Drug WarRant

Nick Gillespie has an absolutely scathing OpEd in Time: Obama’s Unfathomable, Bottomless, Contemptible Cowardice on Pot

What does it say about our elected representatives when even a president who grants that marijuana is no “more dangerous than alcohol,” jokes about his past drug use, and faces no more elections in his lifetime is terrified to go along with a massive and still-growing majority of Americans?

That we can’t look to them for anything resembling leadership. The campaign to legalize marijuana — and thus expand personal freedom while minimizing the massive harms that attend to prohibition regardless of the substance being banned — is decades old and has always had to fight first and foremost against establishment politicians and media outlets. […]

Citizens, it turns out, are more than ready to step and demand change when our leaders are too feckless to lead.

Nick well expresses some of the frustration so many of us have felt with our political classes.

Attorney General Eric Holder: Feds to let banks handle pot money at Politico

The Obama administration will soon announce regulations that allow banks to do business with legal marijuana sellers, Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday.

“You don’t want just huge amounts of cash in these places. They want to be able to use the banking system,” Holder said during an appearance at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “There’s a public safety component to this. Huge amounts of cash—substantial amounts of cash just kind of lying around with no place for it to be appropriately deposited is something that would worry me, just from a law enforcement perspective.”

This is extremely important, not only for the safety of cannabis businesses and the convenience of cannabis consumers, but it also means that the banking industry will now benefit from legalization. And that’s good for the future of legalization.

Update: The Politico article has been updated:

While Holder spoke twice of new “regulations” that were being prepared, a Justice Department spokesman said later that the attorney general was referring to legal “guidance” for prosecutors and federal law enforcement. Such a legal memo wouldn’t be enforceable in court and would amount to less than the kind of clear safe harbor many banks say they would want before accepting money from pot businesses.

Jacob Sullum nails it: Chris Christie Will End The War On Drugs – Just Like Obama Did

It turns out that Christie, who first called the war on a drugs a “failure” in 2012 (eight years after Barack Obama did), has something similar in mind. He does not want to stop responding to drug use with violence; he just wants to make “drug treatment” more “available,” which entails forcing nonviolent drug offenders into treatment by threatening to lock them in cages. Sadly, that does count as an improvement. Most people arrested on drug charges no doubt would prefer treatment to jail. But what is the moral justification for compelling that choice? If the state does not take that approach with alcoholics (except when they have broken the law in ways that endanger or harm others), why should it treat users of arbitrarily proscribed drugs this way?

We have certainly succeeded in getting the public to realize that the drug war is something they don’t want. So now we’re in the ‘putting lipstick on a pig’ phase.

Of course, the two big stories in the news right now are the Superbowl and the President’s comments on marijuana.

Go to Google News and type in Obama and marijuana and you’ll get a ton of articles. Great opportunities for commenting.

Couple of things to watch out for.

1: Kevin and the SAM crowd is misrepresenting the President’s remarks.

As the President noted, the case for marijuana legalization is overstated…

Wrong. What the President said was:

“Having said all that, those who argue that legalizing marijuana is a panacea and it solves all these social problems I think are probably overstating the case.” [emphasis added]

Of course, the reality is that legalizers aren’t claiming panacea and even then, the President would only say that it would “probably” be overstating it.

2. The SAM club is also promoting the President’s “slippery slope” discussion. “Slippery slope is what the article’s author said, not the President, who rather referred to it as a “line-drawing” issue, which, of course, everything is. This is not a negative about legalizing marijuana, but rather the opening of a door to discussing where lines should be drawn.

Here’s the section on marijuana, alcohol, and other drugs in the extensive New Yorker interview by David Remnick with President Obama:

When I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion—the legalization of marijuana—he seemed even less eager to evolve with any dispatch and get in front of the issue. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Is it less dangerous? I asked.

Obama leaned back and let a moment go by. That’s one of his moves. When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in the middle of a sentence and say, “Scratch that,” or, “I think the grammar was all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again.”

Less dangerous, he said, “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer. It’s not something I encourage, and I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.” What clearly does trouble him is the radically disproportionate arrests and incarcerations for marijuana among minorities. “Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do,” he said. “And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.” But, he said, “we should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing.”

Accordingly, he said of the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington that “it’s important for it to go forward because it’s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished.”

As is his habit, he nimbly argued the other side. “Having said all that, those who argue that legalizing marijuana is a panacea and it solves all these social problems I think are probably overstating the case. There is a lot of hair on that policy. And the experiment that’s going to be taking place in Colorado and Washington is going to be, I think, a challenge.”

He noted the slippery-slope arguments that might arise. “I also think that, when it comes to harder drugs, the harm done to the user is profound and the social costs are profound. And you do start getting into some difficult line-drawing issues. If marijuana is fully legalized and at some point folks say, Well, we can come up with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show is not any more harmful than vodka, are we open to that? If somebody says, We’ve got a finely calibrated dose of meth, it isn’t going to kill you or rot your teeth, are we O.K. with that?”

Although the President has been extremely disappointing in terms of his actual actions in reforming drug policy, this is a really incredible message for a sitting President to be making (again showing how far we’ve come). Publicly admitting that marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol? Obviously true, but not something we expect to hear from the administration.

And while it was presented in the context of ‘slippery slope,’ we actually just heard the President of the United States say that there might be a legitimate argument some day for legal, regulated cocaine or meth.

One of the things we have slammed Kevin Sabet and S.A.M. for repeatedly is claiming to have a policy when they won’t even address the largest part of it – what to do with all those marijuana users who don’t need treatment if you’re not going to legalize it.

Recently, Kevin has said that he thinks recreational users should be fined rather than arrested, and finally, Kevin was forced to answer the bigger question by Oregon Senate Judiciary Chairman Floyd Prozanski.

Prozanski also pressed Sabet on where recreational users of marijuana would get the drug. Sabet has said occasional consumers should not be arrested and prosecuted.

“They should be able to do that but they have to go to the black market?” the senator asked.

“Yes,” said Sabet, who called marijuana prohibition and legalization bad policies.

“The cons of legalization are more than the cons of prohibition,” he said. “That is the con of prohibition: that you have to go to the underground market.”

Go to the underground market? That sounds so chic. “Put on your scarf, dear, we’re off to the underground market. They have truffles.”

And… that is “the con” of prohibition? That’s like saying “that is the con of murder; that you die.” That’s a pretty big con.

Having to deal with the black market means a host of destructive things to society, from the large violent criminal organizations that literally get away with murder to the non-violent low-level dealers who get swept up with outrageous sentences, to the corruption of law enforcement, to over-incarceration, to an unwieldy and broken justice system, to destroyed families and communities, to dysfunctional foreign policy, to wasted federal, state and local dollars, to unregulated and potentially unsafe product, to gateway effects, and a lot more.

The idea that this should be less of a concern to us than some unsupported believe that huge numbers of people will suddenly go wild with smoking the evil weed and be unable to care for themselves… ridiculous.

This New York Times article from 1997 (thanks, Erowid), is a hoot.

Seductive Drug Culture Flourishes on the Internet

Even as parents, teachers and government officials urge adolescents to say no to drugs, the Internet is burgeoning as an alluring bazaar where anyone with a computer can find out how to get high on LSD, eavesdrop on what it is like to snort heroin or cocaine, check the going price for marijuana or copy the chemical formula for methamphetamine, the stimulant better known as speed.

Teen-agers need only retreat to their rooms, boot up the computer and click on a cartoon bumblebee named Buzzy to be whisked on line, through a graphic called Bong Canyon, to a mail-order house in Los Angeles that promises the scoop on ”legal highs,” ”growing hallucinogens,” ”cannabis alchemy,” ”cooking with cannabis” and other ”trippy, phat, groovy things.” […]

”We’re really losing the war on the Internet,” said Kellie Foster, a spokeswoman for the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, which hopes to establish its own Web site next month. ”We’ve got to get out there, and we’re not.” […]

”I’d have to agree that the status quo folks are pretty much being hammered,” said Mark Greer, a director of the Media Awareness Project, which uses the Internet to lobby for the weakening or repeal of drug laws. ”They don’t seem to even be trying to compete with us on the Web.” […]

A Vast Warehouse Of Misinformation […]

The Internet also abounds in casual advice like the ”suggestions for first-time users” of ”ecstasy,” a hallucinogenic stimulant that has been found to damage the brains of monkeys in research at Johns Hopkins University.
[there’s some irony for you]

Drug policy reformers always owned the internet. Shut out of government and shut out of traditional media outlets, reformers turned to the internet as the fertile ground for reform to take root and flourish.

There are parts of this country that would never even have seriously discussed legalization, but that’s changing…

Politicians may soon have to take marijuana legalization seriously – Kansas City Star

In our area, the chances of overturning marijuana laws by legislative action seem remote, for now. It’s a tough vote for a politician in an election year.

But change is coming, just the same. Like the dispute over same sex marriage, the public’s attitudes about legal pot appear to be outpacing the views of the legislators they elect.

“We’ve had 80-plus years of failed policy, billions of dollars wasted and untold numbers of lives ruined in the name of controlling a substance that is no more harmful (and probably less so) than alcohol,” one emailer wrote this week. “The Colorado approach is a sane, sustainable policy option.”

State lawmakers will be getting more letters like that, from clear-eyed voters.

I almost missed him. Almost.

Our old nemesis John Walters shows up in this series in the New York Times. Room for Debate: Should Drug Enforcement be Left to the States

He starts out in classic style:

Government of the people, by the people and for the people cannot be indifferent to growing addiction and self-destruction. Where addiction and self-destruction exist, democracy and freedom do not. The Obama administration behaves as if this obvious truth were trivial.

If it is not already, marijuana and other drug use and abuse will soon be one of the fastest-growing health threats in America. The forces are known and predictable.

Federal drug laws and national leadership on this matter arose because anything less was dangerously inadequate.
For decades we have seen that drug use and the disease of addiction are not victimless fun.

The whole thing is a work of beauty by this evil mastermind. The way he invokes government of/by/for the people as a reason to oppress them is breathtaking.

The other articles in the debate are much better (as in grounded in the real world as opposed to Walters’ fantasy world) including good pieces by Glenn E Martin, Kabrina Krebel Chang, Vanita Gupta, and Alex Kreit. Beau Kilmer goes off on the now tired screed that people are just too weak to withstand the power of commercial advertising and must be protected from consumerism.

He’s back, part 2. Speaking of the return of old nemeses, Scott Burns (former assistant director of the ONDCP under Walters) popped up in an article I was reading on NPR: How Long It Too Long? Congress Revisits Mandatory Sentences

The article talks about how, as a nation, we’re finally seeing the destruction of decades of extraordinarily long sentences, particularly for drug crimes, with bipartisan support for reform. But not everyone agrees:

“The real power and efficacy of federal minimum mandatory sentences is our ability to hold them over certain peoples’ heads in solving kingpin drug cases, or major murders,” says Scott Burns, head of the National District Attorneys Association.

What a self-indictment of our justice system!

The always excellent Maia Szalavitz has another great article at The Fix: Don’t Believe the (Marijuana) Hype – What most people think they know about marijuana—especially media columnists—is just years of unscientific, paranoid, and even racist government propaganda.

But why are we so gullible in this area, when reporters are supposed to be skeptical? One reason has got to be the fact that over the last 40 years, the government has spent billions of dollars on advertising and even planted media articles and messages in TV shows aiming to get us all to “just say no.” While these campaigns are often ineffective at preventing use, they do seem to work at clouding perception.

And the truth is seen as immaterial in the drug war. Written into the job description of the “drug czar” by Congress is that whoever heads the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) must “take such actions as necessary to oppose any attempt to legalize the use of a substance (in any form)” that is currently illegal, regardless of the facts. When asked about its distribution of “misleading information”—by a Congressman, in fact—ONDCP cited this provision to justify doing so, saying that this is “within the statutory role assigned to ONDCP.” In other words, they have to lie. […]

The truth is that our perceptions of marijuana—and in fact all of our drug laws—are based on early 20th century racism and “science” circa the Jim Crow era. In the early decades of the 20th century, the drug was linked to Mexican immigrants and black jazzmen, who were seen as potentially dangerous.

Excellent job.

He’s back, part 3. Scott Takes Worker Drug Testing To Supreme Court. Rick Scott just won’t give up until he gets to drug test everyone (and profit handsomely from it). Based on past Supreme Court rulings, I find it highly unlikely that they’ll even take the case, but I always get a bit nervous with what the Supremes might do.

It’s time to put a stake in this national desire to drug test and really reverse the trend, but also getting it out of schools and the workplace in general.

Speaking of drug testing… Drug Tests Don’t Deter Use, But School Environment Might

A survey of high school students found that the possibility that they might face drug testing didn’t really discourage students from alcohol, cigarettes or marijuana. But students who thought their school had a positive environment were less apt to try cigarettes and pot.

Treating your students like criminals who must prove their innocence probably doesn’t foster a positive environment. Same thing is true in the workplace.

Here’s the study.

There has been so much hype over concerns regarding “all the drugged drivers on the road” once marijuana is legalized, and it has been just plain dishonest. Sure, driving impaired is a bad idea regardless of the impairment. But there are many kinds of impairment and many degrees of impairment, and it’s important to know where on the risk scale this lies in order to craft useful public policy.

Driving angry is a terrible impairment, yet we are unlikely to develop a national policy of enforcing a zero-tolerance no-drive rule after getting in an argument.

We know that heavy alcohol use results in some of the highest risks of driving impairment, so it is fitting that we focus efforts on reducing drunk driving and enforcing drunk driving laws. It would be irresponsible to pull resources away from that clear danger toward a much lower risk factor.

And yet, that’s exactly what we’re doing by pushing for zero-tolerance per se laws for cannabis.

This latest study from the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs once again points out quite clearly this fact.

Drugs and Alcohol: Their Relative Crash Risk – Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Report by Eduardo Romano, Pedro Torres-Saavedra, Robert B. Voas, John H. Lacey

Results: For both sober and drinking drivers, being positive for a drug was found to increase the risk of being fatally injured. When the drug-positive variable was separated into marijuana and other drugs, only the latter was found to contribute significantly to crash risk. In all cases, the contribution of drugs other than alcohol to crash risk was significantly lower than that produced by alcohol.

Conclusions: Although overall, drugs contribute to crash risk regardless of the presence of alcohol, such a contribution is much lower than that by alcohol. The lower contribution of drugs other than alcohol to crash risk relative to that of alcohol suggests caution in focusing too much on drugged driving, potentially diverting scarce resources from curbing drunk driving. [emphasis added]

Exactly.

In reading the full article (yes, I shelled out the $30 for it – let me know if you have any questions about the article itself so you don’t have to), it was interesting to read the article’s authors’ astonishment at discovering that cannabis had so little effect on its own to crash risk. They pointed out the possibility (of which we’ve known for a long time) of drivers who have used cannabis being more aware and thus cautious.

They also pointed out that the government data from which they drew counted any amount of the drug showing up in tests and therefore likely included many drivers who had not recently consumed cannabis. But that’s perhaps an appropriate population to have in your sample when pointing out the stupidity of a public policy that promotes zero-tolerance per se laws.