Drug WarRant

In the new Rasmussen Poll, 56% of Americans supported legalizing and regulating marijuana and only 36% were opposed.

That’s pretty remarkable. We’ve done an incredible job in educating the public. And another thing that helps is that pollers are realizing that because of the baggage that certain words carry due to efforts of prohibitionists, careful question wording is essential.

The question for that particular answer was:

Suppose that marijuana was legalized and regulated so that it was illegal for people under 18 to buy, that those who drove while under the influence of marijuana received strict penalties, and that smoking marijuana was banned in public places like restaurants. With such regulations in place, would you favor or oppose legalizing and regulating marijuana?

Interestingly, while only 11% were in favor of legalizing cocaine in a manner similar to tobacco, when the question was asked:

If you knew that legalizing and regulating both marijuana and cocaine would, in fact, reduce drug violence along the Mexican border, would you favor or oppose regulating both marijuana and cocaine?

… the number went up to 47%

That’s incredible.

We still have work to do, but we’re making great strides in the important area (which is the people, not the politicians).

Our Drug Czar’s been in Sweden, hobnobbing with Queen Silvia and having a great time with a supportive audience at the World Federation Against Drugs (WFAD) World Forum Against Drugs.

Naturally, it’s a one-sided gathering of all the worst of the prohibition world. They’re overarching theme is to completely turn the definition of human rights upside down, by apparently saying that human rights means protecting children from the existence of a world where adults use drugs. It’s taking the old, tired “think of the children” mantra to new and even more frightening levels of unreality. In fact, the whole thing was framed around the Convention of the Rights of the Child.

They dragged out the old Drug Czar under Nixon, Robert L. DuPont (who bears a whole lot of responsibility for the current mess), who spewed a bunch of nonsense, such as:

Would anyone faithful to human rights conclude that adult child pornography readers’ right to privacy trumps children’s right to protection from sexual exploitation as contained in CRC Article 34? Of course not. Why should it be different for drug policy?

Yes, he went there.

Of course, Gil gave a speech. He couldn’t pass up this opportunity to promote his “third way” nonsense that he got from Mark Kleiman. (And yes, he used the “silver bullet of legalization” phrase again.)

He took this opportunity to roll out some new bit of nonsense called “Principles of Modern Drug Policy.”

Principles of Modern Drug Policy

The three United Nations drug control conventions are the foundation of the global effort to reduce drug use and its consequences. To implement the conventions in the 21st century, the United States commits itself to the following principles and encourages other nations to do the same:

1. Ensure Balanced, Compassionate, and Humane Drug Policies. Modern drug policies must acknowledge that drug addiction is a chronic disease of the brain that can be prevented and treated. Public health and public safety initiatives are complementary and equally vital to achieving reductions in drug use and its consequences. The drug policy challenge facing the world today is not a choice between an enforcement-only “war on drugs” on the one hand and the extreme notion of drug legalization on the other. Rather, the challenge lies in combining cost-effective, evidence-based approaches that protect public health and safety.
2. Integrate Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery Support Services into Public Health Systems. Public health approaches, such as evidenced-based prevention, screening and brief interventions in healthcare settings, drug treatment programs, and recovery support services, are vital components of an effective drug control strategy. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that drug prevention, treatment, and recovery services are cost-effective ways to reduce drug use and its consequences.
3. Protect Human Rights. Respect for human rights is an integral part of drug policy. Citizens, especially children, have the right to be safe from illegal drug use and associated crime, violence, and other consequences— whether in their family or the community. Drug-involved offenders who have contact with the criminal justice system deserve to be supervised with respect for their basic human rights and be provided with services to treat their underlying substance use disorder.
4. Reduce Drug Use to Reduce Drug Consequences. The best way to reduce the substantial harms associated with drugs is to reduce drug use itself. Public health services for drug users, including HIV interventions for people who inject drugs, should be implemented in the context of comprehensive, recovery-oriented public health systems that also provide drug users access to treatment for addiction. Policies and programs such as injection rooms, drug distribution efforts, and drug legalization should be opposed because they tolerate drug use and allow the debilitating disease of addiction to continue untreated.
5. Support and Expand Access to Medication-Assisted Therapies. Recent innovations in medication-assisted therapies have demonstrated increasing effectiveness in reducing drug use and its consequences. These medications should be further studied to identify new therapies and best practices in program implementation.
6. Reform Criminal Justice Systems to Support both Public Health and Public Safety. Criminal justice systems play a vital role in breaking the cycle of drug use, crime, incarceration, and re-arrest. While individuals should be held responsible for breaking the law, the criminal justice system should help bring them into contact with treatment services if they are suffering from a substance use disorder. This includes providing treatment services in correctional facilities, providing alternatives to incarceration such as drug courts for non-violent drug- involved offenders, and using monitoring, drug testing, and other means to ensure recovery from illegal drug use.
7. Disrupt Drug Trafficking. Transnational criminal organizations should be targeted with a focus on the arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of drug traffickers, the seizure of illegal assets, disruption of drug production networks, control of precursor chemicals, and the eradication of illegal drug crops. International cooperation on information exchange, extradition, and training and technical assistance should be strengthened to eliminate safe harbors for transnational criminal organizations.
8. Address the Drug Problem as a Shared Responsibility. Drug use, production, and trafficking are increasingly globalized problems and pose challenges to all of our nations. Because of the global nature of today’s drug markets, international cooperation is essential to protect public health and safety.
9. Support the UN Drug Conventions: The three UN Drug Conventions are the foundation of our global drug control efforts and are effective in their current form. Efforts to renegotiate the Conventions should be opposed.
10. Protect Citizens from Drugs: Drugs are illegal because their use is dangerous not only to users but to society as a whole. We are committed to protecting all citizens, including those in recovery, from the tragic consequences of illegal drug use.

That last one is particularly outrageous (though not particularly surprising) in that it specifically denies the existence of non-harmful use of currently illicit drugs when it comes to the Drug Czar’s view of drug policy. #10, along with #3 and #4 attempt to invent harm from the non-problematic recreational use of illicit drugs.

And of course, the harms of prohibition are almost entirely ignored.

Update: Check out the seriously deranged rantings of the Russian Drug Czar:

It is more than illustrative that the so-called Global Drug Politics Commission, which directly promotes drug legalization, last year hit upon the idea to present its definitely provocative and favoring drug legalization report on the 1st of June – on the International Children’s Day!

No doubt this large-scale and highly aggressive PR-campaign on drug propaganda is directly or indirectly related to enormous drug business income estimated by experts as 800 billion US dollars per year.

The mentioned report should be unambiguously regarded as a kind of a manifest of drug legalization supporters. […]

The objective of drug legalization supporters is to legalize transnational organized crime, a global criminal international, to make drug trafficking smooth and comfortable.[…]

Today we can see how powerful our antidrug front is. And we should pass to victories over drugs, to resolutely reject decadent moods and conciliation with the drug mafia’s initiatives.

The Harmful Side Effect of Drug Prohibition by Randy Barnett

There are so many reasons why drug prohibition is objectionable, it is hard to enumerate them all. In my Utah Law Review article, The Harmful Side Effects of Drug Prohibition, I try to systematically survey just the “consequentialist” arguments against this socially-destructive social policy. If I were to revise this article today, I suppose I would emphasize even more than I did how destructive the “War on Drugs” has been to the black community, perhaps especially because of the incarceration of thousands of black men, depriving their children of fathers, but also because of how the black market profits from the illicit drug trade supports the gang structure that preys upon the community and sucks up its kids. […]

But, as I said, the problem with assessing the War on Drugs is that there are so many harmful “side effects” of drug prohibition that it is difficult even to know where to begin. This article is my effort to be as comprehensive about these effects, yet still be accessible.

Won’t you please come to Chicago, show your face by Digby

It really doesn’t take much imagination to realize that militarizing the police and outfitting them as if they are about to mount an assault on Fallujah (when they are really just manning a political protest) might lead them to adopt the attitude that they are at war against their fellow citizens.

Under Asset Forfeiture Law, Wisconsin Cops Confiscate Families’ Bail Money by Radley Balko.

Nothing new to us here, but important for the rest of the world to wake up.

So Greer and her family visited a series of ATMs, and on March 1, she brought the money to the jail, thinking she’d be taking Joel Greer home. But she left without her money, or her son.

Instead jail officials called in the same Drug Task Force that arrested Greer. A drug-sniffing dog inspected the Greers’ cash, and about a half-hour later, Beverly Greer said, a police officer told her the dog had alerted to the presence of narcotics on the bills — and that the police department would be confiscating the bail money.

“I told them the money had just come from the bank,” Beverly Greer says. “We had just taken it out. If the money had drugs on it, then they should go seize all the money at the bank, too. I just don’t understand how they could do that.”

Congressmen Seek to Lift Propaganda Ban

There’s been a ban?

… essentially nothing.

Tweet of the day from Glenn Greenwald.

An extra cup of coffee is more likely to make someone unduly aggressive than trace amounts of THC

Maia Szalavitz in Time points out the absurdity of breathless media reports that Trayvon Martin had THC in his system:

Traces of Marijuana Found in Trayvon Martin’s Body: Does It Matter?

I’m not interested in getting into any debate over Martin/Zimmerman (that’s for the courts), but the miniscule presence of THC makes no more difference in this case than the presence of undigested Twinkie.

Wow. Gil is just getting more pathetic every day.

Study: More Than Half of Adult Male Arrestees Test Positive for at Least One Drug

On one side are those who suggest that drug legalization is the “silver bullet” solution to our nation’s drug problem. On the other are those who still believe that the “War on Drugs,” law-enforcement-only strategy is the way forward. Our policies reject both these extremes in favor of a “third way” to approach drug control.

The foundation of this “third way” approach is peer-reviewed, scientific research that provides us insight into the disease of addiction and a roadmap on how to prevent and treat it. The “third way” approach deals in facts — not dogma — and relies on research — not ideology.

And then he proceeds immediately to distort and misinterpret data to fit his ideology.

(Interestingly, he does take a moment to indicate his admiration for Mark A.R. Kleiman, Jonathan P. Caulkins and Angela Hawken.)

I sure hope somebody at the ONDCP makes him actually read the comments to his OpEd. The commenters absolutely eviscerate him. It appears that Huffington Post readers are smart enough to know when someone’s trying to sell them a load of manure.

…

From Duncan in comments here at Drug WarRant comes Your Questions Answered: Driving under the influence of marijuana from Fox 31 in Denver.

The upshot is that in a (fairly unscientific) test, the measurements made no sense at all, and the law being proposed would clearly have done little to actually improve public safety. Clearly the safer approach was to give the officer the ability to determine who was driving badly, rather than testing for the amount of THC in the body.

But of course, remember the Drug Czar and his desire for scientific fact, not ideology to drive policy decisions?

The funny part about that is actually reading what the drug czar says. For instance the ONDCP page on drugged driving includes the following strategies:

The first one is: “Encouraging states to adopt Per Se drug impairment laws”; The second one is: “Collecting further data on drugged driving.”

That’s right. Push for policies and laws, and then try to find the science that agrees with your ideology (or just misrepresent the science so that it does).

That’s the drug czar.

A little exchange over at the reality-based community

Brett: As long as Obama is putting people in prison for getting high, he is, unavoidably, an evil drug warrior. […]
Mark: Of course, “putting people in prison for getting high” is utter fantasy. But I suppose that doesn’t matter to you…

I see what Mark’s doing here, of course. The same thing the drug czar does all the time. It’s about downplaying the seriousness and destructiveness of prohibition, because they still want to use prohibition.

You often hear the drug czar say that nobody is (or very few are) in prison for possession of marijuana, usually as a way of claiming that legalizing marijuana wouldn’t make much of a dent in the prison population, so therefore that particular argument by legalizers isn’t a strong one. That’s a common shady debate trick – attacking just one of many arguments by the opposition and downplaying it, then using that to claim that the opponent’s position is weak.

Interestingly, the other commenters at the site stood up for Brett. It was clear to pretty much anyone reading Brett’s statement that it wasn’t so much a literal statement (as Mark was interpreting it), but a general statement about actively prosecuting marijuana laws.

You can’t separate the act of “getting high” from the rest of what goes on in this misguided drug war as if that is an activity that is somehow exempt from drug warrior extremes. You can’t just “get high.” First, you have to get marijuana. And unless you happen to stumble across some ditch weed on public lands, then something else has to happen — and that connects you to the world of people going to prison. Grow your own? That’s a felony. Buy from someone? They can go to prison for you getting high. Share some with friends? You’re a trafficker. Possess more than some arbitrary small amount? Intent to distribute. Pass a joint within 1000 feet of a day care center while discussing building a tunnel from Mexico? Don’t drop the soap.

Perhaps Brett should have worded it: “As long as Obama is putting people in prison because someone is getting high, he is, unavoidably, an evil drug warrior.” But we knew what he meant.

And people are going to prison. All of us know about people who absolutely shouldn’t be going to prison, and yet are.

And then, of course, don’t forget the “unintended consequences.” Remember Daniel Chong? 5 days locked up in a DEA cell without food or water, merely because he went to a house to “get high” and it was being raided by the DEA.

Marijuana prohibition and legalization are not about the single individual sitting in a room by himself getting high on some weed that he dialed up on his Star Trek replicator. It is a massive enterprise of prohibition activities and criminal activities that needs to stop. And we won’t be deterred by someone pointing at a pot smoker and noting that she isn’t in prison.

So, our morons Congress have come up with a new law! Because there weren’t enough already.

You know how traffickers have been using tunnels (along with submarines, aircraft, corrupt TSA employees and just about any other device) to smuggle drugs into the country?

Well, Congress decided that the problem has been not that drug smuggling is obscenely profitable, but rather that people just don’t know you’re not supposed to dig tunnels under the border and smuggle drugs and stuff. So they’re writing a law to make that illegal.

Border Tunnel Prevention Act of 2012

Any person convicted of using a tunnel or subterranean passage to smuggle aliens, weapons, drugs, terrorists, or illegal goods is subject to an enhanced sentence for the underlying offense. Additional sentence enhancements would further deter tunnel activities and increase prosecutorial options.

This makes me wonder what it is that the authors of the bill are really trying to accomplish. It’s clearly not to reduce the smuggling of drugs, aliens, or other things, because the enhanced sentences are not for those activities. Smugglers can take another route with no additional penalty. In fact, Congress appears to be encouraging exactly that with this bill.

No, the authors seem to be specifically concerned about tunnels. Are they afraid that Mexico will tear off from the U.S. like a perforated ticket stub if we get too many tunnels?

Is it an extreme case of tunnel-phobia? Where even hearing about these tunnels gives them the willies?

Do they really think that yet another law will actually deter people from digging tunnels? Would a law have deterred Hogan, Newkirk, Kinch, Carter, or LeBeau from using tunnels?

If you looked into the ear of one of these Congressional representatives, could you see light at the other end?

The Border Tunnel Prevention Act of 2012 has been authored by Sivestre Reyes (not to be confused with the much more intelligent Silvester the Cat). Dianne Feinstein is the sponsor of the Senate version.

Send some love the way of Reyes’ opponent Beto O’Rourke, who would be far superior.

Judge approves class action lawsuit over NYPD’s stop-and-frisk searches

A judge’s ruling Wednesday on a request to authorize a class action lawsuit over the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) use of “stop-and-frisk” searches could see more than 1 million people line up to file claims against the department for violating their constitutional rights.

While it’s not likely to attract that many plaintiffs, people who were illegally searched in New York City any time after January 5, 2005 are eligible to join the lawsuit. […]

“The Court has rightly recognized that illegal stops-and-frisks are not limited to a few rogue police officers but are the product of a program designed at the highest level of the police department and affect hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of New Yorkers,” Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Darius Charney explained in a prepared statement. “As a result of today’s ruling, all those for whom this practice is a daily reality will now have an opportunity to challenge it as a violation of their fundamental constitutional rights and to ask the Court to order real changes in NYPD stop-and-frisk policy.”

Of course, assuming that the lawsuit is successful, it’s the taxpayers who pay and the lawyers to get paid, but still, it has a chance to force change in a department (and Mayor) who clearly are uninterested in considering the existence of Fourth Amendment rights for brown (or poor) people.

Several interesting articles about the upcoming revisions to psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, for the new DSM 5.

How Psychiatrists Make Drugs More Addictive by Jacob Sullum

The next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, scheduled to be published a year from now, is expected to include a looser definition of addiction that will qualify millions more drinkers, illegal drug users, and participants in other pleasurable activities for psychiatric diagnoses. The upshot will be a lot more spending by taxpayers and private insurers on rarely effective “treatment” for these putative diseases, along with expanded excuses for depriving people of their freedom and relieving them of their responsibility.

DSM 5 Could Mean 40% of College Students Are Alcoholics by Maia Szalavitz

If the change is finalized, anyone whose drinking or drug use creates any problems will essentially be an addict or alcoholic with a “mild” case of the disease and presumably, therefore, not someone who can learn control over his habits.

While researchers have been encouraging the widespread adoption of “brief interventions” and other techniques that don’t require abstinence or a label— with great success— this change could swing the field in the opposite direction.

And that poses a huge problem, particularly for adolescents and young adults with mild problems who may be pushed to adopt an addict identity and to see themselves as having no way to control their drinking or drug use if they ever “relapse.” Rather than empowering those who do have control to use it, these programs essentially tell kids that if they ever have just one drink or puff on a joint, they’re lost.

The New York Times article points out the self-interest that may be involved…

Addiction Diagnoses May Rise Under Guideline Changes by ian Urbina

“The ties between the D.S.M. panel members and the pharmaceutical industry are so extensive that there is the real risk of corrupting the public health mission of the manual,” said Dr. Lisa Cosgrove, a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, who published a study in March that said two-thirds of the manual’s advisory task force members reported ties to the pharmaceutical industry or other financial conflicts of interest. […]

Dr. O’Brien, who led the addiction working group, has been a consultant for several pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Aventis, all of which make drugs marketed to combat addiction.

He has also worked extensively as a paid consultant for Alkermes, a pharmaceutical company, studying a drug, Vivitrol, that combats alcohol and heroin addiction by preventing craving. He was the driving force behind adding “craving” to the new manual’s list of recognized symptoms of addiction. […]

Seems like such a win-win change to the DSM. The Drug Czar wins because with all these new people “needing treatment” it justifies his emphasis on treatment. The drug companies win because they get to drug people up on drugs for which they get paid. The treatment industry wins because they get a ton of new people “needing treatment” that aren’t difficult cases, and with health care covering much of it, they can just rake in the dough without really having to do anything.

As far as I can tell, the only ones who lose are, well, the people.

One of the things we need to do in this country is fight the long-established notion in the general public (and most especially in the lawmakers) that an effective way to deal with something we don’t like is to use the government to ban it.

The fact is that banning as an effective solution for anything is far from a universal truth, yet many people are convinced that it is, so they don’t even bother sit down and say: “We don’t like this. What are the ways of dealing with this, and which are actually likely to be effective?” Instead, they say: “We don’t like this. Ban it.”

Lawmakers, of course, do this all the time (sometimes even just for the political “glory” of banning something). They’ll even try to ban wearing your pants a certain way.

We find this, of course, in our efforts to reform drug policy. There are a lot of people out there who want us to convince them that drugs are harmless before they are willing to accept not banning them — which is why we so often get bogged down in irrelevant discussions over some minor aspect of marijuana’s effects.

The truth, of course, is that even if the drug is harmful, banning is the wrong way to deal with it.

As some LEAP speakers I’ve heard have said to people: “If the drug is as harmful as you think it is, then why would you possibly want it to be unregulated and distributed by criminals?”

A study in the American Journal of Public Health noted that a national survey found 43% of Americans thought cigarettes should be banned.

That’s pretty stunning. 43%

Here, with cigarettes, we have the most extraordinary success story in changing people’s views and habits regarding a particular drug without it being illegal.

It really is astonishing what has happened in the past 20 years. Smoking rates have gone down dramatically. Lung cancer rates have gone down. I take a look around the university where I work, and where I used to see large crowds of students smoking outside our common area any time of day, now it’s one or two.

And this all happened through education and social acceptance. Sure, there were some over-reaches in the “banning” style now and then (we had some misguided efforts by the university to eliminate outdoor ashtrays that just ended up in more cigarette butts on the ground), but for the most part, change happened without banning.

With this legal drug, life-saving changes were happening in society. At the same time, with the illegal drug heroin, we were seeing death tolls mount from tainted drugs.

There are limited times when a ban can be effective. For example, the FDA may ban an additive used in the processing of food products because it is toxic. This is likely to cause the processing companies to find a different way to prepare the food, and unlikely to cause the consumers to seek out the additive on the black market merely because their lunchmeat has been prepared with a different preservative.

But the use of bans has to be approached on a case by case basis, not merely because we dislike something. As we’ve seen so graphically in the drug war, it isn’t just a matter of whether bans are effective or not. Bans can follow the entire scale from effective to destructive.

As Evert (who sent me the link on cigarette bans) says:

In other words, 43% of the population thinks cigarettes should no longer be taxed nor sold with health warnings. 43% of the population would prefer that cigarettes were sold by people who don’t check ID, who don’t turn child customers away and who reinvest drug money in other criminal enterprises. 43% of the population want to clog the courts and jails with non-violent smokers and people involved in voluntary drug deals. 43% of the population would prefer that cigarettes became a more lucrative source of income for corrupt cops, bureaucrats and organised crime.

If 43% of population thinks this, 43% of the population is certifiably insane.