Drug WarRant

Louisiana committee OK’s doubling heroin mandatory minimums

“Make it severe. Make people understand, ‘You do heroin, you’re going to do time.'” — Louisiana Sheriff Association Executive Director Michael Ranatza

“I’ve got to support this bill and the reason I’ve got to support it is I think it’s a preventative measure.” — state Rep. Terry Landry, D-New Iberia

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

We haven’t hit on this for a while…

Policymic has an article: 14 Songs That Should Probably Be the Anthem for Marijuana Legalization

There are some good ones there, but I don’t know that I’d agree with all of them.

Noticeably missing is Fats Waller’s excellent rendition of “If You’re a Viper (the Reefer Song).” This recording was specifically a jab at Harry Anslinger, who had just announced a campaign to go after swing bands…

“Hey cats. It’s 4 o’clock in the morning… Here we are in Harlem. Everybody’s here but the police, and they’ll be here any minute. It’s high time, so catch this song. Here it tis…

I dreamed about a reefer, five feet long. A Mighty Mezz, but not too strong. You’ll be high, but not for long, if you’re a viper.”

The term “viper” came from the sound of pulling on a joint.

…

Also, while it doesn’t count as a song for a legalization anthem, it’s hard to talk about the awareness of marijuana in this country without mentioning Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi1sBwV1-tU

I’ve seen a lot of statements from the usual prohibition-types that goes something like: “Every country that has legalized marijuana has found it to be a disaster and reversed course.” Naturally, that’s absurd on its face since no country has fully legalized marijuana except Uruguay and that’s still being implemented.

But what they’re really trying to say is that the Netherlands has found that they don’t like “legalization” (decriminalization) and are trying to undo the policy.

Steve Rolles at Transform points out that it’s nonsense. Cannabis policy in the Netherlands: moving forwards, not backwards

Misunderstandings and misreporting of actual and proposed changes to Dutch cannabis policy in 2011 have led some opponents of cannabis reform to suggest the country is retreating from its longstanding and pragmatic policy of tolerating the possession, use and sale of cannabis.

This is not the case. In reality, most of the more regressive measures have either not been implemented, have been subsequently abandoned, or have had only marginal impacts. Additionally, there is growing public support for wider, progressive reform, including a system of legal cannabis regulation similar to that adopted in Uruguay, and efforts are underway by numerous municipalities to establish such models of production and supply.

The article goes on to spell out the details.

…

I wonder what it must be like to live your life in such a way that you desperately hope that a policy of liberty will lead to mass destruction, sky-falling, and regret.

A note to those who now seem anxious about large-scale commercial marijuana businesses…

The vast majority of advocates for legalization would have been happy with any legitimate legalization model that would allow responsible adults to purchase a choice of marijuana strains legally.

It could have been the coffee-shop model, or the state-run store model, or the non-profit model. We would have been happy with any of those.

Where were you then? We would have worked with you to create a different, legitimate model. If I recall right, you were saying that legalization wasn’t viable, or that we didn’t know enough to legalize, or that legalization was the wrong way to go, or that we just had to be patient.

And the thing is, even though we’re pissed at you for being an obstructionist instead of a positive force, we would still work with you if you wanted to try to push for a different kind of approach in another state (after all, there are 48 more options to show the value of other models).

If you’re serious about it, work on that instead of complaining ad nauseam about the unfettered capitalism on display in Washington and Colorado.

This is pretty big in terms of self-awareness…

Anti-Drug Group Concedes That Marijuana Legalization ‘Is Happening in America’

The CEO of Partnership at Drugfree.org, best known for its 1980s “Your brain on drugs” ads, conceded during an interview with Advertising Age published Monday that the legalization of recreational marijuana in the U.S. “is happening.” […]

He said the Partnership has shifted toward an educational approach on anti-marijuana advocacy, focusing on parents’ roles in preventing young children from accessing pot.

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.