Drug WarRant

I’ve just spent most of the past week as one of the judges of the Blue Whiskey Independent Film Festival in Palatine, Illinois. Awards were announced this afternoon and will probably be posted online soon. It was quite an amazing festival with incredible films in a wide variety of categories. It makes me feel good about the future of independent film.

Keith Humphreys manages to define two mostly fictional opposing straw camps in a rather bizarre, though creative way and then give us the low-down on what legalization will look like:

This will be tough for baby boomers to hear, but the current generation of Americans doesn’t know Woodstock from chicken stock and understands the Viet Nam War about as much as they do military action in the Crimea. If the U.S. legalized marijuana today, those now fading cultural meanings would not rule the day, capitalism would. Cannabis would seen as a product to be marketed and sold just as is tobacco. People in the marijuana industry would wear suits, work in offices, donate to the Club for Growth and work with the tobacco industry to lobby against clean air restrictions. The plant would be grown on big corporate farms, perhaps supported with unneeded federal subsidies and occasionally marred by scandals regarding exploitation of undocumented immigrant farm workers. The liberal grandchildren of legalization advocates will grumble about the soulless marijuana corporations and the conservative grandchildren of anti-legalization activists will play golf at the country club with marijuana inc. executives, toast George Soros at the 19th hole afterwards and discuss how they can get the damn liberals in Congress to stop blocking capital gains tax cuts.

Wow. That’s certainly a passionate future view.

I think that the reality would be much more along the lines of Eli’s comment on that post (and others):

Big Pot? Really? If anything it would seem more like microbreweries – and many of those potential customers simply existing outside of the market because of the relative ease of growing your own, and the fact that such smaller quanties will ever be required by the average user. I think there might be a scenario in which regulation and health care might create a sort of small pharma marijuana industry. But even there, it would be less Pfizer and more fish-oil-type supplement.

I agree that alcohol is much more likely the model of cannabis legalization than cigarettes, with both the budweiser version as well as the fine wines and single-malt scotches. If you’re looking at tobacco as the model, it would be more likely the cigar/pipe model than the cigarette model.

Marijuana is consumed much more like alcohol or fine tobaccos than like cigarettes. People will want different strains for different moods (just as I like The Balvenie when I’m at home relaxing, but prefer Lagavulin 16 when I’m out with friends).

Oh, and most legalization advocates are not against people making money from the sale of marijuana. We just want it to be legal money, not criminal profits.

Speaking of cannabis and tobacco, the UCIA News Blog reports on Tokepure – a campaign whose time has come

A campaign to get cannabis users to stop smoking tobacco is the biggest and simplest harm reduction campaign the government could and should be running. This is an issue that affects millions of mostly young people. In all honesty, tobacco use is by far and away the biggest danger to health cannabis users face, strange then that the government has never done anything to address the issue. The cannabis law reform campaign CLEAR in association with UKCIA is about to put that right.

I have always been a bit baffled by the tendency for people in the UK to smoke their cannabis mixed with tobacco. It’s never made much sense to me, and it certainly doesn’t make sense from a health perspective.

Of course, governments are never willing to suggest to people how to do a criminalized activity more safely — they’d much rather prop up their failed wars than save their own citizens’ lives.

Best of luck to the Tokepure movement.

“Can’t sugarcoat this,” said Judge Robert Richter. “To take somebody and threaten their life in that fashion. . . Smoking marijuana doesn’t make you do that. Somebody in college studying criminal justice should know.”

This was from an article about a former college student who mugged Kal Penn at gunpoint and tried to explain his actions due to struggling with drug use.

I never have any sympathy for people who try to excuse their violent crimes because of their drug use. No, it is the individual who is responsible, not the drug.

Even though the Twinkie Defense is really a myth, the very concept quite appropriately mocks the notion that a substance can be held responsible for violent crimes.

Drug Czar Kerlikowske has rather famously pronounced on numerous times that he ended the war on drugs (basically by disavowing the term). This is part of his effort to pretend that the current administration is more focused on treatment and prevention than the proven failures of supply-side drug control policy.

Yet the budget has shown that this is all misdirection. Sure, there have been a few extra dollars thrown into treatment, and the drug czar makes an effort to travel around the country visiting treatment centers, but the truth is that we’re still fully funding and supporting the enormous drug war that the U.S. has been fighting for ages.

Now the drug czar has announced the appointment of Marilyn Quagliotti as Deputy Director of Supply Reduction. Check out the qualifications that he brags about for someone joining an agency that is supposedly no longer fighting a war…

…previously served 32 years in the United States Army, rising to the rank of Major General. She was the first woman to attain the rank of General Officer in the Signal Corps and first woman to command a battalion in a combat division. As an Army officer, she served multiple tours throughout the continental United States, South Korea, Germany and Panama. In Panama, she was the Brigade Commander, in command of a unit supporting interdiction efforts to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. Deputy Director Quagliotti holds a M.S degree from the National War College in National Security Strategy…

Nope. No wars here.

A disturbing piece at Al Jazeera about the proliferation of drug mules in the Philippines as the trend is for poor women to be drawn into working as drug mules (sometimes without even knowing what they’re carrying), and ending up on death row in China.

And more are getting caught. Over 690 Filipinos are currently sitting in jails around the world on drug offences, 227 in China alone. Of these, data shows there are 85 currently facing death row from drug-related crimes, and more and more of them are women.

Authorities say international drug syndicates have been specifically targeting Filipino women to traffic drugs, with dramatic increases in the numbers of convicted female drug mules in the last few years.

The women are paid between $500 and $5,000 to swallow tubes containing the drugs, carry them hidden in their luggage or even dissolved and soaked into paper or books.

Labour rights groups say these women are victims of poverty. One in four Filipinos lives on less than $1 a day and one-tenth of the population work abroad to send money home to support their families.

So a poor Filipino woman, desperate to provide for her family, agrees to carrying something and is caught. She gets executed.

How does her death help the world?

It certainly doesn’t affect the traffickers. And there are always more Filipino women for them to target.

The lengthy video investigative report is really a very powerful indictment of the drug war (although unfortunately the reporter’s interview with the Vice President at the end of the piece is very badly done).

Via Radley Balko:

Mom sues Lawrence County over seizure of newborn

For the second time in a year, Lawrence County Children and Youth Services has been accused in a federal lawsuit of removing a child from a mother’s custody after a positive test for opiates allegedly triggered by poppy seeds.

Eileen Ann Bower, a Lawrence County resident whose residence and age were not provided, gave birth to a son, Brandon, on July 13, 2009, according to a complaint filed late Friday. She was stunned, it said, when a blood test at Jameson Hospital came back positive for opiates.

Brandon was taken into foster care three days after his birth, it said, and only returned on Sept. 29.

That’s the first two months of mother and son bonding completely destroyed over poppy seeds.

Where’s the call in state legislatures for Brandon’s law? Can’t they whip together a law in outrage over this? Make it a felony to take away a child without proof of harm? Where are all the Nancy Grace bloodsucking wanna-be’s over this story?

Ms. Bower is suing the county agency, its caseworker and Jameson Health System for negligence, invasion of privacy and violation of due process, according to the complaint by attorney Stanley T. Booker.

Good for her. The state should be prosecuting the county agency for kidnapping and child abuse.

Iran leads the world in drug seizures

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Executive Director Yury Fedotov has said Iran ranks first in the world in illicit drug seizures, Mehr news agency reported.

Iran seizes 80 percent of the opium and 40 percent of the heroin and morphine seized in the world, Fedotov told Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar during a meeting in Tehran on Monday.

“Iran is our important partner in the war on drugs,” he said, adding, it is a “good and reliable” partner for the international community as well.

Wow. I thought we seized a lot. But apparently, Iran seizes even more? With all that seizing, where does that leave us?

Apparently, UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov missed out on an important economic lesson that those of us who enjoyed Doritos in the early 90’s learned very well.

It just doesn’t matter how much you seize. They can always make more. And it just makes it that much more valuable.

Every now and then, it can be amusing to check referral logs.

Today, someone using the U.S. House of Representatives Information System googled “drugged driving death statistics in california.”

It took them to this page.

I’m guessing it may not have been what they were seeking.

More and more, the attempt by the U.S. government to hide and obfuscate the truth about marijuana and the drug war just isn’t working.

Not that many years ago, this kind of editorial in an American newspaper would be unthinkable.

Colorado Springs Gazette: OUR VIEW: Government tells a big fat lie

Once again, government servants have told Americans that marijuana ranks right up there with heroin. The Drug Enforcement Agency ruled on July 8 that marijuana has “no accepted medical use” and will continue as a schedule 1 drug — the most forbidden category.

The DEA is a law enforcement bureaucracy. The medical opinions of law enforcement bureaucrats should be of little interest. We do not ask cops to make laws; we pay cops to enforce the laws established by constitutions or enacted by the people or the decisions of their representatives. […]

Nothing in the Constitution grants the federal government, let alone a lone bureaucracy such as the DEA, to regulate drugs. […]

This is the type of insanity that led President Ronald Reagan to say: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” […]

It seems clear that DEA officials want to demonize marijuana because it guarantees the DEA’s ongoing funding and growth. This ruling does nothing to harm the reputation of medical marijuana, and everything to diminish the reputation of the DEA. We must demand that government employees stop lying to the Americans they are paid to serve with integrity and truth.

The Gazette still has a rather backward view of recreational marijuana, but a very healthy suspicion of the veracity of our government drug warriors.

Add this data point to the Cole memo, the DEA re-scheduling rejection notice, and the ONDCP diatribe in the National Drug Control Strategy…

Feds Propose Clean-Up Language To Drug Regulations

July 11, 2011—The FMCSA [Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration] is proposing new language that will clean up several misconceptions that a driver using a Schedule I controlled substance under a doctors care is allowed to operate a commercial motor vehicle (CMV).

The FMCSA has always considered Sections 382.213, 391.41(b)(12), 391.43(f), and 392.4 to prohibit any and all use of Schedule I drugs by CMV drivers. In fact, Federal law prohibits Schedule I drugs from being prescribed in the United States (75 FR 16237, March 31, 2010). Schedule I drugs have a high potential for abuse and no medically accepted therapeutic use. Currently, Federal law only allows for their use in research, chemical analysis, or manufacture of other drugs.

Unfortunately, some MROs [Medical Review Officers] have misinterpreted FMCSA’s regulations and have permitted drivers to use Schedule I drugs while under the care of a physician and drive a CMV. This action puts the FMCSRs in direct conflict with DOT’s comprehensive drug testing program under 49 CFR, Part 40, which does not permit drivers to use Schedule I drugs. The FMCSA does not believe this is a reasonable interpretation of the regulations.

To avoid any confusion, this rulemaking would harmonize Sections 382.213, 391.41(b)(12), 391.43(f), and 392.4 with DOT-wide regulations and DEA regulations, and make it clear that drivers may not use Schedule I drugs under any circumstances.

It’s really pretty silly how they so carefully avoid even mentioning medical marijuana though that is clearly what they’re addressing (perhaps to fly below the radar?), and how they sidestep the fact that it has nothing to do with impairment or when you’ve used the drug.

They just want to make it flat out prohibited by federal law for any commercial motor vehicle to be driven by someone who uses medical marijuana at all, regardless of state law.

One more piece of the federal war on marijuana.

Talking about ending the drug war.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRl1NxtpOkg

Didn’t get all his facts exactly right, but close enough, and definitely making good points.

Oh, and kudos to whoever got him the suit and haircut.