Drug WarRant

Note: This post is about the dirty underbelly of political maneuvering regarding federal cannabis politics. If you want to believe that people don’t make statements for political purposes, skip this post.

As everyone knows, President Obama made a statement of factual emptiness to Barbara Walters. In it, he completely failed to address the critical thing about the Washington/Colorado votes (distribution) and focused on the portion that the federal government could never actually do (arrest users).

You can bet that every part of what he said was analyzed in advance — not to clarify policy, but rather to provide maximum political benefit (least amount of pissing off of contributors and voters with differing agendas). So he said nothing in a way that sounded vaguely pleasing.

This was an attempt by the President to eat his cake and have it too. Act Presidential without acting.

So what should reformers do? Let him get away with it? Of course not. If he’s going to be vague and not define the status, then reformers should define it for him. This keeps him from getting away with avoiding political damage while leaving policy in unacceptable limbo.

So if he won’t define it…

[Brad] Pitt released a joint statement along with fellow The House I Live In executive producers Danny Glover, John Legend and Russell Simmons, stating, “President Obama should be commended for expressing the will of the people in Colorado and Washington. Our jails are overburdened with nonviolent drug users in this country, too often serving harsher sentences than violent criminals. This defies all common and economic sense. The President’s statement reflects a saner and more sensible drug policy, and a step away from the decades long failed war on drugs.”

So, what’s the President supposed to do? Walk back his non-statement? Say “Oh, I really didn’t mean to give the impression that I favored a saner and more sensible drug policy. I really want the same oppression we’ve always had. I was just saying that because they told me we need Colorado for the mid-terms.” The most they can do is have some former “official” get as much opposition press as possible with no confirmation from the White House.

When enough reform organizations and media pick up on this meme, the conventional wisdom in the population will be that President Obama has pledged not to interfere in Colorado and Washington.

Then, when and if the feds come down on Colorado and Washington operations, it will appear as though the President has gone back on his word. That is, quite frankly, the price that the President pays for not being willing to be forthcoming or transparent about policy in the first place.

Clearly I haven’t been doing my part in this maneuver (this post is a prime example of that), but I understand the politics of it.

This is, of course, not the first time this process has occurred. The Holder memo regarding medical marijuana was a prime example.

I always get a kick out of Mark Kleiman’s surprise at the inability of reformers to understand the memo…

When Holder said that, marijuana advocates nationwide, and specifically the marijuana industry in California, gleefully misinterpreted him as having declared open season. They then purported to have terribly hurt feelings when DEA and the U.S. Attorneys did in fact go after large-scale criminal enterprises in the “medical marijuana” business. Prominent pot advocates bitterly critized Obama (but never the much more hawkish Romney) this year’s campaign.

There may be some advocates who actually misinterpreted the memo, but most of them are far smarter than that, and they realized that the void left by the vagueness of the memo was an opportunity. By filling that void with their “interpretation,” they changed the conventional wisdom and actually made Obama look like the bad guy when the DEA charged in as they always do. There were some advocates who took the ultimate risk in this political game and have ended up in prison.

But the result is that public views have changed and the President was damaged politically by it — factors that may have helped usher in this new era of reform.

And of course reformers didn’t bash Romney. He wasn’t President. If he had won, they would have done so immediately. Bashing Romney would be the equivalent of giving Obama a pass for his drug policies. Reformers need to make it clear that there is a cost to trying to have it both ways.

Now when you see a piece praising President Obama for his bold drug policy, you’ll understand what may be behind it.

Andrew Sullivan has a great piece today discussing David Frum’s article/follow-up regarding cannabis legalization. Frum on Pot

Andrew gets to the right stuff very quickly, rightly criticizing the emphasis on nit-picking details, when the big picture is ignored completely.

What interests me is David’s assumption that smoking marijuana is self-evidently bad for people. He cites a study from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. My italics. It has no section for responsible drug use. It does not consider in any way the possible notion that cannabis, like alcohol or coffee, can also be a personal and social good.

Exactly. And all of us need to be reminded of this now and again. Even here, we often get so wrapped up in debunking the latest attack on marijuana or legalization that we forget to remind people (and ourselves) of this very important point:

And what is so dangerous about imagination? What is so fatal about temporarily slowing your mind down and letting it meander creatively in a culture fixated on materialism and anxiety and greed and pride? Are not hyper-competitive, insanely complex modern societies actually begging for some mental relief? And what’s exactly wrong or socially damaging with giggling?

Some of our greatest music was written under the influence: would David stop that? Jazz might not exist without it. All of our recent presidents were stoners at some point – and the current president in his teens was an enthusiast even by Hawaii standards in the 1970s. Does David think that the man who wrote Dreams From My Father suffered from impaired memory? Does he believe that Michael Phelps who smoked pot and became the most decorated Olympian of all time didn’t do one of those two things? Can we not discuss drugs rationally, rather than with this vast super-structure of boomer-era culture-war synapses attached to it?

Very nice job.

Update: In a similar vein, this program airing next Wednesday looks interesting: Thinking Allowed, Intoxication. In a special programme, Laurie Taylor explores the role and meaning of both alcohol and drugs in human life. Why do so many people chose to alter their consciousness with stimulants, whether legal or illicit? Professor James Mills, the author of ‘Cannabis Nation..’ is joined by Dr Fiona Meesham and Professor Chris Hackley.

Our subject for this one: Mandy Saligari: Why Legalisation of Drugs Won’t Work in Huffington Post UK.

According to her bio “Mandy Saligari is the Clinical Director and founder of Charter Day Care, Residential and Counselling treatment facility in Harley Street, London where she also practices as an addiction and relationship therapist.” And that explains a lot.

Now, for a reasoned and polished critique, go down to comments at that article and read the 6 part rebuttal from Transform. They do a very nice job.

…

But that allows us to have a little fun. Let’s take a look at one passage from Mandy’s piece:

But to me it doesn’t make sense and I am tempted to invite Nick Clegg to experiment on his own kids first as for me the law has a duty to represent a line in the sand that reflects a moral code. It’s what we in the therapy business call an ethical code, or ‘best practice.’

It’s what people in the legal business call “nonsense.” Every single day in my job I deal with making decisions based on “best practices,” and none of them are criminal laws.

It’s a bizarre notion — the idea that none of us would really know what to do morally or as a way of living our lives without laws telling us. It’s almost like setting up our secular criminal justice system as a kind of quasi-religion that substitutes for such things as intelligence, parenting, education, and community.

As a parent I appreciate the law’s support in indentifying and providing clear boundaries around practices that are unhealthy, damaging or dangerous to my young, whether that’s related to e.g. guns, knives, theft, bullying, drugs, drink driving etc.

Really? That’s what the law does? Hmmm….

Stoves are dangerous to our young. Are they illegal for everyone? No, we actually teach our children that stoves are hot (without threatening them with legal sanctions) and mostly keep them safe until they’re ready to make pancakes with us.

Coffee is unhealthy for young kids. Illegal? No.

Sky diving. Table saws. Cars. Walking outside late at night. Drano. Electrical outlets. Aspirin. All things that are unhealthy, damaging or dangerous to our young. All legal.

…

Read the rest of the article (and Transform’s rebuttal) for clear indications that she has no real understanding of the differences between decriminalization and legalization and their relative impacts.

Oakland Insists It Can Defend Medical Pot Club

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – The city of Oakland renewed demands to stay forfeiture proceedings against a local medical marijuana dispensary whose business it defends as a matter of state’s rights.

Though the U.S. government says that Oakland lacks standing to try to block it from seizing Harborside Health Center, the city argued that it has an interest in protecting its economic and public health interests, and it says a stay would serve the orderly adjudication of justice.

I have no idea whether the city has a chance of winning, but I really admire and applaud the fight.

Read the whole thing – it’s pretty entertaining.

David Frum drinks Kevin Sabet’s kool-aid: David Frum on the Perils of Legalizing Pot

It’s a bizarre article that really demonstrates that Frum (to be most charitable) has done no research on the subject.

For instance, he imagines a legalization world exacerbating class differences, without realizing that it’s the drug war that does exactly that.

It’s baffling to me that people who profess anxiety about the trend to social inequality will so often endorse drug legalization. A world of legal drugs will be a world in which the fates of the top one third of Americans and the lower two thirds will diverge even more than they already do. A world of weaker families, absent parents, and shriveling job opportunities is a world in which more Americans will seek a cheap and easy escape from their depressing reality. Legalized marijuana, like legal tobacco, will become a diversion for those who feel they have the least to lose.

Parents are absent and families are weaker due to the drug war, and it’s not the lure of legal drugs that is the problem, but rather the lure of black market money from prohibition that keeps the cycle of social inequality fueled.

And then he completely endorses Kevin Sabet’s “plan” without realizing that the “third way” isn’t actually a real thing.

“People tend to think if you’re against legalization, you’re in favor of increasing the jail population,” says Kevin Sabet, until recently a senior staffer in the Obama administration’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. “The reality is, we can reduce marijuana use as well as incarceration rates. They are not mutually exclusive goals. We can do that through smart measures such as brief medical interventions along with more intensive treatment when needed. Our choices are not as stark as advocates would like us to believe.”

Sabet is forming a new group to find a third way between those stark alternatives. He deserves support, because young Americans deserve better than to be led to a future shrouded in a drug-induced haze.

What is this third way and how does it work? Neither Kevin or the ONDCP ever say, other than vague talk about not emphasizing incarceration and increasing treatment. That’s not a way – it’s just putting lipstick on a pig.

How do you even consider a plan for drug policy without discussing the vast majority of drug users who have no problems with their use? There’s nothing in this third way notion that involves no longer arresting these people and ruining their lives — if there was, it would be called legalization.

Legalization is not a stark alternative — it’s an entire spectrum of options, including smart medical interventions for those who have problems with drugs (but without destroying the lives of those who don’t).

I upgraded WordPress to 3.5 today, and it appears that the Ajax Edit Comments plugin is not working. It’s sending you a lot of garbage when you comment and then not letting you in to edit (although the comments are actually showing up fine). After researching, I’m finding that others have the same problem.

I’ve decided to temporarily deactivate the plug-in and hope that they get an upgrade to it quickly. In the meantime, I’m afraid you’ll be unable to edit posts after making them, so take a quick extra read before hitting the button.

… oh, and apparently there’s peanut butter on the remote.

There’s a brand new and very worthy organization called the Freedom of the Press Foundation

The Freedom of the Press Foundation is dedicated to helping promote and fund aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government. We accept tax-deductible donations to a variety of journalism organizations dedicated to government transparency and accountability.

It’s incredibly important to anyone looking for accountability in government (which definitely includes drug policy reformers) that we have sources willing and able to publish such stories. The government is increasingly using all kinds of intimindation, especially including cutting off sources of funding, against the publishing of information that is embarrassing. This organization will help get needed funds to useful organizations.

And with Glenn Greenwald on the Board of Directors, I can feel very confident in recommending it.

We’ve discussed Peter Hitchens fairly often, and he’s a bit of a one-note wonder when it comes to drug policy, but his writing is so damned entertaining, it’s hard to pass up.

So you want to legalise cannabis? You must be as dumb as Nick Clegg

Perhaps 15 years from now they will be selling Cannabis Cookies in the supermarkets, and the drug itself will be available at your local corner shop. You can guess which famous brand names will be on the packets. I couldn’t possibly comment.

Let us hope that, at least, the State will by then have built enough mental hospitals to house the poor victims of this squalid drug, the young people who will take cannabis and lose their reason.

But the desire of a few rich cynics for a legal market for marijuana is the real reason for the endless dishonest propaganda on the drugs issue which has fooled so many gullible and ignorant politicians and journalists.

In this unpleasant future, greedy businessmen will make enormous fortunes from the misery of others, and the avaricious State will find a new source of tax revenue, to pay the interest on the vast debts it can never meet. […]

All these people calling for a ‘debate’ don’t really want any such thing. They want to hurry us into legalisation – though they will not call it that, hiding behind such words as ‘regulation’ or ridiculous, unscientific claims that cannabis can be smoked for medical purposes.

Once they have won, it will be incredibly hard to go back. By the time people grasp that legal cannabis has made this a Third World country, stupefied and acquiescent, it will be too late.

It’s not too late now. But it very nearly is.

I always get a perverse kick out of the cluelessness of these things…

Goa’s Sunburn festival to be drug free

Panaji, Dec 16 (IANS) Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar said Sunday he will ensure that the Sunburn 2012 music festival on the beaches of Candolim in Goa remains free of drugs.

The Sunburn music festival is sponsored in part by Absolut Vodka and Tuborg breweries.

So says President Obama to Barbara Walters.

Marijuana Users Not High Priority for President Obama

President Obama says recreational users of marijuana in states that have legalized the substance should not be a “top priority” of federal law enforcement officials prosecuting the war on drugs.

“We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Obama said of pot users in Colorado and Washington during an exclusive interview with ABC News’ Barbara Walters.

“It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it’s legal,” he said, invoking the same approach taken toward users of medicinal marijuana in 18 states where it’s legal.

So after a month, the President comes out and says… absolutely nothing.

After all, feds going after users has never been a top priority, because they don’t have the resources to go after that many users. But this says absolutely nothing about distribution methods, or even the possibility of going after some users (it just wouldn’t be a “top priority”).

Now, politically, he could have stated this exact non-policy in several different ways, and they way he stated it is at least positive.

The other thing I kind of liked was one word used here:

“This is a tough problem, because Congress has not yet changed the law,” Obama said. “I head up the executive branch; we’re supposed to be carrying out laws. And so what we’re going to need to have is a conversation about, How do you reconcile a federal law that still says marijuana is a federal offense and state laws that say that it’s legal?”

The word is “yet.” That’s an interesting signal.