Drug WarRant

Should be an interesting weekend, as the President goes to Cartagena for the Summit of the Americas. The administration has been working for the past few months to downplay and sidetrack the huge issue that will be in the room – why Latin American countries are forced to endure massive violence in order to support the U.S.’s futile attempt to prevent people from voluntarily buying drugs.

This press conference yesterday spells out the President’s schedule, and also points out both the fact that the administration doesn’t want to talk about the real issues drug policy and the fact that others do.

In the press conference, Dan Restrepo talked about a variety of issues that the President will discuss, including a short bit about how much the administration is spending on the drug war and treatment. But the first question from the press got right to it:

Q: My question is about drug policy. Although it’s not on the official agenda, several regional leaders, including the Colombian President himself, has said they intend to take the drug policy debate to the next level at this summit and of course it surrounds the call by many leaders to urge decriminalization of certain drugs and also to have a focus on U.S. consumption and reducing U.S. demand for drugs. I’m wondering, what will be the U.S. position and how in-depth do you plan to talk about this at the summit? Thank you.

MR. RESTREPO: Josh, as you know, this is not a new issue in the Americas, nor is this an issue where there is a consensus among the countries — the rest of the countries of the Americas. There are — and as you’ve seen it in the course of the public debate over the last several weeks in the region — real differences of opinion on the question of legalization and decriminalization.

U.S. policy on this is very clear. The President doesn’t support decriminalization. He does think this is a legitimate debate, and it’s a debate that we welcome having because it helps demystify this as an option. I think that Cartagena provides a real opportunity to build on the conversation that Vice President Biden started in Honduras for the countries of Central America last month, where how is it that we can work collectively in the Americas more effectively to address the real challenges of crime and violence that societies — that too many societies are facing right now. There is no magic bullet in that debate as the challenge of — as the consumption of drugs spreads through the Americas, the response and the responsibility to address this challenge also needs to spread. And we need to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to build the kinds of rule of law institutions necessary to defeat these transnational criminal organizations.

I think very much — you’re right that the conversation — this will be part of the conversation in Cartagena. And we welcome the opportunity to go more in depth as to how collectively the countries of the Americas can more effectively address this challenge. And as to consumption in the United States, I think I touched on that in the introductory comments in terms of the investments and the national drug control policy changes that this President has made to address and to enhance treatment prevention and education as ways of driving down drug use and demand here in the United States.

A couple of questions later:

Q: Dan, you say that President Obama welcomed to have the debate on drugs, and even the Latin American President, President Santos, he seems to be open to the idea to decriminalize the consumption of drugs. So the question is — I mean, since you say that the U.S. position is very clear in this regard, what is the — I mean, what is the purpose? What is the penalty to have this dialogue, this debate in Cartagena when already one of the main players in this issue, the United States, doesn’t seem to be able to consider any future change in the government strategy?

MR. RESTREPO: I think that the important thing to bear in mind here is this is a shared responsibility, and it is one that you have an increasing number of capable partners in the Americas who can help confront this challenge. And I think the President very much looks forward to a discussion in Cartagena about how we can do better as a group to address this challenge. […]

And this is not a debate where one country is standing in a very different place than all of the other countries. There is a variety of views on the issue of decriminalization in the Americas. The United States is among the countries who does not see this as the solution and does not see it as a viable option because of the problems that come with it, and because it won’t end transnational organized crime, but that we are — that the leaders of the region will have an opportunity to further discuss this issue and see how we can enhance our cooperation is a positive thing that should help improve the lives of people across the region.

Dancing as fast as he can.

The questions aren’t going to go away.

Spanish town votes for growing cannabis to pay off £1.25m debt

The settlement’s 800 adults, who live 160km (100 miles) south-west of Barcelona, voted in favour of the scheme to rent out 7ha (17 acres) of land to a cannabis consumers’ association.

Mayor Bernat Pellisa – who claims the scheme will create new jobs and reduce organised crime – believes the town council can pay off the debt within two years.

Speaking before the vote on Tuesday, he said: ‘It will have positive social and economic effects.

‘We want to put an end to organised crime, put an end to the black market and the underground economy.’

Some 56.3 per cent of the population voted in favour of allowing cannabis to be grown in the referendum.

Apparently the lawyers are arguing about it.

But if one town gets out of debt through legal cannabis, you can bet others will follow.

In George Will’s previous nonsensical column, he ended by saying:

“A subsequent column will suggest a more economic approach to the “natural” problem of drugs.”

It appears that he’s now come out with it: The 80/20 ratio: rethinking America’s drug-control strategy

The first half of the article could well have been written by Mark Kleiman – in fact, it’s mostly cribbed from his book.

The one thing that Will really messes up on (because it’s what Kleiman always gets wrong) is the notion that alcohol companies market to the 20% of heavy users who consume the lion’s share of product, and that the future of drug legalization will end up with imaginary unrestricted drug companies doing the same thing. The false assumption is that economic self-preservation advertising will be directed at directly causing problematic use.

Part of what Kleiman gets wrong is in not understanding the difference between brand marketing and product marketing. Alcohol companies have no interest in advertising their product (ie, “use alcohol”) to heavy users. They already have them in their pocket.

It’s like when I advertise theatre productions. I don’t need to aim my advertising at the theatre-lovers in town – I just need to inform them that we’re doing theatre and what the dates and times are. They’ll be there. I do, however, need to advertise to the casual theatre-goer and get them to come to the theatre. Sure, they’re harder to reach, but that’s the only way I’ll maximize my audience.

So do alcohol companies do any marketing to heavy users? Sure. Brand marketing (in fact, brand marketing makes up the vast majority of their efforts). That’s where they get you to drink Bud Light instead of Miller Light (not in addition to). It isn’t changing the use of alcohol, only what brand is getting the larger share of the market.

So George Will starts out with an interesting set of figures, but one dealing with a flawed premise.

Then, he steps forward with his promised economic approach. Yes, the following mish-mash is his actual writing. It’s like you can see the wheels turning as he tries to transform Kleiman’s theses into arguments against legalization, but then can’t actually come up with a very good reason to oppose legalization. As he continues to sort through the facts, he finds himself kind of defending legalization, in a back-handed way. Finally, with some disdain, he indicates that it’s probably inevitable. It’s really quite curious:

People used to believe enforcement could raise prices but doubted that higher prices would decrease consumption. Now they know consumption declines as prices rise but wonder whether enforcement can substantially affect prices.

They urge rethinking the drug-control triad of enforcement, prevention and treatment because we have been much too optimistic about all three.

And cartels have oceans of money for corrupting enforcement because drugs are so cheap to produce and easy to renew. So it is not unreasonable to consider modifying a policy that gives hundreds of billions of dollars a year to violent organized crime.

Marijuana probably provides less than 25 percent of the cartels’ revenues. Legalizing it would take perhaps $10 billion from some bad and violent people, but the cartels would still make much more money from cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines than they would lose from marijuana legalization.

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have legalized “medical marijuana,” a messy, mendacious semi-legalization that breeds cynicism regarding law. In 1990, 24 percent of Americans supported full legalization. Today, 50 percent do. In 2010, in California, where one-eighth of Americans live, 46 percent of voters supported legalization, and some opponents were marijuana growers who like the profits they make from prohibition of their product.

Would the public health problems resulting from legalization be a price worth paying for injuring the cartels and reducing the costs of enforcement? We probably are going to find out.

I’m one who tends to be pretty open about the fact that different reform groups have different agendas and viewpoints and that’s OK. I rarely chastise a group or leader merely because I differ with their views or strategy.

I am, however, quite surprised and displeased with the quotes from Allen St. Pierre from NORML in this article. If accurate, they don’t serve St. Pierre or NORML (or any of us) very well.

Allen St. Pierre, executive director for NORML, which seeks to reform marijuana laws, says the president might have political as well as legal motivations for reversing his initial position on medical marijuana. St. Pierre argues that current laws prohibit the Obama administration from turning a blind eye to state’s medical marijuana legalization.

“In essence, the administration is sort of hamstrung,” St. Pierre says.

Most definitely not true. The original Holder memo was correct. The government does have significant discretion in how it uses its funds to enforce laws. And it could still enforce current laws without going out of its way to intimidate medical marijuana operations in the states.

The Obama administration has not been just doing what’s necessary. It’s been taking an active role in escalating the crackdown.

St. Pierre says letting states regulate marijuana as they please would burn up a lot of the president’s political capital, adding that Obama has to take action or he risks earning a reputation in 2012 election as soft on drugs.

I don’t think Obama has a chance in hell of being perceived as soft on anything. This is the guy who claims the power to assassinate American citizens with no judicial review. Even Bush wouldn’t go that far.

There may be political capital involved in the medical marijuana decisions, but it’s the definition of “capital” that means “cash,” not the implied “capital” meaning political will and votes.

It appears, unfortunately, that Allen is speaking as a supporter of candidate Obama and/or the Democratic Party, rather than in his role as executive director of NORML.

If Allen is reading this, I’d love to hear what he was thinking.

This is some huge news!

I’ve spent a good portion of the day on conference calls with leaders of drug policy reform organizations around the world. There may have been one or two that didn’t participate, but enough did join in to form a clear consensus on a major (maybe even shocking to the press) new direction for drug policy reform.

Here’s the big news (a press release will be forthcoming): as of this date, all major drug policy reform groups worldwide will no longer demand that all drugs be legalized without restriction.

I know that this could be a blow to some supporters, but we need to break the impasse that existed between the extremes of prohibitionists and unrestricted legalizationists. It was the right move.

Not only are we dropping demands for unrestricted legalization, but we are, as a group, making an unprecedented move all the way to the clear centrist position of accepting and even supporting drug-appropriate regulations on the production, marketing, distribution, possession, and use of all drugs.

Policy-makers will no longer need to worry about extreme fringe legalizers when attempting to create appropriate fact- and science-based drug policy. Those fringe unrestricted-legalization supporters are gone — replaced with centrist regulated-legalization supporters.

The only fringe extremists remaining are the prohibitionists. It’s time for them to abandon their failures, and compromise to meet us in the middle.

Of course, there were no such conference calls today. No big move to the center. Drug policy reform groups have always been there, at the center. None of the major ones have ever called for completely unregulated legalization. That’s a mythical position that has been invented by prohibitionists as a way to paint their opposition as extreme.

It is, actually, quite silly that we sometimes find ourselves having to explain that legalization doesn’t mean selling shrink-wrapped pre-filled syringes of heroin to 14-year-olds in 7-11 stores, nor that we must allow cocaine distributors to be named advertising sponsors of sports events.

What got me thinking about this was my rather amused reaction to a passage written by Otto Pérez Molina in the Guardian this weekend:

Moving beyond prohibition can lead us into tricky territory. To suggest liberalisation – allowing consumption, production and trafficking of drugs without any restriction whatsoever – would be, in my opinion, profoundly irresponsible. Even more, it is an absurd proposition. If we accept regulations for alcohol and tobacco, why should we allow drugs to be consumed and produced without any restrictions?

Our proposal, as the government, is to abandon any ideological position (whether prohibition or liberalisation) and to foster a global intergovernmental dialogue based on a realistic approach – drug regulation. Drug consumption, production and trafficking should be subject to global regulations, which means that consumption and production should be legalised but within certain limits and conditions. And legalisation therefore does not mean liberalisation without controls.

What a notion.

Hey, I think it’s great! If the President of Guatemala, or anyone else, wants to “invent” the idea of regulated legalization, we’re happy to let them take credit.

We’ll come and meet you at our home in the center.

If you’re interested in Molina’s statement, you might also want to check out this take: Finally, a politician talks sense on drug legalization by Tim Worstall.

If you haven’t signed it yet, go over and sign the “End the Drug War Addiction” petition at AVAAZ.

I’m not one who thinks that petitions are going to actually make change happen, but they can add to the discussion, and that’s always good.

….

This is an open thread.

An interesting white paper: Rehabilitating the war on drugs: Central America and the legalisation debate by Chris Abbott and Joel Vargas at Open Briefing.

I found these passages to be a particularly good description of the U.S. approach toward the drug war and how it impacts Central America:

The war on drugs is the ultimate manifestation of the dominant security orthodoxy, which believes that military force can ultimately control insecurity. In the same way the war on terror essentially aimed to ‘keep the lid’ on terrorism and insecurity without addressing the root causes of perceived injustices, the war on drugs aims to keep the lid on the rising tide of cartel violence without addressing the root causes of illicit drug consumption in North America. Security policies based on this ‘control paradigm’ are often self-defeating in the long term as they simply create a pressure cooker effect. […]

What do the external powers fear so much? In short, the potential decriminalisation or legalisation of drugs in Central America threatens the foundations of deliberate policies enacted by North America and elsewhere.

Central to any war fought using the control paradigm are the principles of protecting the homeland by keeping the violence ‘over there’ and the near complete attention given to tackling external consequences rather than resolving any internal causes. These principles formed the core of the war on terror strategy and lie at the heart of the war on drugs. Legalising drugs in Central America would mean the fight could no longer be carried out elsewhere and would force the consumer markets of North America to look inwards at the internal drivers of the illicit drugs trade.

The white paper goes on to suggest phased-in decriminalization and/or legalization of drugs, in ways that mostly make sense, although I wasn’t sure if this was tongue in cheek:

If successful, this strategy could be extended to include more harmful drugs, such as cocaine and marijuana (the principal targets of the American war on drugs) and encompass the regulation of production and distribution.

… more harmful drugs? Than what?

Brought to my attention thanks to comments in the last post, is George Mason University’s Faculty Staff resources Fact Sheet on Marijuana.

Pretty much every university has one of these – many times it’s part of the contract that faculty and staff sign, and sometimes it’s also used to communicate with students (in some cases they, too, must sign to indicate that they’ve read it). I’m guessing that having a drug policy, and some kind of statement about the effects of various drugs, is part of a condition for federal funding, etc.

But the content varies widely. Some are quite truthful (and therefore bland). Others outrageously full of falsehoods (like this one). Most are a mix.

Since it’s a required thing, they pick one up from somewhere (often boilerplate recommendations from government sources) and disseminate it without any real vetting.

At the university where I work, I got ours changed. About the only really offensive thing in ours was a reference to marijuana causing lung cancer. I contacted the head of the Human Resources Department with information about the Tashkin study on marijuana and lung cancer, and they cheerfully changed the document to eliminate the lung cancer reference entirely.

In many cases, that’s all that’s needed. Simply contacting Human Resources and pointing out the factual errors. Often, the people in charge of disseminating these things either 1. are not aware of the truth or 2. never read the statement.

If you are a student, faculty, or staff member at a university, check out their drug policy documents. Look for verifiable factual errors (including those where there is strong dispute from other studies), and provide that information to the people in charge. Politely ask them to change the document to match current scientific facts.

These are people who pride themselves as working at institutions of higher learning and are usually receptive to facts (as opposed to government workers).

George Will has a particularly stupid column in the Washington Post: The drug legalization dilemma with recycled talking points from the likes of Mark Kleiman.

There are a whole lot of flaws in his arguments – here’s the main one:

So, suppose cocaine or heroin were legalized and marketed as cigarettes and alcohol are. And suppose the level of addiction were to replicate the 7 percent of adults suffering from alcohol abuse or dependency. That would be a public health disaster. As the late James Q. Wilson said, nicotine shortens life, cocaine debases it.

Still, because the costs of prohibition — interdiction, mass incarceration, etc. — are staggeringly high, some people say, “Let’s just try legalization for a while.” Society is not, however, like a controlled laboratory; in society, experiments that produce disappointing or unexpected results cannot be tidily reversed.

Note first that under the Will/Kleiman world-view, all drugs – from marijuana to heroin – will be accepted and marketed in the same identical way that alcohol is under a legal regime. They can’t even imagine different models happening in society. And so we must suffer for their lack of imagination.

Then, of course, in their world-view each new drug will result in a new abuse-population segment equivalent size to that of alcohol abuse with no overlap. Logically, then, if we legalized 20 new drugs, 147 percent of the population would then be suffering from abuse and dependency.

Of course, that’s absolute rubbish.

The truth is that abuse and dependency are driven by a lot of factors and are not specifically tied to the availability of drugs. There is a certain portion of the population that is more likely to abuse drugs, and they will likely abuse drugs regardless of their availability. Changes in that portion have more to do with social structure and than drug policy. This has been proven in world-wide models.

Legalizing a drug doesn’t mean that you have a new population of abusers. Instead, some who now abuse alcohol will switch to the other drug. Some will combine. Some will abuse the new legalized drug who abused it when it was illegal.

The largest increase in number of users of that drug will come from the casual non-problematic use. Criminalization is much more likely to deter non-problematic use than it is to deter abuse.

And that final point about society being messy, so we can’t just try legalization for awhile because we might not be able to reverse it… how convenient. And fucking offensive.

Imagine that argument being used for other social changes… “Oh, yeah, negroes have it rough, but we can’t really take a chance on freeing the slaves, because what if it turns out to be socially disruptive to me and my white friends? We’d never have the political will to reverse the decision. They should just continue being slaves and accept that as being part of the price of our free society.”

There are other points of stupidity and dishonesty in Will’s OpEd, such as his discussion about tobacco.

Another legal drug, nicotine, kills more people than do alcohol and all illegal drugs — combined. For decades, government has aggressively publicized the health risks of smoking and made it unfashionable, stigmatized, expensive and inconvenient. Yet 20 percent of every rising American generation becomes addicted to nicotine.

Note that he uses tobacco to show health risks, and yet conveniently fails to mention that American society has dramatically reduced alcohol use and abuse without criminalization.

Or:

Furthermore, legalization would mean drugs of reliable quality would be conveniently available from clean stores for customers not risking the stigma of breaking the law in furtive transactions with unsavory people. So there is no reason to think today’s levels of addiction are anywhere near the levels that would be reached under legalization.

Why would clean drugs of safe dosage in controlled setting result in higher levels of addiction? Will doesn’t say. He once again implies that availability=addiction, something that is demonstrably untrue.

Throughout, he conflates alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine (and other drugs), even though all three drugs are dramatically different in terms of their effects

And finally, the specter of public health disaster from an unknown supposedly massive group of people just waiting to become addicts at the drop of a legal drug in George Will’s fantasy world still isn’t justification for the worldwide disaster that is the war on drugs.