Drug WarRant

Lawrence O’Donnell has a very powerful Last Word on the War on Drugs.

Good stuff on network mainstream cable TV.

Chatham House Magazine has a slate of drug war articles in the current issue; some good, some atrocious. The current issue is free to read online, so you can check them out now.

In the atrocious category are:

• Legalization Could Make Things Worse by Bill Hughes, former Director General, Serious Organized Crime Agency, UK; Member, Independent Advisory Panel, Drugs and Organized Crime Project, Chatham House
• Organized criminals won’t fade away by Dr Vanda Felbab-Brown, Fellow in Foreign Policy, Brookings Institution

These are like badly written high school papers – confused and rambling all over the place. Really pathetic – like they know that legalization isn’t supposed to be the answer, but they don’t really have a rebuttal for it, so they just wander around.

Vanda doesn’t even seem to know the difference between outlawing and legalizing!

Why outlawing drugs is not an answer

Although frequently portrayed as an effective solution to the problem of organized crime, mere legalization of illicit economies, particularly of drugs, is no panacea.

In the category of moderately OK, is an interview with Mark Kleiman, which unfortunately, concludes with:

Surely reform has to be better than prohibition?

This drug policy reform narrative is based on two false claims. One, it’s possible to substitute regulation and taxation for prohibition and still prevent a mass upsurge in use. I’d like to see how you can do that. The other fallacy is that prohibition is an original sin: once you have committed prohibition you cannot have a sensible drug policy. But I’m convinced we could have policies where most illicit drugs remain illicit but cause much less damage. Against that claim both the prohibitionists and the drug policy reformers will protest.

Here’s the guy who says everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts, and yet he has no problem labeling “false claims” two areas merely because they disagree with his opinion.

He believes that regulated legalization will cause a massive upsurge in use, but cannot prove it, yet those who don’t believe are considered factually wrong. He believes that there is such a thing as sensible drug policy with prohibition, but except for certain populations, he can’t prove it, and yet those who believe we must dismantle prohibition are somehow making false claims.

There are a number of other articles in the issue with some good stuff. Check it out.

One of the things about prohibition that people sometimes forget is that it so often truly does make drug-taking more dangerous.

• Alcohol prohibition led to people going blind from government poisoned alcohol, and to dangerous alcohol stills that were both toxic and explosive.
• Crackdowns on diversion of safer pharmaceutical amphetimines led to dangerous meth labs.
• The many deaths from heroin cut with fentanyl are the result of prohibition. All prohibited drugs lack any safety regulation regarding dosage and purity.
• Banning marijuana leads people to more harmful substances…

How the National Institute for Drug Abuse Helped Create the Dangerous Marijuana Alternative Known As “Spice” by Mike Riggs. 

But it appears NIDA’s quest to cure Americans of their enjoyment of marijuana has backfired. According to a report in The New Orleans Times-Picayune, funds from NIDA helped create the dangerous marijuana alternative known as “Spice” and “K2.”

The funds were disbursed in the mid-1990s to a Clemson University researcher named Dr. John W. Huffman. It was while searching for a cure to marijuana “addiction” that Huffman developed the formula for Spice:

Former Clemson University chemistry professor Dr. John W. Huffman is the namesake of JWH-018, JWH-073 and JWH-200, three of the synthetic cannabinoids banned by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2011.

“The National Institute of Drug Abuse wanted to research marijuana,” said Dr. Victor Tuckler, the emergency room toxicologist at Interim LSU Public Hospital in New Orleans. “They were looking at different receptors of the brain to see if they could come up with a way that people wouldn’t get addicted to this stuff.”

Huffman and his colleagues created more than 400 synthetic cannabinoid compounds during the 1990s.

“Who knows how this got out,” Tuckler said. “Pretty soon, it’s on the Internet and people are making it over in China.”

Yep.

Check out The Strip by Brian McFadden for an excellent cartoon about our incarceration nation.

Medical Marijuana Patients Get Their Day In Federal Court With The Obama Administration

Late last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed to hear oral arguments in Americans for Safe Access v. Drug Enforcement Administration, a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no medical value. Ten years after the Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis (CRC) filed its petition, the courts will finally review the scientific evidence regarding the therapeutic value of marijuana. The D.C. Circuit is scheduled to hear oral arguments on October 16th at 9:30am. […]

The ASA appeal brief asserts that the federal government has acted arbitrarily and capriciously in its efforts to deny marijuana to millions of patients throughout the U.S. ASA argues in its  brief that the DEA has no “license to apply different criteria to marijuana than to other drugs, ignore critical scientific data, misrepresent social science research, or rely upon unsubstantiated assumptions, as the DEA has done in this case.” ASA is urging the court to “require the DEA to analyze the scientific data evenhandedly,” and order “a hearing and findings based on the scientific record.” The panel of judges assigned to hear oral arguments includes Circuit Judges Henderson and Garland, and Senior Circuit Judge Edwards.

The American Society of Addiction Medicine, which bills itself as “The Voice of Addiction Medicine,” has come out with a position paper regarind: State-level Proposals to Legalize Marijuana

About all one needs to do is look at the writing team to discover what this is about:

ASAM Writing Committee to Develop a Response to State-Level Proposals to Legalize Marijuana:

Robert L. DuPont, M.D., Co-Chair
Andrea G. Barthwell, M.D., Co-Chair
Mark Kraus, M.D.
Kevin Sabet, Ph.D.
Richard Soper, M.D.
Scott Teitelbaum, M.D.

Right off the bat, you’ve got two phenomenally discredited quacks as the co-chairs. DuPont was the White House Drug Chief in the 70s and has since made his living from getting people to pee in cups. He once equated marijuana legalization with legalizing speeding and drunk driving.

Andrea Barthwell has made a career out of lying, from her Illinois Marijuana Lectures, where she was caught red-handed falsifying sponsors, to her bogus Coalition to End Needless Death on our Roadways, which took NHTSA data and blatantly lied about the data before sending out to news media.

And Kevin Sabet — apparently a hired gun for anybody who needs him on the prohibition side. He’s not even a doctor.

The content is the standard prohibitionist nonsense, dressed up in footnotes and cherry-picked studies. As usual, Portugal and the Netherlands are dismissed because it’s not true legalization, while fantasy guesses plucked out of the air by RAND writers are considered fact. Every dishonest trick in the book is used from bemoaning drivers who “test positive” for marijuana, to marijuana being “associated with” all kinds of negative outcomes.

Here was the funniest statement in the whole document:

Increased incidence and prevalence of marijuana-related substance use disorders, including marijuana addiction, would lead to increased demand for treatment services. Today’s treatment systems are inadequate for meeting the current treatment needs in our nation.

Why is it, then, that I can’t seem to get rid of all the treatment ads on my site? I’ve listed dozens of treatment organizations on the blocked list for Google ads and more keep coming without end. I get contacted weekly by treatment organizations that want to pay me to stick links into my posts to improve Google rankings (I always turn them down). And treatment organizations offer me articles and infographics all the time. And I’m just one little blog.

Treatment is a hugely profitable industry. To the extent that current treatment needs are not met in our nation, it has nothing to do with marijuana treatment, but rather the fact that these addiction medicine “professionals” want nothing to do with the less profitable real addiction problems of poor people.

Dean Becker nailed it in comments:

Dean Becker 30 Jul
No surprise here, that doctors who make millions from marijuana addiction whether real or reefer madness would be opposed to marijuana legalization.  This objection to the lack of science is a revelation of  the failure of these same doctors and scientists to do the studies in the 40 years since the declaration of eternal drug war by Richard Nixon.  Insofar as potential harms to users this study displays a glaring and ugly lack of recognition of the harms of the drug war itself.  Because of  ASAM’s failure to actually do their job, more than 20 million Americans have been arrested and their futures fractured for smoking marijuana like their President and his “Choom Gang” did in their youth.  Claims of harm from marijuana use to the young and to the populace in general are frivolous at best and downright ugly when compared to the massive health problems of alcohol and tobacco use.  Ignorance can only serve ASAM for so long and the end of reefer madness is fast approaching.  Best get on the side of truth or your “stature” is soon to disappear.

Our truly moronic drug czar Gil Kerlikowske has opened his mouth again (I actually kind of miss John Walters – he was evil, but he at least had a brain, and was a legitimate opponent).

Gil Kerlikowske, Drug Czar: Marijuana Legalization ‘Isn’t Going To Solve Our Drug Problem’

It’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to make a dent in our drug war problem — you know, the disaster you’re spending millions of our dollars to support.

A good article today in the New York Times: South America Sees Drug Path to Legalization by Damien Cave.

Uruguay has taken the experimentation to another level. United Nations officials say no other country has seriously considered creating a completely legal state-managed monopoly for marijuana or any other substance prohibited by the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.

Doing so would make Uruguay the world’s first marijuana republic — leapfrogging the Netherlands, which has officially ignored marijuana sales and use since 1976, and Portugal, which abolished all criminal penalties for drug use in 2001. Here, in contrast, a state-run industry would be born, created by government bureaucrats convinced that opposition to marijuana is simply outdated.

“In 1961, television was just black and white,” said Julio Calzada, secretary general of Uruguay’s National Committee on Drugs. “Now we have the Internet.”

Of course, the devil is in the details, as there is opposition from all sorts of groups including marijuana users regarding how the new policy might be implemented. So, it could take a while yet.

Still, this is such a positive effort. In particular, those who claim to care about the facts and science of drug policy, and go out of their way to repeatedly say that we can’t know what the results of legalization would be (since it doesn’t exist anywhere in the world), should be encouraging this effort by Uruguay with all their might.

After all, we might learn something.

How to the actions of the DEA in this story differ from those of criminal thugs?

Truck owner wants DEA to pay up after botched sting

So the owner of a trucking company with two trucks discovers after the fact that the DEA decided to use one of his trucks and drivers (without the owner’s permission) for a sting operation.

Commandeered by one of his drivers, who was secretly working with federal agents, the truck had been hauling marijuana from the border as part of an undercover operation. And without Patty’s knowledge, the Drug Enforcement Administration was paying his driver, Lawrence Chapa, to use the truck to bust traffickers.

At least 17 hours before that early morning phone call, Chapa was shot dead in front of more than a dozen law enforcement officers – all of them taken by surprise by hijackers trying to steal the red Kenworth T600 truck and its load of pot.

In the confusion of the attack in northwest Harris County, compounded by officers in the operation not all knowing each other, a Houston policeman shot and wounded a Harris County sheriff’s deputy.

But eight months later, Patty still can’t get recompense from the U.S. government’s decision to use his truck and employee without his permission.

Insurance wouldn’t pay for it. He had to hire a company to clean the driver’s blood out of the cab and then have all the bullet holes in his truck fixed. He’s almost bankrupt, and…

Perhaps most unnerving, Patty says, is that drug mobsters now likely know his name, and certainly know his truck.

Panic at the Patty home these days can be triggered by something as simple as a deer scampering through the wooded yard or a car pulling into the driveway.

In Mexico, the drug trafficking organizations act in completely lawless ways that result in deaths without fear of any real repercussions from the law. They consider themselves to be the law. The same is true of terrorist organizations around the globe. And the same is true of the DEA.

Via Radley Balko: Dog shooting prompts police to change policies

Balko’s been in the forefront of getting the public aware of the outrageous amount of puppycide that takes place with law enforcement (and many of these killings are part of routine drug warrant enforcement).

Here’s a rare example where public reaction has resulted in real policy change.

Assistant Police Chief David Carter said a new policy that will go into effect July 1 addresses the options officers have when compelled to use force against dogs.

One of the most significant changes to the policy, Carter said, is that it is more specific on what constitutes a dangerous animal and when an officer can use deadly force against one.

The new policy clarifies that lethal force is authorized if officers decide there is “imminent danger of bodily harm” to themselves or another human, not when a dog is simply acting aggressively, Carter said. It requires a higher level of discretion; the old policy was less specific and said lethal force can be used if an animal is a threat to safety.

The new policy also explains alternatives to deadly force, including yelling at a dog, firing a Taser or using pepper spray.

There are other revisions as well, Carter said. The new policy raises the level of scrutiny on fatal dog shootings. If an officer does use deadly force against a dog, he or she must explain why lesser force was not used, and the incident will be reviewed by the entire chain of command — not just an officer’s sergeant, as is current policy, he said.

“It raises the stature” of dog shootings, Carter said. “We need to be as accountable for the shooting of a dog as any other force.”

They’re also going to institute trainging for cadets on how to handle aggressive dogs without lethal force.

Good news. It would be nice if it was more than just one police department…