Drug WarRant

The scare stories continue to pop up, like this one: Deadly collisions with ties to marijuana use have tripled, study shows (they originally had an even more offensively false headline: “Marijuana legalization leading to fatal car crashes, study shows,” but chose to tone it down to this merely inflammatory inference).

Check out some of the absurdities:

Lake County Sheriff Daniel Dunlap: “Law enforcement has worked very diligently to reduce the number of traffic deaths. There have been big gains made, now they’re adding another dimension to the problem with legalization. It makes you pause. We’re not supposed to eat too many Twinkies, have too many big colas, be in a room inhaling secondhand smoke, but we’re saying marijuana is OK.”

And that has what to do with traffic deaths?

Fortunately, the comments there have pretty much eviscerated the paper for printing this hogwash.

Lee Bowman with Scripps News sees the problem with per se laws, but seems to have a hard time understanding that there are alternatives. Many pot tests, but no certainty how much is too much

But with millions of Americans now legally able to use pot for either medical purposes or outright, there’s growing demand to know how much is too much to safely drive or perform on the job.

Scientists generally admit they don’t know the answer, in part because studies have been limited, but also because marijuana and the ways people use it have changed faster than the pace of research.

Paul Armentano (who is briefly quoted in that story) has an OpEd that gets it right: Extreme Zero Tolerance Anti-Pot Driving Laws are Unfair and Destructive

Efforts to better identify and prosecute impaired drivers are laudable, but the enactment of unscientific and inadvisable ‘per se’ legislation for THC — the primary psychoactive compound in marijuana — and its inert metabolites (byproducts) is not a scientific or advisable approach to addressing traffic safety. […]

The United States Department of Transportation Drug Expert Recognition Training materials similarly acknowledge: “Toxicology has some important limitations. One limitation is that, with the exception of alcohol, toxicology cannot produce ‘per se’ proof of drug impairment. That is, the chemist can’t analyze the blood or urine and come up with a number that ‘proves’ the person was or wasn’t impaired.” […]

As additional states consider amending their cannabis consumption laws, lawmakers would be advised to consider alternative legislative approaches to address concerns over DUI cannabis behavior that do not rely on solely on the presence of THC or its metabolites in blood or urine as determinants of guilt in a court of law.

As you may (or may not) know, the UNODC just had a major event in Vienna with over 1,300 delegates from 127 states, NGOs, and agencies to discuss where we are headed with international drug policy. Missed the coverage on the news? I’m not surprised.

Max Daly has an interesting report on the growing irrelevance of the UNODC: Most Importand UN Drugs Summit For Decades Was Depressing

Echoing the way the century-old drug war has been fought, many speakers just go through the motions, playing drug seizure bingo – relaying meaningless stats about how many tons of drugs they’ve confiscated with how many boats and planes. How drugs is a scourge, a menace, a plague. How we must tackle this head on, otherwise our children will become a generation of drug zombies. […]

So at the end of the meeting in Vienna, the jargon-filled, 45-point statement was nothing like a consensus, as the UN had claimed, but a list of vague pointlessnesses about how drugs are bad, traffickers should get caught and addicts should be helped so they don’t spread disease. There’s no mention of the huge changes in approach adopted in South America, the USA, New Zealand – or in European countries like Portugal and Czech Republic – and no condemnation of the death penalty for drug offences.

Business as usual, even after all that talking.

“It’s just a bland restatement of previous commitments, meaningless platitudes and delusional self-congratulation,” says Steve Rolles, Senior Policy Analyst at the UK-based Transform Drug Policy Foundation. “What we are looking at is the rather desperate last gasps of the War on Drugs as a global framework.”
 […]

In the real world, the global War on Drugs as a joint enterprise is unravelling fast. However, within the walls of the United Nations, everything is just fine.

It may be that there will be no international celebration of the end of the war on drugs with pomp and circumstance, but rather the war will get ignored to death over time as it becomes less and less relevant.

Harford County Office of Drug Control Policy, Partners Supply Funding for Field Trips to Anti-Drug Exhibit

The goal is to take to every seventh grader in the school district to the Maryland Science Center to view the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) exhibit Target America.

Nooooooooo!!!! Why can’t this exhibit die?

For those who haven’t been around that long, here’s my own website about the exhibit, and a report on my picketing of the exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry around 8 years ago and their attempts to stop me.

From the Greeks to Shakespeare, one of the most heinous things in literature is taking a newborn baby from its mother.

I am not a parent, not a mother, yet it is obvious to me that such an act is one of the worst possible things you can do to either the infant or mom.

As Radley Balko reports, in one such case of removal for 75 of the first 78 days of the child’s life due to nothing more than a positive drug test from a poppy seed salad, the price was set at $160,000 in a court settlement.

But even if these tests were 100 percent accurate, treating both patients for addiction seems like a far more humane policy than yanking a newborn from his mother’s arms — or sending the mother to prison.

Of course, if this were a Greek play, the child would grow up not knowing its background and end up ironically slaying Jameson Hospital and Lawrence County Children and Youth Services, resulting in poetic justice.

But we can’t count on such dramatic plot twists and instead must work to change policies. $160,000 will help to make other similar entities think twice.

WNYT: Activists call attention to ‘drugged driving’

The exhibit details deadly accidents caused by drugged driving — responsible for about 100 deaths a day in this country, explained the dean of the college, Dr. James Gozzo.

100 drugged driving deaths a day. That’s a lot.

According to the NHTSA, in 2011 there were a total of 32,367 people killed in all traffic accidents, including drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and cyclists.

That comes to about 88 deaths a day.

Somehow the math doesn’t quite work.

I wrote to ask Dr. Gozzo about it, but got no reply.

And you certainly can’t expect WNYT to look up facts. Their job is to merely report what people tell them, not what’s true.

Update: I received the following response:

Pete,

Hi. My name is Gil Chorbajian, and I am the Director of Communications at Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.

Dr. Gozzo forwarded me your note as I was the one who compiled the statistics for his remarks. The information he shared was that, according to the CDC, approximately 100 people die each day from a drug overdose.

This statistic was cited to shed light on the broader problem of drug abuse, but it appears to have been mistakenly attributed in this instance to drugged driving related deaths.

/ gil

Given some incoherence in the WNYT piece, I’m willing to believe this explanation, as it makes sense in context, and put the blame squarely on inexcusably shoddy reporting at WNYT.

A lot of sources (in fact, from a quick search of Google, just about all of them) have been reporting a new ABC/Wall Street Journal poll and have been saying things like “Americans rank marijuana less dangerous than sugar.”

Yes, it’s probably true, and Americans may believe that, but that’s not really what the poll showed.

Here are the question and results from the survey of 1000 adults:

Q25 Which of the following substances would you say is the MOST harmful to a person’s overall health (RANDOMIZE) (IF ALL, THEN ASK:) Now, if you had to choose just one, which substance would you say is the MOST harmful?

Tobacco...................................... 49
Alcohol ..................................... 24
Sugar........................................ 15
Marijuana..................................... 8

   All (VOL) ................................. 3
   None are harmful (VOL) .................... -
   Not sure................................... 1

The poll specifically asked people what one substance was the most harmful of these four specific substances. It did not ask people to rank them. So the actual correct point that we get from this survey is that more Americans think that sugar is the most harmful of these four substances than those who think marijuana is the most harmful of these substances (which, of course, makes for a lousy headline).

Theoretically (though unlikely), most could think that marijuana was the second-most harmful substance (and just very few think that it was the most harmful) and these results could still be true.

I don’t like it when the other side misuses data. I don’t want to be part of the misuse of data on this side.

Maybe we can ask them to actually rank them next time.

I saw a play in New York where two of the characters had Harriman Leavey Syndrome – a fictional illness where they would tend to make statements that were completely absurd, like some kind of long-form Tourettes. It made much of the play disjointed and nonsensical.

That’s how I felt reading this transcript of an O’Reilly show:

Consequences of marijuana legalization

With the clear difference that the lines in The Realistic Joneses were actually witty.

Had a great week in New York, and the students had a fantastic time. Sorry for the lack of posts here. Some outstanding things I’ve learned by reading the comments here – you guys have been busy (although I did have to clean up a bit of a mess left around the couch).

A couple of things, in case you missed them…

I don’t usually get excited about petitions, but this seems like a fairly good one, put together by LEAP: Amend UN Treaties to End Drug Prohibition

We, the People of the World, petition the United Nations and the Signatory nations of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and two corollary UN drug prohibition treaties, to Amend the Treaties, ending the war on drugs and providing for a health-, harm-reduction and human rights- oriented convention much like that proposed by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. See http://www.tiny.cc/leap_treaty

The House of Representatives passed a bizarre and stupid bill that was clearly only a symbolic statement in opposition to the President: House Republicans Want to Sue the President For Not Arresting People For Marijuana. It’s not going anywhere, but it does show just how completely out of touch so many are in Washington.

University of Colorado stuck in the dark ages. Marijuana symposium features university health and public policy experts

The researchers quickly dismissed notions that marijuana was harmless, presenting studies showing links to cancer, lung disease, lower IQs and potential impacts on fetal health. […]

Bowles said marijuana smoke can induce precancerous changes in the respiratory mucosa of rats. He also cited a study of Swedish military conscripts, showing that those who smoked the highest quantities of marijuana had a 2.1 percent increase in lung cancer. […]

“Babies are full of fat so they are essentially storage chambers for marijuana,” said Borgelt.

Medical Cannabis in Washington survives a legislative scare.

Still keeping extremely busy in New York, trying to keep up with 16 college students, but having a good time. So far, we’ve seen “All the Way,” “Pippin,” “Sleep No More,” “Gentlemen’s Guide to Love and Murder,” and I’ve given walking tours of Midtown, Wall Street/World Trade/Battery Park, Chinatown, Little Italy, Central Park, High Line, Meatpacking District, Village, East Village, Soho, Chelsea, Roosevelt Island.

Check the previous thread for good discussions about Dr. Gupta’s new special that aired last night, as well as action to take regarding medical marijuana in Washington.

Random Drug Testing for All? The Chilling Proposal That Could Eradicate Your Privacy by Paul Armentano.

The practice of random drug testing has become popularized in both the workplace and in public schools. But according to a recently released paper by the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), the controversial practice is, at present, “underutilized” and ought to be expanded to include people of all ages in virtually all aspects of daily life.

The white paper, authored by former United States National Institute on Drug Abuse Director (and present-day drug testing consultant and profiteer) Robert Dupont (along with input from staffers at various drug testing labs and corporations) argues: “The major need today is the wider and smarter use of the currently available drug testing technologies and practices. … This White Paper encourages wider and ‘smarter’ use of drug testing within the practice of medicine and, beyond that, broadly within American society. Smarter drug testing means increased use of random testing rather than the more common scheduled testing, and it means testing not only urine but also other matrices such as blood, oral fluid (saliva), hair, nails, sweat and breath.”

Somebody apparently let Robert DuPont write something. Oh, and Andrea Barthwell helped.

Not getting the message… Governor LePage wants to ramp up the war on drugs

I’m in New York all this week. I’ve got 16 students with me for a week of walking tours and Broadway shows. It’s pretty much a non-stop schedule, so I won’t be able to post much. Not even sure I’ll have time to read much in the news, so let me know what’s going on that’s important in comments (you always do, anyway!)

I’ll say “Hi” to CJ if I run into him.