Reminder: I’ll be hosting the FDL Book Salon with Keith Stroup, author of “It’s NORML to Smoke Pot: The 40 Year Fight for Marijuana Smokers’ Rights”
Today (Sunday) 2 pm Pacific, 4 Central, 5 Eastern
Should be fun. Bring your questions.
Link updated.
You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago. […]
The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.
Obama: Trayvon “could have been me.” True, and so could many still behind bars for drug possession
Exactly. It could have been him.
ONDCP spokesperson Rafael Lemaitre
POTUS: African American men disproportionately involved in criminal justice system. #DrugPolicyReform
Hmmm, Rafe – I think you missed the key quote. And when is the ONDCP going to stop mouthing empty platitudes (“Drug Czar Kerlikowske: Treat Addiction as Public Health Issue”) and address the real issues?
I thought I’d share with you a post I made for my Facebook friends (who generally aren’t as well-educated on drugs and drug policy as you guys)…
Hey, kids – let’s talk about heroin!
What with celebrities and white suburban kids dying from overdoses in the news, more of you may be interested in this, so I’m going to take a moment to give you some facts and maybe even a tip or two that could save someone’s life.
One of the biggest problems we have is ignorance. I think most of my friends would agree that abstinance-only sex education is a really bad idea. After all, if/when someone fails to abstain, if they don’t know about safe sex, the consequences could be severe, and I don’t believe my friends are the type to enjoy taunting someone with “Ha, ha, you made a mistake. Now die.”
Well, the same is true with drug education — ignorance can kill you if you make a mistake — and yet most of us have come away with drug knowledge roughly equal to “Heroin is bad, mmm-kay?”
I may have sparked your interest with the offer of tips to save someone’s life, so I’m going to lead with those to keep you from getting distracted by the latest inspirational Photoshopped picture further down the feed.
— The miracle heroin-reversal drug: Naloxone.
Seriously. This stuff is amazing. If injected, it will act within one minute to block all the opioid receptors and completely turn off a heroin overdose. And it could last for up to 45 minutes, all without harmful side-effects. It makes someone overdosing instantly sober.
So why don’t you know about this? Because for years, the government rejected calls to increase distribution of Naloxone because they were afraid it would encourage people to do heroin (sound familiar? — similar to objections to condom distribution). So instead, people died. Fortunately, in recent years, they’ve started changing their tune.
If you know someone who uses heroin (or who once used heroin and has “quit”), then you should probably try to score some Naloxone. Even if you don’t know someone personally, if you live in a community where there is heroin use (ie, anywhere), then you should ask whether Naloxone is included in the kits of all early responders. It’s better not to wait until the hospital. Save lives.
— The life-saving Good Samaritan laws
One reason people die is that they don’t get help fast enough. And that may be because people are afraid to get help. You show up with a friend who overdosed and the cops are going to want to run a fine-tooth comb through your life (“Someone has to go to jail.”). In some cases, the person who supplied the drug can be charged with murder. Let’s say I’m overdosing and my girlfriend scored the heroin for me. I’m not going to want her to take me in, lose me, and then spend the rest of her life in prison because of me.
Well, more places are now passing Good Samaritan laws, which essentially state that we’re more interested in saving someone’s life than putting someone in jail (the details vary from law to law). It’s amazing how much opposition there is to these laws, so go to bat for them in your community and your state.
— Rehab – the surprise killer
Yes, rehab can lead to death from heroin overdose. Sound strange? Well, heroin users naturally build up a tolerance, which means they need to increase their dosage (sometimes dramatically) in order to reach the same high. Unfortunately, most of our rehab programs are built on the cold-turkey model, instead of the harm-reduction model. And they often don’t do a good job of educating addicts as to what will happen when they relapse (and most will). Their tolerance level will have gone down after they quit cold-turkey, so that the same dosage that was right for them before rehab now could be enough to kill them.
A lot of people die after going through rehab. If you know someone going into rehab, look into harm reduction models, and also make sure they understand the tolerance factors.
— The drug war makes heroin more dangerous
In a controlled and safe environment, heroin really isn’t that dangerous, and many heroin addicts can lead very long and productive lives. But the drug war puts the purity and safety of drugs in the hands of criminals. Dosages can be very uncertain (leading to overdoses), plus you don’t know what may have been used to cut the drugs. For example, a rogue chemist named Ricardo Valdez created 22 pounds of fentanyl which was used to cut heroin in the U.S.. It directly led to over 1,000 deaths around the country, including 300 in the Detroit area alone.
Our lock-em-up approach not only hasn’t worked, but it has made heroin more dangerous, and more profitable to criminals, increasing the incentive for them to hook young people.
In Switzerland, they took a different approach — give it away for free. Yes, they gave away free, controlled, safe doses of heroin to addicts in a clean clinic with doctors and social workers. They did a study in conjunction with this program and found a 94% reduction in criminal activity by those in the program; addicts were living longer; once stabilized they had an easier time kicking the drug; and… they made it unprofitable to be a criminal heroin dealer, so fewer young people were starting!
Changing our drug laws will save lives.
…
Oh, and finally… don’t do heroin, mmm-kay?
… the more you know.
Mark Kleiman has a post up: Why I always put “medical marijuana” in scare quotes. It’s a masterpiece of muddled confusion.
He accepts in the first sentence that “marijuana has medical value.” That should be enough right there to stop him from using scare quotes. After all, he is a public policy writer and has to know that using the scare quotes is, in essence, a strong implication that he doesn’t believe marijuana has medical value. He essentially admits that his scare quotes are a lie.
What appears to bother him is the ickiness of the system. He admits that politics is a messy business (“laws and sausages”) and agrees that the outcome was good. But he doesn’t like the fact that so many people, who don’t really need marijuana for the strict medical purposes intended in the law, are buying their recreational pot from nice clean medical marijuana sources instead of from the usual street criminals. And what really sets him off is that they seem to be… flaunting it.
Of course, this also fits in Kleiman’s ongoing narrative of being disgusted with both sides (criminalizers and legalizers). And sure, there are people who think that legalizers’ interest in medical marijuana is disingenuous, since their main purpose is recreational legalization.
This is, perhaps then, a good time to remind folks about the most glaring difference between those who have been pushing for legalization, and those who try to defend criminalization.
Yes, many legalizers came to the issue without much knowledge about the medical benefits of marijuana. And yes, they discovered that medical marijuana was also good for the legalization movement. They realized that the mass public would be less likely to be scared by a product that was used by grandmothers with cancer, which could defang the decades of government propaganda. And so they learned more about medical marijuana. And, lo and behold, they discovered it was really true. And they met inspirational people whose illness was transformed by using medical marijuana. And so they became legalizers who also cared about medical marijuana. It was not incompatible at all. Sure, they were “using” medical marijuana as a foot in the door for legalization, but only because that was the best way to also insure that sick people would be able to get their medicine. [Note: I do not give permission to quote the previous sentence without including the entire sentence.] If you talked to most legalizers, they would prefer that marijuana was legalized for everyone, but, failing that, would at least want to make sure that sick people could be helped.
Contrast this with the criminalizers. They also realized that medical marijuana was a foot in the door to legalization, and would neutralize many of the scary lies they had told about it. And so they opposed medical marijuana, despite knowing that it could help people. They were willing to force sick people to be hurt, and even arrest them for trying to get better, all in order to protect a failed political position. Yes, they used sick people. It’s despicable, and there’s no way that you can legitimately compare the two sides’ tactics as being even close to morally equivalent.
This dynamic exists across the spectrum in the legalization vs. criminalization debate.
Someone may come to the legalization discussion originally because they like to smoke pot, and they typed “Why is marijuana illegal?” into a search engine.
At the time, they may not have had any particular knowledge about the connections of race and the drug war. But then they learn about how extraordinarily racist the drug war has been, and because they are real people, this bothers them, and the more they learn, the more they are determined that something must be done about it. In this way, legalization became more urgent to them, because now there was another reason for doing it.
And there is a whole laundry list of reasons why legalizers become more involved and passionate about it the more they learn (and sure, many of them still like to smoke pot and would like to do so legally). Here are just a few of those reasons:
etc.
And on each of these issues, legalizers are on the right side. In other words, in each situation, legalization is connected to a better outcome for that issue, whereas criminalization results in a worse outcome.
This is, I think, part of the reason that some people are perplexed by what they may see as an unseemly rabid doggedness on the part of legalizers. After all, why are they so passionate about just wanting to smoke some pot? We care about a whole lot more than that.
So where does that leave Mark Kleiman? After all, he doesn’t like either side, really. He is for a specific limited approach to legalizing marijuana, but [in the larger picture of the entire class of recreational drugs] he is also in favor of maintaining prohibition in order to insure swift penalties for those who are unable to control their drug use.
I think it would be safe to say that he favors the use of government to prevent people from doing what he firmly believes is not in their best interest (and he believes that government can actually do that).
Hey, it’s a cause. Not one I agree with, but he’s at least consistent about that.
And I’ll take my list above, for which I have become passionate through the years of study and learning on the issues, over his cause any day.
[Note: Post updated to reflect unclear writing on my part. The overall bedrock principles of legalization to me hold true regardless of the specific drug (although each of course is different in the way it should be regulated), so I sometimes forget to clarify when I’m talking just about marijuana and when I’m talking about the bigger picture.]
Further update: Mark clarifies his position for the record:
“No, that’s not right. Even for the drugs I’d still like to see prohibited, I’m no longer a believer in user sanctions except for people convicted of non-drug crimes. HOPE and related programs are for property and violent felons, not for drug possessors.”
That’s a good clarification to know.
I am famous. But then again, everyone is. At least that’s the notion behind the All People Are Famous podcast. Eli, the podcast’s host, recently interviewed me, and that episode is now available.
You can learn way more than you ever wanted to about me by listening to it (may not work on all devices – should be available on iTunes soon).
Some upcoming activities:
Interesting article in Salon: The Stoned Age: Were cavemen on drugs?
This thesis—that humanity’s earliest artists were not just reeling due to mind-altering activities, but deliberately sought those elevated states and gave greater meaning to those common visions—is the contention of a new paper by an international research team.
Their thesis intriguingly explores the “biologically embodied mind,†which they contend gave rise to similarities in Paleolithic art across the continents dating back 40,000 years, and can also be seen in the body painting patterns dating back even further, according to recent archelogical discoveries.
At its core, this theory challenges the long-held notion that the earliest art and artists were merely trying to draw the external world. Instead, it sees cave art as a deliberate mix of rituals inducing altered states for participants, coupled with brain chemistry that elicits certain visual patterns for humanity’s early chroniclers.
So perhaps we add cavemen painters to jazz musicians and other creative artists who have found inspiration in altered states of consciousness?
Radley Balko’s been getting some great press for his new book: Rise of the Warrior Cop – The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. There’s an excellent excerpt from the book available at Salon: “Why did you shoot me? I was reading a bookâ€: The new warrior cop is out of control
Very powerful stuff. I hope the book gets excellent distribution.
Some of the Law Enforcement Officers over at Glock Talk had some of their own reactions to it…
Radley Balko droppings… no matter where they are laid, they will always stink.
[Of course, keep in mind that it’s an internet forum that’s going to attract some of the worst scum.]
…
Radley is also known for his “puppycide” posts, detailing the alarming rate at which law enforcement officers seem to need to shoot dogs, as opposed to, say, postal workers.
Now Law Enforcement Today has an article by Jim Gaffney, their risk management contributor, suggesting that officers may want to be careful about shooting dogs to avoid lawsuits. Who Let the Dogs Out?
Officers need to be concerned about the possibility of a lawsuit being filed if an officer is involved in a dog shooting! Many in society these days consider their dogs as valued family members rather than simply the family pet. In fact, the preferred nomenclature is “canine companion†vs. pet these days.
This perspective is a trend emerging in the federal circuit courts of appeal. […]
While attending the ILEETA Conference last month, I attended a class facilitated by Laura Scarry, a Chicago attorney who represents law enforcement officers accused of civil rights violations at the state and federal level. Ms. Scarry advised participants of this change in the court’s view regarding dog shootings. We learned, in fact, such a shooting could possibly be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment! This class informed participants of current court rulings in place by circuit courts ruling that the use of deadly physical force can result in a federal civil rights lawsuit if a dog is “wrongfully†injured or killed.
For the purposes of this article, the portion of the Fourth Amendment under discussion is where the Fourth Amendment discusses that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. The federal courts recognize a dog, one’s canine companion, as an “effect.â€
Sorry, but I don’t buy it…
Drug smugglers set free for lack of money to prosecute
Each year the Border Patrol checkpoint seizes hundreds of thousands of pounds of marijuana.
“We have ’em put it in spare tires and gas tanks,” said a Border Patrol agent, whose voice and identity has been disguised because the agent feared of being fired for telling us what happens next – that up to 60 smugglers a month are being let go.
This Border Patrol agent, who’s in disguise for fear of being fired, said that up to 60 drug smugglers a month are being released. “We catch ’em, but then because our hands are tied, they end up walking and being released,” said the agent. […]
Police here say federal authorities generally won’t prosecute traffickers moving less than 150 pounds of marijuana with a street value of $120,000. So they leave those cases and the costs to local district attorneys, including Carlos Garcia of Brooks County.
“If we were to accept them, we’re accepting them with all those financial responsibilities as well, and right now we’re just not at a point where we can do that,” Garcia said, adding that they just can’t afford it.
The Justice Department used to help pay for the prosecutions in border areas. The funding reached $31 million in 2010 but fell to $5 million this year. There’s no money in the White House budget request for next year.
There’s absolutely no lack of money in the drug war.
If this was of a concern to the feds, they could move some of the money they’re spending on going after medical marijuana providers.
A little more research shows that it’s all about making a case to get more money. The reason that the money was cut was that an audit shows the county had been overpaid almost $2 million by the feds that they haven’t paid back.
Everybody wants their piece of the drug war pie.
… in so many ways.
17 people in Scotland and Ireland have died from fake ecstasy tablets.
The green pills, with a Rolex crown stamped on them, often contain a dangerous chemical called PMA.
They cause extremely high temperatures, hallucinations and convulsions.
When drugs are legal and regulated, these deaths don’t happen.
I’m in Iowa visiting my Mom, who just celebrated her 91st birthday. She’s a regular weekly reader of the Rant and also enjoys reading the comments of those on the couch.
‘Seatbelt Checkpoints’ to Search Cars Without Warrants, Make Drug Arrests
The Beckley, West Virginia Police Department set up a “seatbelt checkpoint,” which resulted in several drug arrests on July 2.
The Beckley police claimed they did the checkpoint to inform residents and raise awareness of a new seatbelt law that goes into effect on July 9.
However, police brought K-9 drug-sniffing dogs to the checkpoints, which were not needed for seatbelt education.
Another example of law enforcement personnel purposely mocking and bypassing the law for their own benefit.
Related, but perhaps more hopeful…
Blood, spit and cops: Nationwide drug roadblocks raise eyebrows
It’s not just in Alabama. The roadblocks are part of a national study led by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is trying to determine how many drivers are on the road with drugs or alcohol in their systems. Similar roadblocks will be erected in dozens of communities across the nation this year, according to the agency.
It’s been going on for decades. Previous surveys date to the 1970s. The last one was run in 2007, and it included the collection of blood and saliva samples without apparent controversy, sheriff’s spokesmen in both Alabama counties said.
But this time, it’s happening as the Obama administration struggles to explain revelations that U.S. spy organizations have been tracking phone and Internet traffic. Against that backdrop, the NHTSA-backed roadblocks have led to complaints in Alabama about an intrusive federal government.
Nice. Perhaps the country is actually getting ready to have a real conversation about these issues.
After all, as we’ve said here often, there are direct connections between government overreach in the so-called war on terror, and the war on drugs.
Servetus on Catholic bishops fear marijuana and freethinking: “An ancient Egyptian mug was found by a USF professor to have once contained hallucinogens: 15-Nov-2024–A University of South Florida…” Nov 17, 20:11
on Catholic bishops fear marijuana and freethinking: “Let us not forget that Joe Biden, the Landrieu Family, the late Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Connick, Sr.*, Leon…” Nov 17, 18:01 on Catholic bishops fear marijuana and freethinking: “Endocannabinoid receptors on interneurons limit stress-induced bad memory generalization to the specific, appropriate memory: 15-Nov-2024 — Researchers at The Hospital…” Nov 16, 10:55
on Marijuana potencies and transitioning to Schedule III: ““smoke rope instead of dope,” Is this a hemp revival?” Nov 15, 05:13
on Catholic bishops fear marijuana and freethinking: ““Falsehoods are dangerous. People who believe absurdities can go on to commit atrocities. Catholicism and other sects and cults that…” Nov 15, 05:00
on Marijuana potencies and transitioning to Schedule III: “https://www.cornbreadhemp.com/pages/how-are-thc-gummies-legal sire behoove a go-to owing me, offering a within easy reach, tasty manner to charge out of CBD’s benefits.…” Nov 13, 13:44
on Marijuana potencies and transitioning to Schedule III: “Worrisome same day cannabis delivery has been somewhat the journey. As someone fervent on spontaneous remedies, delving into the in…” Nov 11, 14:58 on Marijuana potencies and transitioning to Schedule III: “NIDA Director Dr Nora Volkow charts the future of addiction research: 7-Nov-2024″ — I was struck early on by how…” Nov 10, 09:50