Drug WarRant

This article was in Rolling Stone last week, and I believe it’s an important read, if you haven’t already…

Five Reasons Cops Want to Legalize Weed

Of course, it’s more than just weed, and LEAP is on record for being in favor of legalized regulation of all recreational drugs, and these points still hold.

1. It’s about public safety. […]

2. Cops want to focus on crimes that hurt real victims. […]

3. Cops want strong relationships with the communities they serve. […]

4. The war on pot encourages bad – and even illegal – police practices. […]

5. Cops want to stop kids from abusing drugs.

These are good reasons for cops to support legalization, and also very good reasons for the rest of us to want legalization — so that we can work toward restoring a proper relationship between law enforcement and the communities they are sworn to protect and serve.

On Independence Day today, a flag made of hemp fiber is flying over the Capitol Building. A nice nod to tradition. The flag is from Colorado and was arranged by Representative Jared Polis.

Not everyone was pleased.

“This is a completely and utterly disgraceful way to commemorate the birth of our country,” says Calvina Fay, Executive Director of Drug Free America Foundation, Inc. and Save Our Society From Drugs. “There are millions of families in America that battle the scourge of addiction every day and many of them have lost loved ones to drugs,” continued Fay.

“This insensitive gesture makes a mockery of our nation’s prevention, treatment and law enforcement efforts. July 4th is a day that should be spent celebrating the privilege of living in America, not promoting or normalizing drug use to our citizenry,” concluded Fay.

One of the side-effects of the drug war is that it has given wide ranges of government employees the notion that when it comes to drugs, citizens don’t have rights. It’s an ugly and pernicious effect.

It even goes so far as to include snatching children from their parents.

In 2010, Lawrence Country Children and Youth Services seized 3-day-old Isabella and took her from her mother Elizabeth Mort. All based on a hospital drug test that registered the poppy seed bagel she had eaten before going in to the hospital. She wasn’t even informed she had failed the test and no verification was done before taking her child.

Mother wins lawsuit over poppy seed bagel

A child welfare agency and hospital in Pennsylvania have paid Elizabeth Mort $143,500 for the mistake.

Good.

Too bad the individuals involved didn’t have to pay out of their own pockets.

However, the fact that the hospital and the agency had to pay will make an impact. Budgets are a serious thing to these agencies, and you can bet that a number of agencies around the country are discussing this case. Maybe that will save another mother from being separated from her child.

Mark Kleiman does an excellent job responding to the latest schizophrenia scare with his post: Cannabis and schizophrenia: Scare stories are not policy arguments

If I had a young friend with a family history of schizophrenia or who had experienced schizophrenic symptoms, I’d advise that person to stay away from cannabis. Why take unnecessary chances? But the evidence of an actual causal link is fairly underwhelming; it’s very hard to tell whether early cannabis use might reflect attempts at self-medication for pre-clinical symptoms rather than being an actual precipitating cause.

At the population level, we have what seems to me like strong negative evidence on the question whether increasing the availability of cannabis will lead to a measurable increase in the number of people with disabling levels of schizophrenia.

We’ve been actually fairly fortunate on this side of the pond that most policy leaders have not fallen for the schizophrenia scare as a significant anti-legalization argument. But then again, we don’t have the Daily Mail.

What we have is the Kevin Sabet:

Why isn’t this getting more play? Doc at Yale School of Medicine: Pot-Smoking & the Schizophrenia Connection http://t.co/1c1TF9dBCY via @WSJ

The Economics Behind the US Government’s Unwinnable War on Drugs

Benjamin Powell, in this essential article, has explained the basics of economics and the drug war in plain English. This is a great piece to share with people.

One of the biggest problems with those who support supply-side drug policy is a basic lack of understanding of simple economics. Once you understand the trade-offs that are a necessary result of the laws of economics, then it’s impossible to support the drug war if your goal is really to do what’s best for society.

‘Nobody racially profiles’: Bloomberg on the Council’s two ‘bad’ NYPD bills

“The racial profiling bill is just so unworkable,” he said today. “Nobody racially profiles.” […]

In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”

Change in approach to drugs could lead to more arrests at Banks School District

At the request of city law enforcement, the Banks School District is changing its approach toward drugs, […]

Washington County Sheriff’s Deputy Todd Hanlon, who is contracted by the city of Banks to patrol the community and schools, announced the change at a Banks City Council meeting on June 11. […]

Although Hanlon said the district always called at some point, Banks schools handled discipline internally. By time he got involved, it was too late to arrest the student. His job was only to seize and destroy the material.

Now, Hanlon wants to be contacted as soon as the school finds drugs.

“I hate coming in on the tail end of stuff,” he said.

Humorless Ohio AG mugs ‘prescription’ coffee cup

Here’s the issue: does a coffee mug that mimics a prescription bottle and says “Prescription Coffee, RX#: VRY-CAF-N8D, Drink one mug by mouth, repeat until awake and alert” make fun of prescription drug abuse?

DeWine thinks so.

“People die from accidental drug overdoses in this state every day, and these products make light of the problem,” DeWine said in a May press release.“We don’t find these products funny at all.” […]

May was when DeWine and 22 other state attorneys general asked the company to pull the Prescription Line of glasses, coasters, mugs and drink holders.

Tweet from Rafael LeMaitre at ONDCP:

Did you know that we’re supporting research to treat cocaine addiction w/ a vaccine? The future of #DrugPolicyReform http://t.co/IVHrKsPCeT

Yingluck proposes drug-free Asean by 2015

BANGKOK, June 26 (Bernama) — Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has announced her government’s policies on anti-narcotics, concrete protection of community dwellers from drug addiction and support the Association of Southeast Asian nations (Asean) to become a world drug-free region by 2015.

Legalizing marijuana is hard. Regulating a pot industry is even harder. by Mike Konczal in the Washington Post.

It’s hard to slog through all the hand-wringing in this article — fears about making the wrong decisions in regulating marijuana, as though legalization involved suspending a massive anvil above the population and you only had one opportunity to get the suspension system correct.

But the fact is, of all the substances or activities that you might have government regulate, marijuana is one of the least scary. It’s also one of the hardest to contain.

Just legalize it. Slap a few regulations to mostly keep it away from kids and to insure that commercially sold marijuana isn’t moldy and isn’t grown in ecologically damaging ways, and see what happens. Wait until the spike from the novelty wears off and then tweak as needed.

But of course that won’t happen. They’re going to argue and argue over what will ultimately be irrelevant: how to use regulation to prevent addiction (hint: that’s not one of the powers of regulation).

Nice editorial in the New York Times: American Mayors – Let Them Smoke Pot

What the Conference of Mayors resolved seems appropriate — and sensitive to the reality that public attitudes toward marijuana are liberalizing rapidly. In 1969, the Pew Research Center found that only 12 percent of Americans favored legalizing the drug. By 2010, that figure was 41 percent. In 2013, it was 52 percent, a majority.

At any rate, Mr. Holder’s dithering helps no one. The status quo is chaotic and untenable. If you live in Denver or Seattle and you are thinking of applying for a license to sell marijuana, you have a right to know whether federal prosecutors will move to seize your property and jail you.

Kudos to Tom Angell and the Marijuana Majority for their tremendous work organizing this wonderful resolution and getting so many people to write their Mayor (I did). It makes for a very strong argument that marijuana should be a local and state issue.

So this showed up today from Amazon. I’m looking forward to reading it, as soon as I get some time. I’d hurry up and review it, but it doesn’t really seem that Radley needs my review – he’s already got rave reviews on the cover from Norm Stamper, Anthony Romero, Arianna Huffington, Ron Paul, and Glenn Greenwald (who calls it a “must-read”).

I’d trust that.

As always…

Link

Chinese authorities have once again commemorated the UN International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking by stepping up their drug enforcement efforts.

Ahead of the UN anti-drug day on Wednesday, Xinhua News Agency reports that six men were executed in China on Tuesday for separate drug-trafficking charges. Another four individuals were given death sentences, the report said.

So why are we doing this again?

Oh, yeah…

“We have to admit that, globally, the demand for drugs has not been substantially reduced and that some challenges exist in the implementation of the drug control system, in the violence generated by trafficking in illicit drugs, in the fast evolving nature of new psychoactive substances, and in those national legislative measures which may result in a violation of human rights.” – Yuri Fedotov