Drug WarRant

One of the really bizarre things to watch in drug policy — the arguments over how one expresses:

1. the amount that a policy will hurt Mexican drug trafficking organizations, and
2. the amount of prison population directly related to marijuana/possession/non-violent drug offenses.

Everyone seems to agree that these are both impossible to measure with certainty, and additionally, there are all sorts of broadly defined issues regarding how you interpret the parameters.

For example, with the Drug-Trafficking-Organizations, you could simply be talking about the amount of income that would be reduced. Or, you could be looking at how the change in the market would change the activities of the DTOs (going more into kidnapping and other non-consensual crime areas, etc.), or you could look at the change in the attractiveness for new players to enter the market.

For prison populations, such things as “possession” and “non-violent” can be difficult to define. Additionally, it matters whether you’re talking about merely identifying the population currently incarcerated, or how a change in laws would affect future incarceration rates overall (which could be remarkably different).

Given all this, it boggles the mind how some people get outraged over the use of non-quantitatively specific descriptors like “explosion” or “devastating.”

In Polarization, denial, and the cannabis debate, check out Kleiman’s reaction to the description of something as being potentially “devastating.”

For example, see Alejandro Hope’s comment on the thread below: apparently Tim Dickinson converted his statement that pot legalization would cost the Mexican DTOs some revenue but that “the effect would not be devastating” into the claim that it would be “a devastating blow.” Alejandro comments: “in this specific case, denial veers very close to falsification.” I’m not sure “falsification” is the right diagnosis; I’d put it down to self-delusion on the part of Dickinson and his editors. “A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.”

Now check out this article:

US drug legislation to slow Mexico violence?

One of the authors of the report, Alejandro Hope wrote in a clarification of his study that while the lost revenue depends on certain conditions in the US, the impact could be significant.

“We do think that losing marijuana revenues could have a transformative impact on the Mexican drug trafficking industry, over and beyond the direct potential reduction of marijuana export income.”

Other analysts, however, aren’t sure the new policies will put a dent in Mexican drug cartel revenue.

“Marijuana is not that profitable. Their big money comes from cocaine. They also make a lot of money from other things. This is a pinprick in terms of the Mexican cartels,” says Keith Humphreys, a former senior White House Policy Adviser on the drug trade.

Pinprick?

So, the expert says that the effect would be “significant” and “transformative,” but Kleiman is outraged that someone says “devastating,” so I can’t wait to see what he has to say about Humphreys’ “pinprick” — because certainly significant and transformative must be closer to devastating than to pinpricking. But then again, if you hate needles, a pinprick could be devastating, I guess.

You see, these are all just subjective descriptives, because we don’t and can’t know the actual numbers. So it seems pretty strange to jealously guard a particular subjectively evaluated descriptive.

The point, of course, that we in the reform community make, is that legalization will have a strong negative effect on the ability of the drug trafficking organizations to continue to exist as they have. That’s certainly true. The exact degree of this is unknowable, and it is not necessary to know that degree with certainty in order to make a reasoned judgement that this is another valid reason to support legalization.

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In The truthiness of ‘The House I Live In’, Mark Kleiman takes offense with Eugene Jarecki’s description of the prison problem and with Andrew Cohen’s six-question interview with Jarecki (for not setting the record straight).

But the film strongly implies that the mass-incarceration problem consists mostly of non-violent drug dealers serving ludicrously long terms. False.

My understanding from reading the Cohen interview is that the points being made are:

1. The drug war has been responsible for the explosion in incarceration. (True)
2. Many of those incarcerated are non-violent offenders there for long terms. (True)

Of course, Jarecki was doing a film about putting a human face on those in prison, so he focused on individuals whose stories would resonate. That’s good filmmaking, not dishonesty.

See Lee Rosenberg’s piece for another look at how the wide picture is the important part of drug policy discussion rather than bickering over specific percentages of those incarcerated (which gets us nowhere).

Again, discussions about the war on drugs and policy have potential global incarceration impacts (both in a geographic and non-geographic sense). It’s about massive change in our entire justice system.

I’m sure that Mark will be pleased with Kevin Sabet’s tweet:

I agree w/ Kleiman that to say the US prison problem is bc of nonviolent drug users is false. Cohen should know better. http://t.co/xUUO4APD

I guess the fact that Cohen never said it is not a concern.

Liberia: Govt Faces Huge Task Against Marijuana Farmers

When I read this kind of stuff, it makes me a little sad…

The Chief for central Liberia at the Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA), Flomo Weahma, says:”Currently, the laws on the book, in my view, are very weak, and they are permissive of these acts that are perpetrated by criminals who continue to have these drugs in our communities, that have caused our children, our brothers, our fathers and our mothers to become addicted to these harmful substances,” the report divulges. […]

The Director of the DEA, Anthony Souh, the report adds, stated that marijuana is illegal, no matter what, adding: “You cannot take crime to be an income-generating activity. What is a crime is a crime. To go into drugs does not justify one’s desire to make money because there are other cash crops that can make money as well.”

We have exported our drug war, our DEA, our propaganda, and our excuses for authoritarianism and the limiting of human rights to the rest of the world.

When we finally break and subdue this prohibition beast here in the United States, we will still have a moral obligation to undue the damage our drug war has caused abroad.

Parts of Colorado’s pot legalization strategy exported to other states (Denver Post)

But the true test for marijuana activists will come in 2016, the next presidential election year. That is when Kampia hopes to run legalization initiatives in California, Massachusetts, Oregon and Maine.

“There’s a lot of young voters who only come out for presidential elections,” Kampia said at the conference. “The reason we had such a large margin of victory in Colorado and Washington was because it was a presidential election.”

I think he’s right on that, and it gives four years to really develop a good campaign. Still, I’m hopeful that there will also be faster movement on other fronts, since the momentum seems to be there.

Miss Universe doesn’t support marijuana legalization

“It’s been proven to prevent people from their full potentional, and I don’t think that’s a good thing for society,” she said. “If we’re trying to move things forward, a drug like marijuana does the opposite. It will slow things down.”

Olivia Culpo has a good point. We want to move things forward. And, after all, pot smokers have merely gone on to such things as becoming President, winning nobel prizes, winning olympic gold medals, creating new musical forms and developing new technologies, while Misses Universe have gone on to such societal-driving accompishments as wearing beauty products on TV and marrying rich men.

Olivia has decided not to return to college.

As the 2012 Miss Universe winner, Culpo […] received an undisclosed salary, brand new wardrobe, a limitless supply of beauty products and a luxury apartment in New York City. […]

Culpo took to the stage in a purple and blue bikini and a red velvet gown. When she was later asked by the judges about her regrets, she admitted she wished she had never picked on her siblings.

…

I should note that controversy has been dogging the Miss Universe contest with the observation that the past 62 winners have all come from the same planet, completely defying astronomical odds — a planet where, ironically, marijuana is heavily used.

Ilya Somin, at Volokh Conspiracy, nicely expands on Dan Kahan’s notion that gun violence could be reduced by legalizing drugs.

As an extra bonus, this approach to reducing gun violence doesn’t threaten anyone’s civil liberties or Second Amendment rights. It would actually increase protection for civil liberties by cutting back on the many abuses associated with the War on Drugs, such as bogus asset forfeitures and paramilitary police raids that often kill or injure innocent people, and the erosion of the Fourth Amendment. And, unlike stepped-up gun control or “zero tolerance” policies of the sort we got after Columbine, it would actually save the government a great deal of money by reducing expenditures on enforcement efforts and prisons. Drug legalization would also help promote family values in poor communities, which is both good in itself and might help reduce violence still further.

As a bonus at the link above, Ilya rebuts Mark Kleiman’s response.

It’s important to remind people that this doesn’t mean reducing gun violence is the reason to legalize — it is merely a potentially favorable side-effect of legalization.

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Also in guns and drugs…

Mexican observers have wondered where all the desire for gun regulation was when Mexicans were dying.

Link

A Dec. 17 editorial in the left-leaning daily La Jornada called proposals for tightening US gun regulations “hopeful,” but said it was “illuminating that the society of the neighboring country, shocked by the nearly 30 murders carried out [in Newtown], isn’t able to react, on the other hand, to the tens of thousands of homicides committed in Mexico in the past six years with arms sold in the US. Washington demands that Mexican authorities monitor and block the passage of illegal drugs to the north of the common border, but until now hasn’t shown the political will to proceed in the same way with the firearms, including high-caliber weapons, that proliferate in the Mexican market.” (LJ, Dec. 17)

“It is shocking how the debate over gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacre has avoided mentioning gun violence south of the border,” National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) professor John M. Ackerman wrote in the Huffington Post on Dec. 19. “The 20 children gunned down at [Newtown’s] Sandy Hook Elementary School can now be added to the excruciating list of at least 1,200 North American children who have been violently killed since the beginning of the US-backed militarized ‘drug war’ in 2006.” Ackerman also criticized the US government’s failure to prosecute the British bank HSBC for allowing money laundering through its Mexican branch. “The body count will inevitably rise as banks will be able to continue to help drug cartels transfer money freely to purchase assault weapons in the United States without risk of criminal prosecution,” he wrote. (Huffington Post, Dec. 19)

On the road again… Off to visit my folks in Quincy, Illinois and Indianola, Iowa. I’ll stop in when I can.

Everybody have a wonderful holiday season, and if you’re traveling, be safe (be safe regardless).

There’s eggnog in the refrigerator and fruitcake in the pantry. (Not sure how long the fruitcake’s been there — I think I bought it from a Kiwanis member a few years ago.) And the gingerbread characters hanging on the tree are edible.

… but alcohol does.

Today in Medical Daily

Perhaps in response to the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington last month, more teens are lighting up than ever before. However, one study suggests that parents have less to fear from marijuana than from alcohol. The study found that while marijuana had no effect on the health of teenagers’ brain tissue, alcohol did. […]

In addition to the brain scans, the study also required a detailed toxicology report and substance use assessment. The teens also were interviewed every six months. Researchers did not check the teens’ cognitive ability, but simply took brain scans.

The researchers found that, after the year and a half was over, kids who had drank five or more alcoholic beverages twice a week had lost white brain matter. That means that they could have impaired memory, attention, and decision-making into adulthood. The teens that smoked marijuana on a regular basis had no such reduction.

What this study tells us: That we may want to be more concerned about teen use of alcohol than teen use of marijuana.

What this study does not tell us: A damned thing regarding whether either alcohol or marijuana should be legalized or criminalized for adults.

Linn claimed that he had consumed 45 beers in the 6 hours before leaving his Indiana home to set fire to the mosque, which he had discovered while working as a truck driver.

Clearly we have to make beer illegal.

Mosque arsonist tells court: ‘I only know what I hear on Fox News’

… or Fox

Delightful.

AP: Teens’ views on dangers of pot fall to 20-year-low

Teenagers’ perception of the dangers of marijuana has fallen to the lowest level in more than 20 years, a new study says, prompting federal researchers to warn that already high use of the drug could increase as more states move to legalize it.

Of course, the important question they neglected to address was whether teens perceptions of dangers were higher or lower than actual dangers. It may be that they’re just coming to a closer connection to reality as they reject the blatant propaganda that’s been shoveled at them for years.

And naturally, the administration is going to take this opportunity to make completely unfounded and irrelevant attacks against reform.

But then again, this is always a great day for the ONDCP and NIDA! As I tweeted earlier:

.@ONDCP loves drug data days. If # is down, proof drug war is working; if # is up, proof we need more drug war. Can’t lose.