Drug WarRant

Every now and then this ridiculous argument shows up in some serious-sounding piece about legalization and it’s important that a stake be put through its heart before it breeds more stupidity. This time, it showed up in Mamon McKinnon’s Drug Legalization Chic, which I mentioned a few days ago.

“…If the war against drugs is lost, then so are the wars against theft, speeding, incest, fraud, rape, murder, arson, and illegal parking. Few, if any, such wars are winnable. So let us all do anything we choose…”

This is, certainly, nonsense of the most outrageous kind, and it takes a special kind of dementia to see any logic therein.

Of course, the glib sarcastic response is “If you don’t know the difference between marijuana and rape, you won’t get invited to any of the good parties.”

In comments, Old Soldier took a stab at setting people straight:

Rape has a victim. Smoking hemp doesn’t.

In the true sense of the meaning, absolutely right. But unfortunately, this argument gets us nowhere, because there’s always some git like David W who moronically replies:

Tell that to the children? In Dallas Police were called to an apartment. It was full of pot smoke, and there were little children in there. One woman who was smoking was holding her toddler in her arms. What kind of life does that child have to look forward to, even if they some how remain healthy?? How about the organization I belonged to that had it bank account wiped out because our treasurer was a “recovering” addict and stole the money to finance her habit? Or my uncle who abandoned his family (granted, he started on pot when young but had graduated to heroin when he abandoned his wife and two children). No victims my foot.

Completely sidetracked. Mention victimless “crimes” and you’ll always get someone who thinks that secondary victimization is the same thing. And we’ve completely moved away from the topic of legalization. Dave W’s pathetic stories have nothing to do with drug legalization. In fact, they all apparently happened under criminalization. No value to the discussion at hand in any way.

Fact is, the real difference between marijuana and rape (when it comes to the discussion of eliminating criminal penalties) is… economics. Supply and demand.

As long as there is a demand for drugs, there will be a supply. Putting people in jail for selling drugs doesn’t do any good at all, because there’s still a demand, so someone else will step right up and fill the vacancy. That’s why criminal drug laws are always failures, as are interdiction and all other supply-side efforts.

There is no demand for rape.

Whey you arrest and incarcerate a rapist, you take a rapist off the street and make the place safer. Nobody steps up to take their place. There’s no lucrative job opening as rapist to handle the non-existent demand from all the people out there wanting to be raped.

Marijuana and rape are different.

The failure to understand such basic economic principles is just one of the things that makes our legislative output so utterly mindbogglingly stupid.

Yes, Drug WarRant is protesting the crass venality and stupidity of Congress, which was ready to break the internet in a futile attempt to protect the profits of certain entertainment companies.

Just like drug laws, they’re voting on bills that they don’t understand, and for which they have no clue regarding the actual consequences.

Feel free to discuss the protests or anything else here.

Scott Morgan has a fun read in the Huffington Post: How to Write a Clichéd, Unpersuasive Argument Against Drug Legalization.

So much familiar in his critique of Manon McKinnon’s particularly ignorant OpEd in The American Spectator: Drug Legalization Chic.

Guatemala president orders army to join drugs fight

One day after his inauguration, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina has ordered the army to join the fight against drug cartels.

Get ready to start reading death counts.

Sponsor Of Bill To Require Drug Testing For Welfare Recipients is Arrested For DUI

Yep. All we’re saying is that our hard-earned tax money shouldn’t be going to pay for some drugged-up legislator passing bad laws.

Meth Hype Could Undermine Good Medicine

Meth’s persistent bad boy reputation means that medical marijuana dispensaries will not be expanding their offerings to include speed any time soon. Still, the idea is not as totally outlandish as it might seem.

Cop or Soldier? – a fun quiz over at The Agitator that shows the challenge of telling those two apart.

Rocking in the drug-free world

Here’s a story about a “drug-free world” that actually doesn’t bother me at all, but in fact is inspirational. Rocker Sabrina Barajas has decided to go for a “straight edge” lifestyle in her own drug-free world along with those who choose to go the same way.

What makes this story different from the other drug-free world stories is that this is a choice for Barajas, not an attempt to force it onto others.

Barajas is a lyricist and drummer for the Oxnard punk band Facing the Fallen, and is the only member claiming to be straight edge, “Everyone has different opinions on how they choose to live their life, and I choose to live mine sober,” said Barajas, who meets a wide variety of musicians and fans as an intern at Camarillo’s Rock City Studios. […]

“Being straight edge is not a criteria that I have for friends. I have learned that a lot more people are straight edge than I thought, but I haven’t seen it growing into a larger movement. Just that it’s there is good enough for me.” 

Good for you. Live your own life and don’t let others tell you how you should live it. There will always be others who think as you do that will support your decision, as well as good friends who prefer another lifestyle who can broaden your perspective without threatening your being.

Gary Johnson at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government: It’s Time to End the War on Drugs

We own the internet – it doesn’t matter if it’s a conservative site or a liberal site, the commenters are almost always going to be predominantly in favor of legalizing marijuana (still a few opposed, though).

Iran executes people on drug charges; world gives Iran cash

For drug-related offences alone, it put 488 people to death in 2011, the Amnesty International reported last month. Iran denies violating human rights in this case, saying its chosen form of justice leads to less crime. […]

In recent years, Iran has received international assistance, including from several European countries and the United Nations, to help stem the drug flow across its borders.

That is the ultimate subtext of the prohibitionist. It’s sadomoralism. They talk about being concerned about all the people harmed by drugs, but they have absolutely no qualms at all about harming more people in the name of prohibition.

B.C. police reluctant to release deadly ecstasy pill markings

Police in B.C. are reluctant to tell the public what unique markings are on ecstasy pills suspected to contain a lethal additive linked to five deaths in the province .

That’s because they don’t want users thinking they’re sanctioning the rest of the pills.

A number of people have died taking pills that they thought were ecstasy, but were, in fact, a rare drug called PMMA. The police know how those pills were marked and could save lives, but won’t share the information.

Unconscionable.

In the latest Drug Enforcement Administration’s “Dateline DEA” email, they had the following item:

DID YOU KNOW?

In a milestone in U.S. – Colombian relations Carlos Lehder, who became known as a leader of “The Extraditables” arrived in the United States 25 years ago. A major cocaine trafficker, Lehder was indicted in 1981 on U.S. federal charges in Florida and a formal request for extradition was submitted to Colombia in 1983, and this was granted in 1987. Fanatical in his effort to prevent his extradition, he went as far as forming his own political party, with a key objective of preventing extraditions such as his own from Colombia to the United States. His extradition finally happened only after the murder of Colombia’s Justice Minister who was at the time prosecuting his case. Lehder was sentenced to 135 years in federal prison, and in the years since then about 1,350 other Colombians have been extradited to the United States.

This isn’t news, really, but that last number really hit me. 1,350 Colombians extradited. That’s 1,350 foreigners, most of whom never set foot on U.S. soil, and we’ve gone and had them brought here so we could try them at great expense, and then imprison them in our prisons for many years, also at great taxpayer expense (even with conservative numbers, that’s about $34 million per year just for prison for that many). And that’s just Colombia – it’s happened with other countries as well (think Marc Emery in Canada).

Why are we so worried about illegal immigrants? You know, the ones who come over here and work really hard jobs and pay taxes? The DEA is importing immigrants who provide no productive value at all to this country and cost us a ton!

What do we get for those dollars? Nothing.

Of course, the DEA gets work out of it, as do the federal prosecutors, and the prison industry. But we’re paying for it.

This fairly bizarre bit of propaganda has been unveiled in New Zealand: Drugged drivers next on safety hit list

In the war against drugged drivers an advertising campaign reveals the reactions of secretly filmed New Zealanders when they are told the driver of the car they are in is high on drugs.

The new road safety campaign hits television screens this weekend with the unscripted responses of people who thought they were being driven to a costume fitting for a commercial.

Instead they were being covertly filmed by the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) and their drivers were actors pretending to be under the influence of drugs.

I know actors who could scare the crap out of passengers by pretending to be Justin Bieber or an armadillo while driving. What does that mean?

It sounds like a good Candid Camera bit, but what does it really have to do with safety on the highways?

But I’m sure that, obviously with this big effort, New Zealand at least has strong scientific data showing that drugged driving is a serious problem. Right?

Right?

NZTA chief executive Geoff Dangerfield said less was known about the extent of drugged driving in New Zealand compared with research on drink-driving, but evidence suggested drugs could be a bigger factor in crashes than officially reported.

“We know that driving under the influence of drugs is common and widespread, yet our research shows that only one in 10 New Zealanders see it as a problem,” he said.

So they really don’t have much evidence, but they’re sure it must be true, and apparently somehow the fact that New Zealanders don’t see it as a problem means that it’s a problem. There’s logic and science for you.

Not that the U.S. has been any better.

Our National Drug Control Strategy includes these goals (in order)

• Encouraging states to adopt Per Se drug impairment laws
• Collecting further data on drugged driving

Yep. Pass the laws and then look for proof of the problem.

Sabet and Kerlikowse had absolutely no interest in science when they perverted NHTSA data to imply something it didn’t.

Now it’s possible that there may be some real science in the future to determine an actual level of THC that results in actual impairment. The best study I know of in that area is being conducted by Dr. Jeff Brubacher with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He describes it thusly:

…we analyze police reports to determine who should have been able to avoid the crash (culpable) and who had no chance of avoiding the crash (non-culpable). This is done using strict guidelines and without knowing the driver’s toxicology results. We then compare THC positive rates between culpable and non-culpable drivers. If the culpable drivers are more likely to be THC positive, then there is an association between THC and crash causation.

We are also looking at how the culpability rate varies with THC level. Heavy cannabis users have trivially elevated blood THC levels (< 2 ng/mL) for a week or more after last use. There isn’t any evidence that these low levels contribute to crashes. We will also be measuring THC metabolites (COOH-THC) – combined with THC. This can be used to roughly estimate the time from last use till time of crash.

Now that, to me, sounds like real science in determining if, and to what degree, cannabis impairment can be directly connected to safety.

Why isn’t the United States doing that instead of just measuring what’s in the blood of random drivers? Because they aren’t really interested in science or learning the truth. They just want ammunition.

On Tuesday, we reported on the large study that proved that marijuana use did not impair lung function. Ed Dunkle in comments said “I wonder how Kevin Sabet is going to spin this.”

Well, it didn’t take long.

Is Marijuana Good For You? by Kevin Sabet in The Fix.

He was clearly not happy, but basically, his response appears to be something along the lines of ‘Oh yeah? Well, it’s still probably not as good for you as breathing clean air.’ He even tried to double down on the tired old lung cancer bit:

(In case you’re wondering, the evidence linking marijuana and lung cancer are mixed, with a recent study stating that “cannabis smoking increases the risk of developing a lung cancer independently of an eventual associated tobacco exposure.” Other studies have failed to find such a link.)

The study Kevin refers to is neither recent nor much of a study. Dr. Donald Tashkin, clearly one of the leading scientists in this field (if not the top) dismissed it out of hand:
He notes that a much smaller, recent study from New Zealand did claim to find a link, but only in very heavy users. He says, “The authors’ interpretation of their data can be faulted because of the small numbers of their subjects exhibiting such heavy use, which rendered their estimates of risk imprecise.”

Such scientific impreciseness doesn’t seem to bother Kevin Sabet, who promotes the extremely flawed small lung cancer study from New Zealand, while merely mentioning that “other studies failed to find such a link” instead of admitting that the largest study in the world, conducted in the U.S. and funded by NIDA conclusively found no cancer link and a slight inverse link.

Kevin Sabet is clearly no friend to science or medicine.

However, he found his own expert:

Mark Gold, perhaps the most distinguished professor in the country on drugs and the brain and body, told me, “It is possible, but not proven, that cannabis smoke may be less toxic than cigarette smoke, but it is not better than clean air.

Ah, he got a distinguished professor to agree that clean air is good. Congratulations. And who is this Mark Gold, anyway? Where did Kevin find this expert?

Well, it turns out that Kevin has just gotten a job at University of Florida, and he tweets: “…Just appointed as Assistant Professor at their College of Medicine under the great Mark Gold. Staying in Cambridge, MA though.”

Ah.

Bonus: Check out the nonsense from Bob DuPont in Sabet’s article.

Update:

I tweeted:

@KevinSabet Why do you continue to promote the discredited NZ study on lung cancer and downplay the comprehensive U.S. study funded by NIDA?

Sabet tweets back:

@DrugWarRant I’m not promoting, I listed both sides and I’m sticking to the science. The jury is still out on it.

Really?

Let’s look at what he said again:

In case you’re wondering, the evidence linking marijuana and lung cancer are mixed, with a recent study stating that “cannabis smoking increases the risk of developing a lung cancer independently of an eventual associated tobacco exposure.” Other studies have failed to find such a link.

He includes a quote from the discredited New Zealand study, but lumps the Tashkin/NIDA study in “other studies have failed to find such a link.”

How is the jury still out? What jury? Kevin’s jury? Comparing those two disparate studies as if they were merely “both sides” isn’t science.

Update 2: As Howard says, remember that these arguments have no impact on legalization. Legalization arguments are about the damage of prohibition.

As I noted in the original post about the lung study, even if marijuana was extremely damaging to the lungs, that wouldn’t justify prohibition.

Have fun with this one from the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre

In a world-first, researchers from the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC), based at the University of New South Wales, are leading a study to determine whether the pharmaceutical drug Sativex can help people better manage cannabis withdrawal symptoms as a platform for ongoing abstinence. […]

“There is currently no targeted drug available to assist with cannabis withdrawal.” [said NCPIC director Professor Jan Copeland.]