you see any problems.

I also have temporarily reactivated the edit comments function. Apparently, they fixed the bug in an update but the update didn’t actually show up in the numbered update (or something). So I deleted the plug-in and re-installed the newest one in the hopes that it would be the correct version.

Again, let me know if the editing function or comments in general show any problems. If we still have the problem, I’ll have to shut it off again, but at least we know they’re aware of the problem.

Update: Same problem, apparently. Annoying. I’ll deactivate and wait for the next update. If anyone has any connections with the folks at iThemes.com and can light a fire under them to get Ajax Edit Comments fixed, I’d appreciate it. Alternately, if someone knows another reliable comment editing plug-in for WordPress, let me know.

Further Update: New version of the plugin has been released. Let’s try it again.
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Folks, I will not have the level of incivility that has shown up in a few comments in the past couple of days. Infighting with name-calling gets us nowhere. Disagreements with reasoned responses are welcomed and strongly encouraged.

If someone comes on the site and breaks that rule, I expect you to not reply in kind. This is a great group that I admire. Please keep it an enjoyable experience for all.

Thanks.