Drug WarRant

The California Narcotics Officers Association sent this bizarre letter to President Obama, asking him to retract his statements comparing marijuana and alcohol.

They start out by establishing their bona fides – for most people that would be showing that they are experts in a particular field through their study or knowledge in some way… but not the CNOA…

It’s dangerous work, as evidenced by the fact that 90 of the names on the California Peace Officers’ Memorial Wall were members of CNOA. Included among those 90 men and women are two of our past CNOA Presidents.

That’s right, we should believe them on marijuana policy discussions because some of their members have died at some point.

But lets get to the heart of their concern:

The California Narcotic Officers’ Association takes strong issue with your comparison of marijuana and alcohol. […] we would suggest that you reevaluate your comparison of alcohol and marijuana, keeping in mind the words of the late South African President Nelson Mandela:

“We should never underestimate the dangers of the drug problem and the high price that it exacts from many countries, including our own. It is a serious threat not only to the moral and intellectual integrity of our nation and other nations. It is a serious threat to the health and well-being of our people.”

What? Talk about a non-sequitur. What do those words of Mandela have to do with the relative dangers of marijuana and alcohol?

They go on to list the standard reefer madness litany of claimed harms, without any mention of the harms of alcohol.

But then we learn that they don’t actually care what the truth is.

Your comments in THE NEW YORKER minimize the dangers of drug use, and by doing so, lessen the impression that drugs are harmful. […] I would never condone or make reference to any substance that could diminish my children’s future success as being “less harmful.”

It doesn’t matter what the facts are. You’re not allowed to say that one thing is less harmful than another, even if it is.

We’re seeing this kind of rhetoric used a lot more as the prohibitionists realize that truthful comparisons don’t work for them. (You also often see a refusal to compare the relative dangers of driving impaired by alcohol and marijuana.)

It makes me wonder if all such comparisons should be considered inappropriate….

– It’s wrong to say that slapping someone is less harmful than shooting them in the head
– It’s wrong to say that taxing people is less harmful than genocide
– It’s wrong to say that eating sugar is less harmful than eating drain cleaner

Life is about comparisons. We make them constantly in the process of everyday choices. Knowledge helps us make better choices (although we still sometimes make bad ones). Labeling a group of choices as “bad” and therefore not comparable is not good policy, does not make our children safer, and is anathema to a free society.

The California Narcotics Officers should be ashamed of their leadership.

I hadn’t updated the Drug War Victims page recently (not for lack of victims). But the story of Eugene Mallory hit me hard enough that I felt he needed to be added.

Our own Allan Erickson has an excellent post over at Cannabis Now Magazine: Blue Collar Cannabis Economics. In it, he also brings up the issue of drug war victims.

To know that there will not be another Peter McWilliams, or Patrick Dorismond or Kathryn Johnston or Donald Scott dying because of lies existing as laws. The value of that is inestimable. […]

One thing I do suggest is that when legalization really hits the states, en masse, victims funds be set up and money set aside to pursue prosecutions for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The UNODC has spent a lot of effort complaining about marijuana legalization in places like Uruguay, Colorado, and Washington, but focus should really be on the damage being caused by the UNODC.

UN urged to act on Vietnam over death penalty

HANOI, Vietnam — The United Nations should immediately freeze anti-drug assistance to Vietnam after the communist country sentenced 30 people to die for drug-related offenses, three human rights groups working to get countries to abolish the death penalty said Wednesday. […]

Last month, a court in northern Vietnam sentenced 30 people to death last month for heroin trafficking, the largest number of defendants sentenced to death in a single trial in the country’s court history. The trial of each defendant lasted around a day. There are nearly 700 people on the death row in Vietnam, many of them for drugs. […]

UNODC aid to Vietnam will exceed $5 million for technical assistance, equipment, training and other support for the 2012-2017 period, the letter said. Drug control is the largest component of the program.

And, of course, when you have 30 people sentenced to death in one heroin trafficking sweep, you can bet that a majority of those are low-level participants.

UNODC funding to such countries (along with their praise of anti-trafficking efforts) gives cover to horrendous human rights violations in the name of the drug war.

And this is not the only way in which the UNODC’s hands are bloody. The organization has fully admitted the simple truth that world-wide drug prohibition causes black market violence. And yet they refuse to consider alternatives and push for more of the same.

Our article on how the Drug Czar is required by law to lie has gotten a lot of play over the past few years, and it points out how incredibly inappropriate it is for Congress to have such a provision, that is not only anti-science, but also codifies the government has being antagonistic to its citizens.

It was pretty cool to see that issue come up in the ONDCP hearings last week, and now Representative Steve Cohen has proposed the entertainingly-named Unmuzzle the Drug Czar Act, which would remove that provision.

Now, that’s not going to magically make this ONDCP a better place — one that’s suddenly dedicated to the truth. It’ll still be a cesspool of mendacity. But it would be a good move by Congress to eliminate that offensive language, and maybe open the door to the possibility of a future ONDCP that could actually be about drug control policy (as in regulation) rather than prohibition propaganda promotion.

There was a time when you could pass ridiculously harsh laws and nobody would do anything about it as long as it was for “drugs.”

That seems to be changing.

Italy court strikes down drug law blamed for prison crowding

ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s constitutional court on Wednesday struck down a drug law that tripled sentences for selling, cultivating or possessing cannabis and which has been blamed for causing prison overcrowding.

The constitutional court said the law, which was passed in 2006 by Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative government, was “illegitimate”, without giving further details. Some estimates suggest 10,000 people may be released from jail as a result. […]

After the court’s ruling, the drug law previously in place will automatically take effect

Some of the revelations about the NSA and related programs that spy on American people have revealed that the DEA has used some of that likely illegal intelligence in their operations. The problem with that is that you eventually have to put someone on trial and, according to the Constitution, they’re entitled to know the evidence used against them and the DEA doesn’t want people to know the source of their “intelligence.”

So the DEA has used a system that should be offensive to our form of justice called Parallel Construction, where, after making the arrest, they construct another fake trail of evidence to use in trial.

Documents released through FOIA now reveal that the DEA has another secret method.

This Method is So Constitutional, the DEA Won’t Even Release Its Name

Training documents released to MuckRock user C.J. Ciaramella by the Drug Enforcement Administration provide unprecedented details on the tactic known as “parallel construction,” by which agents reverse engineer evidence to hide surveillance programs from defense teams, prosecutors and a public wary of domestic intelligence practices. But the DEA redacted all references to another, apparently more secretive method of concealing sensitive sources.

Per DEA slides, there are precisely four such methods that are both “workable” and acceptable to the American public. […]

But the first of these certified, “acceptable” methods is redacted entirely.

To reiterate, the DEA redacted the name of a method its trainers and legal auditors deemed not only constitutional but also palatable to the public.

As its position on the list suggests, this shielded tactic is “tips and leads paradigm” that is the “primary methodology for protecting [intelligence community] information that is shared with [law enforcement agencies].”

Slopestylers are, without a doubt, the ultimate stoners of the Winter Olympics. And I’m not even saying that they use cannabis. They just have this awesome and relaxed joie de vivre.

I thought I’d share with you a post I made for my Facebook friends who generally aren’t as well-informed about drug policy as readers here. There had been so many posts regarding the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman that I felt it was important for them to hear a different perspective about heroin policy.

…

Free heroin.  I’ve spent over a decade studying and writing about drug policy. My friends know this and sometimes one will come up to me and say “I know you think we should legalize and regulate drugs, and I’m with you when it comes to marijuana. But what would you do with a truly evil drug like heroin?”  And I respond, “I’d have the government give it away for free.”

Yes, that does tend to elicit a shocked reaction, but let’s take a moment to look at our experience with drug policy.

The “just say no” and “drugs are bad, mkay?” approaches to drug policy (espoused by well-meaning, but clueless, outsiders) have little chance of affecting those most likely to become heroin addicts. And close to a century of experience with prohibition laws has proven conclusively that we cannot stop people from getting and using heroin (even in countries where drug trafficking gets the death penalty), plus prohibition itself adds additional harms in terms of uncertain dosage, contamination, criminal involvement, stigma, etc.

Yes, we can do some significant prevention by educating people with real facts about drugs and their effects, but we also need to understand reality. For example, consider that we could completely eliminate sexually transmitted diseases if we could just convince people not to have sex. That’s a fact. It’s also an impossible fantasy. Eliminating heroin use through prohibition laws and societal disapproval is also an impossible fantasy.

Once we accept that there will be a small percentage of the population who use (and perhaps abuse) heroin, the real question is what we can do to reduce the harm.  In the U.S., we tend to focus on abstinence-based treatment programs (cold turkey quitting), often under stressful conditions (connected to arrest, job loss, etc.).

While it works effectively for some people, that approach has two problems.  First, those who have tried to quite smoking know that the worst/hardest time to do it is when they are in a stressful life situation. Yet, heroin addicts are told to quit cold turkey when they’ve reached rock bottom (loss of job, family/children, career, freedom, etc.).  This makes relapse more likely.

Second — and way too many people don’t know this:  you are much more likely to die from a heroin overdose after abstaining for a period of time. That’s right, when you quit cold turkey, if you then relapse, your chances of dying increase. Treatment, bizarrely, often leads to heroin overdose deaths.

How is this possible?  In a nutshell, it has to do with tolerance.  When you start using heroin, your body develops tolerance — you need more to reach a target level of euphoria, but your body adjusts and can handle more. When you quit, your body’s tolerance goes back down, so if you re-start, the same heroin you could tolerate before will now stop your breathing. Studies have indicated that the majority of heroin overdose deaths occur after quitting for a time. That’s probably why you often hear in famous overdose cases that they had recently been in treatment. As an additional complication, those who relapse tend to do so in solitude (stigma/shame) and thus cannot be helped by the simple application of Naloxone, which, while painful, can reverse pretty much any heroin overdose without causing damage.

Despite all this, we rarely discuss whether our approach to heroin use (prohibition and cold-turkey treatment) is the only, or best, approach. There is a better option.  (You were beginning to wonder when I was going to get around to talking about the government giving heroin away for free… here we go.)

I call it Heroin-Assisted Treatment (or HAT). The idea is that anyone using heroin could come to a government-run clinic and get a safe, controlled dose of heroin for free. The clinic would have medical staff and counselors to help people get their lives/jobs/families back into shape, if necessary, so they can maintain their habit without heroin disrupting their lives (and with controlled dosage, it’s possible to do pretty much anything as an addict that a non-addict can do). Once they’ve got their lives in order, they can work at reducing or completely quitting when ready.

I realize that it’s counter-intuitive and sounds completely bonkers. Free heroin? Ridiculous.

But this isn’t my idea. It’s actually been done. And we have clear evidence it works. While each program has had different details, there have been successful HAT programs in Canada, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK, going all the way back to 1994 in Switzerland. And every study done of these programs have shown that they work. Massive reductions in crime, improved physical and mental health, excellent cost benefit to society, and greater longevity for those in the programs.  And here’s the kicker — the existence of such programs takes away the profit potential for criminal heroin dealers, which actually can result in fewer people being exposed to heroin use.

So why don’t we have HAT here? (And why has HAT been under political attack in every country where it is successful?)  Because many people don’t like it. Despite the facts, it is politically unpopular to “provide heroin to addicts” because it sounds like we’re encouraging drug use.

 It’s the same political calculation that promotes abstinence-only sex education under the sadomoralistic belief that it’s better for children to die of sexually transmitted diseases than give them a condom (which might encourage them to have sex).

We can continue a century of provably failed prohibition approaches and continue to watch people die, or consider alternative drug policies that have been proven successes. The question is whether we are willing to learn, and whether we care more about good policy than superficial appearances.

There’s absolutely no doubt that illicit drug production threatens the environment in a number of ways. Prohibitionists, over the years, have tried to dishonestly coopt this basic truth as being an argument against drugs, as opposed to an argument against drug prohibition.

Things are changing and now those who care about conservation are realizing that they need to care about drug policy.

Narco-Deforestation: Linking Drug Policy and Forest Conservation

A new article published in the journal Science, co-authored by United Nations University researcher Dr. David Wrathall, provides compelling evidence that flows of drugs through the Americas are directly related to deforestation rates in North America’s most biodiverse and biosensitive region. The article, “Drug Policy as Conservation Policy: Narco-Deforestation” is the result of collaboration between researchers at the UNU Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) and four US universities: The Ohio State University, Northern Arizona University, the University of Denver and the University of Idaho. […]

The fact that drug crop eradication policies can push growers further into sensitive ecosystems is well documented. But the article references a parallel (but less-investigated) effect from drug trafficking interdiction programmes, which are deflecting drug traffickers, and their ecological impact, to new forest areas — a reminder to the international conservation community that “drug policy is conservation policy” and that continued protection of these ecosystems depends on an alternative policy approach to drug flows. […]

The article concludes that while “drug policy innovations alone will never end deforestation in Central America … rethinking the war on drugs could yield important ecological benefits”.

Drug warriors have a lot of explaining to do. It’s getting harder and harder for them to do their thing unchallenged. And the challenges are coming from a variety of interests.

One of the things that has constantly annoyed me is the heavy use of the perfect solution fallacy (which is also a straw man) by prohibitionists and their apologists. You’re always hearing them say things like “legalization of marijuana won’t destroy the cartels” with the implication being that there is no benefit since the actual current criminals in those positions will likely still exist and still be evil.

Yes, we know that it’ll take more than marijuana to significantly dismantle the operations (and we hope to get there with regulated legalization of all drugs), but in the meantime, every bit of income we deny the drug trafficking organizations means they have a tougher time recruiting new members, bribing government officials, and having the economic power to do their will upon a variety of things (including the environment) unchecked.

This hilarious graphic was tweeted by Drug Free America. They haven’t provided any sources (even when asked), but hey – it has the word “FACT” on it so it must be true.