Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on February 15, 2007, 02:02:30 AM
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All:
IMHO the WOD is a tremendous foolishness that is both counter-productive and counter to basic American values of live and let live.
We begin this thread with a piece whose title captures a certain something , , ,
TAC,
Marc
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DEA: More marijuana needed for studies
Judge rules federal supply is inadequate
By Michael Doyle - McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- Medical researchers need more marijuana sources because government supplies aren't meeting scientific demand, a federal judge has ruled.
In an emphatic but nonbinding opinion, the Drug Enforcement Administration's own judge is recommending that a University of Massachusetts professor be allowed to grow a legal pot crop. The real winners could be those suffering from painful and wasting diseases, proponents say.
"The existing supply of marijuana is not adequate," Administrative Law Judge Mary Ellen Bittner ruled.
The federal government's 12-acre marijuana plot at the University of Mississippi provides neither the quantity nor quality scientists need, researchers contend. While Bittner didn't embrace those criticisms, she agreed that the system for producing and distributing research marijuana is flawed.
"Competition in the manufacture of marijuana for research purposes is inadequate," Bittner determined. Bittner further concluded that there is "minimal risk of diversion" from a new marijuana source. Making additional supplies available, she stated, "would be in the public interest."
The DEA isn't required to follow Bittner's 88-page opinion, and the Bush administration's anti-drug stance may make it unlikely that the grass-growing rules will loosen. Both sides can now file further information before DEA administrators make their ruling.
"We could still be months away from a final decision," DEA spokesman Garrison Courtney said Tuesday, adding that "obviously, we're going to take the judge's opinion into consideration."
Still, the ruling is resonating in labs and with civil libertarians.
"(The) ruling is an important step toward allowing medical marijuana patients to get their medicine from a pharmacy just like everyone else," said Allen Hopper, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.
Based in the California seaside town of Santa Cruz, the ACLU's Drug Law Reform Project has been representing University of Massachusetts scientist Lyle Craker. Since 2001, Craker has been confronting numerous bureaucratic and legal obstacles in his request for permission to grow research-grade marijuana. An agronomist who received a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, Craker was asked to grow bulk marijuana by a five-member group called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. The psychedelic studies group wants to research such areas as developing vaporizers that can efficiently deliver pot smoke.
"This ruling is a victory for science, medicine and the public good," Craker said.
"I hope that the DEA abides by the decision and grants me the opportunity to do my job unimpeded by drug war politics."
(EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)
The latest research made public this week indicated that marijuana provided more pain relief for AIDS patients than prescription drugs did. The Bush administration quickly dismissed those findings as a "smokescreen," and it has remained hostile to Craker's research efforts. During the trial, for instance, DEA attorneys secured an admission from Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies head Richard Doblin that he has smoked marijuana regularly since 1971.
"Can you tell us the source of this marijuana?" DEA attorney Brian Bayly asked Doblin, before withdrawing the question under objections.
The DEA originally claimed that it lost Craker's research application. Then the agency said that his photocopied follow-up lacked a necessary original signature. After a year, Craker tried again. He then had to wait another year before the DEA started processing the application, in which he proposed to grow about 25 pounds of marijuana in the first year.
Craker sued after the agency rejected his application. That brought his case before Bittner.
(EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)
She oversaw the trial, which featured witnesses such as former California legislator John Vasconcellos.
"People have a right to know more about what might help them in their suffering and pain or illness, whatever it might be," Vasconcellos testified, in words repeated by Bittner. "The more research, the better."
(END OPTIONAL TRIM)
The University of Mississippi has monopolized government-grade marijuana since 1968. The university also contracts with North Carolina's Research Triangle Institute, which runs a machine that can roll up to 1,000 finished marijuana cigarettes in an hour.
(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)
The government-grown pot is too "harsh" and filled with stems and seeds, researchers testified.
"The material was of such poor quality, we did not deem it to be representative of medical cannabis," researcher Dr. Ethan Russo said.
(e-mail: mdoylemcclatchydc.com)
02-13-07
mb-cd
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IMHO the WOD is a tremendous foolishness that is both counter-productive and counter to basic American values of live and let live.
I'm with you 100% on this one, but I have some concerns.
I'm all for people being able to legally purchase whatever recreational drugs they want, but I want draconian restrictions on the producers. Do you really want corporations devoting millions of dollars to huge marketing and advertising campaigns designed to convince everyone to buy marijuana, cocaine, MDMA, or whatever? I'm not saying these drugs are any worse than cigarettes and booze (they aren't), but they obviously aren't for everybody.
Does it have to be all or nothing? Either they're completely illegal or we have to allow heroin vending machines in every school or we'd be violating the drug companies' rights to free speech? I say make it all legal, but allow zero advertising.
-milt
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It always worries me when you and I agree :-D
I have no problem with reasonable regulation, indeed I would even consider not extending the legal protection of the corporate form to those who engage in commerce in these items-- but the larger point about live and let live needs to be the guiding principle.
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RE: Legalization/regulation
Apparently, the ease with which a medical marijuana card may be attained has NOT brought about a rush of prospective clients. I'm trying to find the story, but I heard on the news a few nights ago that the fees for obtaining a "card" (allowing an individual to obtain marjuanan for "medicinal" purposes) are going up by a large percentage, something in the area of 95-105%. California had expected something in the area of 100,000 cards to be distributed after the passing of Prop. 420, but to date only 1,500 - 2,000 cards had been registered. I'll try to track the story and post it.
One of the discussions that I always find missing from the legalization debate is that of education. We can't seem to even deal with solid education about the ills of legal drugs (alcohol/cigarettes), so what happens if everything else gets legalized?
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One of the discussions that I always find missing from the legalization debate is that of education. We can't seem to even deal with solid education about the ills of legal drugs (alcohol/cigarettes), so what happens if everything else gets legalized?
Not sure the problem with alcohol & tobacco is a lack of education, but that a lot more of the education comes from the alcohol & tobacco industries themselves (in the form of advertisements) than from more objective sources.
I think what Milt suggests for illegal drugs would make to have applied to alcohol & tobacco products, in some fashion at least. It doesn't help that these industries respond to any such suggestion with a squad of high-priced lawyers who argue that their clients' "free speech" is being violated.
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I'm in Australia so I can only guess at the way things are in the states, here cigerette companys are not allowed to sponser events such as football matches and have massive restrictions on advertising. Alcohol is under similar bans to a lesser degree, like only certain hours for TV advertising.
In terms of legalising all other drugs, one of the best ways to take the power out of something is to accept it. So by legalising the drugs the local dealers would go out of business and ideally the streets would clean up. That being said I am against it, as I believe that it is not going to getting the junkies off the streets and all the same issues would still occur only now it would be more 'accepted' as just a part of life.
Jason
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Jason:
Here too we have restrictions on advertising for cigarettes and alchohol.
I would offer that there is a range of options here; decriminalization is not the same thing as legalization and within legalization there are various regulatory regimes possible.
IMHO going in this direction would pretty much put an end to the vast and extremely violent criminal enterprises devoted to drugs-- enterprises which have corrupted entire nations. IMHO going in this direction would put an end to many rationalizations for the vast expansion of the police power of the state and enable a restoration of the sanctity of people's homes and the sanctity of our privacy.
Marc
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Wow.
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/d/drug-cash.htm
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I recently took a class on the investigation of money laundering. One example cited was a S. Fla. drug house where they had so much cash to launder, 2 million dollars rotted into goo in the humidity before the DEA could get a search warrant.
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Canada ranks fifth worldwide when it comes to marijuana usage, but ranks first among industrialized nations, according to the 2007 World Drug Report.
About 16.8 percent of Canadians ages 15 to 64 light up, compared to 12.6 percent of Americans in the same age bracket, according to the report. Canada’s usage is about four times the worldwide average of 3.8 percent, while the United States' usage is about three times the average.
Marijuana, or cannabis, remains the most commonly used drug in the world with almost 160 million people ages 15 to 64 using it in 2005, said the report, which was put out by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Usage is down slightly from 162 million, according to last year’s World Drug Report, which reviewed data from 2004.
The majority of it is grown in the Americas (46 percent), followed by Africa (26 percent). Canada’s usage trails behind Papua New Guinea and Micronesia at 29 percent each, Ghana at 21.5 percent, and Zambia at 17.7 percent. Among European nations, Cyprus topped the list at 14.1 percent, followed by Italy and Spain, both at 11.2 percent.
Doctors: Pot Triggers Psychotic Symptoms Study: Marijuana Damages Brain Report: Pot Getting Stronger Although Canada is a top five user of marijuana, its use among high school students in Ontario declined 19 percent between 2003 and 2005. Cannabis use amongst 12th graders in the U.S. declined 18 percent between 1997 and 2006, and is 38 percent lower than it was at its peak in 1979, the report said.
Cocaine Use Twice as High for U.S. Students
Canada may have cornered the North American market on marijuana use, but U.S. teens are twice as likely to use cocaine as teens in the rest of the world, according to the report.
About 4.8 percent of U.S. 10th graders have used cocaine compared to an average of 2.35 percent of 15 and 16-year-olds in South America countries and an average of 2.4 percent of similarly aged students in European nations.
Overall, Spain had the highest percentage of cocaine users between the ages of 15 and 64 at 3 percent, followed by the U.S. at 2.8 percent, England at 2.4 percent and Canada at 2.3 percent
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,288846,00.html
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The Lost War
We've Spent 36 Years and Billions of Dollars Fighting It, but the Drug Trade Keeps Growing
By Misha Glenny
Sunday, August 19, 2007; B01
Poppies were the first thing that British army Capt. Leo Docherty noticed when he arrived in Afghanistan's turbulent Helmand province in April 2006. "They were growing right outside the gate of our Forward Operating Base," he told me. Within two weeks of his deployment to the remote town of Sangin, he realized that "poppy is the economic mainstay and everyone is involved right up to the higher echelons of the local government."
Poppy, of course, is the plant from which opium -- and heroin -- are derived.
Docherty was quick to realize that the military push into northern Helmand province was going to run into serious trouble. The rumor was "that we were there to eradicate the poppy," he said. "The Taliban aren't stupid and so they said, 'These guys are here to destroy your livelihood, so let's take up arms against them.' And it's been a downward spiral since then."
Despite the presence of 35,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, the drug trade there is going gangbusters. According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghan opium production in 2006 rose a staggering 57 percent over the previous year. Next month, the United Nations is expected to release a report showing an additional 15 percent jump in opium production this year while highlighting the sobering fact that Afghanistan now accounts for 95 percent of the world's poppy crop. But the success of the illegal narcotics industry isn't confined to Afghanistan. Business is booming in South America, the Middle East, Africa and across the United States.
Thirty-six years and hundreds of billions of dollars after President Richard M. Nixon launched the war on drugs, consumers worldwide are taking more narcotics and criminals are making fatter profits than ever before. The syndicates that control narcotics production and distribution reap the profits from an annual turnover of $400 billion to $500 billion. And terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are using this money to expand their operations and buy ever more sophisticated weapons, threatening Western security.
In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban's most effective recruiter in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Muslim extremists have reinvigorated themselves by supporting and taxing the countless peasants who are dependent one way or another on the opium trade, their only reliable source of income. The Taliban is becoming richer and stronger by the day, especially in the east and south of the country. The "War on Drugs" is defeating the "war on terror."
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For the past three years, I have been traveling the world researching a book on the jaw-dropping rise of transnational organized crime since the collapse of communism and the advent of globalization. I have witnessed how a ferocious drug gang mounted an assault on Sao Paolo, closing the city for three days as citizens cowered at home. I have watched Bedouins shift hundreds of kilos of cocaine across the Egyptian-Israeli border on the backs of camels, and observed how South Africa and West Africa have become an international narcotics distribution hub.
The trade in illegal narcotics begets violence, poverty and tragedy. And wherever I went around the world, gangsters, cops, victims, academics and politicians delivered the same message: The war on drugs is the underlying cause of the misery. Everywhere, that is, except Washington, where a powerful bipartisan consensus has turned the issue into a political third rail.
The problem starts with prohibition, the basis of the war on drugs. The theory is that if you hurt the producers and consumers of drugs badly enough, they'll stop doing what they're doing. But instead, the trade goes underground, which means that the state's only contact with it is through law enforcement, i.e. busting those involved, whether producers, distributors or users. But so vast is the demand for drugs in the United States, the European Union and the Far East that nobody has anything approaching the ability to police the trade.
Prohibition gives narcotics huge added value as a commodity. Once traffickers get around the business risks -- getting busted or being shot by competitors -- they stand to make vast profits. A confidential strategy report prepared in 2005 for British Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet and later leaked to the media offered one of the most damning indictments of the efficacy of the drug war. Law enforcement agencies seize less than 20 percent of the 700 tons of cocaine and 550 tons of heroin produced annually. According to the report, they would have to seize 60 to 80 percent to make the industry unprofitable for the traffickers.
Supply is so plentiful that the price of a gram of heroin is plummeting in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom. As for cocaine, according to the UNODC, the street price of a gram in the United States is now less than $70, compared with $184 in 1990. Adjusted for inflation, that's a threefold drop.
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A surfeit of bananas drove 47-year-old Colombian Susan Castillo to do business with terrorists. "It was about 10 to 15 years ago," she told me. "We had built our farm and raised our seven children on corn and bananas. But suddenly nobody wanted to buy our bananas anymore. We did what everybody did then -- we switched from bananas and corn to coca. Actually, we did not grow the coca ourselves but we rented out our land to a cocalero and he grew the crop." Both the Castillo family and the grower paid tax to the FARC -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a 17,000-strong peasant-based army, by far the largest terrorist organization in the Southern Hemisphere.
I spoke to Castillo in the bare office of a local U.N. counseling center in Ciudad Bolivar, a sprawling refugee camp that extends south from Bogota and houses about 1 million people. A few weeks earlier, she had been forced to leave her home after a pitched battle between the Colombian military and the FARC near La Macarena National Park.
Next to the U.N. office stands a spanking new library, courtesy of Plan Colombia, the $4.7 billion worth of drug-fighting assistance that the United States gave to Colombia over the first half-decade of this new century. Ninety-eight percent of that money was devoted to beefing up the Colombian armed forces' assault on coca plantations and left-wing guerrillas. I was rather pleased to uncover one of its few civilian outlets. All the library needs now is to open (it was padlocked), a few books (there were none) and some people who can read (a rare species in Ciudad Bolivar).
According to the Government Accountability Office, 70 percent of the money allotted to Plan Colombia never leaves the United States. It is used to buy U.S.-built helicopters and other weapons for the military, and a large chunk is paid to the security firm DynCorp. Britain and other E.U. countries have so far resisted spraying Afghan poppy fields with chemicals. But for several years, DynCorp has been spraying the herbicide glyphosate on thousands of acres of coca in Colombia.
The impact of the eradication program has been negligible at best. The FARC not only continues to control a swath of territory the size of Switzerland in south-central Colombia, but it has established itself in the north as well. The United Nations has identified coca plantations in 24 of the country's 32 provinces, whereas it was grown in only six when spraying began. But most embarrassing of all, before his trip to Washington in May, President Alvaro Uribe was forced to announce that production of coca was up 8 percent in 2006. Coca production has been so ample that the wholesale price of Colombia's best-known export has continued to slide throughout the course of Plan Colombia.
And now the U.S. government wants to repeat this "success" in Mexico. There's talk in Washington about a $1 billion aid package for the government of President Felipe Calderón to back his own war against drugs. And in Mexico, it's definitely a war: Calderón has mobilized the army to fight traffickers. In the first half of this year, more than 1,000 people were gunned down by rival drug cartels. Among the dead were newspaper reporters, narcotics police investigators, judges and politicians.
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The collapse of communism and the rise of globalization in the late 1980s and early 1990s gave transnational criminality a tremendous boost. The expansion of world trade and financial markets has provided criminals ample opportunity to broaden their activities. But there has been no comparable increase in the ability of the Western world to police global crime.
International mobsters, unlike terrorists, don't seek to bring down the West; they just want to make a buck. But these two distinct species breed in the same swamps. In areas notorious for crime, such as the tri-border region connecting Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina, or in the blood-diamond conflict zones such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, gangsters and terrorists habitually cooperate and work alongside one another.
Those swamps are steadily seeping toward the United States. British Columbia is now home to the greatest number of organized-crime syndicates anywhere in the world (if we accept the U.N. definition of a syndicate as more than two people involved in a planned crime). According to B.C. government statistics, the production, distribution and export of B.C. Bud, highly potent marijuana grown in hothouses along the province's border with the United States, accounts for 6 percent of the region's gross domestic product. It now employs more Canadians than British Columbia's traditional industries of mining and logging combined.
The majority of the province's criminals remain passive hippie types for whom the drug is a lifestyle choice. But as Brian Brennan, the chief investigator for the drug squad of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, told me, the marijuana trade is threatening to turn nasty as British Columbia's Hells Angels, one of the best-organized criminal syndicates in the world, moves in on the action. The drug trade is so lucrative, he said, that when police seize growing operations in houses worth $500,000, suspects simply abandon the properties. "They are making so much money that they don't care about losing that investment," he said.
An avalanche of B.C. Bud rolls southward into the United States every day, dodging U.S. customs in myriad imaginative ways. But as the Hells Angels and other syndicates get stronger and their control over the port of Vancouver tightens, the ability of U.S. and Canadian authorities to monitor the border becomes ever weaker.
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Could anything replace the war on drugs? There's no easy answer. In May, the Senlis Council, a group that works on the opium issue in Afghanistan, argued that "current counter-narcotics policies . . . have focused on poppy eradication, without providing farmers with viable alternatives." Instead of eradication, the council, which is made up of senior politicians and law enforcement officials from Canada and Europe, concludes that Afghan farmers should be permitted to grow opium that can then be refined and distributed for medical purposes. (That's not going to happen, as the United States has recently reiterated its commitment to poppy eradication.)
Others argue that the only way to minimize the criminality and social distress that drugs cause is to legalize narcotics so that the state may exert proper control over the industry. It needs to be taxed and controlled, they insist.
In Washington, the war on drugs has been a third-rail issue since its inauguration. It's obvious why -- telling people that their kids can do drugs is the kiss of death at the ballot box. But that was before 9/11. Now the drug war is undermining Western security throughout the world. In one particularly revealing conversation, a senior official at the British Foreign Office told me, "I often think we will look back at the War on Drugs in a hundred years' time and tell the tale of 'The Emperor's New Clothes.' This is so stupid."
How right he is.
misha.glenny@which.net
Misha Glenny is a former BBC correspondent and the author of "McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Underworld," to be published next year.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/17/AR2007081701716_pf.html
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This article from the Washingtonpost illustrates the effects of the War on Drugs along the Mexican border. Also check out the photo gallery.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/15/AR2008031501013.html
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The Lessons of Prohibition
Repeal Day drives home the folly of the Drug War
Radley Balko | December 3, 2008
This Friday, Dec. 5, is the 75th anniversary of Repeal Day, the day America repealed its disastrous alcohol prohibition.
Prohibition was the pièce de résistance of the early 20th-century progressives' grand social engineering agenda. It failed, of course. Miserably.
It did reduce overall consumption of alcohol in the U.S., but that reduction came largely among those who consumed alcohol responsibly. The actual harm caused by alcohol abuse was made worse, thanks to the economics of prohibitions.
Black market alcohol was of dubious origin, unregulated by market forces. The price premium that attaches to banned substances made the alcohol that made it to consumers more potent and more dangerous. And, of course, organized crime rose and flourished thanks to the new market created by the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act.
So hospitalizations related to alcohol soared. And so did violent crime. Corruption flourished, as law enforcement officials in charge of enforcing prohibition went on the take, from beat cops all the way up to the office of the United States Attorney General. Even the U.S. Senate had a secret, illegal stash of booze for its members and their staffs.
In 1924, the great social critic H.L. Mencken wrote of prohibition:
Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favourite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.
A bill in Congress celebrating the anniversary of Repeal Day echoes Mencken's sentiment. It notes that "throughout American history, alcohol has been consumed by its citizens"; that prohibition resulted in "abuses" and the "irresponsible overconsumption of alcohol"; and that the ban on "'intoxicating liquors' in the United States, resulted in a dramatic increase in illegal activity, including unsafe black market alcohol production, organized crime, and noncompliance with alcohol laws..."
But there's one positive thing we can say alcohol prohibition: At least it was constitutional. The prohibitionists built support for their cause by demonizing alcohol from state to state, winning over local legislators one at a time. When they'd built a sufficient national movement, they started the momentum for a constitutional amendment. Congress didn't pass a blanket federal law, Constitution be damned. They understood that the federal government hasn't the authority to issue a national ban on booze, so they moved to enact the ban properly.
When America repealed prohibition, we repealed it with a constitutional amendment making explicit that the power to regulate alcohol is reserved for the states. Even today, when Congress wants to pass federal alcohol laws (such as the federal drinking age, or the federal minimum blood-alcohol standard for drunk driving), it can't simply dictate policy to the states. Instead, it ties the laws to federal highway funding, a blackmail that while distasteful, at least carries the pretense of adherence to the Constitution.
Contrast that to drug prohibition, where Congress (and the Supreme Court, when it upheld it) made no attempt to comply with the Constitution in passing the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (CSA), the law that gave us the modern drug war.
There's no question that drug prohibition has been every bit the failure alcohol prohibition was. Nearly 40 years after the CSA passed, we have 400,000 people in prison for nonviolent drug crimes; a domestic police force that often looks and acts like an occupying military force; nearly a trillion dollars spent on enforcement, both here and through aggressive interdiction efforts overseas; and urban areas that can resemble war zones. Yet illicit drugs like cocaine and marijuana are as cheap and abundant as they were in 1970. The street price of both drugs has actually dropped—dramatically—since the government began keeping track in the early 1980s.
The main difference between the two prohibitions is that one was enacted lawfully, and once it became clear that it had failed, we repealed it (and government revenues soared with new alcohol taxes). As the drug war has failed, the government merely claims more powers to fight it more aggressively.
Eliot Ness and his colleagues raided supply lines, manufacturing hubs, and warehouses, but alcohol consumption was still legal. You didn't have armed-to-the-teeth cops breaking down the doors of private homes the way they do now for people suspected of consensual drug crimes. During prohibition, doctors could prescribe alcohol as medication. Today, federal SWAT teams storm medical marijuana clinics and terrorize their patients, thanks to the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Gonzales v. Raich, which allowed the federal government to prevent a dying woman from possessing medical marijuana, solely for her own use, to treat the symptoms of her illnesses, even though the voters of California had determined that she should be left alone.
When he first visited the United States in 1921, Albert Einstein wrote of America's ban on booze: "The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law... For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced."
That's as true today as it was then.
Radley Balko is a senior editor at reason. This article originally appeared at FoxNews.com.
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By ETHAN A. NADELMANN
Today is the 75th anniversary of that blessed day in 1933 when Utah became the 36th and deciding state to ratify the 21st amendment, thereby repealing the 18th amendment. This ended the nation's disastrous experiment with alcohol prohibition.
Corbis
Celebrating the end of alcohol prohibition, Dec. 5, 1933.
It's already shaping up as a day of celebration, with parties planned, bars prepping for recession-defying rounds of drinks, and newspapers set to publish cocktail recipes concocted especially for the day.
But let's hope it also serves as a day of reflection. We should consider why our forebears rejoiced at the relegalization of a powerful drug long associated with bountiful pleasure and pain, and consider too the lessons for our time.
The Americans who voted in 1933 to repeal prohibition differed greatly in their reasons for overturning the system. But almost all agreed that the evils of failed suppression far outweighed the evils of alcohol consumption.
The change from just 15 years earlier, when most Americans saw alcohol as the root of the problem and voted to ban it, was dramatic. Prohibition's failure to create an Alcohol Free Society sank in quickly. Booze flowed as readily as before, but now it was illicit, filling criminal coffers at taxpayer expense.
Some opponents of prohibition pointed to Al Capone and increasing crime, violence and corruption. Others were troubled by the labeling of tens of millions of Americans as criminals, overflowing prisons, and the consequent broadening of disrespect for the law. Americans were disquieted by dangerous expansions of federal police powers, encroachments on individual liberties, increasing government expenditure devoted to enforcing the prohibition laws, and the billions in forgone tax revenues. And still others were disturbed by the specter of so many citizens blinded, paralyzed and killed by poisonous moonshine and industrial alcohol.
Supporters of prohibition blamed the consumers, and some went so far as to argue that those who violated the laws deserved whatever ills befell them. But by 1933, most Americans blamed prohibition itself.
When repeal came, it was not just with the support of those with a taste for alcohol, but also those who disliked and even hated it but could no longer ignore the dreadful consequences of a failed prohibition. They saw what most Americans still fail to see today: That a failed drug prohibition can cause greater harm than the drug it was intended to banish.
Consider the consequences of drug prohibition today: 500,000 people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails for nonviolent drug-law violations; 1.8 million drug arrests last year; tens of billions of taxpayer dollars expended annually to fund a drug war that 76% of Americans say has failed; millions now marked for life as former drug felons; many thousands dying each year from drug overdoses that have more to do with prohibitionist policies than the drugs themselves, and tens of thousands more needlessly infected with AIDS and Hepatitis C because those same policies undermine and block responsible public-health policies.
And look abroad. At Afghanistan, where a third or more of the national economy is both beneficiary and victim of the failed global drug prohibition regime. At Mexico, which makes Chicago under Al Capone look like a day in the park. And elsewhere in Latin America, where prohibition-related crime, violence and corruption undermine civil authority and public safety, and mindless drug eradication campaigns wreak environmental havoc.
All this, and much more, are the consequences not of drugs per se but of prohibitionist policies that have failed for too long and that can never succeed in an open society, given the lessons of history. Perhaps a totalitarian American could do better, but at what cost to our most fundamental values?
Why did our forebears wise up so quickly while Americans today still struggle with sorting out the consequences of drug misuse from those of drug prohibition?
It's not because alcohol is any less dangerous than the drugs that are banned today. Marijuana, by comparison, is relatively harmless: little association with violent behavior, no chance of dying from an overdose, and not nearly as dangerous as alcohol if one misuses it or becomes addicted. Most of heroin's dangers are more a consequence of its prohibition than the drug's distinctive properties. That's why 70% of Swiss voters approved a referendum this past weekend endorsing the government's provision of pharmaceutical heroin to addicts who could not quit their addictions by other means. It is also why a growing number of other countries, including Canada, are doing likewise.
Yes, the speedy drugs -- cocaine, methamphetamine and other illicit stimulants -- present more of a problem. But not to the extent that their prohibition is justifiable while alcohol's is not. The real difference is that alcohol is the devil we know, while these others are the devils we don't. Most Americans in 1933 could recall a time before prohibition, which tempered their fears. But few Americans now can recall the decades when the illicit drugs of today were sold and consumed legally. If they could, a post-prohibition future might prove less alarming.
But there's nothing like a depression, or maybe even a full-blown recession, to make taxpayers question the price of their prejudices. That's what ultimately hastened prohibition's repeal, and it's why we're sure to see a more vigorous debate than ever before about ending marijuana prohibition, rolling back other drug war excesses, and even contemplating far-reaching alternatives to drug prohibition.
Perhaps the greatest reassurance for those who quake at the prospect of repealing contemporary drug prohibitions can be found in the era of prohibition outside of America. Other nations, including Britain, Australia and the Netherlands, were equally concerned with the problems of drink and eager for solutions. However, most opted against prohibition and for strict controls that kept alcohol legal but restricted its availability, taxed it heavily, and otherwise discouraged its use. The results included ample revenues for government coffers, criminals frustrated by the lack of easy profits, and declines in the consumption and misuse of alcohol that compared favorably with trends in the United States.
Is President-elect Barack Obama going to commemorate Repeal Day today? I'm not holding my breath. Nor do I expect him to do much to reform the nation's drug laws apart from making good on a few of the commitments he made during the campaign: repealing the harshest drug sentences, removing federal bans on funding needle-exchange programs to reduce AIDS, giving medical marijuana a fair chance to prove itself, and supporting treatment alternatives for low-level drug offenders.
But there's one more thing he can do: Promote vigorous and informed debate in this domain as in all others. The worst prohibition, after all, is a prohibition on thinking.
Mr. Nadelmann is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.
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JOSE DE CORDOBA
MEXICO CITY -- As drug violence spirals out of control in Mexico, a commission led by three former Latin American heads of state blasted the U.S.-led drug war as a failure that is pushing Latin American societies to the breaking point.
"The available evidence indicates that the war on drugs is a failed war," said former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in a conference call with reporters from Rio de Janeiro. "We have to move from this approach to another one."
The commission, headed by Mr. Cardoso and former presidents Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and César Gaviria of Colombia, says Latin American governments as well as the U.S. must break what they say is a policy "taboo" and re-examine U.S.-inspired antidrugs efforts. The panel recommends that governments consider measures including decriminalizing the use of marijuana.
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Associated Press
Mexico has been besieged by drug violence amid a two-year government crackdown.
The report, by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, is the latest to question the U.S.'s emphasis on punitive measures to deal with illegal drug use and the criminal violence that accompanies it. A recent Brookings Institution study concluded that despite interdiction and eradication efforts, the world's governments haven't been able to significantly decrease the supply of drugs, while punitive methods haven't succeeded in lowering drug use.
John Walters, former director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said, "It's not true that we've lost or can't do anything about the drug problem," and cited security improvements in Colombia.
President Barack Obama has yet to appoint a successor to Mr. Walters. A spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy said he couldn't comment on speculation over the appointment of a new director.
According to a Democratic official familiar with the process, Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske is under consideration for an administration job, most likely to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
The three former presidents who head the commission are political conservatives who have confronted in their home countries the violence and corruption that accompany drug trafficking.
The report warned that the U.S.-style antidrug strategy was putting the region's fragile democratic institutions at risk and corrupting "judicial systems, governments, the political system and especially the police forces."
The report comes as drug violence is engulfing Mexico, which has become the key transit point for cocaine traffic to the U.S. Decapitation of rival drug traffickers has become common as cartels try to intimidate one another.
Mr. Walters said increased violence in border areas of Mexico was partly a result of criminal organizations compensating for reduced income from the supply of drugs by turning to other activities, such as people-smuggling, and continuing to fight over turf.
U.S. law-enforcement officials -- as well as some of their counterparts in Mexico -- say the explosion in violence indicates progress in the war on drugs as organizations under pressure are clashing.
"If the drug effort were failing there would be no violence," a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. There is violence "because these guys are flailing. We're taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now."
Latin American governments have largely followed U.S. advice in trying to stop the flow of drugs from the point of origin. The policy has had little effect.
In Colombia, billions of dollars in U.S. aid have helped the military regain control from the hands of drug-financed communist guerrillas and lower crime, but the help hasn't dented the amount of drugs flowing from Colombia.
In the conference call, Mr. Gaviria said the U.S. approach to narcotics -- based on treating drug consumption as a crime -- had failed. Latin America, he said, should adapt a more European approach, based on treating drug addiction as a health problem.
—David Luhnow, Louise Radnofsky and Evan Perez contributed to this article.
Write to José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com
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By FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO, CéSAR GAVIRIA and ERNESTO ZEDILLO
The war on drugs has failed. And it's high time to replace an ineffective strategy with more humane and efficient drug policies. This is the central message of the report by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy we presented to the public recently in Rio de Janeiro.
AP
A soldier stands next to packages containing marijuana at an army base in Cali, Colombia, August 2008.
Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalization of consumption simply haven't worked. Violence and the organized crime associated with the narcotics trade remain critical problems in our countries. Latin America remains the world's largest exporter of cocaine and cannabis, and is fast becoming a major supplier of opium and heroin. Today, we are further than ever from the goal of eradicating drugs.
Over the last 30 years, Colombia implemented all conceivable measures to fight the drug trade in a massive effort where the benefits were not proportional to the resources invested. Despite the country's achievements in lowering levels of violence and crime, the areas of illegal cultivation are again expanding. In Mexico -- another epicenter of drug trafficking -- narcotics-related violence has claimed more than 5,000 lives in the past year alone.
The revision of U.S.-inspired drug policies is urgent in light of the rising levels of violence and corruption associated with narcotics. The alarming power of the drug cartels is leading to a criminalization of politics and a politicization of crime. And the corruption of the judicial and political system is undermining the foundations of democracy in several Latin American countries.
The first step in the search for alternative solutions is to acknowledge the disastrous consequences of current policies. Next, we must shatter the taboos that inhibit public debate about drugs in our societies. Antinarcotic policies are firmly rooted in prejudices and fears that sometimes bear little relation to reality. The association of drugs with crime segregates addicts in closed circles where they become even more exposed to organized crime.
In order to drastically reduce the harm caused by narcotics, the long-term solution is to reduce demand for drugs in the main consumer countries. To move in this direction, it is essential to differentiate among illicit substances according to the harm they inflict on people's health, and the harm drugs cause to the social fabric.
In this spirit, we propose a paradigm shift in drug policies based on three guiding principles: Reduce the harm caused by drugs, decrease drug consumption through education, and aggressively combat organized crime. To translate this new paradigm into action we must start by changing the status of addicts from drug buyers in the illegal market to patients cared for by the public-health system.
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We also propose the careful evaluation, from a public-health standpoint, of the possibility of decriminalizing the possession of cannabis for personal use. Cannabis is by far the most widely used drug in Latin America, and we acknowledge that its consumption has an adverse impact on health. But the available empirical evidence shows that the hazards caused by cannabis are similar to the harm caused by alcohol or tobacco.
If we want to effectively curb drug use, we should look to the campaign against tobacco consumption. The success of this campaign illustrates the effectiveness of prevention campaigns based on clear language and arguments consistent with individual experience. Likewise, statements by former addicts about the dangers of drugs will be far more compelling to current users than threats of repression or virtuous exhortations against drug use.
Such educational campaigns must be targeted at youth, by far the largest contingent of users and of those killed in the drug wars. The campaigns should also stress each person's responsibility toward the rising violence and corruption associated with the narcotics trade. By treating consumption as a matter of public health, we will enable police to focus their efforts on the critical issue: the fight against organized crime.
A growing number of political, civic and cultural leaders, mindful of the failure of our current drug policy, have publicly called for a major policy shift. Creating alternative policies is the task of many: educators, health professionals, spiritual leaders and policy makers. Each country's search for new policies must be consistent with its history and culture. But to be effective, the new paradigm must focus on health and education -- not repression.
Drugs are a threat that cuts across borders, which is why Latin America must establish dialogue with the United States and the European Union to develop workable alternatives to the war on drugs. Both the U.S. and the EU share responsibility for the problems faced by our countries, since their domestic markets are the main consumers of the drugs produced in Latin America.
The inauguration of President Barack Obama presents a unique opportunity for Latin America and the U.S. to engage in a substantive dialogue on issues of common concern, such as the reduction of domestic consumption and the control of arms sales, especially across the U.S.-Mexico border. Latin America should also pursue dialogue with the EU, asking European countries to renew their commitment to the reduction of domestic consumption and learning from their experiences with reducing the health hazards caused by drugs.
The time to act is now, and the way forward lies in strengthening partnerships to deal with a global problem that affects us all.
Mr. Cardoso is the former president of Brazil. Mr. Gaviria is a former president of Colombia. Mr. Zedillo is a former president of Mexico.
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How to stop the drug wars
Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution
Illustration by Noma Bar
A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.
That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.
Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.
“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.
The evidence of failure
Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.
This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.
Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.
Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.
Al Capone, but on a global scale
Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.
The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and “harm reduction” (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of “soft” drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.
Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.
Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.
That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.
There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the state’s job to stop them from doing so.
What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.
By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts—a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.
A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?
This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article). Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13237193
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BTW I would like to note my approval of the BO Administration's decision to respect States' right to decriminalize pot.
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BTW I would like to note my approval of the BO Administration's decision to respect States' right to decriminalize pot.
Yeah, if he were to stop drug prohibition madness it'd change my opinion of him significantly.
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When the Mexican Drug Trade Hits the Border
April 15, 2009
By Fred Burton and Ben West
For several years now, STRATFOR has been closely monitoring the growing violence in Mexico and its links to the drug trade. In December, our cartel report assessed the situation in Mexico, and two weeks ago we looked closely at the networks that control the flow of drugs through Central America. This week, we turn our attention to the border to see the dynamics at work there and how U.S. gangs are involved in the action.
The nature of narcotics trafficking changes as shipments near the border. As in any supply chain, shipments become smaller as they reach the retail level, requiring more people to be involved in the operation. While Mexican cartels do have representatives in cities across the United States to oversee networks there, local gangs get involved in the actual distribution of the narcotics.
While there are still many gaps in the understanding of how U.S. gangs interface with Mexican cartels to move drugs around the United States and finally sell them on the retail market, we do know some of the details of gang involvement.
Trafficking vs. Distribution
Though the drug trade as a whole is highly complex, the underlying concept is as simple as getting narcotics from South America to the consuming markets — chief among them the United States, which is the world’s largest drug market. Traffickers use Central America and Mexico as a pipeline to move their goods north. The objective of the Latin American smuggler is to get as much tonnage as possible from Colombia, Peru and Bolivia to the lucrative American market and avoid interdictions by authorities along the way.
However, as narcotic shipments near the U.S.-Mexican border, wholesale trafficking turns into the more micro process of retail distribution. In southern Mexico, drug traffickers move product north in bulk, but as shipments cross the U.S. border, wholesale shipments are broken down into smaller parcels in order to hedge against interdiction and prepare the product for the end user. One way to think about the difference in tactics between trafficking drugs in Central America and Mexico and distributing drugs in the United States is to imagine a company like UPS or FedEx. Shipping air cargo from, say, New York to Los Angeles requires different resources than delivering packages to individual homes in southern California. Several tons of freight from the New York area can be quickly flown to the Los Angeles area. But as the cargo gets closer to its final destination, it is broken up into smaller loads that are shipped via tractor trailer to distribution centers around the region, and finally divided further into discrete packages carried in parcel trucks to individual homes.
Click to enlarge
As products move through the supply chain, they require more specific handling and detailed knowledge of an area, which requires more manpower. The same, more or less, can be said for drug shipments. This can be seen in interdiction reports. When narcotics are intercepted traversing South America into Mexico, they can be measured in tons; as they cross the border into the United States, seizures are reported in kilograms; and by the time products are picked up on the streets of U.S. cities, the narcotics have been divided into packages measured in grams. To reflect this difference, we will refer to the movement of drugs south of the border as trafficking and the movement of drugs north of the border as distributing.
As narcotics approach the border, law enforcement scrutiny and the risk of interdiction also increase, so drug traffickers have to be creative when it comes to moving their products. The constant game of cat-and-mouse makes drug trafficking a very dynamic business, with tactics and specific routes constantly changing to take advantage of any angle that presents itself.
The only certainties are that drugs and people will move from south to north, and that money and weapons will move from north to south. But the specific nature and corridors of those movements are constantly in flux as traffickers innovate in their attempts to stay ahead of the police in a very Darwinian environment. The traffickers employ all forms of movement imaginable, including:
Tunneling under border fences into safe houses on the U.S. side.
Traversing the desert on foot with 50-pound packs of narcotics. (Dirt bikes, ATVs and pack mules are also used.)
Driving across the border by fording the Rio Grande, using ramps to get over fences, cutting through fences or driving through open areas.
Using densely vegetated portions of the riverbank as dead drops.
Floating narcotics across isolated stretches of the river.
Flying small aircraft near the ground to avoid radar.
Concealing narcotics in private vehicles, personal possessions and in or on the bodies of persons who are crossing legally at ports of entry.
Bribing border officials in order to pass through checkpoints.
Hiding narcotics on cross-border trains.
Hiding narcotics in tractor trailers carrying otherwise legitimate loads.
Using boats along the Gulf coast.
Using human “mules” to smuggle narcotics aboard commercial aircraft in their luggage or bodies.
Shipping narcotics via mail or parcel service.
These methods are not mutually exclusive, and organizations may use any combination at the same time. New ways to move the product are constantly emerging.
Once the narcotics are moved into the United States, drug distributors use networks of safe houses, which are sometimes operated by people with direct connections to the Mexican cartels, sometimes by local or regional gang members, and sometimes by individual entrepreneurs. North of the border, distributors still must maneuver around checkpoints, either by avoiding them or by bribing the officials who work there. While these checkpoints certainly result in seizures, they can only slow or reroute the flow of drugs. Hub cities like Atlanta service a large region of smaller drug dealers who act as individual couriers in delivering small amounts of narcotics to their customers.
It is a numbers game for drug traffickers and distributors alike, since it is inevitable that smugglers and shipments will be intercepted by law enforcement somewhere along the supply chain. Those whose loads are interdicted more often struggle to keep prices low and stay competitive. On the other hand, paying heavy corruption fees or taking extra precautions to ensure that more of your product makes it through also raises the cost of moving the product. Successful traffickers and distributors must be able to strike a balance between protecting their shipments and accepting losses. This requires a high degree of pragmatism and rationality.
Local Gangs
While the Mexican cartels do have people in the United States, they do not have enough people so positioned to handle the increased workload of distributing narcotics at the retail level. A wide range of skill sets is required. Some of the tactics involved in moving shipments across the border require skilled workers, such as pilots, while U.S. gang members along the border serve as middlemen and retail distributors. Other aspects of the operation call for people with expertise in manipulating corrupt officials and recruiting human intelligence sources, while a large part of the process simply involves saturating the system with massive numbers of expendable, low-skilled smugglers who are desperate for the money.
The U.S. gangs are crucial in filling the cartel gap north of the border. Members of these border gangs typically are young men who are willing to break the law, looking for quick cash and already plugged in to a network of similar young men, which enables them to recruit others to meet the manpower demand. They are also typically tied to Mexico through family connections, dual citizenship and the simple geographic fact that they live so close to the border. However, the U.S. gangs do not constitute formal extensions of the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations. Border gangs developed on their own, have their own histories, traditions, structures and turf, and they remain independent. They are also involved in more than just drug trafficking and distribution, including property crime, racketeering and kidnapping. Their involvement in narcotics is similar to that of a contractor who can provide certain services, such as labor and protection, while drugs move across gang territory, but drug money is not usually their sole source of income.
Click to enlarge
These gangs come in many shapes and sizes. Motorcycle gangs like the Mongols and Bandidos have chapters all along the southwestern U.S. border and, while not known to actually carry narcotics across the border into the United States, they are frequently involved in distributing smaller loads to various markets across the country to supplement their income from other illegal activities.
Street gangs are present in virtually every U.S. city and town of significant size along the border and are obvious pools of labor for distributing narcotics once they hit the United States. The largest of these street gangs are MS-13 and the Mexican Mafia. MS-13 has an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 members worldwide, about 25 percent of whom are in the United States. MS-13 is unique among U.S. gangs in that it is involved in trafficking narcotics through Central America and Mexico as well as in distributing narcotics in the United States. The Mexican Mafia works with allied gangs in the American Southwest to control large swaths of territory along both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. These gangs are organized to interact directly with traffickers in Mexico and oversee transborder shipments as well as distribution inside the United States.
Prison gangs such as the Barrio Azteca and the Texas Syndicate reach far beyond the prison fence. Membership in a prison gang typically means that, at one point, the member was in prison, where he joined the gang. But there is a wide network of ex-prisoner gang members on the outside involved in criminal activities, including drug smuggling, which is one of the most accessible ways for a gang member to make money when he is released from prison.
Operating underneath the big gang players are hundreds of smaller city gangs in neighborhoods all along the border. These gangs are typically involved in property theft, drug dealing, turf battles and other forms of street crime that can be handled by local police. However, even these gangs can become involved in cross-border smuggling; for example, the Wonderboys in San Luis, Ariz., are known to smuggle marijuana, methamphetamine and cocaine across the border.
Gangs like the Wonderboys also target illegal immigrants coming across the border and steal any valuable personal items or cash they may have on them. The targeting of illegal immigrants coming into the United States is common all across the border, with many gangs specializing in kidnapping newly arrived immigrants and demanding ransoms from their families. These gangs are responsible for the record level of kidnapping reported in places like Phoenix, where 368 abductions were reported in 2008. Afraid to notify law enforcement out of a fear of being deported, many families of abducted immigrants somehow come up with the money to secure their family member’s release.
Drug distribution is by far the most lucrative illicit business along the border, and the competition for money leads to a very pragmatic interface between the U.S. border gangs and the drug cartels in Mexico. Handoffs from Mexican traffickers to U.S. distributors are made based upon reliability and price. While territorial rivalries between drug traffickers have led to thousands of deaths in Mexico, these Mexican rivalries do not appear to be spilling over into the U.S. border gangs, who are engaged in their own rivalries, feuds and acts of violence. Nor do the more gruesome aspects of violence in Mexico, such as torture and beheadings, although there are indications that grenades that were once part of cartel arsenals are finding their way to U.S. gangs. In dealing with the Mexican cartels, U.S. gangs — and cartels in turn — exhibit no small amount of business pragmatism. U.S. gangs can serve more than one cartel, which appears to be fine with the cartels, who really have no choice in the matter. They need these retail distribution services north of the border in order to make a profit.
Likewise, U.S. gangs are in the drug business to make money, not to enhance the power of any particular cartel in Mexico. As such, U.S. gangs do not want to limit their business opportunities by aligning themselves to any one cartel. Smaller city gangs that control less territory are more limited geographically in terms of which cartels they can work with. The Wonderboys in Arizona, for example, must deal exclusively with the Sinaloa cartel because the cartel’s turf south of the border encompasses the gang’s relative sliver of turf to the north. However, larger gangs like the Mexican Mafia control much broader swaths of territory and can deal with more than one cartel.
The expanse of geography controlled by the handful of cartels in Mexico simply does not match up with the territory controlled by the many gangs on the U.S. side. Stricter law enforcement is one reason U.S. border gangs have not consolidated to gain control over more turf. While corruption is a growing problem along the U.S. side of the border, it still has not risen to the level that it has in northern Mexico. Another reason for the asymmetry is the different nature of drug movements north of the border. As discussed earlier, moving narcotics in the United States has everything to do with distributing retail quantities of drugs to consumers spread over a broad geographic area, a model that requires more feet on the ground than the trafficking that takes place in Mexico.
Assassins’ Gate
Because the drug distribution network in the United States is so large, it is impossible for any one criminal organization to control all of it. U.S. gangs fill the role of middleman to move drugs around, and they are entrusted with large shipments of narcotics worth millions of dollars. Obviously, the cartels need a way to keep these gangs honest.
One effective way is to have an enforcement arm in place. This is where U.S.-based assassins come in. More tightly connected to the cartels than the gangs are, these assassins are not usually members of a gang. In fact, the cartels prefer that their assassins not be in a gang so that their loyalties will be to the cartels, and so they will be less likely to have criminal records or attract law enforcement attention because of everyday gang activity.
Cartels invest quite a bit in training these hit men to operate in the United States. Often they are trained in Mexico, then sent back across to serve as a kind of “sleeper cell” until they are tapped to take out a delinquent U.S. drug dealer. The frequency and ease with which Americans travel to and from Mexico covers any suspicion that might be raised.
The Gaps
The U.S.-Mexican border is a dynamic place, with competition over drug routes and the quest for cash destabilizing northern Mexico and straining local and state law enforcement on the U.S. side. Putting pressure on the people who are active in the border drug trade has so far only inspired others to innovate and adapt to the challenging environment by becoming more innovative and pragmatic.
And there is still so much we do not know. The exact nature of the relationship between Mexican cartels and U.S. gangs is very murky, and it appears to be handled on such an individual basis that making generalizations is difficult. Another intelligence gap is how deeply involved the cartels are in the U.S. distribution network. As mentioned earlier, the network expands as it becomes more retail in nature, but the profit margins also expand, making it an attractive target for cartel takeover. Finally, while we know that gangs are instrumental in distributing narcotics in the United States, it is unclear how much of the cross-border smuggling they control. Is this vital, risky endeavor completely controlled by cartels and gatekeeper organizations based in Mexico, or do U.S. gangs on the distribution side have more say? STRATFOR will continue to monitor these issues as Mexico’s dynamic cartels continue to evolve.
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Wichita Witch Hunt
Harvey A. Silverglate, 09.01.09, 4:15 PM ET
No good deed goes unpunished when a private citizen is up against the federal drug warriors--those members of the Department of Justice who have been seeking, with increasing success in recent decades, to effectively control the practice of pain relief medicine. But a current drama being played out in federal court in Kansas portends an even darker turn in the DOJ's war--a private citizen is being threatened with prosecution for seeking to raise public and news media consciousness of the Feds' war against doctors and patients.
The current contretemps in Wichita has its roots in 2002 when Sean Greenwood, who for more than a decade suffered from a rare but debilitating connective tissue disorder, finally found a remedy. William Hurwitz, a Virginia doctor, prescribed the high doses of pain relief medicine necessary for Greenwood to be able to function day-to-day.
Yet when federal agents raided Hurwitz's clinic in 2003 and charged the pain management specialist with illegal drug trafficking, Greenwood's short-lived return to normalcy ended. He couldn't find another doctor willing to treat his pain--the chances were too good that the "narcs" and the federal prosecutors who work with them would assert impossibly vague federal criminal drug laws. Three years later, Greenwood died from a brain hemorrhage, likely brought on by the blood pressure build-up from years of untreated pain.
Greenwood's wife, Siobhan Reynolds, decided to fight back. In 2003 she founded the Pain Relief Network (PRN), a group of activists, doctors and patients who oppose the federal government's tyranny over pain relief specialists.
Now, the PRN's campaign to raise public awareness of pain-doctor prosecutions has made Reynolds herself the target of drug warriors. Prosecutors in Wichita have asked a federal grand jury to decide whether Reynolds engaged in "obstruction of justice" for her role in seeking to create public awareness, and to otherwise assist the defense, in an ongoing prosecution of Kansas pain relief providers. The feds' message is clear: In the pursuit of pain doctors, private citizen-activists--not just physicians--will be targeted.
For Reynolds, the script of the Kansas prosecution has become all too familiar: The feds announced a 34-count indictment at a December 2007 press conference. Local media dutifully reported the charges with minimal scrutiny and the accused--Dr. Stephen Schneider and his wife, Linda, a nurse--were convicted in the court of public opinion before their trial even began.
In such an atmosphere, it is very difficult to make the point that physicians engaged in the good faith practice of medicine are being second-guessed--not by fellow physicians, but by the federal government--and punished under the criminal law for administering what the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) of the Department of Justice considers more narcotics than is necessary to alleviate a patient's pain.
When pain doctors administer too much of a controlled substance, or do so knowing that they will be diverted to narcotic addicts, they are deemed no longer engaged in the legitimate practice of medicine. But the dividing line is far from clear and not subject to universal agreement even within the profession. Any patient in need of relief can, over time, develop a chemical dependence on a lawful drug--much like a diabetic becomes dependent on insulin. And, once a treatment regimen begins, many patients' tolerance to the drug increases. Thus, to produce the same analgesic effect, doctors sometimes need to increase the prescribed amount, and that amount varies from person to person.
It is notoriously difficult even for trained physicians to distinguish an addict's abuse from a patient's dependence. Nonetheless, federal narcotics officers have increasingly terrorized physicians, wielding the criminal law and harsh prison terms to punish perceived violators. Since 2003, over 400 doctors have been criminally prosecuted by the federal government, according to the DEA. One result is that chronic pain patients in this country are routinely under-medicated.
The litany of abusive prosecutorial tactics could fill a volume. A "win-at-all-costs" mentality dominates federal prosecutors and drug agents involved in these cases. After a Miami Beach doctor was acquitted of 141 counts of illegally prescribing pain medication in March 2009, federal district court Judge Alan Gold rebuked the prosecution for introducing government informants--former patients of the doctor who were cooperating to avoid their own prosecution--as impartial witnesses at trial.
Improprieties galore marked the prosecution of Dr. Hurwitz. Before his trial in federal court in Virginia in 2004, the DEA published a "Frequently Asked Questions" (FAQ) pamphlet for prescription pain medications. In a remarkable admission, the DEA wrote that confusion over dependence and addiction "can lead to inappropriate targeting of practitioners and patients for investigation and prosecution." Yet on the eve trial, the DEA, realizing that Hurwitz could rely on this government-published pamphlet to defend his treatment methods, withdrew the FAQ from its Web site. Winning the case proved more important than facilitating sound medical practice. Hurwitz was convicted.
In Kansas, it appears that zealous prosecutors are targeting not only the doctors, but also their public advocates. When Reynolds wrote op-eds in local newspapers and granted interviews to other media outlets, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tanya Treadway attempted to impose a gag order on her public advocacy. The district judge correctly denied this extraordinary request.
Undeterred, Treadway filed on March 27 a subpoena demanding a broad range of documents and records, obviously hoping to deter the peripatetic pain relief advocate, or even target her for a criminal trial of her own. Just what was Reynolds' suspected criminal activity?
"Obstruction of justice" is the subpoena's listed offense being investigated, but some of the requested records could, in no possible way, prove such a crime. The prosecutor has demanded copies of an ominous-sounding "movie," which, in reality, is a PRN-produced documentary showing the plight of pain physicians. Also requested were records relating to a billboard Reynolds paid to have erected over a busy Wichita highway. It read: "Dr. Schneider never killed anyone." Suddenly, a rather ordinary exercise in free speech and political activism became evidence of an obstruction of justice.
On Sept. 3, a federal judge will decide whether to enforce this subpoena, which Reynolds' lawyers have sought to invalidate on free speech and other grounds. The citizen's liberty to loudly and publicly oppose the drug warriors' long-running reign of terror on the medical profession and its patients should not be in question. Rather, the question should be how the federal government has managed to accumulate the power to punish doctors who, in good faith, are attempting to alleviate excruciating pain in their patients.
Harvey A. Silverglate, author of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (Encounter Books, 2009), is a criminal defense and civil liberties attorney and author in Cambridge, Mass.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/01/siobhan-reynolds-pain-relief-network-wichita-justice-department-opinions-contributors-harvey-a-silverglate.html
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I've been a police officer for 12 years and i've finally come to the conclusion that the WODs is a failure, and ultimately misguided. I still pursue drug offenders, because in the present situation drug and crime are inextricably tied together so that fighting drugs IS fighting crime (because of the illegal nature of drugs and what is required to get them).......but it doesn't have to be that way if we eliminate the profit of drugs via some measure of decriminalization.
It's a costlier and costlier endeavor to pursue the WOD, with no hope of winning. There has to be another way.
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BTW I would like to note my approval of the BO Administration's decision to respect States' right to decriminalize pot.
Yeah, if he were to stop drug prohibition madness it'd change my opinion of him significantly.
He would give lip service to it, but ultimately doing so would actually serve the purpose of shrinking the power of the federal government, and that's one thing you can count on BO ever doing!
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sgtmac, crafty, bbg, I agree at least part way with you guys. Consumer level amounts should be a state right to legislate and I would like the move to be toward decriminalization rather than legalization. As much of a free marketer that I pretend to be, I am not interested in seeing pot commercials on prime time, just as I don't appreciate actors discussing erection issues during prime time with my daughter. I don't want to see big government start to profit off selective legalization with taxation the way they do with gambling and smoking. As long as they do there will still be a black market. I don't see highly addictive and highly destructive drugs (meth for example) in the same light as those that we consider no worse than alcohol. Unfortunately, the really effective pain meds are highly addictive.
The feds may still have a role regarding large amounts crossing state and federal boundaries.
What is grown on your property, consumed on your property and harms no one off of your property should already be legal under the highest law of the land.
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Another “Victory” in the War on Drugs
Posted by Daniel J. Mitchell
A grandmother in Indiana has been arrested for purchasing cold medicine. We can all sleep more safely now that this hardened criminal has been taught a lesson. The Terre Haute News reports:
When Sally Harpold bought cold medicine for her family back in March, she never dreamed that four months later she would end up in handcuffs.
Now, Harpold is trying to clear her name of criminal charges, and she is speaking out in hopes that a law will change so others won’t endure the same embarrassment she still is facing.
…Harpold is a grandmother of triplets who bought one box of Zyrtec-D cold medicine for her husband at a Rockville pharmacy. Less than seven days later, she bought a box of Mucinex-D cold medicine for her adult daughter at a Clinton pharmacy, thereby purchasing 3.6 grams total of pseudoephedrine in a week’s time.
Those two purchases put her in violation of Indiana law 35-48-4-14.7, which restricts the sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, or PSE, products to no more than 3.0 grams within any seven-day period.
When the police came knocking at the door of Harpold’s Parke County residence on July 30, she was arrested on a Vermillion County warrant for a class-C misdemeanor, which carries a sentence of up to 60 days in jail and up to a $500 fine.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/09/28/another-victory-in-the-war-on-drugs/
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http://reason.com/blog/2009/10/08/probation-and-a-fine-the-sente
Reason Magazine
Probation, Fine, and Financial Ruin: The Penalty for Not Committing a Crime
Jacob Sullum | October 8, 2009
Last month a federal judge sentenced Rosa Martinez, a physician in Yakima, Washington, to a year's probation and a $1,000 fine for Medicare and Medicaid fraud. The fraud occurred when a physician's assistant in Martinez's practice mistakenly charged the government for her services at the physician's rate, which is allowed only when the supervising physician is present, which Martinez wasn't. She said she was unaware of the rule but accepted responsibility for the errors because they occurred on her watch. The overcharges totaled $22. No, that's not a typo. "Clearly," U.S. District Judge Fred Van Sickle said, "this is not any type of overt crime." Noting Martinez's dedication to her patients and her reputation for high-quality pro bono work, Van Sickle declined the prosecution's request to impose community service as part of her sentence, saying, "The kind of work you do is such that imposing some form of community service would not make sense."
This pathetic outcome is all that is left of a federal prosecution that threatened Martinez with up to 20 years in federal prison, portraying her as a taxpayer-bilking drug pusher. The case, launched three years ago by U.S. Attorney James A. McDevitt, stemmed from Martinez's willingness to treat people with histories of illegal drug use for pain, a practice that is not only legal but ethically required. In 2007 a jury acquitted her of prescribing narcotics outside the scope of medicine, failed to reach verdicts on related charges of unlawfully distributing narcotics, and convicted her on eight felony counts of health care fraud. After the trial, Judge Van Sickle dismissed the distribution charges and ordered a new trial on the fraud charges. The Yakima Herald-Republic reports that a medical billing expert hired by Martinez's lawyer "concluded that the convictions were based on misrepresentations by government auditors." According to the lawyer, "it gutted the prosecution's case," which is why McDevitt agreed to a plea bargain instead of retrying Martinez. As for Martinez, she wanted to keep fighting, but she "had run out of money" and assets, having "lost her home in the process of defending herself against the charges."
Keep this case in mind the next time you read about an alleged "pill mill" operator who faces a daunting list of charges that cast every aspect of his practice in a sinister light. More on drug control vs. pain control here.
[Thanks to the Pain Relief Network's Siobhan Renolds for the tip.]
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Ottawa
When George P. Shultz took office as Ronald Reagan's secretary of state in 1982, his first trip out of the country was to Canada. His second was to Mexico.
"Foreign policy starts with your neighborhood," he told me in an interview here in the Canadian capital last week. "I have always believed that and Ronald Reagan believed that very firmly. In many ways he had [the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement] in his mind. He paid a lot of attention to both Mexico and Canada, as I did."
Mr. Shultz, now a co-chair of the North American Forum—which pulls together members of the business and government community for an annual pow-wow—is still paying a lot of attention to the American neighborhood.
These days that means taking seriously the problem of drug-trafficking violence on the Mexican border. "It's gotten to the point that . . . you've got to be worried about what's happening to Mexico, and you've got to realize that the money that's financing all that comes from the United States in terms of the profits from the illegal drugs. It's not healthy for us, let alone Mexico, to have this violence taking place."
Mr. Shultz carries weight on this issue, in part because he has been thinking about it critically for decades and listening to our neighbors' viewpoints. He has long harbored skepticism about interdiction as a solution to drug abuse in the U.S. Those doubts were prescient.
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Members of the Mexican Federal Police inspect an unmarked grave in Ciudad Juarez, a major distribution center for drugs bound for the United States.
.In 1988, Mr. Shultz recalls, he traveled to Mexico for the inauguration of President Carlos Salinas. After the ceremony they had a private conversation. "He said to me that he understood it was important for Mexico to do what it could to stop the flow of drugs into the United States. But he wanted me to know that the funds to support all that traffic came from the United States to Mexico." Mr. Shultz says that around the same time he heard a very similar refrain from the president of Colombia, Virgilio Barco.
Mr. Salinas also warned the secretary that Americans should realize they are not immune: "This problem will spill across. Drug gangs will eventually be in the United States."
In recent years, Mr. Shultz says, "There has come to be more and more of a realization of the nature of the problem. I thought it was interesting six or eight months ago, that three former presidents of Latin American countries, President Zedillo from Mexico, President Cardoso from Brazil and President Gaviria from Colombia made a report basically saying that we have to look at this problem in all of its dimensions if we are going to get anywhere with it. And we have to realize what its origins are."
Yet it is also true that those presidents spoke up only after they left office. I asked him if there is any hope of policy leadership from those in office. "There is a certain amount of evidence that people are realizing the nature of the problem and have more of a willingness to try to deal with it."
But, he says, we still have not created the "political space" necessary to raise the issue in public. "Right now if you are in politics you can't discuss the problem. It's just poison. The result is that we have this giant problem that is tearing Mexico apart . . . and we have plenty of problems here too and we're really not having a debate about it."
Mr. Shultz is a strong proponent of education to reduce demand. "If we want to get serious about this issue, we should start with a gigantic campaign to persuade people that drugs are bad for them. And it has to be based on solid factual material. You can't try to mislead people."
The Americas in the News
Get the latest information in Spanish from The Wall Street Journal's Americas page.
.Yet that's been difficult because of the taboo. Mr. Shultz recalls what happened shortly after he left government, when his view that interdiction is not the solution came up after a speech to a Stanford alumni group.
Then, as now, he believed that we need to look at the problem from an economic perspective and understand what happens when there is high demand for a prohibited substance. When his comment hit the press, he says he "was inundated with letters. Ninety-eight percent of them agreed with me and over half of those people said I'm glad you said it, but I wouldn't dare say it. The most poignant comment was from [a former member of the House of Representatives] who wrote and said I was glad to see your statement. I said that a few years ago and that's why I'm no longer a congressman!"
I asked Mr. Shultz if he thinks a more sensible approach might come from the states. He says "people can express themselves a little better at the state level." And, with respect to some liberalization of the drug-possession laws at the state level, "I regard these developments as a distinctive statement by people that the present system is not working very well and they want to change it."
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Very interesting. A huge problem with no easy solution. Nothing really gets legalized in this country as lemonade stands get shut down for licensing issues and tobacco gets sold on the black market as taxation goes sky high, so I think that can be a misnomer.
I can see decriminalization for consumers to a point as Crafty described in this thread agreeing with Obama. I can see reevaluating all penalties and trying to get them in proportion to the amount of damage done to others. A renewed campaign with honest science to inform people of risks makes sense.
An advantage of legalization would be labeling for potency and content, but that really isn't legalization if buying and selling as it is known today is still a violation of all FTC (and IRS) laws.
Here is a question (or two) for our libertarian friends here in favor of full legalization of drugs, what would you do then about prescription drugs? Cocaine you can buy and sell but for Valium or Viagra you need a Doctor and a Pharmacy reaping fees and profits? That doesn't make sense. And further, if could trust ourselves with medicines, why can't we trust we the people with 'medical' devices and procedures? Today that can be a felony with years in jail.
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I use to work a phone hotline with a couple pharmacologists employed by a major drug company who often spoke about how hard it is to define the line between psychoactive/recreational and medicinal drug use. A lot seems to depend on the headset of the users, speculation that mirrors my experience a working drug rescue: thing going on inside a person's head strongly informed how they reacted to a given psychoactive substance. As such, I'm not sure there's much return to be found in defining the line between a pharmacological and recreational reaction and indeed, substances like Viagra blur that line quite significantly.
Perhaps the solution is as simple as invoking different standards of consumer/civil liability: substances self-prescribed for recreational purposes are not covered by consumer liability laws so long as the substance conforms to its strength/adulterant labeling, while physician prescribed substances are fully covered by consumer protections. I'm sure other schema could be arrived at, I just have a hard time envisioning one that would harm more folks or enrich our enemies better than the counterproductive status quo. Not sure I understand the medical device questions, but suspect it would also work under the consumer protection standards I note above.
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That's rather subtle. I like it.
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Al Qaeda linked to rogue aviation network
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60C3E820100113
TIMBUKTU, Mali (Reuters) - In early 2008, an official at the U.S. Department
of Homeland Security sent a report to his superiors detailing what he called
"the most significant development in the criminal exploitation of aircraft
since 9/11."
The document warned that a growing fleet of rogue jet aircraft was regularly
crisscrossing the Atlantic Ocean. On one end of the air route, it said, are
cocaine-producing areas in the Andes controlled by the leftist Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia. On the other are some of West Africa's most
unstable countries.
The report, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, was ignored, and the
problem has since escalated into what security officials in several
countries describe as a global security threat.
The clandestine fleet has grown to include twin-engine turboprops, executive
jets and retired Boeing 727s that are flying multi-ton loads of cocaine and
possibly weapons to an area in Africa where factions of al Qaeda are
believed to be facilitating the smuggling of drugs to Europe, the officials
say.
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has been held responsible for car and
suicide bombings in Algeria and Mauritania.
Gunmen and bandits with links to AQIM have also stepped up kidnappings of
Europeans for ransom, who are then passed on to AQIM factions seeking ransom
payments.
The aircraft hopscotch across South American countries, picking up tons of
cocaine and jet fuel, officials say. They then soar across the Atlantic to
West Africa and the Sahel, where the drugs are funneled across the Sahara
Desert and into Europe.
An examination of documents and interviews with officials in the United
States and three West African nations suggest that at least 10 aircraft have
been discovered using this air route since 2006. Officials warn that many of
these aircraft were detected purely by chance. They caution that the real
number involved in the networks is likely considerably higher.
Alexandre Schmidt, regional representative for West and Central Africa for
the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, cautioned in Dakar this week that the
aviation network has expanded in the past 12 months and now likely includes
several Boeing 727 aircraft.
"When you have this high capacity for transporting drugs into West Africa,
this means that you have the capacity to transport as well other goods, so
it is definitely a threat to security anywhere in the world," said Schmidt.
The "other goods" officials are most worried about are weapons that militant
organizations can smuggle on the jet aircraft. A Boeing 727 can handle up to
10 tons of cargo.
The U.S. official who wrote the report for the Department of Homeland
Security said the al Qaeda connection was unclear at the time.
The official is a counter-narcotics aviation expert who asked to remain
anonymous as he is not authorized to speak on the record. He said he was
dismayed by the lack of attention to the matter since he wrote the report.
"You've got an established terrorist connection on this side of the
Atlantic. Now on the Africa side you have the al Qaeda connection and it's
extremely disturbing and a little bit mystifying that it's not one of the
top priorities of the government," he said.
Since the September 11 attacks, the security system for passenger air
traffic has been ratcheted up in the United States and throughout much of
the rest of the world, with the latest measures imposed just weeks ago after
a failed bomb attempt on a Detroit-bound plane on December 25.
"The bad guys have responded with their own aviation network that is out
there everyday flying loads and moving contraband," said the official, "and
the government seems to be oblivious to it."
The upshot, he said, is that militant organizations -- including groups like
the FARC and al Qaeda -- have the "power to move people and material and
contraband anywhere around the world with a couple of fuel stops."
The lucrative drug trade is already having a deleterious impact on West
African nations. Local authorities told Reuters they are increasingly
outgunned and unable to stop the smugglers.
And significantly, many experts say, the drug trafficking is bringing in
huge revenues to groups that say they are part of al Qaeda. It's swelling
not just their coffers but also their ranks, they say, as drug money is
becoming an effective recruiting tool in some of the world's most
desperately poor regions.
U.S. President Barack Obama has chided his intelligence officials for not
pooling information "to connect those dots" to prevent threats from being
realized. But these dots, scattered across two continents like flaring
traces on a radar screen, remain largely unconnected and the fleets
themselves are still flying.
THE AFRICAN CONNECTION
The deadly cocaine trade always follows the money, and its cash-flush
traffickers seek out the routes that are the mostly lightly policed.
Beset by corruption and poverty, weak countries across West Africa have
become staging platforms for transporting between 30 tons and 100 tons of
cocaine each year that ends up in Europe, according to U.N. estimates.
Drug trafficking, though on a much smaller scale, has existed here and
elsewhere on the continent since at least the late 1990s, according to local
authorities and U.S. enforcement officials.
Earlier this decade, sea interdictions were stepped up. So smugglers
developed an air fleet that is able to transport tons of cocaine from the
Andes to African nations that include Mauritania, Mali, Sierra Leone and
Guinea Bissau.What these countries have in common are numerous disused
landing strips and makeshift runways -- most without radar or police
presence. Guinea Bissau has no aviation radar at all. As fleets grew, so,
too, did the drug trade.
The DEA says all aircraft seized in West Africa had departed Venezuela. That
nation's location on the Caribbean and Atlantic seaboard of South America
makes it an ideal takeoff place for drug flights bound for Africa, they say.
A number of aircraft have been retrofitted with additional fuel tanks to
allow in-flight refueling -- a technique innovated by Mexico's drug
smugglers. (Cartel pilots there have been known to stretch an aircraft's
flight range by putting a water mattress filled with aviation fuel in the
cabin, then stacking cargoes of marijuana bundles on top to act as an
improvised fuel pump.)
Ploys used by the cartel aviators to mask the flights include fraudulent
pilot certificates, false registration documents and altered tail numbers to
steer clear of law enforcement lookout lists, investigators say. Some
aircraft have also been found without air-worthiness certificates or log
books. When smugglers are forced to abandon them, they torch them to destroy
forensic and other evidence like serial numbers.
The evidence suggests that some Africa-bound cocaine jets also file a
regional flight plan to avoid arousing suspicion from investigators. They
then subsequently change them at the last minute, confident that their
switch will go undetected.
One Gulfstream II jet, waiting with its engines running to take on 2.3 tons
of cocaine at Margarita Island in Venezuela, requested a last-minute flight
plan change to war-ravaged Sierra Leone in West Africa. It was nabbed
moments later by Venezuelan troops, the report seen by Reuters showed.
Once airborne, the planes soar to altitudes used by commercial jets. They
have little fear of interdiction as there is no long-range radar coverage
over the Atlantic. Current detection efforts by U.S. authorities, using
fixed radar and P3 aircraft, are limited to traditional Caribbean and north
Atlantic air and marine transit corridors.
The aircraft land at airports, disused runways or improvised air strips in
Africa. One bearing a false Red Cross emblem touched down without
authorization onto an unlit strip at Lungi International Airport in Sierra
Leone in 2008, according to a U.N. report.
Late last year a Boeing 727 landed on an improvised runway using the
hard-packed sand of a Tuareg camel caravan route in Mali, where local
officials said smugglers offloaded between 2 and 10 tons of cocaine before
dousing the jet with fuel and burning it after it failed to take off again.
For years, traffickers in Mexico have bribed officials to allow them to land
and offload cocaine flights at commercial airports. That's now happening in
Africa as well. In July 2008, troops in coup-prone Guinea Bissau secured
Bissau international airport to allow an unscheduled cocaine flight to land,
according to Edmundo Mendes, a director with the Judicial Police.
"When we got there, the soldiers were protecting the aircraft," said Mendes,
who tried to nab the Gulfstream II jet packed with an estimated $50 million
in cocaine but was blocked by the military.
"The soldiers verbally threatened us," he said. The cocaine was never
recovered. Just last week, Reuters photographed two aircraft at Osvaldo
Vieira International Airport in Guinea Bissau -- one had been dispatched by
traffickers from Senegal to try to repair the other, a Gulfstream II jet,
after it developed mechanical problems. Police seized the second aircraft.
FLYING BLIND
One of the clearest indications of how much this aviation network has
advanced was the discovery, on November 2, of the burned out fuselage of an
aging Boeing 727. Local authorities found it resting on its side in rolling
sands in Mali. In several ways, the use of such an aircraft marks a
significant advance for smugglers.
Boeing jetliners, like the one discovered in Mali, can fly a cargo of
several tons into remote areas. They also require a three-man crew -- a
pilot, co pilot and flight engineer, primarily to manage the complex fuel
system dating from an era before automation.
Hundreds of miles to the west, in the sultry, former Portuguese colony of
Guinea Bissau, national Interpol director Calvario Ahukharie said several
abandoned airfields, including strips used at one time by the Portuguese
military, had recently been restored by "drug mafias" for illicit flights.
"In the past, the planes coming from Latin America usually landed at Bissau
airport," Ahukharie said as a generator churned the feeble air-conditioning
in his office during one of the city's frequent blackouts.
"But now they land at airports in southern and eastern Bissau where the
judicial police have no presence."
Ahukharie said drug flights are landing at Cacine, in eastern Bissau, and
Bubaque in the Bijagos Archipelago, a chain of more than 80 islands off the
Atlantic coast. Interpol said it hears about the flights from locals,
although they have been unable to seize aircraft, citing a lack of
resources.
The drug trade, by both air and sea, has already had a devastating impact on
Guinea Bissau. A dispute over trafficking has been linked to the
assassination of the military chief of staff, General Batista Tagme Na Wai
in 2009. Hours later, the country's president, Joao Bernardo Vieira, was
hacked to death by machete in his home.
Asked how serious the issue of air trafficking remained for Guinea Bissau,
Ahukharie was unambiguous: "The problem is grave."
The situation is potentially worse in the Sahel-Sahara, where cocaine is
arriving by the ton. There it is fed into well-established overland
trafficking routes across the Sahara where government influence is limited
and where factions of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb have become
increasingly active.
The group, previously known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat,
is raising millions of dollars from the kidnap of Europeans.
Analysts say militants strike deals of convenience with Tuareg rebels and
smugglers of arms, cigarettes and drugs. According to a growing pattern of
evidence, the group may now be deriving hefty revenues from facilitating the
smuggling of FARC-made cocaine to the shores of Europe.
UNHOLY ALLIANCE
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UNHOLY ALLIANCE
In December, Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the UN Office on
Drugs and Crime, told a special session of the UN Security Council that
drugs were being traded by "terrorists and anti-government forces" to fund
their operations from the Andes, to Asia and the African Sahel.
"In the past, trade across the Sahara was by caravans," he said. "Today it
is larger in size, faster at delivery and more high-tech, as evidenced by
the debris of a Boeing 727 found on November 2nd in the Gao region of
Mali -- an area affected by insurgency and terrorism."
Just days later, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials arrested
three West African men following a sting operation in Ghana. The men, all
from Mali, were extradited to New York on December 16 on drug trafficking
and terrorism charges.
Oumar Issa, Harouna Toure, and Idriss Abelrahman are accused of plotting to
transport cocaine across Africa with the intent to support al Qaeda, its
local affiliate AQIM and the FARC. The charges provided evidence of what the
DEA's top official in Colombia described to a Reuters reporter as "an unholy
alliance between South American narco-terrorists and Islamic extremists."
Some experts are skeptical, however, that the men are any more than
criminals. They questioned whether the drug dealers oversold their al Qaeda
connections to get their hands on the cocaine.
In its criminal complaint, the DEA said Toure had led an armed group
affiliated to al Qaeda that could move the cocaine from Ghana through North
Africa to Spain for a fee of $2,000 per kilo for transportation and
protection.
Toure discussed two different overland routes with an undercover informant.
One was through Algeria and Morocco; the other via Algeria to Libya. He told
the informer that the group had worked with al Qaeda to transport between
one and two tons of hashish to Tunisia, as well as smuggle Pakistani, Indian
and Bangladeshi migrants into Spain.
In any event, AQIM has been gaining in notoriety. Security analysts warn
that cash stemming from the trans-Saharan coke trade could transform the
organization -- a small, agile group whose southern-Sahel wing is estimated
to number between 100 and 200 men -- into a more potent threat in the region
that stretches from Mauritania to Niger. It is an area with huge foreign
investments in oil, mining and a possible trans-Sahara gas pipeline.
"These groups are going to have a lot more money than they've had before,
and I think you are going to see them with much more sophisticated weapons,"
said Douglas Farah, a senior fellow at the International Assessment Strategy
Center, a Washington based security think-tank.
NARCOTIC INDUSTRIAL DEPOT
The Timbuktu region covers more than a third of northern Mali, where the
parched, scrubby Sahel shades into the endless, rolling dunes of the Sahara
Desert. It is an area several times the size of Switzerland, much of it
beyond state control.
Moulaye Haidara, the customs official, said the sharp influx of cocaine by
air has transformed the area into an "industrial depot" for cocaine.
Sitting in a cool, dark, mud-brick office building in the city where nomadic
Tuareg mingle with Arabs and African Songhay, Fulani and Mande peoples,
Haidara expresses alarm at the challenge local law enforcement faces.
Using profits from the trade, the smugglers have already bought "automatic
weapons, and they are very determined," Haidara said. He added that they
"call themselves Al Qaeda," though he believes the group had nothing to do
with religion, but used it as "an ideological base."
Local authorities say four-wheel-drive Toyota SUVs outfitted with GPS
navigation equipment and satellite telephones are standard issue for
smugglers. Residents say traffickers deflate the tires to gain better
traction on the loose Saharan sands, and can travel at speeds of up to 70
miles-per-hour in convoys along routes to North Africa.
Timbuktu governor, Colonel Mamadou Mangara, said he believes traffickers
have air-conditioned tents that enable them to operate in areas of the
Sahara where summer temperatures are so fierce that they "scorch your
shoes." He added that the army lacked such equipment. A growing number of
people in the impoverished region, where transport by donkey cart and camel
are still common, are being drawn to the trade. They can earn 4 to 5 million
CFA Francs (roughly $9-11,000) on just one coke run.
"Smuggling can be attractive to people here who can make only $100 or $200 a
month," said Mohamed Ag Hamalek, a Tuareg tourist guide in Timbuktu, whose
family until recently earned their keep hauling rock salt by camel train,
using the stars to navigate the Sahara.
Haidara described northern Mali as a no-go area for the customs service.
"There is now a red line across northern Mali, nobody can go there," he
said, sketching a map of the country on a scrap of paper with a ballpoint
pen. "If you go there with feeble means ... you don't come back."
TWO-WAY TRADE
Speaking in Dakar this week, Schmidt, the U.N. official, said that growing
clandestine air traffic required urgent action on the part of the
international community.
"This should be the highest concern for governments ... For West African
countries, for West European countries, for Russia and the U.S., this should
be very high on the agenda," he said.
Stopping the trade, as the traffickers are undoubtedly aware, is a huge
challenge -- diplomatically, structurally and economically.
Venezuela, the takeoff or refueling point for aircraft making the trip, has
a confrontational relationship with Colombia, where President Alvaro Uribe
has focused on crushing the FARC's 45-year-old insurgency. The nation's
leftist leader, Hugo Chavez, won't allow in the DEA to work in the country.
In a measure of his hostility to Washington, he scrambled two F16 fighter
jets last week to intercept an American P3 aircraft -- a plane used to seek
out and track drug traffickers -- which he said had twice violated
Venezuelan airspace. He says the United States and Colombia are using
anti-drug operations as a cover for a planned invasion of his oil-rich
country. Washington and Bogota dismiss the allegation.
In terms of curbing trafficking, the DEA has by far the largest overseas
presence of any U.S. federal law enforcement, with 83 offices in 62
countries. But it is spread thin in Africa where it has just four offices --
in Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and South Africa -- though there are plans to open
a fifth office in Kenya.
Law enforcement agencies from Europe as well as Interpol are also at work to
curb the trade. But locally, officials are quick to point out that Africa is
losing the war on drugs.
The most glaring problem, as Mali's example shows, is a lack of resources.
The only arrests made in connection with the Boeing came days after it was
found in the desert -- and those incarcerated turned out to be desert nomads
cannibalizing the plane's aluminum skin, probably to make cooking pots. They
were soon released.
Police in Guinea Bissau, meanwhile, told Reuters they have few guns, no
money for gas for vehicles given by donor governments and no high security
prison to hold criminals.
Corruption is also a problem. The army has freed several traffickers charged
or detained by authorities seeking to tackle the problem, police and rights
groups said.
Serious questions remain about why Malian authorities took so long to report
the Boeing's discovery to the international law enforcement community.
What is particularly worrying to U.S. interests is that the networks of
aircraft are not just flying one way -- hauling coke to Africa from Latin
America -- but are also flying back to the Americas.
The internal Department of Homeland Security memorandum reviewed by Reuters
cited one instance in which an aircraft from Africa landed in Mexico with
passengers and unexamined cargo.
The Gulfstream II jet arrived in Cancun, by way of Margarita Island,
Venezuela, en route from Africa. The aircraft, which was on an aviation
watch list, carried just two passengers. One was a U.S. national with no
luggage, the other a citizen of the Republic of Congo with a diplomatic
passport and a briefcase, which was not searched.
"The obvious huge concern is that you have a transportation system that is
capable of transporting tons of cocaine from west to east," said the
aviation specialist who wrote the Homeland Security report.
"But it's reckless to assume that nothing is coming back, and when there's
terrorist organizations on either side of this pipeline, it should be a high
priority to find out what is coming back on those airplanes."
(Additional reporting by Tiemoko Diallo in Mali, Alberto Dabo in Guinea
Bissau and Hugh Bronstein in Colombia, editing by Jim Impoco and Claudia
Parsons)
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The War on Drugs Is Doomed
Strong demand and the high profits that are the result of prohibition make illegal trafficking unstoppable.
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
They say that the first step in dealing with a problem is acknowledging that you have one. It is therefore good news that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will lead a delegation to Mexico tomorrow to talk with officials there about efforts to fight the mob violence that is being generated in Mexico by the war on drugs. U.S. recognition of this shared problem is healthy.
But that's where the good news is likely to end.
Violence along the border has skyrocketed ever since Mexican President Felipe Calderón decided to confront the illegal drug cartels that operate there. Some 7,000 troops now patrol Juárez, a city of roughly one million. Yet even militarization has not delivered the peace. The reason is simple enough: The source of the problem is not Mexican supply. It is American demand coupled with prohibition.
It is doubtful that this will be acknowledged at tomorrow's meeting. The drug-warrior industry, which includes both the private-sector and a massive government bureaucracy devoted to "enforcement," has an enormous economic incentive to keep the war raging. In Washington politics both groups have substantial influence. So it is likely that we are going to get further plans to turn Juárez into a police state with the promise that more guns, tanks, helicopters and informants can stop Mexican gangsters from shoving drugs up American noses.
Last week's gangland-style slaying of an unborn baby and three adults who had ties to the U.S. Consulate in Juárez has drawn attention to Mrs. Clinton's trip. The incident stunned Americans. Yet tragic as they were, statistically those four deaths don't create even a blip on the body-count chart. The running tally of drug-trafficking linked deaths in Juárez since December 2006 is more than 5,350. There has also been a high cost to the city's economy as investors and tourists have turned away.
Even with low odds of a productive outcome, though, Mexico can't afford to write off tomorrow's meeting. It is an opportunity that, handled correctly, could provide for a teachable moment. I suggest that one or two of Mexico's very fine economists trained at the University of Chicago by Milton Friedman sit down with President Obama's team to explain a few things about how markets work. They could begin by outlining the path that a worthless weed travels to become the funding for the cartel's firepower. In this Econ 101 lesson, students will learn how the lion's share of the profit is in getting the stuff over the U.S. border to the American consumer. In football terms, Juárez is first and goal.
Mexico hasn't always been an important playing field for drug cartels. For many years cocaine traffickers used the Caribbean to get their product to their customers in the largest and richest market in the hemisphere. But when the U.S. redoubled its efforts to block shipments traveling by sea, the entrepreneurs shifted to land routes through Central America and Mexico.
Mexican traffickers now handle cocaine but traditional marijuana smuggling is their cash cow, despite competition from stateside growers. In a February 2009 interview, then-Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora told me that half of the cartel's annual income was derived from marijuana.
This is especially troubling for Mexican law enforcement because marijuana use, through medical marijuana outlets and general social acceptance, has become de facto legal in the U.S., and demand is robust. The upshot is that consumption is cool while production, trafficking and distribution are organized-crime activities. This is what I called in a previous column, "a stimulus plan for Mexican gangsters."
In much of the world, where institutions are weak and folks are poor, the high value that prohibition puts into drugs means that the thugs rule. Mr. Medina Mora told me in the same 2009 interview that Mexico estimated the annual cash flow from U.S. drug consumers to Mexico at around $10 billion, which of course explains why the cartels are so well armed and also able to grease the system. It also explains why Juárez is today a killing field.
Supply warriors might have a better argument if the billions of dollars spent defoliating the Colombian jungle, chasing fast boats and shooting down airplanes for the past four decades had reduced drug use. Yet despite passing victories like taking out 1980s kingpin Pablo Escobar and countless other drug lords since then, narcotics are still widely available in the U.S. and some segment of American society remains enthusiastic about using them. In some places terrorist organizations like Colombia's FARC rebels and al Qaeda have replaced traditional cartels.
There is one ray of hope for innocent victims of the war on drugs. Last week the Journal reported that Drug Enforcement Administration agents were questioning members of an El Paso gang about their possible involvement in the recent killings in Juárez. If the escalation is now spilling over into the U.S., Americans may finally have to face their role in the mess. Mrs. Clinton's mission will only add value if it reflects awareness of that reality.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703580904575132153106546066.html
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Obama and Clinton both want to use the firepower of the Mexican cartels to justify sabotaging American gun rights through international treaties-- as if the kinds of guns they use were available to US citizens! No automatics at my store! No grenade launchers either! And who originally created and trained the Zetas? The US government! But I digress , , ,
They also want to use the drug wars in Mexico to justify enabling more immigration and work visas for Mexicans; the better to have more amnesty to create tens of millions of new voters for the Progressive agenda.
On a lighter note, here's this. Did Thomas Jefferson get stoned?
"1806 July "I remember seeing in your greenhouse a plant of a couple of feet
height in a pot the fragrance of which (from its gummy bud if I recollect
rightly) was peculiarly agreeable to me..." (Jefferson to W.Hamilton,
Betts, Garden Book, 323)"
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"They also want to use the drug wars in Mexico to justify enabling more immigration and work visas for Mexicans; the better to have more amnesty to create tens of millions of new voters for the Progressive agenda."
Crafty,
This is my biggest fear. The liberals have already worked out the details to sell the immigration "reform" to the public. The libs will go to great lengths to point out this is NOT "amnesty".
The immigrants will have to pay fines, pay back taxes, say they are sorry, and go on some sort of path to citizenship yadda yadda yadda.
This is coming soon and will also go through the reconciliation business. ASAP.
All the Dem voters will want it - not just Latinos but all of them because they know it strengthens their voting base.
I do not think the Republicans are able to persuade Blacks that this is NOT in their long term interests though it clearly isn't. The interests of Blacks are not the *same* as illega immigrants. But for expediency of short term common voting interests - the liberal agenda - they and most of their leaders will go for it.
Blacks apparently don't want to see they too are giving away their country. All they see is that this is some sort of social justice - transfer of wealth - reparations etc... In the long run they are shooting themselves in the foot in my opinion. I really feel Blacks have the same interests as Whites (and all legal citizens - Latinos/Asians etc.) on this issue.
If this goes through before November - and I would be shocked if the libs don't shove this through the same way - our country could well be gone forever.
Again the immigrants of today are NOT the same as our forefathers.
They come here and many immediately game the system. The rest of us who know this appear to be unable to do anything about it.
Has any one else noticed that the pundits in the MSM consistently sit with *smirks* on their faces whenever the topic of Obama's agenda being "socialist/communist" comes up? Again if not for Fox, talk radio their is no truth out there.
I just don"t get how som mnny in our country are for this. What a nightmare. Our own media has drank the cool aid and covers for the Phoney One.
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The Parable of Prohibition
A very bizarre chapter of history can teach us a lot.
By Johann Hari
Posted Thursday, June 3, 2010, at 10:03 AM ET
Since we first prowled the savannahs of Africa, human beings have displayed a few overpowering and ineradicable impulses—for food, for sex, and for drugs. Every human society has hunted for its short cuts to an altered state: The hunger for a chemical high, low, or pleasingly new shuffle sideways is universal. Peer back through history, and it's everywhere. Ovid said drug-induced ecstasy was a divine gift. The Chinese were brewing alcohol in prehistory and cultivating opium by 700 A.D. Cocaine was found in clay-pipe fragments from William Shakespeare's house. George Washington insisted American soldiers be given whiskey every day as part of their rations. Human history is filled with chemicals, come-downs, and hangovers.
And in every generation, there are moralists who try to douse this natural impulse in moral condemnation and burn it away. They believe that humans, stripped of their intoxicants, will become more rational or ethical or good. They point to the addicts and the overdoses and believe they reveal the true face—and the logical endpoint—of your order at the bar or your roll-up. And they believe we can be saved from ourselves, if only we choose to do it. Their vision holds an intoxicating promise of its own.
Their most famous achievement—the criminalization of alcohol in the United States between 1921 and 1933—is one of the great parables of modern history. Daniel Okrent's superb new history, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, shows how a coalition of mostly well-meaning, big-hearted people came together and changed the Constitution to ban booze. On the day it began, one of the movement's leaders, the former baseball hero turned evangelical preacher Billy Sunday, told his ecstatic congregation what the Dry New World would look like: "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever rent."
The story of the War on Alcohol has never needed to be told more urgently—because its grandchild, the War on Drugs, shares the same DNA. Okrent alludes to the parallel only briefly, on his final page, but it hangs over the book like old booze-fumes—and proves yet again Mark Twain's dictum: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
There was never an America without chemical highs. The Native Americans used hallucinogens routinely, and the ship that brought John Winthrop and the first Puritans to the continent carried three times more beer than water, along with 10,000 gallons of wine. It was immediately a society so soaked in alcohol that it makes your liver ache to read the raw statistics: By 1830, the average citizen drank seven gallons of pure alcohol a year. America was so hungry for highs that when there was a backlash against all this boozing, the temperance movement's initial proposal was that people should water down their alcohol with opium.
It's not hard to see how this fug of liquor caused problems, as well as pleasure—and the backlash was launched by a furious housewife from a small town in Ohio. One Sunday in 1874, Eliza Thompson—a mother to eight children, who had never spoken out on any public issue before—stood before the crowds at her church and announced that America would never be free or godly until the last whiskey bottle was emptied onto the dry earth. A huge crowd of women cheered: They believed their husbands were squandering their wages at the saloon. They marched as one to the nearest bar, where they all sank to their knees and prayed for the soul of its owner. They refused to leave until he repented. They worked in six-hour prayer shifts on the streets until the saloonkeeper finally appeared, head bowed, and agreed to shut it down. This prayer-athon then moved around to every alcohol-seller in the town. Within 10 days, only four of the original 13 remained, and the rebellion was spreading across the country.
It was women who led the first cry for Temperance, and it was women who made Prohibition happen. A woman called Carry Nation became a symbol of the movement when she traveled from bar to bar with an oversize hatchet and smashed them to pieces. Indeed, Prohibition was one of the first and most direct effects of expanding the vote. This is one of the first strange flecks of gray in this story. The proponents of Prohibition were primarily progressives—and some of the most admirable people in American history, from Susan B. Anthony to Frederick Douglas to Eugene V. Debs. The pioneers of American feminism believed alcohol was at the root of men's brutality toward women. The anti-slavery movement saw alcohol addiction as a new form of slavery, replacing leg irons with whiskey bottles. You can see the same left-wing prohibitionism today, when people like Al Sharpton say drugs must be criminalized because addiction does real harm in ghettos.
Of course, there were more obviously sinister proponents of Prohibition too, pressing progressives into weird alliances. The Ku Klux Klan said that "nigger gin" was the main reason that oppressed black people were prone to rebellion, and if you banned alcohol, they would become quiescent. An echo of this persists in America's current strain of prohibition. Powder cocaine and crack cocaine are equally harmful, but crack—which is disproportionately used by black people—carries much heavier jail sentences than powder cocaine, which is disproportionately used by white people.
It was in this context that the Anti-Saloon League rose to become the most powerful pressure group in American history and the only one to ever change the Constitution through peaceful political campaigning. It was begun by a little man called Wayne Wheeler, who was as dry as the Sahara and twice as overheated—and a political genius, maneuvering politicians of all parties into backing a ban. He threatened them by weaving together a coalition of evangelicals, feminists, racists, and lefties—the equivalent of herding Sarah Palin, the National Association of Women, David Duke, and Keith Olbermann into one unstoppable political force.
With the passage of the 18th Amendment in 1921, the dysfunctions of Prohibition began. When you ban a popular drug that millions of people want, it doesn't disappear. Instead, it is transferred from the legal economy into the hands of armed criminal gangs. Across America, gangsters rejoiced that they had just been handed one of the biggest markets in the country, and unleashed an armada of freighters, steamers, and even submarines to bring booze back. Nobody who wanted a drink went without. As the journalist Malcolm Bingay wrote, "It was absolutely impossible to get a drink, unless you walked at least ten feet and told the busy bartender in a voice loud enough for him to hear you above the uproar."
So if it didn't stop alcoholism, what did it achieve? The same as prohibition does today—a massive unleashing of criminality and violence. Gang wars broke out, with the members torturing and murdering one another first to gain control of and then to retain their patches. Thousands of ordinary citizens were caught in the crossfire. The icon of the new criminal class was Al Capone, a figure so fixed in our minds as the scar-faced King of Charismatic Crime, pursued by the rugged federal agent Eliot Ness, that Okrent's biographical details seem oddly puncturing. Capone was only 25 when he tortured his way to running Chicago's underworld. He was gone from the city by the age of 30 and a syphilitic corpse by 40. But he was an eloquent exponent of his own case, saying simply, "I give to the public what the public wants. I never had to send out high pressure salesmen. Why, I could never meet the demand."
By 1926, he and his fellow gangsters were making $3.6 billion a year—in 1926 money! To give some perspective, that was more than the entire expenditure of the U.S. government. The criminals could outbid and outgun the state. So they crippled the institutions of a democratic state and ruled, just as drug gangs do today in Mexico, Afghanistan, and ghettos from South Central Los Angeles to the banlieues of Paris. They have been handed a market so massive that they can tool up to intimidate everyone in their area, bribe many police and judges into submission, and achieve such a vast size, the honest police couldn't even begin to get them all. The late Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman said, "Al Capone epitomizes our earlier attempts at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this one."
One insight, more than any other, ripples down from Okrent's history to our own bout of prohibition. Armed criminal gangs don't fear prohibition: They love it. He has uncovered fascinating evidence that the criminal gangs sometimes financially supported dry politicians, precisely to keep it in place. They knew if it ended, most of organized crime in America would be bankrupted. So it's a nasty irony that prohibitionists try to present legalizers—then and now—as "the bootlegger's friend" or "the drug-dealer's ally." Precisely the opposite is the truth. Legalizers are the only people who can bankrupt and destroy the drug gangs, just as they destroyed Capone. Only the prohibitionists can keep them alive.
Once a product is controlled only by criminals, all safety controls vanish and the drug becomes far more deadly. After 1921, it became common to dilute and relabel poisonous industrial alcohol, which could still legally be bought, and sell it by the pint glass. This "rotgut" caused epidemics of paralysis and poisoning. For example, one single batch of bad booze permanently crippled 500 people in Wichita, Kan., in early 1927—a usual event. That year, 760 people were poisoned to death by bad booze in New York City alone. Wayne Wheeler persuaded the government not to remove fatal toxins from industrial alcohol, saying it was good to keep this "disincentive" in place.
Prohibition's flaws were so obvious that the politicians in charge privately admitted the law was self-defeating. Warren Harding brought $1,800 of booze with him to the White House, while Andrew Mellon—in charge of enforcing the law—called it "unworkable." Similarly, the last three presidents of the United States were recreational drug users in their youth. Once he ceased to be president, Bill Clinton called for the decriminalization of cannabis, and Obama probably will too. Yet in office, they continue to mouth prohibitionist platitudes about "eradicating drugs." They insist the rest of the world's leaders resist the calls for greater liberalization from their populations and instead "crack down" on the drug gangs—no matter how much violence it unleashes. Indeed, Obama recently praised Calderon for his "crackdown" on drugs by—with no apparent irony—calling him "Mexico's Eliot Ness." Obama should know that Ness came to regard his War on Alcohol as a disastrous failure, and he died a drunk himself—but drug prohibition addles politicians' brains.
By 1928, the failure of Prohibition was plain, yet its opponents were demoralized and despairing. It looked like an immovable part of the American political landscape, since it would require big majorities in every state to amend the Constitution again. Clarence Darrow wrote that "thirteen dry states with a population of less than New York State alone can prevent repeal until Haley's Comet returns," so "one might as well talk about taking a summer vacation of Mars."
Yet it happened. It happened suddenly and completely. Why? The answer is found in your wallet, with the hard cash. After the Great Crash, the government's revenues from income taxes collapsed by 60 percent in just three years, while the need for spending to stimulate the economy was skyrocketing. The U.S. government needed a new source of income, fast. The giant untaxed, unchecked alcohol industry suddenly looked like a giant pot of cash at the end of the prohibitionist rainbow. Could the same thing happen today, after our own Great Crash? The bankrupt state of California is about to hold a referendum to legalize and tax cannabis, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has pointed out that it could raise massive sums. Yes, history does rhyme.
Many people understandably worry that legalization would cause a huge rise in drug use, but the facts suggest this isn't the case. Portugal decriminalized the personal possession of all drugs in 2001, and—as a study by Glenn Greenwald for the Cato Institute found—it had almost no effect at all.* Indeed, drug use fell a little among the young. Similarly, Okrent says the end of alcohol prohibition "made it harder, not easier, to get a drink. ... Now there were closing hours and age limits, as well as a collection of geographic proscriptions that kept bars or package stores distant from schools, churches and hospitals." People didn't drink much more. The only change was that they didn't have to turn to armed criminal gangs for it, and they didn't end up swigging poison.
Who now defends alcohol prohibition? Is there a single person left? This echoing silence should suggest something to us. Ending drug prohibition seems like a huge heave, just as ending alcohol prohibition did. But when it is gone, when the drug gangs are a bankrupted memory, when drug addicts are treated not as immoral criminals but as ill people needing health care, who will grieve? American history is pocked by utopian movements that prefer glib wishful thinking over a hard scrutiny of reality, but they inevitably crest and crash in the end. Okrent's dazzling history leaves us with one whiskey-sharp insight above all others: The War on Alcohol and the War on Drugs failed because they were, beneath all the blather, a war on human nature.
http://www.slate.com/id/2255385/
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Here is a simple point about the limitations of legalization and criminalization that avoids the stigma of drugs and alcohol.
Car Seatbelts. 99.999 percent of the time, adults are better off wearing them while driving. It is now a crime to not wear a seatbelt. Despite the laws and despite common sense, how often do many of us not wear our seatbelt? How many thousands of people die per year because we do not remember to do the wise thing?
To paraphrase Alan Watts: We are going to accept the fact that there are always going to be people who do stupid things.
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The Sisyphean futility of it all , , ,
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ST. LOUIS — Seated at a hookah lounge in the Tower Grove district, Albert Kuo trained his lighter above a marbleized glass pipe stuffed with synthetic marijuana. Inhaling deeply, Mr. Kuo, an art student at an area college, singed the pipe’s leafy contents, emitting a musky cloud of smoke into the afternoon light. Mr. Kuo, 25, had gathered here with a small cohort of friends for what could be the last time they legally get high in Missouri on a substance known popularly as K2, a blend of herbs treated with synthetic marijuana.
“I know it’s not going to kill me,” said Mr. Kuo, who likened the drug’s effects to clove cigarettes. “It’s a waste of time, effort and money to ban something like this.”
On Tuesday, Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, signed a bill prohibiting possession of K2. Missouri is the nation’s eighth state this year to ban the substance, which has sent users to emergency rooms across the country complaining of everything from elevated heart rates and paranoia to vomiting and hallucinations.
Investigators blame the drug in at least one death, and this month, Gov. Mike Beebe of Arkansas, a Democrat, signed an emergency order banning the substance. Similar prohibitions are pending in at least six other states, including Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Ohio, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“It’s like a tidal wave,” said Ward Franz, the state representative who sponsored Missouri’s legislation. “It’s almost an epidemic. We’re seeing middle-school kids walking into stores and buying it.”
Often marketed as incense, K2 — which is also known as Spice, Demon or Genie — is sold openly in gas stations, head shops and, of course, online. It can sell for as much as $40 per gram. The substance is banned in many European countries, but by marketing it as incense and clearly stating that it is not for human consumption, domestic sellers have managed to evade federal regulation.
“Everybody knows it’s not incense,” said Barbara Carreno, a spokeswoman for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. “That’s done with a wink and a nod.”
First developed in the lab of a Clemson University chemist, John W. Huffman, K2’s active ingredients are synthetic cannabinoids — research-grade chemicals that were created for therapeutic purposes but can also mimic the narcotic effects of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. In a statement, Mr. Huffman said the chemicals were not intended for human use. He added that his lab had developed them for research purposes only, and that “their effects in humans have not been studied and they could very well have toxic effects.”
Nevertheless, pure forms of the chemical are available online, and investigators believe that many sellers are buying bulk quantities, mixing them with a potpourrilike blend of herbs and labeling the substance K2.
“It’s not like there’s one K2 distributor — everybody is making their own stuff, calling it K2 and selling it, which is the most unnerving aspect,” said Dr. Christopher Rosenbaum, an assistant professor of toxicology at the University of Massachusetts who is studying the effects of K2 in emergency room patients.
The American Association of Poison Control Centers reports that so far this year there have been 567 K2-related calls, up from 13 in 2009. But investigators add that no one is really certain what is in K2, and people are arriving at emergency rooms with symptoms that would not normally be associated with marijuana or a synthetic form of the drug.
“I don’t know how many people are going for a box of doughnuts after smoking K2, but they’re sure getting some other symptoms,” said Dr. Anthony Scalzo, a professor of emergency medicine at the St. Louis University who first reported a rise in K2-related cases and is collaborating with Dr. Rosenbaum in researching K2’s effects. “These are very anxious, agitated people that are requiring several doses of sedatives.”
Dr. Scalzo, who is also the medical director for the Missouri Poison Control Center, added that although tests had found cannabinoids in K2, it was unclear “whether the reaction we’re seeing is just because of dose effect, or if there’s something in there we haven’t found yet.”
That question remains at the center of an investigation into the death of David Rozga, an Iowa teenager who last month committed suicide shortly after smoking K2. Mr. Rozga, 18, had graduated from high school one week earlier and was planning to attend college in the fall.
According to the police report, Mr. Rozga smoked the substance with friends and then began “freaking out,” saying he was “going to hell.” He then returned to his parents’ house, grabbed a rifle from the family’s gun room and shot himself in the head.
“There was nothing in the investigation to show he was depressed or sad or anything,” said Detective Sgt. Brian Sher of the Indianola Police Department, who led the investigation. “I’ve seen it all. I don’t know what else to attribute it to. It has to be K2.”
But many users say they are undaunted by reports of negative reactions to the drug. K2 does not show up on drug tests, and users say that while they would like to know what is in it, they would take their chances if it means a clean urine test.
The Missouri ban, which goes into effect Aug. 28, prohibits several cannabinoids that investigators have found in K2 and related products. Nevertheless, investigators and researchers say that bans like the one in Missouri are little more than “Band-Aids” that street chemists can sidestep with a slight alteration to a chemical’s molecular structure.
“Once it goes illegal, I already have something to replace it with,” said Micah Riggs, who sells the product at his coffee shop in Kansas City. “There are hundreds of these synthetics, and we just go about it a couple of them at a time.”
Investigators say that a more effective ban might arise once the Drug Enforcement Administration completes its review of cannabinoids, placing them under the Controlled Substances Act. Currently, however, only one such substance is controlled under the act, though the agency has listed four others as “chemicals of concern.”
“It’s hard to keep up with everything,” said Ms. Carreno of the D.E.A., adding, “The process of scheduling something is thorough and time consuming, and there are a lot of gifted chemists out there.”
Meanwhile, states are largely on their own when it comes to controlling this new breed of synthetic cannabis, which often comes down to a game of cat-and-mouse where law enforcement agents, politicians, users and their families must formulate new responses as each iteration of a drug comes to market.
“Where does a parent go to get answers?” asked Mike Rozga, who said he learned of K2 only after his son’s death. “We talk to our kids about sex. We talk to our kids about drugs, and we talk to our kids about drinking and being responsible. But how can you talk to your kids about something you don’t even know about?”
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Anti-tobacco laws, education and taxes have cut smoking in adults from about 50% to about 20%. Are we better or worse off for these efforts as a country?
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So, you have changed your mind and now advocate the same approach to marijuana?
:lol:
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I have said before that my position is that for strategic purposes, I support legalization of drugs, understanding that very ugly consequences will result from that policy decision.
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I stand corrected. :-)
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http://www.safeaccessnow.org/section.php?id=69
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http://reason.com/blog/2010/11/01/the-most-dangerous-drug
Reason Magazine
The Most Dangerous Drug
Jacob Sullum | November 1, 2010
A new study in The Lancet rates the harmfulness of 20 psychoactive drugs according to 16 criteria and finds that alcohol comes out on top. Although that conclusion is generating headlines, it is not at all surprising, since alcohol is, by several important measures (including acute toxicity, impairment of driving ability, and the long-term health effects of heavy use), the most dangerous widely used intoxicant, and its abuse is also associated with violence, family breakdown, and social estrangement. A group of British drug experts gathered by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) rated alcohol higher than most or all of the other drugs for health damage, mortality, impairment of mental functioning, accidental injury, economic cost, loss of relationships, and negative impact on community. Over all, alcohol rated 72 points on a 100-point scale, compared to 55 for heroin, 54 for crack cocaine, and 33 for methamphetamine. Cannabis got a middling score of 20, while MDMA (Ecstasy), LSD, and psilocybin mushrooms were at the low end, with ratings of 9, 7, and 6, respectively.
(http://reason.com/assets/mc/jsullum/2010_11/drug-harms.jpg)
One can quibble with these judgments (some of that in a minute). But there is no question that the ISCD, which University of Bristol psychopharmacologist David Nutt organized after he was fired from his job as the government's chief drug adviser for excessively candid comparisons of cannabis and alcohol, has put more thought into its classification scheme that the British and U.S. governments put into theirs. As Leslie King, a co-author of the study, wryly observes, "What governments decide is illegal is not always based on science."
You could view the fact that distinctions between tolerated and proscribed drugs have never had a firm scientific basis as yet another reason why politicians should not be empowered to control the substances we put into our bodies. Or, if you are David Nutt, you could view it as a reason why they should consult experts like you before they try to do so. While Nutt seems to think that marijuana and psychedelics are too strictly controlled, for example, he also argues that alcoholic beverages are too cheap and too readily available. For him, that conclusion flows directly from the scientific evidence, although a closer examination might reveal some intervening value judgments.
Putting aside the issue of technocratic paternalism, there is an impressionistic aspect to many of the judgments underlying these drug scores. In the procedure used for the study, the authors write, "scores are often changed from those originally suggested as participants share their different experiences and revise their views." Sometimes these views are backed up by data, such as ratios of lethal to effective doses or survey results that indicate addiction rates, but often the evidence is more anecdotal. It also is not clear whether judgments about alcohol's harms were influenced by the fact that it is so widely consumed. As I read the study, the scores are supposed to be independent of use rates. But A.P. reports that "experts said alcohol scored so high because it is so widely used and has devastating consequences not only for drinkers but for those around them." Regarding social consequences, there is much room for interpretation about alcohol's causal role in domestic violence and other harmful behavior.
The scores may also exaggerate the intrinsic dangers of illegal drugs, since they do not distinguish between harms caused by drug use itself and harms caused by prohibition. "Many of the harms of drugs are affected by their availability and legal status," the authors note. "Ideally, a model needs to distinguish between the harms resulting directly from drug use and those resulting from the control system for that drug." The harm associated with heroin use, for example, is compounded by unpredictable purity, by artificially high prices that encourage injection, and by anti-paraphernalia policies that encourage needle sharing.
As usual, defenders of drinking are outraged by the comparison between alcohol and illegal drugs. Brigid Simmonds, chief executive of the British Beer & Pub Association, tells The Sun, "The vast majority of people know it's just not rational to say that enjoying a social beer with friends in the pub or glass of wine over dinner has the moral or societal equivalence of injecting heroin or smoking a crack pipe." Such reactions are based on the observation that the vast majority of drinkers are not alcoholics. Despite alcohol's very real dangers, they generally manage to consume it in a way that not only does not harm them or others but on balance enhances their lives. Here is the point that defensive drinkers like Simmonds miss: If this is possible with alcohol, it is possible with any intoxicant that large numbers of people have shown an interest in consuming. For more on that, see my book Saying Yes.
I discuss Nutt's drug-related deviance here, here, and here. Ron Bailey notes a previous Nutt-led study of drug dangers here. Brendan O'Neill cited Nutt in his 2009 attack on the "unholy alliance between alcohol prohibitionists and marijuana reformers." I discussed the potential and perils of comparing marijuana to alcohol in a 2010 book review.
[Thanks to Terry Michael for the tip.]
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After their bogus Iraq study, I trust nothing from the Lancet.
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Agreed.
I gather Prop 19, the marijuana initiative here in CA lost yesterday. Too bad, it was a chance to move towards sanity on this issue.
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Portugal has decriminalized possession of less than a 10 day supply of commonly abused drugs, resulting in a long study, the abstract for which follows. The whole piece is lengthy and well footnoted:
Abstract
The issue of decriminalizing illicit drugs is hotly debated, but is rarely subject to evidence-based analysis. This paper examines the case of Portugal, a nation that decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs on 1 July 2001. Drawing upon independent evaluations and interviews conducted with 13 key stakeholders in 2007 and 2009, it critically analyses the criminal justice and health impacts against trends from neighbouring Spain and Italy. It concludes that contrary to predictions, the Portuguese decriminalization did not lead to major increases in drug use. Indeed, evidence indicates reductions in problematic use, drug-related harms and criminal justice overcrowding. The article discusses these developments in the context of drug law debates and criminological discussions on late modern governance.
http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/6/999.full#ref-63
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BBG, thanks for posting. I prefer decriminalization (portugal) over legalization(that failed in Calif), but I don't like that they include all illicit drugs. I am thinking of meth but other illicit drugs or prescription drugs are dangerous or highly addictive and don't need more sanctioning, encouragement or tolerance. If penalties are absurd or disproportional, get them down to where the system can plea bargain an addict into treatment instead of wasting our limited space in jail.
Even if legalization is right, it isn't the focus we should have right now in terms of divisive social issues. I personally would not like to see full libertarian legalization with consequences for the addicts before I receive full libertarian freedom to not pay a damn penny for any of the choices that they make including drugs, food, shelter or healthcare.
OTOH, (I've posted this before but) whenever the Court determined that growing one pot plant on your own property for your own consumption is a form of interstate commerce started a constitutional problem much larger than drug use.
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OTOH, (I've posted this before but) whenever the Court determined that growing one pot plant on your own property for your own consumption is a form of interstate commerce started a constitutional problem much larger than drug use.
Very good point. It's one thing for a state to pass a law or not, another when there is no evidence of an intent to cross state lines or national borders.
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Even if legalization is right, it isn't the focus we should have right now in terms of divisive social issues. I personally would not like to see full libertarian legalization with consequences for the addicts before I receive full libertarian freedom to not pay a damn penny for any of the choices that they make including drugs, food, shelter or healthcare.
I understand the triage point, but with so many drug users in jail the drugs, food, shelter, or healthcare underwriting is something of a given. Combined with the law enforcement resources devoted to the drug war--as well as numerous other perverse incentives--I think a strong argument can be made that it's in our economic interests to end yet another example of failed prohibition.
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The Libertarian answer to this?
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=709882n
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/11/national/11meth.html
ULSA, Okla., July 8 - The Laura Dester Shelter here is licensed for 38 children, but at times in the past months it has housed 90, forcing siblings to double up in cots. It is supposed to be a 24-hour stopping point between troubled homes and foster care, but with foster homes backed up, children are staying weeks and sometimes months, making it more orphanage than shelter, a cacophony of need.
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Pat Childres, a volunteer at the Laura Dester Shelter, cuddling two children who are awaiting placement in foster homes.
Children awaiting foster placement were fed lunch by Leslie Beyer, left, and Theresa Boyd at the Laura Dester Shelter in Tulsa, Okla.
In a rocking chair, a volunteer uses one arm to feed a 5-day-old boy taken from his mother at birth, the other to placate a toddler who is wandering from adult to adult begging, "Bottle?" A 3-year-old who arrived at dawn shrieks as salve is rubbed on her to kill the lice.
This is a problem methamphetamine has made, a scene increasingly familiar across the country as the number of foster children rises rapidly in states hit hard by the drug, the overwhelming number of them, officials say, taken from parents who were using or making methamphetamine.
Oklahoma last year became the first state to ban over-the-counter sales of cold medicines that contain the crucial ingredient needed to make methamphetamine. Even so, the number of foster children in the state is up 16 percent from a year ago. In Kentucky, the numbers are up 12 percent, or 753 children, with only seven new homes.
In Oregon, 5,515 children entered the system in 2004, up from 4,946 the year before, and officials there say the caseload would be half what it is now if the methamphetamine problem suddenly went away. In Tennessee, state officials recently began tracking the number of children brought in because of methamphetamine, and it rose to 700 in 2004 from 400 in 2003.
While foster populations in cities rose because of so-called crack babies in the 1990's, methamphetamine is mostly a rural phenomenon, and it has created virtual orphans in areas without social service networks to support them. in Muskogee, an hour's drive south of here, a group is raising money to convert an old church into a shelter because there are none.
Officials say methamphetamine's particularly potent and destructive nature and the way it is often made in the home conspire against child welfare unlike any other drug.
It has become harder to attract and keep foster parents because the children of methamphetamine arrive with so many behavioral problems; they may not get into their beds at night because they are so used to sleeping on the floor, and they may resist toilet training because they are used to wearing dirty diapers.
"We used to think, you give these kids a good home and lots of love and they'll be O.K.," said Esther Rider-Salem, the manager of Child Protective Services programs for the State of Oklahoma. "This goes above and beyond anything we've seen."
Although the methamphetamine problem has existed for years, state officials here and elsewhere say the number of foster children created by it has spiked in the last year or two as growing awareness of the drug problem has prompted more lab raids, and more citizens reporting suspected methamphetamine use.
Nationwide, the Drug Enforcement Administration says that over the last five years 15,000 children were found at laboratories where methamphetamine was made. But that number vastly understates the problem, federal officials say, because it does not include children whose parents use methamphetamine but do not make it and because it relies on state reporting, which can be spotty.
On July 5, the National Association of Counties reported that 40 percent of child welfare officials surveyed nationwide said that methamphetamine had caused a rise in the number of children removed from homes.
The percentage was far higher on the West Coast and in rural areas, where the drug has hit the hardest. Seventy-one percent of counties in California, 70 percent in Colorado and 69 percent in Minnesota reported an increase in the number of children removed from homes because of methamphetamine.
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BBG, Fair enough, but small steps might be less controversial and more do-able.
My theory is that prisons need a class rank based on crime done, time served and threat posed. Then we boot out the least dangerous guy each time we convict a new murdering rapist or bomb-building Islamist. Small-time drug offenders should walk quickly.
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http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1231/p01s03-usgn.html
Meat Camp, N.C. - It is a disturbing scene that plays out all too often across the hog hollows of Appalachia. Authorities raid illicit meth labs set up in rickety trailers and mountain shacks: Using hoses, scrubs, and soap, they decontaminate children on the spot and throw away tainted blankets and teddy bears.
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GM: sounds like both your examples would be made far more tolerable if they involved legal substances manufactured with high quality control at low cost and distributed in a manner that caused addicts to cross paths with health care workers as has been successfully done in Portugal. During Prohibition bathtub gin produced in hollows and ghettos around the country--are we noticing a pattern yet?--lead to very similar results, results that were greatly mitigated by the repeal of a policy that was a lunatic, abject failure by any measure, just as our current drug policy is today except, I suppose, for the agencies handed billions of dollars to "combat" drug use.
Doug: agreed. I think the smart play over the next several years would be to stay on message advocating for limited government with its fiscal house in order. Trust you understand, however, that such a message covers other stuff people hold strong opinions about like abortion, gay rights, among other heated social issues.
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So as long as high grade meth was able to be purchased at Walmart, then the children of the addicted would be well taken care of?
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BBG, Okay I will stay focused (for the coalition) and lay off for 2 years of the rights of liberal women to slaughter their young. You will note however that my posts on the subject were aimed more at changing minds than changing laws. It was the arguments back that presumed I was advocating criminalization in spite of my denials.
Back to the war on drugs, statistics and claims of high levels of incarcerations don't match my property management experience of doing criminal lookups on inner city tenants. I see arrests and convictions but not large amounts of time served for minor amounts of possession. Maybe our state laws are different than elsewhere?
You moved on to costs of incarceration that are true without accepting my point that, aside from incarceration, an addicts right to freely screw up his life should be linked to my right to not pay for it. We are a million political miles away from the latter.
I am curious about prescription drugs. Outside of proper prescription they are illicit drugs too as you see it? So legalization (if we were to discuss it later) would have some loosening on the pharmacy industry? I knew of a woman able to get prescriptions of strong mental health type drugs and trade them directly with a dealer for pot and cocaine which I assume means they have a high street value and that is a widespread practice(?) Open it all up?
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GM, I don't favor legalization especially of meth but you probably could get the meth addicts kids over to child protection based on other outward signs of neglect.
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So as long as high grade meth was able to be purchased at Walmart, then the children of the addicted would be well taken care of?
Your stark questions grow old. Look at the experience of Prohibition and then answer your own question. If you can't any reply would be a waste of time. If you can then I don't understand why the question was asked in the first place.
The rank, grossly counterproductive, stupidity of our current drug laws defy the type of linear analysis that is your stock in trade when arguing. Legalization pulls a whole slew of people out of an illegal subculture, you know like it did with Prohibition. It makes an expensive product that those already involved in said illegal subculture are willing to lie, cheat, steal, and kill for cheaply available, you know like it did with Prohibition. It removes the profit motive that inspires kingpins to school their minions to dominate territories in a savage fashion, you know like it did with Prohibition. It puts all these kids forced by parents to live off the grid lest they have an engagement with law enforcement back into a more mainstream setting, you know like it did with Prohibition. Women who peddle their bodies for resources used to obtain psychoactive substances that cost so much that they are forced to chose between food, drugs, contraception et al would have the economic freedom to perhaps make better choices, you know like it did with Prohibition. And so on.
Of course we could always keep employing people to send parents off to prisons while make kids the ward of the state who eventually get set off to gladiator academies where they are prepped to keep the dysfunctional process spinning out it's perverse incentives. It clearly works well creating the sort of social issues that you see as so dire the status quo is best embraced.
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Is it possible that the dynamics of meth addiction are different than alcohol? Is the prohibition of alcohol the best example? The brits fought two wars with China to end China's prohibition of opium, with the end result of about a quarter of the chinese population addicted to the drug with all the serious social impacts one would expect from that degree of addiction.
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It is possible, yet hasn't been demonstrated in the rare instance where we have first hand knowledge, i.e. Portugal. Nor does it reflect my experience involved in various subcultures. I remain very strongly of the opinion that the physical manifestations of addiction are not what's hardest to overcome, it's the immersion in the culture, or more specifically, how drug use simplifies existence. I know it's counterintuitive, but addicts wake every morning with one need, go to bed every night with one desires, have the whole of their being focussed on a single pursuit that elbows aside most existential issues. Current drug law only reinforces that dynamic, while even a poorly designed decriminalization effort could interdict that dynamic.
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Doug, I got my dander on and neglected your post.
BBG, Okay I will stay focused (for the coalition) and lay off for 2 years of the rights of liberal women to slaughter their young. You will note however that my posts on the subject were aimed more at changing minds than changing laws. It was the arguments back that presumed I was advocating criminalization in spite of my denials.
Sorry if I came off as a weenie, but I quit hanging out on Free Republic because of their stark habits where gay rights, abortions, and other social issues are concerned. The Second Amendment is my single issue, but even it is undermined by proliferate government and out of control spending, so I've come to conclude that staying on message where bloated government and budgets are concerned is the best means to assure the long term viability where other issues are concerned.
Back to the war on drugs, statistics and claims of high levels of incarcerations don't match my property management experience of doing criminal lookups on inner city tenants. I see arrests and convictions but not large amounts of time served for minor amounts of possession. Maybe our state laws are different than elsewhere?
Wikipedia has the incarceration rate data if you'd like to see it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate, citing 500,000 drug prisoners. Most users likely don't get incarcerated, though the cost of most drugs does give them incentives to obtain money by illegal means, most likely thefts of various sorts. Can't find stats stating how many thefts, B&Es, strong armed robberies, etc. are related to drug use. Most the folks in prison, or probation, or on parole likely took the Amway approach starting off as small time distributors and then working their way up the organization. In the areas where other economic activities are few and far between the allure of drug profits is yet another perverse incentive.
You moved on to costs of incarceration that are true without accepting my point that, aside from incarceration, an addicts right to freely screw up his life should be linked to my right to not pay for it. We are a million political miles away from the latter.
Consider me on the same page, and note that folks getting higher quality, lower cost drugs have resources they can apply to stuff other than obtaining drugs. Haven't encountered any research on the topic, but have known my share of junkies in high paying jobs that exhibit few of the pathologies common to garden variety junkies as they had the resources to lead otherwise healthy lives. It would be interesting to see if this observation holds up say when folks are involved in long term pain management regimens, or take ADD stimulants, etc. My guess is that the drugs themselves don't do most the damage, rather the lifestyle choices forced by participation in the illegal drug culture do.
I am curious about prescription drugs. Outside of proper prescription they are illicit drugs too as you see it? So legalization (if we were to discuss it later) would have some loosening on the pharmacy industry? I knew of a woman able to get prescriptions of strong mental health type drugs and trade them directly with a dealer for pot and cocaine which I assume means they have a high street value and that is a widespread practice(?) Open it all up?
Let define drug abuse. Way back in my telephone hotline days we tried to do so; the only definition that made sense was "the use of any substance to the point that it interfered or negatively impacted your family, social, or vocational life." Occasionally snorting high quality smack does not qualify as abuse under this definition, while getting into the communal wine and pissing off your priest does. This def doesn't care where you obtain a substance, it only concerns itself with whether it's used to the point it gums up your life. I agree with this def and so make no distinction regarding from whom a psychoactive substance is obtained.
Your scenario does remind me of one of the last drug rescues I got called out on, though: a crazy young lady whose sister I use to date got released from the mental hospital and traded a fistful of psych drugs for a bag of weed. 4 boneheads proceeded to take one pill of each color--stelazine, tuinal, librium, and valium, IRC--and then split a six pack of Schlitz Malt Liquor tall boys. I got to spend the night keeping them from walking into traffic and humping trees, one of the last straws in my transition from hippy sweetness and light to the crusty old fartdom I practice today.
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Caught behind enemy lines
Sunday, November 7, 2010 | Borderland Beat Reporter Ovemex
By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
It starts at the airport. A burly guy in a hoodie drapes himself over the barrier that leads out of the parking lot. Watching. Just watching.
Most taxi drivers are on the drug cartels' payroll, ordered to spy on visitors and monitor the movements of the military and state investigators. Their license plates brazenly shed, they cruise streets dotted with paper-flower shrines marking the dead. Watching.
In the main downtown plaza, in front of City Hall and the cathedral, about a dozen guys in baggy pants with sunglasses on their heads hang out alongside the shoeshine men. They eye passersby, without speaking.
This is a city under siege.
It's a city where you avert your eyes when men clean their guns in the middle of the plazas.
Where schoolchildren are put through the paces of pecho a tierra drills, literally, "chest to the ground" — a duck-and-dive move for when the shooting starts.
Where you try to remain invisible; you never know who is standing next in line at the grocery store or the 7-Eleven.
Where a middle-aged man muses that it's turned out to be a good thing, after all, that he and his wife never had children.
The Times spent a week recently in Reynosa, passing time with and talking to a dozen residents, to learn how they cope under cartel rule. All were terrified to speak of their experiences and agreed to do so only under the strictest anonymity. Most did not want to be seen in public with a foreign reporter and would meet only in secret. One insisted on meeting across the nearby border in the United States.
"You go around with Jesus in the mouth," one man says.
Meaning, you pray.
Reynosa is the largest city in Tamaulipas, a harrowing state bordering Texas that is all but lost to federal government rule.
The Burger Kings and California-style shopping malls give the city a sense — a false sense — of normalcy. Cars circulate down wide streets. Evangelical churches and donut shops and beauty parlors are open for business.
But Reynosa, with a population of about 700,000, may be the single largest city in Mexico under the thumb of the cartels.
Drug traffickers with the powerful Gulf cartel have long dominated Tamaulipas. In Reynosa, residents more or less coexisted with the traffickers, sometimes joining them, sometimes skirting them. No authority dared challenge them.
The arrangement was shattered early this year when the paramilitary wing of the cartel, the Zetas, split furiously from their patrons, and the two ruthless groups declared war on each other. It was when, as people here put it, the devil jumped.
Battles raged in the spring and early summer, with uncounted scores of people killed. The Gulf cartel fought the Zetas, and the Mexican army fought them both. Bombs and grenades exploded at nightclubs, television stations and city offices. The man who was likely to be the state's next governor was assassinated in broad daylight, along with most of his entourage.
Combat still erupts regularly. But Reynosa is as much a prison camp as a war zone. Army patrols periodically pass through — listening to the bad guys listening to them on radio frequencies — and on the outskirts man roadblocks and hand out leaflets pleading for citizens' cooperation.
The Gulf cartel has control of the city, but Zetas lurk for about 60 miles in any direction. Highways between major Tamaulipas cities are extremely dangerous, stalked by one gang or the other. People speak using terms of war, like "refugees" and "displaced." Even the mayor is displaced. (He fled to Texas.)
The cartels have infiltrated everything: from city hall and the police department, through border customs agencies and all the way down to taco vendors and pirated CD stands.
"There is a great sense of uneasiness in the city," said Armando Javier Zertuche, a psychologist who also serves as secretary of economic development for Reynosa. "It used to be that if someone got kidnapped or killed, you knew they had something to do with [drug trafficking]. Now, with this war, everyone is at risk. It has fallen on top of regular citizens."
The Commuter
Her stomach clenched when she saw the big white cars ahead in the road, blocking the way. Maybe it's the army, her husband suggested, noting the gunmen were wearing camouflage. But she knew.
She had already been grabbed by the traffickers twice in the last few months. How she survived the third time, she doesn't really know. But survival now is the goal of every day.
She commutes regularly between Reynosa and her home city, a couple of hours away: The work is better in Reynosa. She uses all sorts of tactics to try to be safe, keeping in constant radio contact with loved ones, hiding her money in her underwear, even using U.S. roads to commute between Mexican cities.
"My life has changed totally," she says, speaking in a hotel room with a television on to cloak the conversation. "To drive on the highways is to tempt death."
She and her husband had not driven far out of Reynosa that morning in September, westward along the "Riberena" riverside highway that occasionally glimpses Texas, when they were confronted by the armed men.
The men, gruff, cursing, communicating with their comandante by radio, reeked of marijuana. One was branded, like a head of cattle, with the letter Z, for Zetas.
They threw her husband against the hood of the car, rifled through her purse and packages, demanded to know who they were and where they were going and gestured wildly with their AK-47s. They demanded to see her husband's papers, as though they were the authority. She felt herself beginning to pass out.
"You know who we are?" growled one of the men.
They stole the couple's cellphones and toiletries and CDs but, for some reason, let them go. She and her husband climbed back into their car and drove for nearly 10 miles in utter silence.
"This is out of the government's hands," says the commuter, 46 and wound tightly. "Mexico has been sacrificed and sold to the narcos. It is the narcos who have the power."
In their quiet moments, the commuter and her husband don't chat about work or movies or family. They talk about how to behave when confronted by gunmen. Remain calm and passive. Don't show defiance. Assume no help will arrive.
"The narcos rule our lives," she says. "They order. We must obey."
The Dentist
Every morning when the dentist leaves for work, her mother says a prayer: "Dear God, let my children remain invisible to the eyes of the bad men."
She rushes to finish all her tasks in the daytime, to avoid going out at night. Friends have been kidnapped, and everyone has a story of being caught in a gun battle. Her family frequently receives telephoned threats.
"The saddest part is that our authorities have washed their hands of this. If you have a problem, you have nowhere to go," says the dentist, who is 41, tall, with long, dark hair. "We are abandoned and alone."
She is seated in the back section of an empty coffee shop at a nearly deserted shopping mall. She lowers her voice when the kid mopping up comes close. She stops talking until he moves on.
She would like to open up her own dental office instead of working for the state, where she tends to those who can't afford private healthcare. But then she'd have to pay piso — extortion money to the traffickers. Her uncles, a family of bakers, pay weekly sums to the gangsters to avoid having their bakeries torched, or worse. One uncle refused, and they kidnapped and held his son until he forked over the cash.
That means the dentist's plans are on hold. That spares her one dilemma: whether to fill the cavities in the mouths of narcos.
For all the fear, intimidation and what she calls psychosis, life must go on. And so it does in fits and starts. She has ventured out at night a few times lately, always in the company of friends and usually meeting at someone's house. And always super-vigilant, watching the cars sharing the streets, casting an eye into the distance to avoid roadblocks, erected either by the military or the gangs.
Nothing is done in a casual or spontaneous way.
"You even have to be careful of your friends and workmates," she says. "You don't know who they might be related to."
The Journalist
There are other parts of Mexico where cartels also hold sway, like blood-soaked Ciudad Juarez, or drug-trafficking central Culiacan, and where journalism remains strong and active. Not Reynosa.
Throughout the state of Tamaulipas, in fact, journalists practice a profound form of self-censorship, or censorship imposed by the narcos. The gun battles and grenade attacks that raged for months were rarely, if ever, covered in the largest local newspapers.
It is also the only place in Mexico where reporters with international news media have been confronted by gunmen and ordered to leave.
"I spend all day tweeting," says a young Reynosa journalist who, like most here, is on the payroll of both his television station and the city government.
Social media networks such as Twitter have taken the place of newspapers and radio reports, with everyone from city officials to regular people tweeting alerts about a gun battle here, a blockade there. It is a kind of ad hoc warning system, but it is not journalism.
The reporter says everyone knows what can be written about and what must be ignored. Asked if his life in Reynosa is scary, he pauses for a long while, puts his head in his hands and rubs his brow.
"Not scary. Not comfortable."
Four local journalists disappeared from Reynosa in March. Only one was heard from again; the others are presumed dead. (One of those purportedly ran a news website for the Gulf cartel.)
Mexico's major television network, Televisa, has given security training to all of its employees in Tamaulipas. On-air broadcasters are told to change their clothes before leaving the building so they can't be easily identified. Everyone is told to drive nondescript cars.
Journalists know their newsrooms have been infiltrated and their publications are watched. They routinely receive telephoned warnings when they publish something the traffickers don't like; more often, they avoid anything questionable. In Ciudad Victoria, the state capital, the Zetas now have a "public information" branch that regularly sends news releases to the local papers. The papers know they have to publish the releases: editors were rounded up a while back by the Zetas who used wide planks to beat them into submission.
It is a kind of instinct, knowing at a gut level what the cartel wants divulged, the young journalist says.
"Everyone knows the limits."
The Mother
The store with the copy machines is just three blocks away, but the mother doesn't let her 13-year-old son go alone. Recruiters for the drug traffickers cruise the neighborhoods in their SUVs, armed to the teeth, "fishing" for youngsters.
A 12-year-old in her son's class was recently kidnapped. He eventually reappeared, a few cities over, but is so traumatized that he remains under psychiatric care.
Outdoor recesses have frequently been canceled; school itself is often called off or interrupted when battles break out. And in their free time, kids collect spent shells as souvenirs.
When life is so tenuous, the mother says, you seek value in agony. Her son has gotten a lot closer to her, not bothered by and in fact welcoming her frequent calls to check on him.
"That youthful rebelliousness that you would expect at his age is gone," she says.
She's a native of Tamaulipas, her 14 brothers and sisters scattered all over the state. Holidays always meant the family got together. No more.
We lost Easter week, she says, because the fighting was so heavy.
"Now we are worried about Christmas," she says. "The narcos have appropriated family activities. Even that they have taken away from us."
The Businessman
The shootout at the baseball stadium was the last straw.
The businessman was there with his wife and young children, sitting a few rows from the mayor. The wife began to sob. The 9-year-old said, "Let's move."
And so they left Mexico.
The businessman, his wife and three children moved about a mile from their home in Reynosa, across the border to Hidalgo, Texas. "How long have we been here?" he asks his son inside their new home. "Four weeks, Papi."
The only furniture in the living room is a couch, a flat-screen television and a bookcase. On top of the bookcase is a large, gold-trimmed black sombrero, a memento of home, the businessman says.
"I don't want my kids to forget Mexico."
He is a senior executive in his company, a good job with good pay and status. But it is a company with a certain public face, and he can no longer put his family at risk. He will continue to commute back to Reynosa daily, at least for the time being.
"Reynosa is a minefield," he says. "You can be threatened by a soldier or by a criminal, or just stumble upon a gunfight. Anyone who can, escapes."
No one is formally counting how many people have fled, but one city official said it could be about 10% of Reynosa's population.
"One block over, there's another family from Reynosa. And a couple blocks farther, there are four more," the businessman says. "You run into people you know at stoplights."
One time, a visitor from Mexico City came to his office. It didn't take long for the phone to ring. It was the drug traffickers, asking who the visitor was. They ordered him to stop talking to the visitor.
He has changed his cellphone number four times in the last eight months to elude threatening calls.
The businessman and his family aren't sure how many people were killed at the baseball stadium that day. No one ever knows these things with certainty. But the shooting forced the businessman into exile, a huge decision to leave his home of a lifetime.
The adjustment is clearly difficult. The children mope about, friendless, unsure of what to do. The wife is despondent, nervous. "You have to learn to start your life over," she says.
He says exile will last just two years, because after the Mexican presidential elections in 2012, the next government will make a deal with the narcos and "this war we did not ask for" will be over.
It will be back to the norm: the narcos, peacefully, in charge.
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/11/caught-behind-enemy-lines.html
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Free access to drugs, no government authority. Sounds like a Libertarian paradise.
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Driven by the illegal profits on both sides of the border and and the law abiding being unarmed in Mexico.
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Hey BBG, Going back to your link regarding incarceration rates. I get the concept - that the profits from illegality support the criminal industry which supports the violence, burglary, territory wars, etc. I don't see politically how you get to full legalization. The failure of legalization of just marijuana in just California means that we aren't headed toward full legalization of everything everywhere even if that was the best solution. I also don't quite get what happens to the former drug gang underworld if we did. Do they go to trade schools and become welders and programmers and raise families in the suburbs or do they continue in crime. At the borders, it sounds like human trade is a big part of it too, so that would continue without the drugs or maybe escalate.
There are exceptions pointed out in the incarceration figures. Countries with laws far stricter than ours also have lower incarceration rates, so our incarceration rates are partly a part of some other dynamic.
There is a third world country within American inner cities that people outside these areas don't see. It is based mostly I think on the long term effects of welfare dependency but everyone has their own theory of why it exists. Girls/women have babies before they grow up and get a free pass for it. Men are unneeded and available for whatever the temptation is that comes their way. What we call juvenile crime includes 13-17 1/2 year olds that haven't reported to a parent authority for years, if ever.
I know a lot of drug money comes from executives and rich kids in rich suburbs, people in any walk of life, but a whole lot of it also comes from free money that we pass around. If women with children did not get a free pass, men would have to shape up and get a job, a car, a home and maybe a marriage in order to knock up women. Not so much hit and run. George Gilder among others wrote books on this subject. If you hold people more personally accountable for productive behavior, they have less time and inclination for the rest of it.
One thing I don't like about legalization is the sanctioning aspect. What might be a sweet or pleasant smell to me in one situation is not something I want to run across out with my daughter or advertised on prime time television. Another thing I don't like about it is government control. Why do you think the price would go down? The authorities we have now will not allow that to happen. They argue for higher sin taxes on beer supported by studies that as we keep raising the price, the quantity that gets to underage drinkers goes down. That would only widen and deepen under 'legalization'. That is not legalization (IMO). Tax laws alone would be enough drug deals to stay underworld. http://www.ehow.com/list_7289139_minnesota-marijuana-laws.html "States such as Minnesota, failure to comply with the state’s drug tax law may result in a defendant facing an additional fine of up to $14,000 and seven years in jail."
I favor limited decriminalization and the lowering or rightsizing of prison sentences to match the damage or cost to society. I could see how full legalization might fit acceptably into a lower taxed, personally accountable, otherwise free society, but I don't see how it would work in ours.
I agree with your definition. Drug use becomes abuse as soon as it starts to screw up other important aspects of your life.
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Free access to drugs, no government authority. Sounds like a Libertarian paradise.
Hmm, I dunno. Which shoe fits?
authoritarian |əˌθôriˈte(ə)rēən; ôˌθär-|
adjective
favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, esp. that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.
• showing a lack of concern for the wishes or opinions of others; domineering; dictatorial.
libertarian |ˌlibərˈte(ə)rēən|
noun
1 an adherent of libertarianism : [as adj. ] libertarian philosophy.
• a person who advocates civil liberty.
2 Philosophy a person who believes in the doctrine of free will.
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Doug, I full well realize that abandoning the current, failed drug prohibition regimen is not in the political cards, but that don't mean I can't call a failed policy a failed policy. Think the CA effort was too big a bite at the apple, as I understand it the proposition included elements that would impact private businesses that employed pot smokers and so on. Not aware of any studies examining what happened to rum runners post Prohibitions, but I assume some assimilated into the new, legal structure, others focussed on other illegal activities and duked it out w/ those now in a more crowded field, while others threw in the towel for more mainstream pursuits as the high profits were no longer there. Heck, what happened to milkmen, blacksmiths, glass blowers, et al when faced with a change to the economic structure? Expect Hayek has an answer.
No doubt there are plenty of nuances to the incarceration figures, though one strikes me as pretty darn stark: the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Strikes me that a beacon of democracy might want to do something about that stat.
No debate about the third world nature of some areas of the US, to which I'd add we are such a beacon that we attract third world elements to enter the country illegally. Gun crime studies I'm aware of, when controlled for race/ethnic origin, show a lot of the pathologies lie in narrow demographic slices. As that may be, accountability is an ethic I certainly hold dear.
I think decriminalization could occur without explicit sanctioning, though understand the argument. Flip side is current non-sactioning efforts are quite counterproductive. I remember sitting in 8th grade drug education class and being shown a film where a kid smoked dope, bought a hotdog at the fair, which turned into one of the little red head trolls found in vending machines of the day, that proceeded to talk to the kid, to the point the kid walked into traffic, if I remember correctly. Alas, when verifications efforts failed to produce talking hotdog trolls it tainted all the other non-santioning horror stories being told back then. Indeed, my experience is that a lot of the "say no" or whatever efforts inspire eye rolls at best, with abject disbelief being a common result.
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Today's edition of Pravda On The Beach/Left Angeles Times/LA Times has a fairly big article on how the Prop 19 folks were encouraged by just how many votes they got from across the spectrum and are planning to try again in 2012 with a better crafted version.
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lawlessness - Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 :
Lawless \Law"less\, a.
1. Contrary to, or unauthorized by, law; illegal; as, a
lawless claim.
[1913 Webster]
He needs no indirect nor lawless course. --Shak.
[1913 Webster]
2. Not subject to, or restrained by, the law of morality or
of society; as, lawless men or behavior.
[1913 Webster]
3. Not subject to the laws of nature; uncontrolled.
[1913 Webster]
Or, meteorlike, flame lawless through the void.
--Pope.
-- Law"less*ly, adv. -- Law"less*ness, n.
[1913 Webster]
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BBG, Enjoying the discussion and very much appreciate you correctly pointing out failure and challenging the status quo.
We are today so far away from living in a free society. I would like to examine all the laws that make it illegal to open a lemonade stand first before tackling more difficult areas. You didn't address my point (I don't think) that in this government-centric world, the cost of drugs if legalized would not decrease, and thus not remove the underworld profit structure. I'm sure you oppose the excessive sin taxes but they would most certainly accompany or follow legalization.
"I think decriminalization could occur without explicit sanctioning": This I think is more do-able. More simply would be to allow certain organic products, the ones no more dangerous than beer, to be home cultivated on a hobby scale and shared narrowly with no large transactions or cross border movement. Give the responsible user some outlet for safe recreation or relaxation, more decentralized and at zero cost to weaken the incentive and control of the underworld industry that seems to be concentrating into a very sophisticated organized crime structure.
I know there is truth in it, but I don't like the logic that the man robbed or stabbed because of the high cost of drugs. Seems to me (intuitively) that the blacksmiths migrated into other legal trades and the drug gang profiteers will move into armed robbery, kidnapping and hostage taking, or crimes I haven't thought of yet.
I don't know what to make of our high incarceration rates. So often certain incarcerations seem too minor in terms of horrible offenders freed and re-offending. I shouldn't digress here, but I personally like Singapore-style caning as an option for effective deterrence (for thuggery not usage) with less time serviced. :-)
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When you fly into Taiwan's main airport (Taoyuan) there is a large sign in both Chinese and English warning you that possession of illegal drugs is punishable by death. Funny enough, Taiwan has a very low rate of drug addition.
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**What? The magical Libertarian policy hasn't worked? This couldn't be right, could it?**
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/01/10/20100110mex-drugs.html
Drug law changes little for life in Mexico
by Dennis Wagner - Jan. 10, 2010 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic
AGUA PRIETA, Sonora - A few blocks from the municipal police station, on the morning after a cartel gunfight took four more lives in Sonora, drug dealers cruise the streets of La Zona Roja with cellphones in their hands.
Addicts in a local treatment center say these "carros alegres," or happy cars, bring crack cocaine to consumers with all the speed and reliability of a pizza delivery.
The happy cars are one more sign of Mexico's growing drug-abuse problem and serve as a backdrop to the government's decision in August to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of narcotics. When the measure was adopted, President Felipe Calderón and Mexico's Congress said they wanted to concentrate law-enforcement efforts on the ruthless cartels that are blamed for an estimated 13,000 deaths since Calderón declared a war on drugs in December 2006. Calderón also said decriminalization of personal-use quantities would thwart corrupt Mexican cops who sometimes shake down drug users for bribes.
The measure incited controversy from Mexico City to Washington, D.C. Legalization advocates suggested that America's closest neighbor and ally in the drug war had finally recognized the waste of filling prisons with non-violent addicts who need treatment rather than punishment. Drug-enforcement hard-liners warned that eliminating criminal charges for drug abuse would lead to increased public consumption and addiction, perhaps even spawning narco-tourism by Americans looking to get high legally in Mexico.
That the happy cars still cruise about Agua Prieta suggests that critics and supporters overestimated the law's possible effects, both on drug violence and the scourge of addiction.
The reform seems to have had more impact in the rhetorical war over drug decriminalization than it has on Mexican streets. Rather than claiming victory, legalization advocates say the new law may even make things worse because of the way it's written. Conversely, anti-legalization groups condemn the measure because it appears to legitimize drug abuse.
Beneath the lofty debate, cops, treatment counselors, government officials, researchers and addicts interviewed last month said there have been no discernible changes related to the new law.
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GM:
A plausible point, but many other variables are present too. For example, Taiwan (I have been there btw) has a coherent family culture and is a country of economic growth.
As for the Mexican law,
a) the US market and its huge profits remain,
b) honest coverage of drug issues in Mexico often leads to people getting shot/decapitated etc, all we have here is an author opining
c) there do not seem to be many Americans practicing narco-tourism :lol:
d) not much data yet, the law is quite new
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So, unless the US legalizes all drugs, the problems with the narcos in Mexico will continue? Will Canada have to legalize all drugs as well?
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GM:
A plausible point, but many other variables are present too. For example, Taiwan (I have been there btw) has a coherent family culture and is a country of economic growth.
So rather than legalization, would developing the family and economy be a more effective policy? You have certainly noticed that Taiwan and Hong Kong are big on the rule of law and also have high levels of economic freedom, especially Hong Kong. I can say HK is one of my favorite places in the world.
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**What? The magical Libertarian policy hasn't worked? This couldn't be right, could it?**
I don't think Mexico has enjoyed a libertarian moment since Europeans started recording history there in the 1500s, so I'm not sure what your point is, though your authoritarian streak certainly seems to chafe when libertarian principles are mentioned.
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You didn't address my point (I don't think) that in this government-centric world, the cost of drugs if legalized would not decrease, and thus not remove the underworld profit structure. I'm sure you oppose the excessive sin taxes but they would most certainly accompany or follow legalization.
I dunno, Doug, all this stuff is so dirt cheap to produce, and so much of the markup involves getting the product from the dirt cheap production area to the proscribed distribution area that I expect substantial sin taxes could be imposed while still keeping costs well below current levels. A fix that kept the structural problems in place certainly wouldn't be much of a fix.
I know there is truth in it, but I don't like the logic that the man robbed or stabbed because of the high cost of drugs. Seems to me (intuitively) that the blacksmiths migrated into other legal trades and the drug gang profiteers will move into armed robbery, kidnapping and hostage taking, or crimes I haven't thought of yet.
All my years in the restaurant biz informs my thinking here. Lotta folks on the fringe of society straddling lines back and forth between honest employment and various scams. I think it boils down to raw benefit/cost evaluations: folks teeter over into the outlaw side of things 'cause it looks like more money for less work, and teeter back when risks outweigh rewards. Lotta pretty convincing data that concealed carry laws cause criminals to reevaluate the b/c ratio; crimes where one has to confront the victim like strong arm robberies go down, while one where you don't like auto theft go up. Remove obscene profits and my guess folk will migrate elsewhere.
I don't know what to make of our high incarceration rates. So often certain incarcerations seem too minor in terms of horrible offenders freed and re-offending. I shouldn't digress here, but I personally like Singapore-style caning as an option for effective deterrence (for thuggery not usage) with less time serviced
Criminal justice system is another can of worms, one I neither have the tools or energy to open.
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**What? The magical Libertarian policy hasn't worked? This couldn't be right, could it?**
I don't think Mexico has enjoyed a libertarian moment since Europeans started recording history there in the 1500s, so I'm not sure what your point is, though your authoritarian streak certainly seems to chafe when libertarian principles are mentioned.
Mexico legalized possession of drugs for personal use and as Crafty pointed out, honest coverage of drug issues in Mexico often leads to people getting shot/decapitated, but as the shootings/decapitations seem to increase, I think a fair argument can be made that it hasn't worked. My personal experience seeing the real ugly consequences of the drug subculture cause me to chafe when I see simplistic sloganeering on the topic. I will add that the bulk of the substance related horrors I've seen are related to the legal drug, alcohol. I don't buy "Just legalize everything and all the badness will go away".
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I don't buy "Just legalize everything and all the badness will go away".
Which isn't the argument I've made, perhaps more fairly characterized as "the current regimen has failed by any sensible measure, let's take the lessons of Prohibition and see if we can work our something better." Sorry if this seems like sloganeering, though your insistence that the founding principles of this country in this and privacy contexts amount to some sort of wild eyed idealism certainly inspires cognitive dissonance on my end. Does one really need to describe why preferring liberty to other options is a good thing?
I'm also confused by the syllogism that legalization in Mexico somehow speaks to libertarian principles in view of the violence endured there. The violence endured there is a direct result of the obscene profits available through involvement in the illicit drug trade. It would seem the experience of decriminalization in Portugal and some Scandinavian countries--countries without 500 year histories of oligarchic corruption--might be seen as more germane.
I'll note in closing that by many measures alcohol is one of the more damaging drugs out there. I'm of the opinion that people are hardwired to seek mind altering experiences; perhaps allowing more menu options would steer folks away from worse choices. I'll point out that I've recently posted pieces about two long term drug users--Keith Richards and Ozzy Osbourne--in other sections of this forum who both manage productive lives despite Rasputin-like consumption habits. Though not arguing for that sort of gross overconsumption, I think a case can be made that the sad cases--as both Doug and I have touched on--are a result of decision making outside the scope of substance abuse. I've mentioned already my belief that a lot of pathologies can be traced back to people who need a single touchstone in their lives that inform all decision making, be it a substance, religion, online gaming, or whatever. In view of the fact there is no shortage of high performing drug addicts, I think it would be more productive to look at what makes the sad cases embrace failure in all aspects of their lives.
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Alcohol has a long history within western civilization and certain social structures and laws evolved to address it's use and abuse. Illegal drugs have a legal status as well as a social stigma attached to their use. Were these no longer present, I fear the impact to our already frayed social fabric. I will clarify that I do not fail to distinguish the difference between marijuana and hard drugs.
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"I will clarify that I do not fail to distinguish the difference between marijuana and hard drugs."
Making that distinction and moving toward decriminalization over legalization, maintaining some stigma, maybe we could come to some kind of cease fire here. :-)
Couple that with a recognition that very small personal amounts in your home, growing on your property or even in your personal vehicle if not connected with another driving error or crime would be out of the jurisdiction of an officer or prosecutor of a limited government.
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As an empirically oriented man I would be completely comfortable with a compromise that decriminalized pot but not the hard drugs for a reasonable amount of time to see how things worked out.
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What I don't get is California not legalizing it. It's quasi-legal now and I can't imagine a population deciding to vote Jerry Brown back into the Governor's office without being very, very high.
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There was quite a surge of practical oriented criticisms near the finish line: e.g. the implications of no-testing and people driving, the rights of employers to have employees who were stoned at work, etc. Lots of people said, there were open to the idea but this Proposition was badly drawn. It very much looks like a better crafted version will be attempted in 2012.
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Alcohol has a long history within western civilization and certain social structures and laws evolved to address it's use and abuse.
As does cocaine--and original ingredient in Coca Cola and other fountain drinks--various opiates--paregoric was available in drug stores well into the '70s--various stimulants such as dexedrine--I remember drug companies mailing out samples of biphetamine to the general public--and so on. Heirs to prohibition have certainly done a fine job of demonizing these substances over the past couple decades--I read a story yesterday where a pregnant women in PA had eaten a poppy seed bagel prior to delivery of her child only to have the child seized by Family Services when a unrequested "standard" test for drug abuse imposed on all postpartum women in the state revealed opiate precursors--and their perverse incentive can be found just about any direction you point.
Some claim these polices are a racist vestige as much drug use was ascribed to black culture, others claim that mainstream medicine has sought to prevent being cut out of business by self-medication, while there are certainly plenty of modern day puritans underfoot embracing the ethic of earlier killjoys. Bottom line is that I think there are a lot of other forces at work here besides libations and their history.
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http://www.livescience.com/culture/beer-helped-rise-of-civilization-101104.html
Archaeological evidence suggests that until the Neolithic, cereals such as barley and rice constituted only a minor element of diets, most likely because they require so much labor to get anything edible from them — one typically has to gather, winnow, husk and grind them, all very time-consuming tasks.
Hayden told LiveScience he has seen that hard work for himself. "In traditional Mayan villages where I've worked, maize is used for tortillas and for chicha, the beer made there. Women spend five hours a day just grinding up the kernels."
However, sites in Syria suggest that people nevertheless went to unusual lengths at times just to procure cereal grains — up to 40 to 60 miles (60 to 100 km). One might speculate, Hayden said, that the labor associated with grains could have made them attractive in feasts in which guests would be offered foods that were difficult or expensive to prepare, and beer could have been a key reason to procure the grains used to make them.
"It's not that drinking and brewing by itself helped start cultivation, it's this context of feasts that links beer and the emergence of complex societies," Hayden said.
Feasts would have been more than simple get-togethers — such ceremonies have held vital social significance for millennia, from the Last Supper to the first Thanksgiving.
"Feasts are essential in traditional societies for creating debts, for creating factions, for creating bonds between people, for creating political power, for creating support networks, and all of this is essential for developing more complex kinds of societies," Hayden explained. "Feasts are reciprocal — if I invite you to my feast, you have the obligation to invite me to yours. If I give you something like a pig or a pot of beer, you're obligated to do the same for me or even more."
"In traditional feasts throughout the world, there are three ingredients that are almost universally present," he said. "One is meat. The second is some kind of cereal grain, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, in the form of breads or porridge or the like. The third is alcohol, and because you need surplus grain to put into it, as well as time and effort, it's produced almost only in traditional societies for special occasions to impress guests, make them happy, and alter their attitudes favorably toward hosts."
The brewing of alcohol seems to have been a very early development linked with initial domestication, seen during Neolithic times in China, the Sudan, the first pottery in Greece and possibly with the first use of maize. Hayden said circumstantial evidence for brewing has been seen in the Natufian, in that all the technology needed to make it is there — cultivated yeast, grindstones, vessels for brewing and fire-cracked rocks as signs of the heating needed to prepare the mash.
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That is quite fascinating! , , , but I can top it :lol:
Terrence McKenna in "The Nector of the Gods" posits that human consciousness was triggered by eating psilocybin-like mushrooms.
As those of the psychodelic generation can tell you these shrooms grow from the dung of cattle. With the shift of the tectonic plates eons ago in Africa which gave rise to the savana, came the rise of herds of animals of the cattle family e.g. wildebeasts. McKenna hypothesizes that early man ate the shrooms growing therein and thus triggered consciousness.
Ha! Top that! :-D
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Well, Terrence McKenna was quite the fan of hallucinogens, and I think it would require a lot to make his theory seem viable.
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:lol:
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http://www.justice.gov/dea/demand/speakout/06so.htm
Fact 6: Legalization of Drugs will Lead to Increased Use and Increased Levels of Addiction. Legalization has been tried before, and failed miserably.
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Legalization proponents claim, absurdly, that making illegal drugs legal would not cause more of these substances to be consumed, nor would addiction increase. They claim that many people can use drugs in moderation and that many would choose not to use drugs, just as many abstain from alcohol and tobacco now. Yet how much misery can already be attributed to alcoholism and smoking? Is the answer to just add more misery and addiction?
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It’s clear from history that periods of lax controls are accompanied by more drug abuse and that periods of tight controls are accompanied by less drug abuse.
In 1880, many drugs, including opium and cocaine, were legal — and, like some drugs today, seen as benign medicine not requiring a doctor’s care and oversight. Addiction skyrocketed.
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During the 19th Century, morphine was legally refined from opium and hailed as a miracle drug. Many soldiers on both sides of the Civil War who were given morphine for their wounds became addicted to it, and this increased level of addiction continued throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In 1880, many drugs, including opium and cocaine, were legal — and, like some drugs today, seen as benign medicine not requiring a doctor’s care and oversight. Addiction skyrocketed. There were over 400,000 opium addicts in the U.S. That is twice as many per capita as there are today.
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By 1900, about one American in 200 was either a cocaine or opium addict. Among the reforms of this era was the Federal Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which required manufacturers of patent medicines to reveal the contents of the drugs they sold. In this way, Americans learned which of their medicines contained heavy doses of cocaine and opiates — drugs they had now learned to avoid.
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Specific federal drug legislation and oversight began with the 1914 Harrison Act, the first broad anti-drug law in the United States. Enforcement of this law contributed to a significant decline in narcotic addiction in the United States. Addiction in the United States eventually fell to its lowest level during World War II, when the number of addicts is estimated to have been somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000. Many addicts, faced with disappearing supplies, were forced to give up their drug habits.
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What was virtually a drug-free society in the war years remained much the same way in the years that followed. In the mid-1950s, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics estimated the total number of addicts nationwide at somewhere between 50,000 to 60,000. The former chief medical examiner of New York City, Dr. Milton Halpern, said in 1970 that the number of New Yorkers who died from drug addiction in 1950 was 17. By comparison, in 1999, the New York City medical examiner reported 729 deaths involving drug abuse.
The Alaska Experiment and Other Failed Legalization Ventures
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The consequences of legalization became evident when the Alaska Supreme Court ruled in 1975 that the state could not interfere with an adult’s possession of marijuana for personal consumption in the home. The court’s ruling became a green light for marijuana use. Although the ruling was limited to persons 19 and over, teens were among those increasingly using marijuana. According to a 1988 University of Alaska study, the state’s 12 to 17-year-olds used marijuana at more than twice the national average for their age group. Alaska’s residents voted in 1990 to recriminalize possession of marijuana, demonstrating their belief that increased use was too high a price to pay.
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European experiments with drug legalization have failedBy 1979, after 11 states decriminalized marijuana and the Carter administration had considered federal decriminalization, marijuana use shot up among teenagers. That year, almost 51 percent of 12th graders reported they used marijuana in the last 12 months. By 1992, with tougher laws and increased attention to the risks of drug abuse, that figure had been reduced to 22 percent, a 57 percent decline.
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Other countries have also had this experience. The Netherlands has had its own troubles with increased use of cannabis products. From 1984 to 1996, the Dutch liberalized the use of cannabis. Surveys reveal that lifetime prevalence of cannabis in Holland increased consistently and sharply. For the age group 18-20, the increase is from 15 percent in 1984 to 44 percent in 1996.
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The Netherlands is not alone. Switzerland, with some of the most liberal drug policies in Europe, experimented with what became known as Needle Park. Needle Park became the Mecca for drug addicts throughout Europe, an area where addicts could come to openly purchase drugs and inject heroin without police intervention or control. The rapid decline in the neighborhood surrounding Needle Park, with increased crime and violence, led authorities to finally close Needle Park in 1992.
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The British have also had their own failed experiments with liberalizing drug laws. England’s experience shows that use and addiction increase with “harm reduction” policy. Great Britain allowed doctors to prescribe heroin to addicts, resulting in an explosion of heroin use, and by the mid-1980s, known addiction rates were increasing by about 30 percent a year.
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The relationship between legalization and increased use becomes evident by considering two current “legal drugs,” tobacco and alcohol. The number of users of these “legal drugs” is far greater than the number of users of illegal drugs. The numbers were explored by the 2001 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Roughly 109 million Americans used alcohol at least once a month. About 66 million Americans used tobacco at the same rate. But less than 16 million Americans used illegal drugs at least once a month.
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It’s clear that there is a relationship between legalization and increasing drug use, and that legalization would result in an unacceptably high number of drug-addicted Americans.
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When legalizers suggest that easy access to drugs won’t contribute to greater levels of addiction, they aren’t being candid. The question isn’t whether legalization will increase addiction levels—it will— it’s whether we care or not. The compassionate response is to do everything possible to prevent the destruction of addiction, not make it easier.
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Alcohol has a long history within western civilization and certain social structures and laws evolved to address it's use and abuse.
As does cocaine--and original ingredient in Coca Cola and other fountain drinks--various opiates--paregoric was available in drug stores well into the '70s--.
A momento I keep on my wall (it's rather colorful) is my late Grandfather's (Physician/Surgeon) Special Tax Stamp; dated 1949. Cost for the stamp; $1.00.
In bold print above his name and Wisconsin address, it says,
"Practitioner Dispensing Opium, Coca Leaves, Etc."
It makes for good conversation... :-)
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Given that pre-human bipeds, like modern humans today, were often the prey for a variety of african predators, being detached from reality in that environment wouldn't have been optimal for a slow, weak primate species with no natural weapons. "Fear and Loathing in Olduvai Gorge" would probably have been a really short book.
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You crack me up :lol:
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-09/cameron-risks-spat-with-chinese-by-wearing-poppy-during-visit-to-beijing.html
U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron resisted a request from Chinese officials yesterday to remove the poppy symbol that Britons wear every November in memory of their war dead during his visit to Beijing, according to two British officials familiar with the matter.
Poppies have been Britain’s symbol of remembrance since World War I, when the flowers grew on battlefields. The Royal British Legion sells paper poppies in November to raise funds for veterans in the run-up to Armistice Day on Nov. 11.
The flower has a different resonance in China, which fought and lost two Opium Wars with Britain in the 19th century. Those resulted in the U.K. forcing the Chinese to open their borders to trade, including in the narcotic derived from the Asian variety of the poppy. Britain also gained the territory of Hong Kong, which was not handed back to China until 1997.
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The compassionate response is to do everything possible to prevent the destruction of addiction, not make it easier.
Not surprised to read the hodgepodge of panic mongering in this report--marijuana use goes up when it's legal, sh!t oh dear--as our current, failed drug laws amount to a full employment act where the DOJ is concerned, but to clothe these counterproductive practices in the word "compassion" is damn near well stroke inducing. "Compassion" is not much on display where drug warriors are concerned, and claiming it as a fig leaf in the face of the 500,000 in jail et al full well demonstrates the disconnect where law enforcement and drug policy is concerned.
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Obamacare and the War on Drugs
by David Rittgers
If the generation of "limited government" lawmakers freshly chosen to man the trenches in Washington wishes to be taken seriously, the butcher's bill must include some of the social conservatives' sacred cows.
Starting with the War on Drugs.
Many conservatives have long argued that the federal government is broadly empowered to prosecute the drug war under Congress's authority over interstate commerce. In the name of the drug war, they have been willing to allow federal law-enforcement officers to prosecute seriously ill patients who use medical marijuana in compliance with their states' laws.
Many of those same conservatives are now finding that the terrible, swift sword of expansive federal power that they endorsed in the name of drug prohibition has now been turned on them in the form of Obamacare's individual mandate.
The Justice Department is defending Obamacare by asserting that a 2005 Supreme Court case, Gonzales v. Raich, permits such a broad reading of the Commerce Clause that the federal government can tell individual citizens that they have to buy health insurance.
The Raich case was about medical marijuana. Angel Raich, a resident of Oakland, Calif., used medical marijuana to deal with the debilitating pain caused by an inoperable brain tumor, a seizure disorder, and a life-threatening wasting syndrome. California law allowed her to do so, but the Drug Enforcement Administration claimed that the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) made no exception for those in Raich's position.
The Raich case closed out a decade's worth of rolling back the scope of Congress's power. In 1995, the Court held in United States v. Lopez that the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act exceeded the limits of Congress's ability to regulate interstate commerce. United States v. Morrison in 2000 invalidated a federal civil remedy for victims of intrastate gender-motivated violence. Raich reversed this pushback. By a six-to-three majority, the court held that the aggregation of individuals' small-scale cultivation and consumption of marijuana in compliance with California law would substantially affect the market for the drug, a market that the federal government had outlawed.
Raich cemented the legal foundation for the individual health-insurance mandate that has so many conservatives outraged.
Not all states took Raich's broad claims of federal power lying down. Deep blue California, Maryland, and Washington State filed an amicus brief contending that Congress had intended only to interdict large-scale drug traffickers, not to bar states from accommodating those in Raich's position. The attorneys general of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, drug warriors tried and true, nonetheless objected to what they saw as an alarming disregard for federalism and state sovereignty. (Disclosure: The Cato Institute also filed an amicus brief.)
Several conservative drug-war supporters in the House joined a brief in support of a limitless reading of Congress's Commerce Clause power in the Raich case but have since denounced the application of that power in Obamacare — the unintended consequence of a shortsighted focus on maximizing drug enforcement. Indiana Republican Dan Burton was one of those who signed on; he has since sponsored a bill to repeal Obamacare's "government-run" health-care solution. Burton and fellow drug warrior Mark Souder signed on to another repeal measure before Souder resigned amidst an adultery scandal. Georgia Republican Jack Kingston took up the charge to repeal the individual mandate as well. Former representative Ernest Istook (R., Okla.) has been on the warpath, phrasing the issue as "Obamacare vs. Limited Government."
The Justice Department has found Raich an exceedingly useful tool in battling the legal challenges to Obamacare. In the Florida lawsuit, the DOJ claims that "Individuals who self-insure engage in economic activity at least as much as the plaintiffs in Raich." The same goes for Michigan, where a federal judge recently upheld the individual mandate as a legitimate exercise of Congress's Commerce Clause power: "As living, breathing beings, who do not oppose medical services on religious grounds, they cannot opt out of this market." The words "Gonzales v. Raich" kick off the government's Commerce Clause argument in the Virginia litigation. (Disclosure: The Cato Institute has filed briefs in support of Virginia attorney general Kenneth Cuccinelli's challenge to Obamacare.)
The jump from Raich to Obamacare is a short one, at least in the government's eyes. The dissenters in Raich predicted the expansion of Commerce Clause authority. Justice Thomas warned that if the federal government could override a state's licensing of medical marijuana, "then it can regulate virtually anything — and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers." Justice O'Connor noted the "perverse incentive to legislate broadly pursuant to the Commerce Clause" — the more broadly Congress writes a law, the more likely Raich's logic is to uphold it. O'Connor discussed how the Court's logic would allow the government to regulate (and ban) non-commercial activities that would detract from regulated markets, such as home-care substitutes for daycare. This would be funny, if a federal judge had not just ruled that being alive and breathing means you must buy health insurance or face the consequences.
A principled stand on the limits of federal power does not begin and end with health care. The Commerce Clause is a double-edged sword: Conservatives cannot wield it in the drug war without making it a useful tool for advancing progressive visions of federal power.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12546
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Good point.
Similarly, Bush's AG Ashcroft imposed the Feds into Oregon's Right to Die issues.
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Powerful stuff, Rarick, that does an authoritative job of outlining the idiocy of our current drug policy.
Let me second the speaker in the video: Check out the HBO series The Wire to see a realistic depiction of the folly of the WOD.
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Can anyone explain why the Chinese are so bitter about the end of their prohibition of opium? You'd think that they would have thanked the Brits, given how wonderful having free access to large quantities of addictive drugs was for them.
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**Should we let China freely import opiates here, turnabout being fair play and all.....**
http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/opiumwars/opiumwars1.html
British and American merchants, anxious to address what they perceived as a trade imbalance, determined to import the one product that the Chinese did not themselves have but which an ever-increasing number of them wanted: opium. Before 1828, large quantities of the Spanish silver coin, the Carolus, flowed into China in payment for the exotic commodities that Europeans craved; in contrast, in the decade of the 1830s, despite an imperial decree outlawing the export of yellow gold and white silver, "only $7,303,841 worth of silver was imported, whereas the silver exported was estimated at $26,618, 815 in the foreign silver coin, $25,548,205 in sycee, and $3,616,996 in gold" (Kuo, p. 51). although the Chinese imperial governed had long prohibited the drug except for medicinal use, the "British Hong" (companies such as Dent, Jardine, and Matheson authorized to operate in Canton) bought cheaply produced opium in the Begal and Malwa (princely) districts under the auspices of the British East India Company, the number 150 lb. chests of the narcotic being imported rising from 9,708 in 1820 to 35,445 in 1835. With the British government's 1833 cancellation of the trade monopoly enjoyed by the East India Company, cheap opium flooded the market, and China's net outflow of silver amounted to some 34 million Mexican silver dollars over the course of the 1830s.
67th Foot taking [a] fort. [Clock on thumbnail for larger image/]
As the habit of smoking opium spread from the idle rich to ninety per cent of all Chinese males under the age of forty in the country's coastal regions, business activity was much reduced, the civil service ground to a halt, and the standard of living fell. The Emperor Dao guang's special anti-opium commissioner Lin Ze-xu (1785-1850), modestly estimated the number of his countrymen addicted to the drug to be 4 million, but a British physician practising in Canton set the figure at 12 million. Equally disturbing for the imperial government was the imbalance of trade with the West: whereas prior to 1810 Western nations had been spending 350 million Mexican silver dollars on porcelain, cotton, silks, brocades, and various grades of tea, by 1837 opium represented 57 per cent of Chinese imports, and for fiscal 1835-36 alone China exported 4.5 million silver dollars. The official sent in 1838 by the Emperor Dao guang (1821-1850) of the Qing Dynasty to confiscate and destroy all imports of opium, Lin Ze-xu, calculated that in fiscal 1839 Chinese opium smokers consumed 100 million taels' worth of the drug while the entire spending by the imperial government that year spent 40 million taels. He reportedly concluded, "If we continue to allow this trade to flourish, in a few dozen years we will find ourselves not only with no soldiers to resist the enemy, but also with no money to equip the army" quoted by Chesneaux et al., p. 55). By the late 1830s, foreign merchant vessels, notably those of Britain and the United States, were landing over 30,000 chests annually. Meantime, corrupt officials in the hoppo (customs office) and ruthless merchants in the port cities were accumulating wealth beyond "all the tea in China" by defying imperial interdictions that had existed in principle since 1796. The standard rate for an official's turning a blind eye to the importation of a single crate of opium was 80 taels. Between 1821 and 1837 the illegal importation of opium (theoretically a capital offence) increased five fold. A hotbed of vice, bribery, and disloyalty to the Emperor's authority, the opium port of Canton would be the flashpoint for the inevitable clash between the governments of China and Great Britain.
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If you need us to enumerate the differences between the two situations then the discussion isn't worth having in the first place. Clearly you didn't watch the video: addiction rate the same, quality up, cost down, 70 billion dollars spent on law enforcement, 500,000 in jail, a million marijuana arrest annually, and so on ad nauseam. Where in that set of circumstances is anything but abject failure? What have we purchased with the estimated trillion dollars we've thrown at this rank buffoonery? Why are the folks most resolutely in WOD corner those who stuff their pockets or finance their war against America with the profits from the same?
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It seems like a simple question. I'm not sure why it's so difficult to get an answer. Were China able to lawfully import tons of narcotics to the US for recreational consumption for pennies a hit, would we be better off? What would legalization look like? Do we enforce age laws regarding consumption? Should there be restrictions on driving, flying, operating heavy machinery? What would we enforce, if anything?
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Well let's see, we already have Venezuela, Al Qaeda, and all sorts of other unsavory characters importing drugs, so having China do so would probably be as step up. As the video you appear to have not watched stated, addiction rates tend to remain at 1.3 percent whether drugs are legal, somewhat banned, or as illegal as they are today, so the source thereof doesn't appear to be particularly germane, except insofar as the monies collected are used to fund our enemies, does it?
Again, if you had watched the video you'd have noted that youth rates of marijuana use goes down as they now have to purchase the drug from a regulated vendor--like booze--rather than ubiquitous school yard vendors. I think your other questions are as easy to dispose of, so perhaps you could do so for the class all by yourself and spare me from enumerating the obvious.
While your at it, and in view of the stark questions you tend to ask, how 'bout you speak to the trillion dollars down the rat hole; the half million citizens incarcerated; the damage done to the 4th and 5th amendments by drug enforcement, including asset forfeiture; higher quality; lower price; all without any discernible impact on the rate of drug abuse. Name some other business with a record of abject failure where the authors of that failure would not be unceremoniously fired. How would you deal with such an unblemished record of unmitigated failure by any sane measure if it occurred anywhere other than in law enforcement?
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Well let's see, we already have Venezuela, Al Qaeda, and all sorts of other unsavory characters importing drugs, so having China do so would probably be as step up. As the video you appear to have not watched stated, addiction rates tend to remain at 1.3 percent whether drugs are legal, somewhat banned, or as illegal as they are today, so the source thereof doesn't appear to be particularly germane, except insofar as the monies collected are used to fund our enemies, does it?
**To me, that is the most compelling argument for legalization. I fear the social destruction of legalization, but even more, I fear that AQ or another entity could finance a nuke or nukes to detonate CONUS as the result of profits from illegal drugs.**
Again, if you had watched the video you'd have noted that youth rates of marijuana use goes down as they now have to purchase the drug from a regulated vendor--like booze--rather than ubiquitous school yard vendors. I think your other questions are as easy to dispose of, so perhaps you could do so for the class all by yourself and spare me from enumerating the obvious.
**My internet connection is slow and after the DEA chart on heroin price and purity '80-'99, my browser crashed, dumping the cached video.**
While your at it, and in view of the stark questions you tend to ask, how 'bout you speak to the trillion dollars down the rat hole; the half million citizens incarcerated; the damage done to the 4th and 5th amendments by drug enforcement, including asset forfeiture; higher quality; lower price; all without any discernible impact on the rate of drug abuse. Name some other business with a record of abject failure where the authors of that failure would not be unceremoniously fired. How would you deal with such an unblemished record of unmitigated failure by any sane measure if it occurred anywhere other than in law enforcement?
**Let's look at the costs associated with the enforcement of other laws. We spend huge amounts investigating sexual assaults and murder, and yet rape and murder still takes place every year. Should we look at legalization of those as a way out of our costly, and seemingly unproductive wars on rape and murder? I reject your assertion that damage has been done to the 4th and 5th, and if it were, look to the courts, not law enforcement.**
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**Let's look at the costs associated with the enforcement of other laws. We spend huge amounts investigating sexual assaults and murder, and yet rape and murder still takes place every year. Should we look at legalization of those as a way out of our costly, and seemingly unproductive wars on rape and murder? I reject your assertion that damage has been done to the 4th and 5th, and if it were, look to the courts, not law enforcement.**
Hmm, victimless v. crime w/ victim. That'll require about a nanosecond of contemplation. How 'bout we let the victimless crimes take care of themselves and focus our efforts on crimes w/ bona fide victims?
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You implied that law enforcement was failing because the war on drugs continued. I pointed out that like enforcing other laws, it's an ongoing process.
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Yes, one with limited resources so perhaps those available should be applied to crimes that have actual, non-self selected, victims.
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Are those meth orphans self selecting victims?
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http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ovc/publications/bulletins/children/pg5.html
Dangers to Children Living at Meth Labs
A child living at a clandestine methamphetamine laboratory is exposed to immediate dangers and to the ongoing effects of chemical contamination. In addition, the child may be subjected to fires and explosions, abuse and neglect, a hazardous lifestyle (including the presence of firearms), social problems, and other risks.
Chemical contamination. The chemicals used to cook meth and the toxic compounds and byproducts resulting from its manufacture produce toxic fumes, vapors, and spills. A child living at a meth lab may inhale or swallow toxic substances or inhale the secondhand smoke of adults who are using meth; receive an injection or an accidental skin prick from discarded needles or other drug paraphernalia; absorb methamphetamine and other toxic substances through the skin following contact with contaminated surfaces, clothing, or food; or become ill after directly ingesting chemicals or an intermediate product. Exposure to low levels of some meth ingredients may produce headache, nausea, dizziness, and fatigue; exposure to high levels can produce shortness of breath, coughing, chest pain, dizziness, lack of coordination, eye and tissue irritation, chemical burns (to the skin, eyes, mouth, and nose), and death. Corrosive substances may cause injury through inhalation or contact with the skin. Solvents can irritate the skin, mucous membranes, and respiratory tract and affect the central nervous system. Chronic exposure to the chemicals typically used in meth manufacture may cause cancer; damage the brain, liver, kidney, spleen, and immunologic system; and result in birth defects.6 Normal cleaning will not remove methamphetamine and some of the chemicals used to produce it. They may remain on eating and cooking utensils, floors, countertops, and absorbent materials. Toxic byproducts of meth manufacturing are often improperly disposed outdoors, endangering children and others who live, eat, play, or walk at or near the site.7
Fires and explosions. Approximately 15 percent of meth labs are discovered as a result of a fire or explosion. Careless handling and overheating of highly volatile hazardous chemicals and waste and unsafe manufacturing methods cause solvents and other materials to burst into flames or explode. Improperly labeled and incompatible chemicals are often stored together, compounding the likelihood of fire and explosion. Highly combustible materials left on stovetops, near ignition sources, or on surfaces accessible to children can be easily ignited by a single spark or cigarette ember. Hydrogenerators used in illegal drug production “constitute bombs waiting to be ignited by a careless act.”8 Safety equipment is typically nonexistent or inadequate to protect a child.
Abuse and neglect. Children living at methamphetamine laboratories are at increased risk for severe neglect and are more likely to be physically and sexually abused by members of their own family and known individuals at the site. Parents and caregivers who are meth dependent typically become careless, irritable, and violent, often losing their capacity to nurture their children. In these situations, the failure of parents to protect their children’s safety and to provide for essential food, dental and medical care (including immunizations, proper hygiene, and grooming), and appropriate sleeping conditions is the norm. Older siblings in these homes often assume the role of caretaker.9 Some addicted parents fall into a deep sleep for days and cannot be awakened, further increasing the likelihood that their children will be exposed to toxic chemicals in their environment and to abusive acts committed by the other drug-using individuals who are present. Children living at meth lab sites may experience the added trauma of witnessing violence, being forced to participate in violence, caring for an incapacitated or injured parent or sibling, or watching the police arrest and remove a parent.10
Hazardous lifestyle. Hazardous living conditions and filth are common in meth lab homes. Explosives and booby traps (including trip wires, hidden sticks with nails or spikes, and light switches or electrical appliances wired to explosive devices) have been found at some meth lab sites. Loaded guns and other weapons are usually present and often found in easy-to-reach locations. Code violations and substandard housing structures may also endanger children. They may be shocked or electrocuted by exposed wires or as a result of unsafe electrical equipment or practices. Poor ventilation, sometimes the result of windows sealed or covered with aluminum foil to prevent telltale odors from escaping, increases the possibility of combustion and the dangers of inhaling toxic fumes. Meth homes also often lack heating, cooling, legally provided electricity, running water, or refrigeration. Living and play areas may be infested with rodents and insects, including cockroaches, fleas, ticks, and lice. Individuals responding to some lab sites have found hazardous waste products and rotten food on the ground, used needles and condoms strewn about, and dirty clothes, dishes, and garbage piled on floors and countertops. Toilets and bathtubs may be backed up or unusable, sometimes because the cook has dumped corrosive byproducts into the plumbing.11 (See Children Found in Meth Lab Homes.)
The inability of meth-dependent and meth-manufacturing parents to function as competent caregivers increases the likelihood that a child will be accidentally injured or will ingest drugs and poisonous substances. Baby bottles may be stored among toxic chemicals. Hazardous meth components may be stored in 2-liter soft drink bottles, fruit juice bottles, and pitchers in food preparation areas or the refrigerator. Ashtrays and drug paraphernalia (such as razor blades, syringes, and pipes) are often found scattered within a child’s reach, sometimes even in cribs. Infants are found with meth powder on their clothes, bare feet, and toys. The health hazards in meth homes from unhygienic conditions, needle sharing, and unprotected sexual activity may include hepatitis A and C, E. coli, syphilis, and HIV.
Social problems. Children developing within the chaos, neglect, and violence of a clandestine methamphetamine laboratory environment experience stress and trauma that significantly affect their overall safety and health, including their behavioral, emotional, and cognitive functioning. They often exhibit low self-esteem, a sense of shame, and poor social skills.12 Consequences may include emotional and mental health problems, delinquency, teen pregnancy, school absenteeism and failure, isolation, and poor peer relations. Without effective intervention, many will imitate their parents and caretakers when they themselves become adults, engaging in criminal or violent behavior, inappropriate conduct, and alcohol and drug abuse.13
Many children who live in drug homes exhibit an attachment disorder, which occurs when parents or caretakers fail to respond to an infant’s basic needs or do so unpredictably. These children typically do not cry or show emotion when separated from their parents. Symptoms of attachment disorder include the inability to trust, form relationships, and adapt. Attachment disorders place children at greater risk for later criminal behavior and substance abuse. To minimize long-term damage, children from these environments require mental health interventions and stable, nurturing caregivers.
Other risks. Dangerous animals trained to protect illegal meth labs pose added physical hazards, and their feces contribute to the filth in areas where children play, sleep, and eat. Many children who live in meth homes also are exposed to pornographic materials or overt sexual activity. Others may actually be involved in the manufacturing process but receive no safety gear to protect them from noxious chemical fumes.
Children Found in Meth Lab Homes
The living areas and physical condition of children found in two meth lab homes are described below.
The five children ranged in age from 1 to 7 years old. The one-bedroom home had no electricity or heat other than a gas stove with the oven door opened. Used hypodermic needles and dog feces littered areas of the residence where the children were found playing. Because there were no beds for the children, they slept with blankets underneath a small card table in the front room. The bathroom had sewage backed up in the tub, leaving no place for the children to bathe. A subsequent hospital exam revealed that all the children were infected with hepatitis C. The youngest was very ill. His liver was enlarged to the size of an adult’s. The children had needle marks on their feet, legs, hands, and arms from accidental contact with syringes.
At another lab site, a 2-year-old child was discovered during a lab seizure. Her parents both abused and manufactured methamphetamine. She was found with open, seeping sores around her eyes and on her forehead that resembled a severe burn. The condition was diagnosed as repeated, untreated cockroach bites.
Source: Governor’s Office of Criminal Justice Planning, n.d., Multi-Agency Partnerships: Linking Drugs with Child Endangerment, Sacramento, CA, p. 9.
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Are those meth orphans self selecting victims?
No, they are victims of failed policies creating immense profits which inspire folks to partake or all sorts of questionable behavior, you know, like we've been talking about all the way along.
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So if meth were legal, then their parents would be Ward and June Cleaver?
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Another question you can answer yourself. But the kids wouldn't be raised among the volatile chemicals needed to make meth.
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A Gangster With Oil
Posted 11/15/2010 06:57 PM ET
Colombian police escort suspected Venezuelan drug lord Walid Makled Garcia in Bogota last August. He says Hugo Chavez protected his drug empire. AP View Enlarged Image
Geopolitics: Years ago, Americans worried about Venezuela's leftist Hugo Chavez becoming a new Castro — with oil. It happened. Now he's filling his cabinet with drug lords, and the threat morphs into something creepier.
Last week, Chavez promoted Major General Henry Rangel Silva to general-in-chief, the top position in the Venezuelan military command.
It was a rogue act because, in 2008, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control named Rangel and two other Chavez loyalists as "Tier II Kingpins" for material support of drug trafficking.
The U.S. designation came of an administrative process so strict and thorough the U.S. government could indict someone if it's right — and be sued if it's wrong. There have been no lawsuits.
Rangel is said to provide material support for Colombia's FARC communist terrorists, who control 60% of Colombia's cocaine production, pushing it into Mexico and other destinations.
With Mexico endangered by local cartels' trade with Venezuela's government-linked suppliers, the link to Mexico's drug war is very real. And it's a national security problem for the U.S. — a big one.
The promotion shows Chavez is surrounding himself with drug lords. Most leaders would expel someone with those credentials. Not Chavez. He almost seems to be flaunting Rangel and others like him. One can only conclude that Venezuela is now a narcostate.
With seven other Chavez loyalists also on the Treasury's list (but not yet announced) the rot is far deeper than the U.S. wants to admit. The only real question left is what will we do about it?
It's important because drug lords have turned Mexico a battlefield. Violence on the U.S.-Mexico frontier began in 2005, the same year Chavez stopped cooperating with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. In 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderon began his six-year term by declaring war against the drug cartels. So far, it has cost 30,000 lives, and the war's now spilling over our borders.
Two Fridays ago, Mexican marines killed Antonio Cardenas, the chief of the Gulf Cartel, in a shootout that shut the U.S. border with Mexico down. Cardenas' war was fueled by people like Rangel.
Now, there are even people who can prove it. Last August, Colombian forces captured a major Venezuelan drug lord named Walid Makled-Garcia, who'd had a falling out with Chavez.
Makled was so high-ranking the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration last week declared him the "King of Kingpins" after his indictment in New York. Until this summer, Makled commanded Venezuela's air and seaports. His gigantic jetliners loaded with tons of cocaine flew from "the presidential ramp" headed for Mexico.
Makled says he kept records and tapes of his encounters with Rangel, and other top Venezuelan military and intelligence leaders, bribing them to let his drug jets take off. He made $1.4 billion from his work — about the same amount as Chapo Guzman, Mexico's richest cartel chief, whom Forbes magazine estimates is worth $1 billion.
In 2006, Makled's records show, a DC-9 loaded with five and half tons of cocaine crashed in Mexico. It was discovered by Mexican police before it could reach its "buyer" — who happened to be the Sinaloa drug lord Guzman, known for his shootouts in Juarez.
There's also a political aspect emerging in that Mexican war: In recent news item about a child assassins turning up in Mexico, Mexican police report that these gangs are being protected by Chavez's leftist political ally in Mexico, the PRD Party. If PRD continues in this way, it may soon become a leftist drug insurgency, like FARC.
It all pushes the question of what to do about Chavez to a new level of urgency. Right now, Colombia must decide whether to extradite Makled to the U.S. to tell everything he knows about Chavez, or to send him to Venezuela, where he is likely to be killed.
Chavez asked for Makled first, and the murders he's charging him with are graver than the U.S.' cocaine-smuggling charges. Chavez badly needs to silence him to promote his generals.
The Obama administration has its own dilemma — does it want Makled to talk, or does it just want to sweep him and his shocking revelations under the rug as war continues to rage in Mexico?
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/553849/201011151857/A-Gangster-With-Oil.aspx
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A Meth Lab in a residence would still be a violation of local zoning ordinance in any municipality I know of, like having an oil refinery or nuclear waste storage site (as I have offered to do for money) on your property. If there isn't a local ordinance against it because it is already against state law, then there will be.
If meth were legalized - and it won't be - child protection laws would be unchanged. If authorities wouldn't remove the meth; they would remove the children.
Regarding meth orphans, I have been inside of foster homes and I have been inside meth homes. The children are doing far better in the former.
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For decades I have tried to form an opinion to legalize or not.
I can never quite figure it out.
I would be for a trial period of legalizing marijuana say for 7 years or something like that and see what happens.
I am too afraid to say the same for other drugs. It just seems like other drugs would be used more and our problems worse.
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Another question you can answer yourself. But the kids wouldn't be raised among the volatile chemicals needed to make meth.
Meth doesn't require poppies from southwest asia or coca plants from south america. You only need household chemicals from local stores for the various methods to make it. So legal meth wouldn't mean people don't make their own. Especially if it's taxed, like alcohol is.
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A Meth Lab in a residence would still be a violation of local zoning ordinance in any municipality I know of, like having an oil refinery or nuclear waste storage site (as I have offered to do for money) on your property. If there isn't a local ordinance against it because it is already against state law, then there will be.
If meth were legalized - and it won't be - child protection laws would be unchanged. If authorities wouldn't remove the meth; they would remove the children.
Regarding meth orphans, I have been inside of foster homes and I have been inside meth homes. The children are doing far better in the former.
So then law enforcement would be enforcing those laws with search warrants, yes?
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I think it makes sense to realize that there are drugs that by-pass free will. Certainly not pot, but meth would appear to be a contender. As such, legalization may not make sense.
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"So then law enforcement would be enforcing those laws with search warrants, yes?"
There were two points there, local zoning ordinances and child protection. I was ready to go off on a rant about child protection, but maybe you were referring to the zoning rules. In both cases, I think you can start off presumed guilty which removes some of the need for specific evidence. Neither is necessarily a criminal charge which removes defendant rights you would have had with a criminal charge. Sounds flippant but I can give first hand stories.
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Crafty, I agree. If the goal is resolution, the issue should be separated down to areas where political agreement is possible. The argument here keeps drifting back to extreme examples.
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There are harsh realities related to this subject. The Libertarian sloganeering imagines that every man is an island, and that the hard drug addict with peacefully self-destruct with no collateral damage. Even if drugs are decriminalized and/or legalized, then there will still be drug related crimes and search warrants. Alcohol is legal, and most every state has an agency specifically charged with enforcing alcohol laws. Most every local level law enforcement agencies does lots of cases related to alcohol. Letting the genie of hard drugs out of the bottle will have a serious impact that I'd estimate we'd all feel.
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http://reason.com/blog/2010/11/16/speed-5-this-time-for-sure
Reason Magazine
Speed 5: This Time for Sure!
Jacob Sullum | November 16, 2010
First the government encouraged illicit production of methamphetamine by restricting access to legal speed. Then it encouraged pseudoephedrine-based production by banning or restricting other precursors. Appalled by all the scary, toxic, flammable meth labs that subsequently popped up around the country, it restricted access to cold and allergy remedies containing pseudoephedrine, forcing customers to ask pharmacists for them, sign a registry, and abide by quantity limits. Those restrictions, in turn, encouraged a shift to the "shake and bake" method for producing meth, which is less complicated and does not require as much pseudoephedrine but is in some ways more dangerous and more environmentally destructive. The next logical step, according to Lincoln County, Oregon, District Attorney Rob Bovett, is to require a prescription for products containing pseudoephedrine, thereby banning all over-the-counter sales. This time for sure!
In a New York Times op-ed piece (noted this morning by Radley Balko), Bovett suggests that a prescription requirement would not have much impact on consumers, since it would affect "only 15 pharmaceutical products and their generic equivalents." If the number of products containing pseudoephedrine, an inexpensive and effective decongestant, is smaller than it used to be, that might have something to do with the fact that treating consumers like criminals while making them jump through new hoops to buy their favored remedies tends to put a damper on demand. Many companies reformulated their products in response to the new restrictions (which took effect nationally in 2006), replacing pseudoephedrine with phenylephrine, which seems to be about as effective as a placebo but can be purchased without seeking permission from a state-appointed gatekeeper. A prescription requirement, which would add the cost and inconvenience of a medical appointment to the barriers, would be fatal to this product category.
I do not accept Bovett's blithe assumption that any inconvenience and discomfort imposed upon cold and allergy sufferers is justified by the need to prevent people from getting high, since I do not think preventing people from getting high is a legitimate function of government. But even if it were, there is no reason to believe that requiring a prescription for cold and allergy remedies would accomplish that end (or, as the headline on his piece puts it, "Kill the Meth Monster"—an unusually candid acknowledgment that drug warriors mainly fight chimerical threats of their own invention). Bovett concedes but is completely undeterred by the fact that the vast majority of illicit meth consumed in this country is supplied not by mom-and-pop labs or mobile shake-and-bakers but by large criminal organizations based in Mexico, which do not buy their pseudoephedrine a couple of packs at a time from Rite Aid. And even if all the world's pseudoephedrine could be magically eliminated, other methods of production would be used instead. Time and time again, the black market in drugs has proven highly adaptable since the government created it nearly a century ago.
What Rob Bovett actually demands, then, is that people sacrifice cheap, safe, and effective medicine so he and like-minded authoritarians can look like they are fighting drug abuse. The proper response to this plea is a snot-filled sneeze of contempt.
Previous coverage of the pseudoephedrine crackdown here.
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The Libertarian sloganeering imagines that every man is an island, and that the hard drug addict with peacefully self-destruct with no collateral damage.
Back to dissing that radical embrace of freedom, I see. You appear not to be paying attention however: if the rate of drug abuse stays at 1.3 percent of the population before laws are passed, when laws are not particularly onerous, or when they are fairly onerous then the whole "peacefully self-destruct" straw man is in actuality a straw man of a straw man. Most of the results you present as reasons to further the current policy that has failed by any sane measure are in fact manifestations of that failed policy. It would appear you are unable to step out of that hall of mirrors.
Even if drugs are decriminalized and/or legalized, then there will still be drug related crimes and search warrants. Alcohol is legal, and most every state has an agency specifically charged with enforcing alcohol laws. Most every local level law enforcement agencies does lots of cases related to alcohol. Letting the genie of hard drugs out of the bottle will have a serious impact that I'd estimate we'd all feel.
No debate with most of this, except for the assumption in the last clause that we are not feeling the half million incarcerated, the trillion spent, the million pot arrests, the damage done to freedoms most of us hold dear et al by the regimen that, again, has failed miserably by any rational measure.
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Tangent: Speaking of major operations in Mexico, I am reminded of the Chinese national with a business pharmaceutical background who purchased a Mexican citizenship. Authorities found a home filled with IIRC $250,000,000 in CASH. Hotly pursued by narco hit squads, he fled. An American LEO that I have trained was the man who put the cuffs on him here in the US-- just ahead of the hit squads closing in.
Larger point, the operations in Mexico can get REALLY big.
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Back in the day folks in my circle use to get all kinds of stoned and then go to the midnight showing of Reefer Madness to giggle about the over the top representation of dope smoking found therein. That representation had little to do with reality as any stoner knew it, instead serving to illustrate just how little the heirs to the Puritan ethic cared about truth, while also showing just how quickly the general public lapped up the Puritan panic mongering du jour up. The process repeats itself endlessly with one breathless newsperson or another latching on to this substance or that, be it LSD, MDA, DMT, STP, cocaine, meth, various herbs whose name I can't remember, and now, sh!t oh dear, this. Has a pattern emerged yet? Will I be whisked away if I drop a No Doze in my rum and coke?
http://reason.com/blog/2010/11/17/four-loko-bannedby-its-manufac
Reason Magazine
Four Loko Banned...by Its Manufacturer (One Step Ahead of the FDA)
Jacob Sullum | November 17, 2010
Last November the Food and Drug Administration warned 27 companies that they probably were breaking the law by selling beverages that contain alcohol and caffeine, since this combination has never been officially approved. Today, after a year of review, the FDA is expected to announce that it was right; caffeinated alcoholic beverages are illegal. Rather than seize all existing stocks of Four Loko, Joose, etc., the FDA probably will send more letters, warning the manufacturers that they are producing "adulterated" beverages. At that point the companies can either stop producing the drinks or mount an expensive, time-consuming, and uncertain legal challenge to the FDA's determination.
Staying one step ahead of the FDA, Phusion Products, the Chicago-based manufacturer of Four Loko, yesterday announced that it is removing caffeine, guarana (which contains caffeine), and the amino acid taurine from its product, which henceforth will essentially be a sweet, fruity malt liquor with the potency of wine, rather than an alcoholic energy drink. Surely that move will eliminate all of the controversy surrounding the product.
For those who are worried about what will happen when their stockpiles of genuine Four Loko run out, BuzzFeed has instructions for making your own at home. For those who want to stay awake while they're drinking but would not touch a declassé drink like Four Loko with a 10-foot tongue (why am I thinking of Freddy Krueger all of a sudden?), New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni reviews hoity-toity coffee cocktails served by boutique bars in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Something tells me these drinks, despite providing a pharmacologically identical experience, will never inspire a moral panic like the one that drove Four Loko and its ilk from the market.
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Tangent: Speaking of major operations in Mexico, I am reminded of the Chinese national with a business pharmaceutical background who purchased a Mexican citizenship. Authorities found a home filled with IIRC $250,000,000 in CASH. Hotly pursued by narco hit squads, he fled. An American LEO that I have trained was the man who put the cuffs on him here in the US-- just ahead of the hit squads closing in.
Larger point, the operations in Mexico can get REALLY big.
That was the one that was a major whale in Vegas, right?
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You should spend sometime working with the children who parents were "embracing freedom", BBG. Your fond reefer madness memories are pretty distant from the reality I've seen. I recall one young girl, born with spina bifida. Were that her only problem, see her mom was one of those "freedom embracers", living that non-puritanical lifestyle who brought home another "freedom embracer" that was also unencumbered by that puritanical concept that adults shouldn't rape children,. This girl has serious trauma related to that and a case of Hep C as well. So she engages in self mutilation and me and other jack booted thugs have to intervene many times, because we don't recognize her freedom to destroy her body, being the forces of oppression and all. I know the medical personnel were concerned that if she kept injuring her feet, they'd have to be amputated. I guess that's just society trying to push their "footist" morality on her, right?
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And what makes you think I haven't, GM?
I ought to know better that to enter into these kinds of discussions with LEOs, but I hate leaving misinformation unchallenged. Spent time on a lot of mats with a lot of LEOs who think their H2H training is some sort of received wisdom from which one cannot stray. Remember one FBI guy in a Thai Boxing class who wouldn't throw a right Thai kick--the biggest weapon in the arsenal--because it would leave his right, gun bearing hip, forward, which was a no-no. Alas, he couldn't fight in a right lead either for the same reason, so he spent all his time trying to come up with a way fight with no lead at all, which did not work. We try to cut slow learners slack, but after 4 weeks of his blundering about we got sick of the hip forward sanctimony and so seriously showed him the error of his ways in the hope he'd get better or quit. He quit, but I've no doubt he's off somewhere keeping his right hip rearward no matter what.
And then there are LEOs at the range. Christ, I don't even want to get started there. Make no mistake, some of the best guys I've trained with have been LEOs, but there have been relatively few. Some of the most obstinate, know it all, testosterone addled, inflexible, unwilling to step outside of their training orthodoxy boneheads I've ever met have been LEOs, too, and unfortunately the latter tend to outnumber the former.
Where the mat or the range is concerned I expect you number among the former crowd or you wouldn't be here in the first place, but where the WOD is concerned LEO orthodoxy rules the day. As I've said time and again without receiving a convincing refutation: the WOD has failed by any sane measure. Most of the stuff you've introduced are in fact artifacts of the WOD and citing them makes about as much sense as citing eggs for laying chickens.
So yes, by all means, let's do this for the children. Let's end the madness that is a major player in just about any sad story you could cite. Doing so likely won't make the parents any wiser, but at least the State won't be the prime mover foisting failed, prohibitionist policies yet again.
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Yeah, some cops suck at H2H and shooting, sometimes it's beyond embarrassing to think of what i've seen. I'll note that despite that, most of those men and women do not hesitate to run towards the sound of the guns when called to do so.
We are a nation of laws. Some laws are better than others. The fact that marijuana is a schedule I drugs makes no sense, still it is the law until changed or negated. I've worked as a law enforcement officer in a state where marijuana under an ounce with no intent to distribute was less than a misd. It's not generally worth the time/cost to bother citing someone into court for it. I've had more than a few people approach me to give information about drugs being dealt. I dutifully have passed the information on to the applicable Narcs. I can tell you that if it's marijuana and we aren't talking about kilos or a major grow operation, they don't even pretend to sound interested.
I'll remind you that one of the key concepts for this nation was a moral people who regulated their own behavior. We increasingly are a post-modern, post-moral people with very destructive results. This does not mean that we should be enforcing dietary laws or beating unmarried couples with sticks, but there has to be a secular code of conduct that is enforced. A otherwise law abiding taxpayer who covertly smokes their homegrown weed while watching a movie in their bedroom is right around the person who unlawfully tears a tag off a mattress on my list of priorities as a law enforcement officer.
I'm obligated to intervene if someone wants to shove a shotgun in their mouth and pull the trigger, but if someone wants to slowly kill themselves with Big Macs, grain alcohol and cigarettes, I could care less, so long as I don't have to subsidize it.
Once upon a time, there wasn't a 70% + illegitimacy rate amongst blacks, as a result, there wasn't the violent crime/death rate for that population we see today. Guess where whites are heading? Same path. So what will the violent crime rate look like when whites have a 70% illegitimacy rate? Societies change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Hard drugs with no legal controls would be immensely destructive to our society.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/country-matters-let-us-never-go-the-way-of-the-ik-1384655.html
"consider the plight of the Ik, the African tribe memorably portrayed by Colin Turnbull in his book The Mountain People.
When this first appeared in 1972, it caused outrage - so revolting, so inhuman was the behaviour which it described. Now republished as a paperback, it remains just as shocking and a salutary warning against the breakdown of social values which we are now beginning to witness in our own country.
A peripatetic anthropologist, who died only a few weeks ago, Turnbull studied primitive communities in Africa, India, Tibet and Polynesia. In 1992, he was ordained a Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama. Yet never did he endure more rebarbative companions than during his time with the Ik, among whom he lived in north-eastern Uganda between 1964 and 1967.
Principally hunter-gatherers, who moved about the country in their perpetual search for food, the Ik also lived for some of the time in villages of grass huts, each surrounded by stockades of grass and reeds. So harsh was their struggle for survival that they had abandoned what we think of as basic human values: they had lost all use for love, kindness, sentiment, honesty or altruism, and were motivated entirely by individual self-interest.
This manifested itself in the most brutal forms. Food being their greatest necessity, they fought for it, stole it from each other, lied about it, and when they got some, stuffed themselves until they vomited, so that they could cram down everything available.
Even in times of famine, men who returned to their village after a successful hunt would creep back laden with meat and then slip out before dawn to sell it at the police post, without having given their starving wives or children a mouthful. On one occasion, during a season of particular hardship, a young man who had been away for months reappeared so fat from heavy eating that the author hardly recognised him; but he brought nothing with him except three gourds of honey, which he took straight to the police post for sale.
Along with love, the Ik had long since rejected all notion of family. Children were thrown out at the age of three, and formed themselves into gangs, which raided crops, fought each other, and generally competed for survival. The aged - that is, those over about 25 - were similarly disregarded and cast out. As Turnbull remarked bitterly, this made good biological sense: 'The children were as useless as the aged, or nearly so; as long as you keep the breeding group alive, you can always get more children. Anything else is racial suicide.'
One dreadful episode concerned a girl called Adupa who was, even by local standards, slightly mad. Driven out by her family, tormented by other children, she clamoured for some sort of affection, until in the end her parents shut her into their compound and went away, promising to bring food. 'When they came back she was still waiting for them. It was a week or 10 days later, and her body was already almost too far gone to bury.'
Cruelty was endemic. Adults and children alike found the sight of others suffering pain highly amusing. Turnbull described how men would watch 'with eager anticipation' as a child crawled towards a fire, 'then burst into gay and happy laughter as it plunged a hand into the coals'.
Once, a woman dumped her baby on the ground while she was working out in the fields, and a leopard carried it off. The mother was delighted, because 'she was rid of the child and no longer had to carry it about and feed it'. Still better, it meant that the leopard must be somewhere close, sleeping off its meal, and would offer the hunters an easy kill. 'The men set off and found the leopard, which had consumed all of the child except part of the skull: they killed the leopard, and cooked it and ate it, child and all.'
The question which Turnbull never solved was of how his subjects had descended to such depths. He felt sure that they had once been far less vicious than when he knew them, and he attributed their decline at least partly to the reduction of their old hunting grounds, much of which had been taken as a national park. With their nomadic movement restricted, and their whole existence constrained, the Ik's hardship became such that 'the family simply ceased to exist'.
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Nice to read of your soft side GM 8-)
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I'm at least as warm and cuddly as a pile of rusty nails, if not more.
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We've spent billions every year, and yet we still have illegal aliens. Time to shut down the Border Patrol and ICE. The virtual border fence wasn't working anyway. What's the worst that could happen?
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http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_2_a1.html
It is of course true, but only trivially so, that the present illegality of drugs is the cause of the criminality surrounding their distribution. Likewise, it is the illegality of stealing cars that creates car thieves. In fact, the ultimate cause of all criminality is law. As far as I am aware, no one has ever suggested that law should therefore be abandoned. Moreover, the impossibility of winning the “war” against theft, burglary, robbery, and fraud has never been used as an argument that these categories of crime should be abandoned. And so long as the demand for material goods outstrips supply, people will be tempted to commit criminal acts against the owners of property. This is not an argument, in my view, against private property or in favor of the common ownership of all goods. It does suggest, however, that we shall need a police force for a long time to come.
In any case, there are reasons to doubt whether the crime rate would fall quite as dramatically as advocates of legalization have suggested. Amsterdam, where access to drugs is relatively unproblematic, is among the most violent and squalid cities in Europe. The idea behind crime—of getting rich, or at least richer, quickly and without much effort—is unlikely to disappear once drugs are freely available to all who want them. And it may be that officially sanctioned antisocial behavior—the official lifting of taboos—breeds yet more antisocial behavior, as the “broken windows” theory would suggest.
Having met large numbers of drug dealers in prison, I doubt that they would return to respectable life if the principal article of their commerce were to be legalized. Far from evincing a desire to be reincorporated into the world of regular work, they express a deep contempt for it and regard those who accept the bargain of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay as cowards and fools. A life of crime has its attractions for many who would otherwise lead a mundane existence. So long as there is the possibility of a lucrative racket or illegal traffic, such people will find it and extend its scope. Therefore, since even legalizers would hesitate to allow children to take drugs, decriminalization might easily result in dealers turning their attentions to younger and younger children, who—in the permissive atmosphere that even now prevails—have already been inducted into the drug subculture in alarmingly high numbers.
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"Amsterdam, where access to drugs is relatively unproblematic, is among the most violent and squalid cities in Europe."
Perchance is any of that due to the clash of civilizations occurring there?
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We've spent billions every year, and yet we still have illegal aliens.
Does that effort cause more problems than it cures? If so, yes, we should shut it down. If not then border integrity, such as it is, is worth protecting.
I'm immersed in an annual effort that will take me out to a dry county in rural Kentucky where the descendants of the Scotch-Irish participants in the Whiskey Rebellion now set up their stills and meth labs in the same shelter caves, and thus will be too busy to further discuss why efforts to ban the production and distribution of substances that have failed by any rational measure since the first Fed tried to tax the first settler's booze much further, or at least with the kind of patience and deliberation required. Dimes to dollars someone will show up in camp with a bottle of something untaxed; had a couple Copt researchers from Lebanon show up 3 or 4 years back with some homemade ouzo that was pretty darn tasty. Have no idea how they got it into the country, but they were so impressed by my camp management skills that they left me with a bottle I've been slowly nursing ever since.
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Let's see, the Whiskey Rebellion was put down by a paramilitary force armed with the latest in weapons technology, lead by one George Washington. Alert Radley Balko!
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/netherlands/8144369/Dutch-government-attempts-to-ban-sale-of-marijuana-to-tourists.html
Dutch government attempts to ban sale of marijuana to tourists
The new conservative Dutch government wants to force the country's marijuana cafés to become "members only" clubs, in a move that would effectively block foreigners from buying the drug.
Coffee shop in Holland
Marijuana has been sold openly in designated cafés in the Netherlands for decades Photo: REUTERS
7:36PM GMT 18 Nov 2010
If the idea ever becomes reality – it would be legally complicated and politically divisive – it would be the latest of the country's liberal policies to be scrapped or curtailed as the Dutch rethink the limits of their famed tolerance.
While marijuana is technically illegal in the Netherlands, it has been sold openly in designated cafés for decades, and police make no arrests for possession of small amounts.
Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten said that in the future, only residents of Dutch cities will be allowed to purchase cannabis. "Not tourists. We don't like that," he said on state television in remarks broadcast on Wednesday.
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So citizens will now be able to sell grass at a markup to tourists? Another problem solved, eh what?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQRMvg5TAl8&feature=player_embedded
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BOZEMAN, Mont. — With his electrician’s tool belt and company logo cap, Rick Schmidt looks every bit the small-business owner he in fact is. That he often reeks of marijuana these days ... well, it is just part of the job, he said.
“I went on a service call the other day — walked in and a guy said to me, ‘What have you been smoking?’ ” said Mr. Schmidt, 39.
For Gallatin Electric, a six-employee company founded by Mr. Schmidt’s father, Richard, as for other businesses in this corner of south-central Montana, medical marijuana has been central to surviving hard times as the construction industry and the second-home market collapsed. Not the smoking of it, the growing of it or even the selling of it, but the fully legal, taxable revenues being collected from the industry’s new, emerging class of entrepreneurs. Three of the four electricians on staff at Gallatin, Mr. Schmidt said, are there only because of the work building indoor marijuana factories.
Questions about who really benefits from medical marijuana are now gripping Montana. In the Legislature, a resurgent Republican majority elected last fall is leading a drive to repeal the six-year-old voter-approved statute permitting the use of marijuana for medical purposes, which opponents argue is promoting recreational use and crime.
If repeal forces succeed — the House last month voted strongly for repeal, and the Senate is now considering it — Montana would be the first to recant among the 15 states and the District of Columbia that have such laws.
In Bozeman, a college and tourism town north of Yellowstone National Park, construction jobs and tax collections dried up just as the marijuana business was blossoming; residents and politicians here say the interconnection of economics and legal drugs would be much more complicated to undo.
Economic ripples or entanglements extend in every direction, business people like the Schmidts say — gardening supply companies where marijuana growers are buying equipment, mainstream bakeries that are contracting for pot-laced pastries, and even the state’s biggest utility, NorthWestern Energy, which is seeing a surge in electricity use by the new factories. Medical marijuana, measured by numbers of patients, has roughly quadrupled in Montana in the last year.
“It’s new territory we’re treading in here,” said Brad Van Wert, a sales associate at Independent Power Systems, a Bozeman company that completed its first solar installation last month — a six-kilowatt rooftop solar array, costing about $40,000 — for a medical marijuana provider called Sensible Alternatives.
Mr. Van Wert said that his company was assertively going after this new market, and that marijuana entrepreneurs, facing big tax bills, were responding to the appeal of a 30 percent tax credit offered by the state for expansion of renewable energy.
The Bozeman City Council passed regulations last year sharply restricting the numbers of storefront suppliers downtown. But growers and providers say that even though the regulations restricted their numbers, they also created a climate of legitimacy that has made other businesses more comfortable in dealing with them for equipment and supplies.
And unlike the situation in sunny California or Colorado, where medical marijuana has similarly surged, growing marijuana indoors is all but mandatory here, a fact that has compounded the capital expenditures for start-ups and spread the economic benefits around further still. An industry group formed by marijuana growers estimates that they spend $12 million annually around the state, and that 1,400 jobs were created mostly in the last year in a state of only 975,000 people.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars a month,” one new grower and medical marijuana provider, Rob Dobrowski, said of his outlay for electricity alone, mainly for his light-intensive grow operation that supplies four stores around the state.
Mr. Dobrowski was a construction contractor until the recession hit, as were two of his brothers who have joined him in the business. He said he now employs 33 people, from a standing start of zero a year ago.
Bozeman’s mayor, Jeff Krauss, a Republican, said he thought there was an element of economic fairness to be considered in the debate about medical marijuana’s future. “I don’t think anybody passed it thinking we were creating an industry,” he said, referring to the 2004 voter referendum. But like it or not, he said, it has become one, and legal investments in the millions of dollars have been made.
“Somewhere around 25 people have made anywhere from a $60,000 to a $100,000 bet on this industry,” Mr. Krauss said, referring to the local startups and their capital costs.
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“Now the Legislature has got us saying, ‘Ha, too bad, you lose,’ ” Mr. Krauss added. “Boy is that a bad message to send when we’re in the doldrums.”
One owner of a gardening supply company in the Bozeman area estimated that a person could essentially buy a job for $15,000, beginning a small growing operation with 100 plants. Especially for construction trade workers who were used to being self-employed before the recession, the owner said, the rhythms of the new industry feel familiar.
“Forty to 50 percent of customers come from construction,” said the owner, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because her national suppliers threatened to stop doing business with her if their products were openly associated with marijuana. “Plumbers, electricians, the whole genre of working-class, blue-collar Montana.”
There are shadowy corners in the supposedly compassionate world of medical marijuana. The owner of one downtown pastry shop, where the sale of marijuana cookies and brownies accounts for about 15 percent of revenue, said he broke off a relationship with his first marijuana provider, who wanted the baker to use less marijuana in the products and falsify the ingredients to save the grower production costs.
And it is easy to find workers in this new economy who were in the illegal pot world before. But it is also easy to find people like Josh Werle, 29, who took a job as a grower at a company called A Kinder Caregiver after work as a commercial painter dried up.
Mr. Werle, a fourth-generation Montanan, said his family had seen many industries fade and fail over the decades — from railroads to agriculture, and now, in his case, construction. He said he had also worried about his health as a painter, breathing fumes all day. But the economy is what finally pushed him out.
“I never envisioned myself working in this,” said Tara Gregorich, 29, who graduated last May from Montana State University with a degree in environmental horticultural science. She sat under the lights in an industrial grow room, legs splayed around a plant that she was trimming lower shoots from to encourage growth. “But this is one of the few industries in Montana that is year-round.”
At Gallatin Electric, Rick Schmidt said he still made a sharp distinction between medical marijuana and street drugs. Illegal drug dealers, he said, “should have the book thrown at them.”
But he thinks medical use probably does have benefits.
Mr. Schmidt said his father-in-law, who suffers from post-polio syndrome, was considering applying for a medical marijuana card
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British Panel Concludes that the War on Drugs is a Failure
Ilya Somin • March 22, 2011 12:56 am
A British panel composed of leading members of Parliament and former public officials has concluded that the War on Drugs is a failure and should be abandoned. The panel includes former heads of MI5 (the British domestic intelligence agency) and the Crown Prosecution Service, as well as leading Conservatives, including prominent former members of Margaret Thatcher’s government. Here’s a report by the conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph:
The “war on drugs” has failed and should be abandoned in favour of evidence-based policies that treat addiction as a health problem, according to prominent public figures including former heads of MI5 and the Crown Prosecution Service.
Leading peers – including prominent Tories – say that despite governments worldwide drawing up tough laws against dealers and users over the past 50 years, illegal drugs have become more accessible.
Vast amounts of money have been wasted on unsuccessful crackdowns, while criminals have made fortunes importing drugs into this country.
The increasing use of the most harmful drugs such as heroin has also led to “enormous health problems”, according to the group....
It could lead to calls for the British government to decriminalise drugs, or at least for the police and Crown Prosecution Service not to jail people for possession of small amounts of banned substances.
Their intervention could receive a sympathetic audience in Whitehall, where ministers and civil servants are trying to cut the numbers and cost of the prison population....
The chairman of the new group, Baroness Meacher.... told The Daily Telegraph: “Criminalising drug users has been an expensive catastrophe for individuals and communities....”
Lord Lawson, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1983 and 1989 [under Margaret Thatcher], said: “I have no doubt that the present policy is a disaster....”
In the United States, the opposition of political conservatives is still perhaps the most important obstacle to efforts to cut back on the War on Drugs. Hopefully, this reconsideration by some of their British counterparts will lead more American conservatives follow the example of William F. Buckley and Pat Robertson, both of whom gradually came to realize that the War on Drugs causes enormous harm, and is bad for family values.
http://volokh.com/2011/03/22/british-panel-concludes-that-the-war-on-drugs-is-a-failure/
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This piece very much mirrors my experience when working drug rescue and while, uh, partaking of intense field studies. I take particular note of efforts to demonize the drug du jour, how damnfoolish the resulting hysteria looks to those immersed in the culture (hence leading them to question just about EVERYTHING said by anyone in a position of authority), and how most folks rejoin adult life eventually, less some casualties along the way. Indeed, I can look back at a good 4 or 5 kids in my circle he became acid casualties, while I'm bumping into just about everyone else on Facebook these days, apparently little worse for wear. The picture very little resembles the one presented by the media:
Middle-American Methamphetamine
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In small-town America, drugs are an everyday experience.
By Nick King | April 6, 2011
Since the late 1990s members of the media have routinely trekked into the hinterlands of America to cover the meth “epidemic,” flap their lips about the newfound dangers of the heartland, and beat a path back to their urban refuges. I had hoped that this phenomenon would end with the recent decline in meth use, but instead Nick Reding’s Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town climbed the New York Times bestseller list and claimed the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for 2009. This is especially irksome for me because I grew up in a small town in Southeast Missouri that was sometimes referred to as the meth capital of the world.
According to DEA statistics, Missouri had led the nation in the number of meth labs discovered every year since 2003. When I was in high school, MTV dispatched a news crew to my town and interviewed a number of friends and acquaintances for a story on meth users.
I did meth for the first time when I was 15, and by the time I was 17, I was using it once or twice a week. I can safely say that although many fine writers, Reding included, have attempted to tackle drug use in small town America—and have exposed the uncomfortable truth that drugs are more prevalent in rural than urban areas—none of them really understand the subject.
These outsiders routinely accept a sensationalized version of meth’s power: it is a uniquely addictive drug that ruins everyone it touches. But most people who take meth and other illicit drugs are otherwise normal—they just like to get lifted every once in a while. This is not to minimize the possibly dire consequences of drug abuse. I have a number of friends who died well before their times due to rampant substance-abuse problems—none of them directly meth-related, however. One of my best friends died after shooting up coke hours before his court date. Few have more familiarity with these tragedies than I do, but they are by far the exception rather than the rule.
Taking meth is like joining a secret society. Most users don’t talk about those activities to outsiders, but we can communicate all we need to each other, even when surrounded by the uninitiated, with knowing smiles, quick head bobs, subtle sniffs of the nose. Once I became at least a semi-regular consumer of the drug, I discovered that users extended well beyond the speed freaks at Wal-Mart buying lithium batteries at three in the morning. I could read the signs perfectly—the teeth grinding, chain-smoking, darting eyes, and omnipresent bottles of water—and could even spot those members of my town’s upper crust who happened to enjoy a rush. Anyone can spot a tweaker who has been up for days in the depths of amphetamine psychosis, but few non-users have the eyes to see the rest.
Of course, this was also true of most of my town’s good, God-fearing folk. They substituted hysteria for real knowledge of the drug. We walked among them as their employees—or employers, for that matter—neighbors, and friends, but if they had known who we were, they would have descended upon us like a screech owl on a vole. Anyone arrested for meth got his face splashed across the front page of the paper. Within days, even hours, formerly respected members of the community could have their lives ruined not by the drug but by people’s perception of it. But regardless of how shocking the upstanding citizens of town found it when one of their own was exposed as a fiend, the revelation never made them question their presumptions. I remember when two girls around my age were busted cooking off a batch at a local motel. The girls were popular at school and from good families, but after the news got around town, every time I left for a party my mother demanded to know if either one of them would be there—as if they were the only ones at school who did white dope.
Because of the dire repercussions of being found out, we were more tight-lipped about meth than any other drug, even with our peers. When my friend Drew first started using meth, he flaunted his consumption and told anyone who asked exactly what he was on. Drew was friendly and gregarious by nature, but that could not stand. Some of us told him to shut his damn mouth and refused to acknowledge his existence until he did so. He learned more discretion in the next few days than he had hitherto in his life.
Meth is not the whole story here, not by a long shot. In my tribe, almost everyone took almost every kind of drug imaginable—meth included, but it was hardly the sine qua non of our drug universe. On a typical weekend night, we might drink a fifth of whiskey on top of a couple blue bombers of hydrocodone, then snort a rail around three in the morning to keep the party going. The order could be reversed by taking a psychedelic like LSD or psilocybin in the afternoon—possibly accompanied by a little meth or ecstasy to steady the mind—and then drinking into the early morning with a nightcap of codeine cough syrup to ensure a peaceful sleep. We smoked weed almost constantly regardless of which route we took, and drinking and driving was treated like a competitive sport.
For the most part, however, we were not the stereotypical burnouts that people expected this behavior from, nor did we think of ourselves as such. Several of my closest friends and I were in the top decile of our class despite being intoxicated half of our waking lives—frequently including school hours. We were almost all athletes and participated in a number of activities and clubs. For two years, every one of my class’s officers was a multiple drug felon.
We were also, by and large, neither poor nor neglected by our parents. Our mothers and fathers were solidly middle-class or, in a few cases, upper-class. They worked as doctors, bankers, teachers, contractors—very few lawyers, oddly—and owned some of the most respected small businesses in town. Busy as they were with work, our parents made every effort to be involved in our lives: attending parent-teacher conferences, cheering us on at sporting events, and taking us to church every Sunday followed by lunch at one of the town’s few nice restaurants.
Nor can anyone attribute our wide-ranging illicit behavior to a faltering local economy, as Reding does frequently in Methland:
One example of the connection between financial loss and the increase in meth use was a feeling among small-time cooks that they, like the moonshiners of the early twentieth century, were the last of a breed, not just of rebellious criminals, but of small business people. In the wake of so many closed storefronts, it was the Beavis and Butt-Head cooks, as the police called them, who touted their place in the increasingly weak economy of Oelwein [Iowa].
My town never had similar economic woes. Granted, there were two strip malls that sat largely empty—where we would congregate on weekend nights to drink, sell drugs, and decide where everyone should go for the evening—but that was more the consequence of the owner’s outlandishly high rents than an indicator for the economic health of the town. The industrial park was always full of humming factories with more moving to town when I graduated, and pretty much all of my friends worked summers and part-time during the school year. There was poverty in the area, to be sure, but in a town where many people were only two or three generations removed from sharecropping—myself included—that was nothing new.
It’s possible that we turned to drugs out of boredom, but I doubt it. True, there weren’t numerous recreational options around town, especially for teenagers. We had the local multiplex and a few pool halls that allowed minors, and that was it. Still, we were good at making our own fun. We were less than an hour’s drive from a lake and a number of rivers and creeks, so the springs and summers were a seemingly endless cycle of swimming, tubing, fishing, campouts, and bonfires. Regardless of the season, we had house parties when someone’s parents went out of town, and if worse came to worst, we could just drive around all night. The only things the cities had that really interested us were concerts, and we were always game for driving to see our favorite bands.
But it’s not as if we used drugs less when we were occupied; we believed they enhanced any situation. In fact, our desire to use drugs increased proportionally to how much fun we thought an activity would be. When we took our senior trip to a tourist trap on the Redneck Riviera in Florida’s Panhandle, eight of us brought along eight balls of both meth and coke, a pound of weed, and four ounces of ’shrooms. Most daringly, one friend raided the pharmacy where he worked and filled a large Mason jar full of every pill he could find that had a “may cause drowsiness” or “do not operate heavy machinery” warning. Drugs were not all we were concerned about, however. They were always a secondary concern next to being with our friends. A decade later, I still spend most of my time with the same people despite having moved away from our hometown years ago.
This all seemed perfectly normal to us. We didn’t match the conceptions of drug users presented by the media or government, but we were certain the same thing was happening everywhere in the country. We were not disabused of this notion until our friend Calhoun moved to Kansas City and came back to visit, telling us that all his new acquaintances thought he was an addict. I remember his explanation very clearly:
So the first day at work I start talkin’ to the guy that’s showin’ me around the place, and I ask him where I can get some weed, and, ya know, he tells me. And then I’m like, ‘so where can I get some pills,’ and—again—he tells me. Then I ask him where I can get some meth, and he says he doesn’t know. So I ask him if he knows where I can get some X, and he’s like, ‘what the f–k’s wrong with you!?’
Calhoun shrugged in disbelief. “I don’t know! I just thought people liked to party. I guess up there ya just do like one or two drugs at a time or somethin’ like that.” This pretty well blew our minds. Who wouldn’t do any and all drugs available to him? We weren’t even the craziest people we knew, so if we were addicts, we simply didn’t have the terminology to explain the people who were really out there—people like The Hawk and Bodean.
The Hawk was the best meth cook I knew. While the less competent chefs cooked up batches of gray or even brown dope filled with impurities, The Hawk’s stuff was always pure white—or occasionally blue when he was experimenting with a new recipe—and burned hard and pure going up the nostrils, like a white hot nail straight into your brain. But again, he did not fit the popular stereotype of a chef as some backwoods hick, rail-thin with half his teeth missing. He was skinny but not unusually so, in his early twenties when I knew him, with dark hair and nondescript features. If he wore dress pants and a tie he would have looked like a car salesman, but he was a damn sight smarter, nicer, and more honest than most car dealers I know. The Hawk sold drugs, but from what I could tell his primary income came from weed; the meth was more of a hobby. As friends of his, we never paid for the lines and quarter grams The Hawk gave us over the years, and even when dealing with higher quantities he never charged us retail. The guy was addicted to meth and probably benzos to boot, but he never wronged me or anyone I knew and still goes down as a standup guy in my book.
Bodean was something else. If someone I trusted had told me he was the Norse god Loki, I would have believed it. You never knew what he would do next, but the good money was always that it would be violent and destructive. Although he was just as familiar as The Hawk with the white-dope devil, he always remembered to eat and lifted weights, so his body was 190 ripped pounds in 70 inches. His hair was jet black with long bangs that fell to one side of his face almost down to his sharp jaw. If he had grown it a little longer and put it into a devil lock, he would have fit in on stage with the Misfits. I was friends with Bodean, but I knew better than to cross him when he was angry, especially if he had been drinking bourbon.
A guy in the class below mine once had the misfortune of becoming the target of Bodean’s rage when he was pounding Jim Beam. It was a misunderstanding, but Bodean landed about ten elbows to the kid’s face before he knew what was happening. Another time, the cops came to bust a party, and while they were occupied inside, Bodean attempted to steal their cruiser. When the cops ran back outside, he jumped out of the car and yelled, “F–k you, pigs!” in his guttural, almost caveman-like drawl and took off through the backyard. The cops chased after him, but were literally clotheslined in the next yard while Bodean ducked and kept running through the cemetery, across Main Street, and through the woods to home—about two miles. Although I can’t be sure what mixture of drugs Bodean was on for all his adventures, the only occasion I am certain he was fueled primarily by amphetamines was the time he shot his PlayStation with his MAC-10. He had been up for days, and one of his friends wouldn’t stop playing Tony Hawk, so Bodean walked into the room and shot right through the console and into a water line in his basement. Fortunately, many plumbers in the area would work for crank.
Bodean was also involved in the drug trade—pretty deeply at times—but we didn’t necessarily consider him a drug dealer. Drugs were not his only source of income, and he was by no means a kingpin. Most people we knew only sold drugs to get their own supply for free, so we didn’t think of them “real” drug dealers because such a wide definition would incorporate pretty much everyone we knew at one time or another. We considered selling—or at least giving—drugs to your friends a social duty. If I bought a quarter pound of weed and sat on it while my friends were dry, it would have made me an instant pariah. There were few deeds nobler in our minds than breaking the law by, say, trafficking a sheet of acid back from a rave for no profit save a fantastic experience shared with your friends.
We took a much dimmer view of cops, our natural enemies. We had a certain grudging respect for a cop who really believed he was making the world a better place by busting people for getting high—quixotic as that belief is—but crooked cops were the lowest of the low in our taxonomy. After two of the cities’ top narcs busted a friend of mine with a pound of weed, it was agreed that no charges would be filed as long as the cops kept the pot and my friend never mentioned it again. We already knew those particular officers were crooked, so it was hardly a revelation to us—other townspeople might have reacted very differently to the news—but we were all sickened by the theft. They were worse than highwaymen because they publicly claimed a noble purpose.
Still, we didn’t want them to quit being cops; if you had to get busted, it was best to get popped by them. What we really wanted was for crooked cops to be punished for their sins in dramatic fashion. We hoped that they would be struck by lightning, in an obvious act of God’s anger, but we would have settled for having them publicly exposed as crooked and sent to prison. But as long as such people lived in our town, they could do the least harm as police officers.
While we took our trips on LSD and the cops took theirs on power, the good townsfolk had their religion. Our town was a departure point to parts unknown, and most people chose to ride one of two trains: drugs or Jesus. Both groups believed they were bound for enlightenment and cursed the other as hopelessly naïve and probably wicked. Conveniently, if anyone grew weary of his chosen car, the trains ran on parallel tracks, and people frequently jumped from one to the other.
My friend Matt was as devoted a space cadet as I knew. The summer before our senior year, we had a running contest to see who could take the most acid at one time. Some might wonder why two intelligent young men would do something so hazardous to their mental health. It was for the same reason Sir Edmund Hilary conquered Everest: because it was there. We were determined to scale the mountains of our minds then dynamite them to pieces, only to build them higher still and do it all again. I bowed out of the contest after I ate a ten-strip of Tim Leary blotter paper at a hippie festival and came to believe that I had zipped my tackle off while taking a leak, but Matt pressed on. He ended up eating 22 hits at an outdoor rave, and he claimed he saw a girl we knew turn into a duck-billed platypus. He more than doubled a total that had nearly destroyed me, and you would never know a nervous thought had crossed his mind. It was as if tripping were his natural state of being.
Nevertheless, he frequently bounced back to the Lord. It seemed that every time a girl broke his heart, his world would shatter, and he would spend the next two or three weeks attending prayer groups and preaching the Good News to us. This tendency was probably attributable to the reform school his mother sent him to near Patterson, Missouri. The teachers were former Marines and zealous Baptists who beat the students and forced them to memorize Bible verses. While Matt was there, one of his classmates slashed another student’s throat in an attempt to take over the school. That school was the only topic Matt felt uncomfortable discussing, and I have to believe it is part of the reason Matt could be intoxicated on a far deeper level by Jesus than by LSD.
I didn’t fully comprehend how warped my little town was until I moved away for college. I attended an elite Midwestern university, and many of my classmates came from supercilious locales like New York and L.A. For the most part, they thought of my friends and me as half-mad provincials with minds twisted from the tedium of small-town life and adulterated methamphetamine. The same attitude pervades the journalists who cover drug use in rural America. (Reding is exceptional in that he has a small-town pedigree and makes a noble attempt to see through his subjects’ eyes. Still, despite his best efforts, he remains an outsider in the places he describes.) They come to find madmen, who are admittedly easy to find, confirm their prejudices, and file their stories confident that they’ve made a difference. True, they have told the rest of the world more than it ever wanted to know about rural America’s underbelly. But they can’t tell us the whole truth because they don’t know it and never will.
Nick King writes from Missouri.
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Gee, all the addicts and shattered lives I've seen must not have really happened.
Glad I read that. I guess hard drugs aren't even a public health problem, just harmless fun.
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http://aia.berkeley.edu/media/pdf/shah_children_meth.pdf
These kids just don't know how to party.
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http://realestate.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=23154768
How to avoid buying a meth house
A home that’s contaminated because of methamphetamine production or use may show few visible signs of the risks it poses. And if that weren’t bad enough, there’s a lot of bad guidance floating around about how to spot one.
By Marilyn Lewis of MSN Real Estate
As the highly addictive drug methamphetamine grows in popularity, so does the chance you could end up buying a “meth house” when you go shopping for real estate.
Making or even smoking meth leaves behind a stew of chemicals that saturates walls, ceilings, floors and carpets with meth as well as mercury, lead, iodine, lithium and poisonous solvents. For each pound of drug, meth “cookers” dump, flush or leave behind 5 to 6 pounds of poisonous waste.
Exposure to even small amounts of these poisons can damage humans’ nervous systems, liver and blood production mechanisms. Small children suffer most. Exposure can trigger birth defects and developmental problems in babies in the womb. (Learn about drug-endangered children at the Office of National Drug Control Policy.)
Meth labs are found in houses, commercial buildings, cabins, mobile homes, RVs, caves, abandoned mines and federal and state forests and parks. The stuff is so easy to make and the ingredients are so cheap and common that some users just make their own at home in two-liter pop bottles or a picnic cooler.
Video: Test kit to detect a meth house?
If you accidentally buy a meth house, your health isn’t the only thing at stake. You could get stuck with tens of thousands of dollars in costs for testing and hazardous-materials cleanup.
That is what happened to Dawn Turner’s son and his young family when they unwittingly bought a meth house in a rural area in Tennessee in 2004. It wasn’t until 2006, when they decided to sell the house, that they learned from neighbors that the previous owner of their home was in prison for making and using meth there. The cost of testing, decontaminating and re-testing the house: $16,000. The experience devastated the young couple, emotionally and financially, says Turner, who began a Web site, MethLabHomes.com, that’s a repository of news and resources to help keep others from making the same mistake.
Many homeowners she talks with are wiped out financially by these contaminated homes, Turner says.
Sorting fact from fiction
A home contaminated by meth production has few visible signs. Buyers need help identifying the risks, yet bad information abounds. Here are some common myths about meth houses:
Myth No. 1: You can use hair spray or spray starch to find meth residue.
Fact: Hair spray? Not a chance. There is a bit of truth that starch, sprayed on a contaminated surface, will turn purple-red. Starch turns color in the presence of iodine, used in cooking meth. “It’s a pretty common high-school science project,” says Caoimhín P. Connell, an industrial hygienist who’s an expert in detecting methamphetamine with Forensic Applications Consulting Technology in Bailey, Colo. The spray-starch trick caught on after it was featured in an episode of “CSI.” It can work, but it’s not reliable or sensitive, so if you don’t see purple, you can’t conclude that a house is clean.
Myth No. 2: You can tell by the smell.
Fact: An old, out-of-use method of meth manufacture does produce a nasty odor that’s reminiscent of cat urine. Even current methods – at certain stages – produce various odors. But none of these is a reliable tip-off. In fact, most meth-contaminated homes have no odor or visual clues.
Mike Parker, a landlord in Trinidad, Colo., spent two years and $40,000 to test and clean up one of his 21 apartments after police arrested a tenant with meth supplies four years ago. The apartment was sealed for two years while Parker tried to borrow enough money for the job. His insurance policy didn’t cover it. “They literally go in and tear everything out,” Parker says of the cleanup by a hazardous-waste company. “I had to recarpet, put in a new toilet, new appliances, new fixtures. They took out the stove, refrigerator, everything.”
And yet, Parker had been in the apartment the day of the bust and he smelled nothing -- no tell-tale odors whatsoever. Despite all his trouble, he says he feels somewhat lucky: Had all 21 apartments shared a heating system, the entire building would have been affected.
Parker vouches for the fact that meth labs are easy to conceal. Usually they go undiscovered until a landlord finds a mess when tenants depart or a neighbor phones police to report someone’s weird behavior. “We presume that for every meth lab law enforcement discovers, there are 15 that have not been discovered,” Connell says.
Myth No. 3: No problem, they were only smoking it.
Fact: Experts differ on how much methamphetamine smoking it takes to contaminate a home to a level that’s dangerous to inhabitants. Connell says one smoke could leave a home uninhabitable. But researcher John Martyny, an associate professor at University of Colorado and industrial hygienist at National Jewish Health Center in Denver, disagrees: “One smoke, you probably would be able to detect it but it’s going to be pretty low,” says Martyny. While detectable, the residue wouldn’t likely violate any state’s regulations, he says.
However, repeated smoking will. Manufacturing methamphetamine creates more contamination than smoking, but repeated smoking will push levels in a home over state limits to levels that make a structure dangerous to inhabitants. In a 2008 study, “Methamphetamine contamination on environmental surfaces caused by simulated smoking of methamphetamine” (published in the Journal of Chemical Health and Safety), Martyny’s laboratory simulated “six or seven smokes, maybe a little bit more, and it (the result) was well over the limits.” (Editor’s note: This story as originally published included only Connell’s expert opinion that one smoke could leave a home uninhabitable.)
Myth No. 4: You’re safe in high-end neighborhoods.
Fact: Plenty of labs have been discovered in expensive homes in “nice” neighborhoods. “We have processed meth labs in the homes of two different dentists, a public accountant and an international banker who had a legitimate income of seven figures,” Connell says. He recently tested and found meth in a “beautiful,” 4,500-square-foot, million-dollar house in downtown Denver.
In 2009, the Drug Enforcement Administration reported clandestine meth labs in 46 states. (Click your state on this DEA map.) Certain areas become hot spots. Lately, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri are a center for labs. One reason: Midwest farmers use tons of anhydrous-ammonia fertilizer on crops. It’s a “precursor” (ingredient) for meth and is stored in big tanks in and around farms. Thieves help themselves and a manufacturing industry grows up around the supply.
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Gee, all the addicts and shattered lives I've seen must not have really happened.
Glad I read that. I guess hard drugs aren't even a public health problem, just harmless fun.
Not saying it doesn't shatter lives; am saying that for every shattered life there are dozens or hundreds of folks dealing with their recreational drug use just fine, at least until they get arrested. And of the folks I know who did auger in due to drugs, all had poorly treated serious issues before they started self-medicating; my guess is if there weren't psychoactives around they'd have found a different method by which to self destruct.
7the grade drug education class they showed us a film where a kid went to a carnival, got given a joint by an evil carney, then bought a hot dog, which turned into a talking troll, causing him to freak out and run into traffic or something. We of course thought that having our hotdogs turn into talking trolls would be pretty cool and so tried to replicate the experiment. Alas, the results were not as advertised, which pretty much threw drug education credibility out the window, which pretty much left us open to any experience that came our way. Of the 4000 who processed through my high school before I got thrown out I'd guess about half were involved with psychoactives, and I can think of about six or so who developed brain bubbles off it. Far more wrapped cars around trees drunk.
Bottom line Puritans du jour demonize drugs citing "facts" that often don't prove congruent with reality. New drug users discover the foolishness of the hysteria as bath salts, faux marijuana, caffeinated alcohol, or the usual drug bogeymen are hyperventilated over. A small percentage of this group make a series of stupid decisions at a young age and flame out, becoming poster kids for the hysterics. The insane profits the counterproductive laws create drive others into the biz and hence subculture. Others are brought deeper into that culture via arrest. These groups then get their turn as poster children. Most, however, move on or dial down their usage as they move into adulthood, or have the nutritional and medical resources to successfully deal with the symptoms of their drug use. All but for the permanent underclass who, brought up as de facto wards of the state, find the most available escapes from their stark reality is either heavy drug use, ruthless drug sales, or both. They make the best poster children of all.
So yes, the job that you have exposes you to the starker end of the spectrum where you see the worst cases. If your experience had been parallel with the author of the piece, you would instead see a lot of folks getting though their misspent youth pretty much intact and moving on to make better decisions informed by their past bad ones. Is either perspective the One, Whole, Truth? No, but both have their place and seeing how we've incarcerated a half million citizens, burned through a trillion dollars, and enriched our enemies with no discernible benefit to ourselves, I figure perhaps another perspective might be in order where the WOD is concerned.
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Cultures can be destroyed. Look at substance use on Indian Reservations and tell the what the multigenerational impact has been.
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Cultures can be destroyed. Look at substance use on Indian Reservations and tell the what the multigenerational impact has been.
Yes they can be, particularly when the government is hurrying the process along via policies that fail by any rational criteria. Think the experience of many Native American groups serve as a case in point.
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Since the BIA was transferred from the Dept. of War to the Dept. of the Interior, the biggest impact to native peoples was alcohol and other drugs in the destruction of generations.
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What role the absence of economic opportunity? And why is it absent?
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Depends on the location of the reservation. Many are very rural, and often were placed in locations where the land was seen as having little or no value.
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"What role the absence of economic opportunity? And why is it absent?"
"Depends on the location of the reservation. Many are very rural, and often were placed in locations where the land was seen as having little or no value."
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Reservations around here have some extremely beautiful and valuable lands AND they are rural, isolated away from the economic centers - so they are mostly blighted and dependent on either the government or dependent on the check from the tribe if they are lucky enough to be a member of one of the few that make a fortune in gambling. There was an opportunity missed to build, sell and develop vacation properties in just parts of these beautiful lakes and forests for huge sums, if they were so inclined. They were not. Could have employed everyone available and put the proceeds into other properties and wider growth businesses. That just isn't their culture.
Time on their hands is one factor (alcohol and drug problems), but heredity/genetics plays a role too. Also, everyone has a different propensity to become alcoholic or other addiction/abuse. The higher your family history, the more one needs to shy away from it. Point in this debate I think is that passing a law against it, alone, doesn't stop it.
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GM, Thank you for the post about the meth houses. That is an amazing property crime to inflict that type of environmental damage to a property, a total loss in cases, huge, huge financial damage to the landlord who may have done nothing wrong. Now a legal requirement for disclosure (state law), you may never be able to sell the house again without a full teardown, and that would require the cost of environmental hazardous waste disposal, which is probably higher than land value. So it will just sit there. If you legalize the meth we are still looking at the felony level arson IMO equal to firebombing the house, and restitution in any deal should include reimbursement of the whole cost. Or as MPD (Mpls) says to felony level property damage, 'sounds like you just have a landlord-tenant issue there'.
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I've related this info before, but there are Gullah and Geechee (African) communities along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia that did not suffer much of the disfunction that the heirs to slavery often did. When those folks were appropriated from Africa they brought malaria, and resistance to it, to the New World. Snatched up specifically for the rice growing skills they practiced in costal Africa, they were often set down in the southern US more or less culturally intact. Malaria sickened the landowners, driving them inland and leaving these cultural groups to chart their way to a degree unimaginable to most slave groups.
Unsupervised or poorly supervised, many of this community escaped south the Florida swamplands where the they joined Seminole Indian groups, and became known as Black Seminoles. The Spanish government, concerned by the expansion of the nascent American nation, armed these tribes so they could serve as a buffer between the US and Spanish Florida holdings. Hence the Seminole wars were launched; American soldiers did not fare very well during it, leaving the government to bribe the Seminole tribes to move out west. Doing so as a culturally intact, armed society that had just taken names, the Seminole tribes and their Gullah and Geechee precursors have done a lot better over the years than the counterparts that had their cultures ripped asunder prior to being made wards of the state.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I suspect drug use is more of a symptom than primary cause of many pathologies. Those with strong roots and good support systems tend to surmount or successfully adapt to the human tendency to seek psychoactive experiences. Those that have had their roots ripped out one way or another tend to find something else to make the focus of their existence and that thing often ends up being some sort of inebriant use. Devoid of other options worth grasping at, that cycle is rarely broken.
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There is nothing nice about getting conquered. Having said that, note that the Jews have had their share of tragedy, yet tend not to have the multigenerational substance abuse issues previously mentioned. The children and grandchildren of those who fled the horrors of the communists in SE asia aren't showing the same levels of pathology found on the reservations.
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Yet note the cultural continuity of those groups you cite. I'm better acquainted with Judaism than say the Hmong, but despite all they've endured they still had the Torah, traditions, a common language(s), educational structures, and so on. In the case of most blacks and Native Americans, traditions were swept away, language was lost, families torn apart, religion stripped away, education either banned or consisted of little more than pounding square pegs into round holes. Just about every defining characteristic as a people was cut away. With no cultural touchstones to be had other crutches filled the void.
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Meth use progression:
(http://www.boingboing.net/assets_c/2011/03/methsteve-thumb-600x241-38638.jpeg)
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Can addicted parents fail to properly socialize their children? If enough of society becomes addicted, could there be a tipping point where the society fails?
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I dunno. Got any data that supports or refutes that question? Seems in a lot of our exchanges you assume a substance so addictive that only the most onerous and to date counterproductive governmental coercion is fully justified. Unless you count addictive substances like air, food, and water I've not seen any evidence that there is a substance that creates craving so intense it can cause societies to fail, though I guess the redistributionist ideologies some try to foist come close.
Indeed, the long, sordid history of prohibitionists is chock full of instances where uncontrolled behavior inspired by a substance is claimed as reason to impose draconian measures. Reefer Madness tried to do it with grass, I remember Dragnet and other cop shows of the day doing so with acid, cocaine had everyone all aflutter a couple decades back, then came angle dust, heroin, ecstasy, and currently meth, though I'm surely forgetting others. A lot of substances that were gonna end society as we know it came and went, and here we are still sputtering along.
But worry not, our current means of dealing with the awful possibility some will find life more tolerable after ingesting this substance or that spins off perverse incentives at such a furious rate that we will always have it until the psychoactive substance no one can resist does indeed arrive on the scene.
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China was severely damaged by the opium the Brits waged wars to sell to them. They're still pissed off about it today. Most hard illegal drugs are not used by the the vast majority of the public. Do you think society would be better off were coke, meth, heroin as commonly used and freely available as alcohol is today?
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Wow, is there a hole in this bucket or what? No matter how many laps around the track we take, we end up chasing tangents that fail to address the utter failure of American drug policy by any rational standard. So you feel Great Britain muscling in on feudal China is somehow germane to this conversation? Perhaps if you could explain how I'll be able to muster the energy to traipse down another alley with little to do with the abject counter-productivity of America's current prohibition spasm.
As for the impact of use of all the substances you cited, we've been there already too. Recall the discussion where it was mentioned that cocaine, opiates, marijuana, et al were once legal in the US? The nation didn't fold up shop then. Or recall the discussion where studies stating addiction rates remain about the same regardless of whether strict, middlin', or lax laws were in place? Do we really need to go down that road again?
Indeed, the more I contend with issues where you and I disagree the more it seems your tactic is to postulate an existential threat that necessitates an authoritarian response while ducking and weaving when any sort of rational benefit/cost analysis is called for. Well I see no existential threat here beyond the one created when millions of Americans are arrested, hundreds of thousands of them imprisoned, and hundreds of billions of dollars are spent et al on an anti-drug pogrom that has failed by any reasonable standard. I find no value partaking of "can god create a rock so big he himself can't move it" gamesmanship so unless you can answer questions like "why is it a good thing to have a half-million citizens in jail while our collective wallet is a trillion dollars lighter" I'm done dancing in circles with you.
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Well, Mexico decriminalized drugs and that's worked out well.
Here is the Libertarian cost/benefit formula, as best as I can tell:
A law costs money to enforce and people keep violating the law, so decriminalize the crime.
Thus, as we keep losing the war against murder, time to treat murder as a public health issue and not a crime.
The majority of the public doesn't want weed legalized, much less meth. This is why Libertarian talking points like this keep Libertarian Party a fringe group and nothing more.
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1) Murder laws and enforcement seem to have a significant effect on the net amount of murder. I'm not seeing that the same can be said of the WOD.
2) Concerening your example of Mexican decriminalization, part of the libertarian argument is that criminalization, which remains the case here in the US, creates extreme profits and thus extreme criminal behavior. Thus the argument is that the evil behaviors we see in Mexico are fomented by the illegal mega profits here in the US.
3) In my case, I tend to organize my thinking to distinguish drugs that tend to transcend free will (e.g. heroin, meth, etc) and those that don't (e.g. pot)
4) I think BBG's point that GM tends to avoid cost/benefit analysis has merit
5) I think GM has moved my heart with some of his entries about the costs to the children of drug users
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1) Murder laws and enforcement seem to have a significant effect on the net amount of murder. I'm not seeing that the same can be said of the WOD.
You don't think people respond to social stigma and the potential for legal penalties? Depending on the type of murder, some offenders have almost no risk of re-offending. Should we incarcerate that group for the same length as the others? Should there be a moral basis for public policy?
2) Concerening your example of Mexican decriminalization, part of the libertarian argument is that criminalization, which remains the case here in the US, creates extreme profits and thus extreme criminal behavior. Thus the argument is that the evil behaviors we see in Mexico are fomented by the illegal mega profits here in the US.
And if the rest of the world dosn't also decriminalize, isn't there still the potential for profits elsewhere?
3) In my case, I tend to organize my thinking to distinguish drugs that tend to transcend free will (e.g. heroin, meth, etc) and those that don't (e.g. pot)
4) I think BBG's point that GM tends to avoid cost/benefit analysis has merit
I think BBG ignore the unintended consequences of what he advocates.
5) I think GM has moved my heart with some of his entries about the costs to the children of drug users
I'll note that I've seen more children with the obvious signs of fetal alcohol syndrome than those who were also exposed to other substances, although FAS is physically obvious where as the other substances tend to be neurological and developmental in their presentation.
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Wow, ignoring unintended consequences with the irony utterly lost. No percentage in deconstructing that.
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Right, because in the magical land of Libertarianstan, meth and crack legally sold at Wal-mart wouldn't have a downside. We have a culture of governmental dependency alread. Let's see how legalized hard drugs add to that mix.
What could go wrong?
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And what has gone right with the current regimen? You know, the one we are talking about? The one that has resulted in a greater supply of purer product with each new law? The one that spins off the perverse incentives the drug warriors then cite as reason to keep funding it?
But by all means indict liberty rather than the authoritarian folly the has failed by any sane standard. Do it for the children, you know the ones with all their parents in prison.
Can't wait for the next lap. Perhaps we can explore the use of betel nut in Swaziland during the 15th century or something.
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So the legal and thus even purer product would be even better? Societies/cultures don't always change for the best. I'd cite our own as a good example. Hey, how great would it be to have Snooki as a spokesperson for legal cocaine products on MTV?
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We could move the discussion move away from stark extremes and see what small, incremental changes right now might work better toward drug use and abuse, lower our costs and enhance our liberty a little without hurting others. Any ideas?
Full legalization of even just pot will quickly make it a government controlled, heavily sin-taxed business in this climate, still in need of an underworld market, with crime enforced territories and distribution. (That is why I favor limited decriminalization instead.) If we had a coherent Supreme COurt, what is grown and consumed personally on your own property without harming others would already be a protected activity. We already have taxation before legalization in our state (and 18 other states): "Minnesota assesses a tax of $3.50 per gram ($100 per ounce, $1600 per pound) of marijuana. Though the law is largely unobserved by marijuana purchasers (do ya think?), failure to comply could result in additional fines of up to $14,000 and jail time of up to seven years. Ultimately, the stamp law allows for the additional charge of tax evasion to be assessed to individuals purchasing marijuana." http://www.ehow.com/list_7289139_minnesota-marijuana-laws.html I'm sure 'legalized' drug traffickers won't forget to buy and affix the stamp and avoid the 7 year imprisonment.
We need in my opinion legalization of things like lemonade stands before legalizing of the hardest narcotics. Also I don't see how the pharmacy industry continues in a libertarian scheme where we are all empowered to buy and sell all product, OxyContin for example. Legalization of the most dangerous drugs simply isn't going to happen at this point, though the discussion is interesting. Rightsizing penalties and reassigning some law enforcement priorities seems more realistic to me.
I see the point that laws against drugs drive up the price and drive up the crime to protect those profits but I don't believe that under so-called legalization our all-controlling government will actually allow the price to fall below current market price and be readily available. I also don't that people willing to murder over drug issues will then move into productive work (accountants and school teachers?) with any realistic law change.
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New and Improved, and now without any Iranian Plutonium!
Illegal Act of Love: Wife Says Husband Grew Pot for Her
Autumn Ziemba
Fox 8 News Reporter
6:57 p.m. EDT, May 6, 2011
MEDINA, Ohio -- A Medina County senior citizen is sentenced to jail time for cultivating marijuana that he says was medicinal for his wife with cancer.
Friday, 69-year-old Gary Burton was sentenced to 60 days in jail, 30 days house arrest and two years probation, with credit for time served.
Burton was arrested in January for cultivating marijuana in excess of 1,000 grams, which is a third degree felony.
But some argue that Burton's reason for committing the crime far outweighs the law.
"He was just trying to take care of me, the best way he knew how," says a tearful Sherri Burton, Gary's wife of 44 years.
Sherri suffers from depression and anxiety, and was diagnosed with breast cancer that has now spread to her lymph nodes .
The diagnosis was a major blow to the couple.
"If I didn't have Gary there to hang onto me and hold me and say 'it's okay,' I probably wouldn't have gotten through a lot of those days," Sherri says.
But she says Gary wanted to ease her fear and pain with something natural that he could provide on his own.
"[The marijuana has] helped me in sleeping at night. Even though I'm on other medication, it's helped me to relax and not be consumed by the cancer," Sherri explains.
The couple planted two marijuana plants in a secluded spot in their own Chippewa Lake back yard.
Sherri says they chose to grow their own because they wanted it to be pure and free of chemicals.
Gary is now serving his sentence at the Medina County Jail--a sentence some consider to be lenient, but to Sherri, it might as well be a lifetime.
"I don't even want to think about the next 60 days. I don't even want to think about tomorrow," she says.
Their vow was 'in sickness and in health,' but with Gary behind bars, Sherri will have to endure her next two months of treatment alone.
"I refuse to go for surgery unless he's by my side. I need him by my side," she says. "We just want to relax and enjoy what time we have left, and who knows how long that will be. Nobody knows."
Now Sherri want to public to understand one thing.
"Marijuana is not as evil or bad as they think it is," she says. "They need to keep an open mind, and someday, they may need it themselves."
The couple hasn't had health insurance since Gary retired several years ago.
It's possible they may also lose their social security benefits while Gary is behind bars.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nec5LRAgXgE&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
http://www.wsbt.com/news/wjw-busted-for-pot-txt,0,1667279.story
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Yes, let's toss out that whole rule of law thing and just go with how we feeeeEEEeeeel about something. I'm assuming Ohio doesn't have medical marijuana, but there is nothing stopping someone traveling to a state where it is an option, yes? Cheaper and easier than a felony conviction, I'd think.
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GM:
I love ya man, but on a human level that is one of the more profoundly clueless things you've said. :roll:
Marc
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That would be the rule of law meant to protect 69 year old cancer patients from . . . oh wait a second. Nevermind.
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I'm guessing that when the Ohio state legislature passed laws against the cultivation of marijuana, and the governor signed it, it wasn't with the intent of incarcerating grandfatherly elders with ill wives, still where does personal responsibility come in?
I own many firearms that are legal in my state, but a felony in California. I make choices on where to live based on the laws of those places. If medical marijuana was important to me, that would influence my decisionmaking in where to live.
I live in a place with a thriving medical marijuana industry that serves the masses of critically ill people who are suffering from some sort of illness that manifests as tie-dyed clothing and patchouli oil instead of regular bathing. Thank god these poor people have found the medication they so desperately needed.
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Question: "Where does personal responsibility come in?"
Answer: Personal responsibility comes in when you take care of your dying wife.
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Question: "Where does personal responsibility come in?"
Answer: Personal responsibility comes in when you take care of your dying wife.
Would that involve thinking "I think medical marijuana would be a good thing for her, but if I grew some here in Ohio, I could face felony charges which would probably have more of a negative effect on her health than any positive that might come from the weed"?
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Oh my goodness. The thesis I've been hammering on in this thread--US drug policy has failed by any sane standard--has not been seriously challenged by any post herein. We've been treated to equivocation, tail chasing, law and order chest thrumming, blamed the symptoms for the disease, and all manner of other sophistry, but NOTHING posted in this thread has come close to causing me to rethink the proposition that our drug policy is the rankest kind of counterproductive folly, and I expect I am not alone in that belief.
So here we have a couple of sexagenarians on social security with no insurance dealing with what appears to be a terminal disease and contending with these sad circumstances by planting an herb that has been used medicinally for thousands of years and the best you got is that these folks of little means should move out of state or suck it up and do the time? For real? This, in your opinion, conforms with the protect and serve ethic? Think the nation's founders would give this travesty a thumbs up? There have been a lot of jurisdictions with a lot of stupid laws--say the eugenic folly foisted by progressive forbearers--would you back all of them as long as they are on the books or does there come a time when rational examination of costs, benefits, results and impact on our humanity suggests that perhaps a policy with no demonstrable upside should be, oh I dunno, reassessed?
There have been folks on this list who have presented global warming as a issue so dire that only policies that would return this nation to a pre-industrial age can save us and no amount of evidence to the contrary caused them to reassess their Luddite proscriptions. There are others who think world opinion bears so much weight that Israel should return to pre-'67 borders despite the fact they are surrounded by sworn enemies committed to their national destruction that would then exploit that return to accomplish what they've never forsworn, yet no argument against national suicide sways them, either. And then there's you who has been shown the unmitigated stupidity of our current anti-drug crusade yet continues to insists against all evidence that this is the Big Muddy in which we must continue to wade. Is this the company you really want to be counted among?
I guess it's time to make fun of Libertarian impotence again, or launch another appeal on the behalf of the kids made drug orphans and wards by the policies of the state, or toss out a one liner about some other substance issue dealt with by another state in another time that has little bearing on current discussion, or do an internet dump, or just generally behave so didactically that it's easier to avoid the conversation than to deal with another lap around an unproductive track. But should you do any or all the fact remains that current US drug policy has utterly failed by any sane measure, a thesis you have yet to address to any successful degree.
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Using the same standard, the "war on crime" has failed. Time to give up on the whole law enforcement fad.
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Oy vey. Victim v. victimless crimes. We've been there. Now that we've disposed of the reductio ad absurdum what's next? Ad hominem? Appeal to authority? Roll out the drug orphans again?
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Hey, just using your standard for judging the "drug war" a failure. Perhaps murder is better addressed as a public health issue with treatment and education programs? After all, despite the all the money spent on investigating, prosecuting and incarcerating murderers every year, we still have new murders.
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"Roll out the drug orphans again?"
You rolled out the drug war grandpa. Does that make a matched set?
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Does anyone know if this forum has a "Poll" function? I'd love to see a vote on who is "winning" this conversation!
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"Does anyone know if this forum has a "Poll" function? I'd love to see a vote on who is "winning" this conversation!"
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VERY interesting points revealed on both sides of this argument.
The truth IMO, in just this one case, is somewhere in between the extremes. We aren't about to legalize meth level dangers and we don't need to lock and throw away the key on Grandpa for honestly helping Grandma. I propose a compromise. If you are terminally ill with less than a year to live, you can smoke anything you want. But at the end of the year, unlike the released and Lockerbie bomber, you have to keep your part of the bargain.
I believe (stated previously) that the casual and safe user of mild and relatively accepted substances will be far better served with decriminalization than with legalization which would most certainly be accompanied with a complete government takeover - enforced with criminal penaltiues. The user whose odor permeated the hallway should learn to efficiently operate a one-hitter. And weatherstrip that door; your heat and AC are getting out too. :-)
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"If you are terminally ill with less than a year to live, you can smoke anything you want. But at the end of the year, unlike the released and Lockerbie bomber, you have to keep your part of the bargain."
Does this mean Grandma has to commit hara-kiri if she is still alive? Isn't that against the law? :lol:
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Let me again point out that I distinguish between things like methamphetamine and cocaine and marijuana. I also understand that the black market for illegal drugs creates lots of wealth for criminal enterprises, including those that might use those profits to fund catastrophic terrorism. However, there are serious short and long term social impacts from legalization and there are many different things that are illegal in this country that I think even the most ardent Libertarian would shy away from legalizing. The exploitation of children and/or human trafficking being a few things that leap to mind.
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GM: Feel free to post stories of drug orphans that supports your arrest millions, incarcerate hundreds of thousands, spend trillions all to no discernible benefit position. I've no desire to foist prior restraint, and offer no apologies when I provide a concrete example of the utter folly of the drug war and drug warriors. Please further note a qualitative difference in our posting habits: I post a primary source speaking specifically to the thesis I've outlined repeatedly, while your drug orphans appear generically, with few specifics, specifics I suspect would bulwark my thesis far better than they would support yours if they were indeed offered. Red herrings, in other words, brought forth to guise your inability to seriously challenge the thesis that the drug war has failed by any rational measure.
BTW, see the recently released FBI crime stats? It seems serious crime is falling, which suggests to me something is being done correctly. Any similar dataset to support your authoritarian predilections where the drug war is concerned or does my thesis that the war on drugs has failed by any rational criteria still stand?
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"challenge the thesis that the drug war has failed by any rational measure."
What is the rational measure for success/failure in enforcing any law? If we enforce laws against any crime, and we still have more crimes committed, is that a failure?
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" However, there are serious short and long term social impacts from legalization and there are many different things that are illegal in this country that I think even the most ardent Libertarian would shy away from legalizing. The exploitation of children and/or human trafficking being a few things that leap to mind."
I'm not following the logical progression here GM. How does decriminalizing pot for example lead to the exploitation of children and human trafficking?
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It doesn't lead to that, but those things are prohibited by law, just like illegal drugs are. If we accept that "prohibition never works", then should those things be prohibited or legalized as drugs would be legalized?
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Sorry to be slow but I'm still struggling here to follow what you are saying. If you are not saying that legalizing/decriminalizing pot would lead to the exploitation of children and/or human trafficking, then why aren't you for decriminalizing/legalizing pot?
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If the public wants marijuana legalized, I don't have much objection to it. There are some problematic issues, such as driving under it's influence, and workplace safety but I don't see it as catastrophic. Now, legalizing meth would be very different, wouldn't it?
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Let's look at Colorado's laws. Marijuana was pretty much decriminalized in the 1970's. Under an ounce for personal use is a petty offense, not even a misd. Now, with medical marijuana, it's quasi-legal.
http://www.denverpost.com/news/marijuana/ci_16985232
Experts worry that medical-pot laws promote teen use
By John Ingold
The Denver Post
Posted: 01/01/2011 01:00:00 AM MSTUpdated: 01/01/2011 03:38:13 PM MST
A marijuana plant flourishes under grow lights at a warehouse in Denver on Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2010. Experts are worried that increasingly lax attitudes toward marijuana with the boon of the medical marijuana industry is promoting teen use. (Ed Andrieski, Associated Press file)Substance-abuse experts, alarmed by the rapid growth of Colorado's medical-marijuana industry, are intensifying their efforts to study the industry's impact on drug use.
The experts say they especially worry that increasingly permissive attitudes surrounding marijuana use might be leading to higher teenage drug use and addiction rates.
That has been an often-voiced concern during debates over medical marijuana in Colorado. But substance-abuse-prevention workers say evidence from their clinics seems to bear it out. And they point to a recent study showing an increase in teenage marijuana use nationwide and a decrease in perceptions of its risk as further evidence of a need to examine the issue.
"The basic rule with any drug is if the drug becomes more available in the society, there will be more use of the drug," said Thomas Crowley, a University of Colorado psychiatry professor and director of the university's Division of Substance Dependence. "And as use expands, there will be more people who have problems with the drug."
At his substance-abuse-treatment clinic for adolescents at Denver Health Medical Center, Christian Thurstone said he has seen hard evidence of the trend. Since the summer of 2009, roughly when Colorado's medical-marijuana boom began, Thurstone said he has seen treatment referrals triple, from five to 15 per month. The large majority of those teens are referred — either by the criminal justice system, social services or other means — because of marijuana, he said.
Worried by the increase, Thurstone conducted a survey of 76 kids in his program. Of those, 60 said they knew someone with a medical-marijuana card, and 37 said they have obtained pot from a medical-marijuana patient, though none were patients themselves.
What's more, Thurstone said teens who got marijuana from a patient were more likely to report smoking pot daily than those who didn't. About 83 percent of the teens who scored pot from a patient reported daily use, compared with about 56 percent of those who didn't get marijuana from a patient.
"It looks like it's increasing access," Thurstone said of the state's medical-marijuana program. "It looks like it's making social norms more positive for marijuana. And it looks like it's increasing frequency of use."
Thurstone said he intends to apply for federal grant funding to more fully examine the subject.
That funding would come from $2 million a year that the National Institute on Drug Abuse set aside late last year to study the effects of medical-marijuana policies on broader drug use and public health.
NIDA officials decided to offer the funding after seeing a rapid change in marijuana policies across the country — 15 states and the District of Columbia now have medical-marijuana programs, and California voters vigorously debated a legalization initiative this fall before voting it down.
Wilson Compton, the director of NIDA's division of epidemiology, services and prevention research, said very little research has looked at how medical-marijuana policies affect overall marijuana use. Compton said he was surprised to see how openly dispensaries were advertising when he visited Colorado last year on a ski trip.
Read more: Experts worry that medical-pot laws promote teen use - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/news/marijuana/ci_16985232
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What is the rational measure for success/failure in enforcing any law? If we enforce laws against any crime, and we still have more crimes committed, is that a failure?
Sir: I have a long list of questions and statements that you have failed to address in any meaningful way throughout this thread, unless one counts the ad hominem. Before I devote the energy to untangle yet more rank sophistry such as that quoted above, do you have any data that suggest the WOD has not failed by any rational standard? You know, the thing we are arguing about here?
This discussion has crossed the line from informed debate to the sort of uninspired, repetitive, non-sequitor laden verbal gymnastics you have given others grief for in no uncertain terms when encountered elsewhere on this forum. Are you unable to grasp that irony? Are you so locked into the anti-drug dogma that the complete failure of the WOD impacts your thinking not one whit? If so, further conversation makes no more sense than debating the heliocentric universe with a medieval bishop and I will devote no more time to it where you are concerned.
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In other words: "I got nothin'". :wink:
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Well, inspired by GM's different tone yesterday and a good night's sleep, I will take a stab at it:
With laws concerning violence, theft, and fraud, we don't really have a choice for they are what in the American Creed is called "natural law". OTOH, with prohibition laws, just as with the prohibition against alcohol and its repeal, we do have a choice based upon our perception of the empirical results.
With the drugs involved in the WoD's prohibitions, IMHO it is not necessarily one size fits all. Just as there is a choice whether and if so how much to drink, so too with pot. OTOH a fair case can be made that as a practical matter the nature of some drugs bypasses man's free will.
Does this help GM?
Marc
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http://www.leap.cc/#
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http://www.leap.cc/#
I am aware of LEAP. Cranium still intact. :-D
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In other words: "I got nothin'".
I assume that is self-referential as I've posted plenty that has yet to be responded to in a cogent manner. Or are you truly expecting me to make an argument neither of us agree with to the effect that because murders still occur we shouldn't prosecute murders and then extrapolate that finding in a manner magically demonstrating that the war on drugs has not failed by any rational standard? Whut?
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What is the standard you want to use to decide if a law is worth enforcing or not? Simple question. Your answer is?
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See my post of May 28.
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See my post of May 28.
As I read your response, I interpret it as you agreeing with me that certain drugs should be illegal, and I'm sure that you'd agree that were something like marijuana fully legalized in California, that there would still be laws regulating it's sales and use, just as there is with alcohol.
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What is the standard you want to use to decide if a law is worth enforcing or not? Simple question. Your answer is?
I see, so "failed by any rational standard," an argument you've yet to address in any meaningful way, gets trumped by "it's on the books so we gotta enforce" it even if it causes more problems than it cures, tears American founding ideals asunder, and enriches our enemies, too boot. That is your repartee?
It's not that I don't understand that you are trying to create an unstated syllogism, or in this case something better labeled a sillygism, that as best I can tell goes something like this:
All laws must be enforced,
The WOD embodies a lot of freaking laws,
Therefore you can't not enforce drug laws unless you're willing to not enforce murder laws either, so there.
Don't see how those verbal gymnastics dispute my contention that the WOD has failed miserably by any sane standard, and can't see a reason to get involved in sophist sideshows when you've done such a poor job of addressing the thesis I've been harping on. All I can conclude is that you have an emotional investment in the WOD that trumps the rational debate you are usually capable of and hence I see no percentage in engaging the red herrings that appear to be all you are able to muster.
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Again, I'm trying to get your criteria you'd use to judge any law enforcement policy's effectiveness.
If you deem the WOD a failure, please explain how the other "wars" are or are not a failure. Didn't Nixon also declare a war on cancer? We still have cancer, right?
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The war on cancer is not kicking in people's doors.
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The war on cancer is not kicking in people's doors.
Search warrants are served on more than just drug crimes.
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So? What's your point?
You used the War on Cancer, and I distinguished its applicability to the question presented here. Your answer is a non-sequitor.
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If you are opposed to search warrants, they happen for all sorts of investigations, not just drugs.
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C'mon GM, don't be silly. We both know I am not opposed to all search warrants. I am noting though that a cost of the WOD is a lot of doors getting kicked in, exigently or otherwise :-P. This something all good Americans believe should be minimized, yes?
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Again, I'm trying to get your criteria you'd use to judge any law enforcement policy's effectiveness.
If you deem the WOD a failure, please explain how the other "wars" are or are not a failure. Didn't Nixon also declare a war on cancer? We still have cancer, right?
Hmm, I think I understand. You are conceding the point that the WOD has failed by any rational standard, but it's a double secret concession, and now want to move on to a thesis that you won't state aloud 'cause it's silly, namely that a failed policy can't be abandoned despite it's failure unless it's failure is fully defined, not counting the trillion dollars, half million incarcerated, millions arrested, enriched enemies, damage done to our founding values, families ripped apart, law enforcement bribed and subverted and on and on and on.
You are sounding like others I won't bother naming; the contortions you have embraced to avoid speaking to the thesis under discussion speaks for itself.
BTW, there has been progress made in the war on cancer. Has there been progress made in the WOD, or does using the term "war" requires us to keep fighting wars we've lost by any rational standard?
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If someone wants to give meth to a young child, should society attempt to prevent/stigmatize/punish such conduct?
Should we just shrug our shoulders and say it's none of our business?
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What is the point of speaking to us as if we agree with something which we don't?
Oy vey.
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Just trying to clarify the jello-like positions here. Simple questions.
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What does the end of the "war on drugs" look like? Everything uncontrolled? Oxycontin machines next to gumball machines? Cocaine back in coke?
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The first step is to agree to go in that direction and as a society work out a consensus.
I'm guessing that it would look something like this:
Pot: Legal, but regulated. Home use OK, OK at clubs. bars-- just like alchohol. Just like alcohol, no puffing in public places. No access for children. I'd be perfectly comfortable with no mass advertising, Home grown OK. Stores like the clinics here in LA? Psylocybin, peyote, and other psychedlics: Home grown OK, available at clinics. Addictive substances (e.g. heroin and other substances which by-pass free will) Decriminalized, but available through clinics administered by some sort of nurse practitioner or some sort of trained, certified person on site?
Just some initial thoughts.
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"Pot: Legal, but regulated." Regulated by whom?
"Psylocybin, peyote, and other psychedlics: Home grown OK, available at clinics." How does one get a prescription or refferal to grow or purchase such things at clincs?
"Addictive substances (e.g. heroin and other substances which by-pass free will) Decriminalized, but available through clinics administered by some sort of nurse practitioner or some sort of trained, certified person on site?" Given the litigation case law related to cigarettes and the potential for malpractice accusations, can you see many medical professionals willing to prescribe crack or meth?
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GM:
Regulated by whom? State? County? City?
How to get a prescription/referral? Liability? Law defines standards (e.g age, no liability for provider, etc)
Really, this is a matter for discussion by our elected officials, so I'm not going to get into all the details. I've given a rough outline of what occurs to me off the top of my head to refute your imputations of meth to children and other childish arguments.
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"Really, this is a matter for discussion by our elected officials, so I'm not going to get into all the details. I've given a rough outline of what occurs to me off the top of my head to refute your imputations of meth to children and other childish arguments."
So, even under your plan, someone who sold meth to children would face having law enforcement serve a search warrant on his home and arrest him for dealing drugs?
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A Colorado doctor under fire for recommending marijuana to a pregnant woman says he provided the patient with appropriate care and disputes that pregnancy and medical marijuana don't mix.
Dr. Manuel Aquino, who could lose his medical license over the recommendation in January, also says the woman's behavior was "intentional, reckless or grossly negligent" in not telling him during the exam that she was pregnant. He also accuses the Colorado Medical Board of taking too long to bring a case against him and says new laws requiring a fuller relationship between doctors recommending marijuana and patients seeking it were not in place when he made the recommendation.
"The charges herein do not allege conduct below the standard of care," Aquino states in his defense.
Aquino's response comes in a document filed late Wednesday in the administrative case against him. In that case, the Colorado Medical Board is seeking to strip his license, which would make him the first doctor punished for substandard care in making a marijuana recommendation.
The medical board accuses Aquino of writing the recommendation for the woman, who was six months pregnant, after a 3-minute visit in which he didn't perform a physical exam, didn't review her medical history and didn't ask whether she was pregnant.Aquino, though, says new regulations requiring him to have a "bona-fide" relationship with marijuana-seeking patients weren't in place in January. He also denied a statement contained in the medical board's complaint that "pregnancy is a contraindication for the use of medical marijuana."
Aquino's attorney, Sheila Meer, has declined to comment. The case is scheduled for a hearing in March.
News of Aquino's prosecution has spurred comments on online cannabis message boards debating whether marijuana use during pregnancy is harmful. Medical research hasn't been unanimously conclusive on the subject, though several studies suggest prenatal marijuana exposure can have negative consequences for children.
A 2009 article in the European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience noted that numerous studies have shown marijuana use during pregnancy can result in low birth weight and children with hyperactivity, and short-term memory and impulse-control problems.
"Recent evidence suggests that perinatal (marijuana) exposure alters fundamental developmental processes," the study's authors wrote.
Read more: Colorado doctor defends recommending marijuana to a pregnant patient - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/news/marijuana/ci_16933274?
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"So, even under your plan, someone who sold meth to children would face having law enforcement serve a search warrant on his home and arrest him for dealing drugs?"
Give this man a cigar for reading comprehension! :lol:
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So, the war on drugs continues?
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""Pot: Legal, but regulated." Regulated by whom?"
Decriminalization would offer more freedom than a complete, legal government takeover.
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"Recent evidence suggests that perinatal (marijuana) exposure alters fundamental developmental processes,"
GM, There isn't a human being developing inside a pregnant woman. This is settled law. Saying otherwise is 'crazy talk'.
If there was, and we systematically killed 40 million of them, it would be like a ... modern day holocaust. And we know it isn't.
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But funny enough Doug, it would be unethical and possibly criminal to run a study on pregnant mothers, exposing some to THC in a double blind study to determine exactly the damage done to a developing fetus. However, aborting those fetuses is like some sort of holy sacriment that cannot be questioned. Weird how that works.
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Yes, like terrorists. You can shoot them but not question them for long periods.
Fetal alcohol syndrome and damage from cigarette smoke are other areas of impossibility because they falsely assume there is a human being growing and developing inside the mother.
'Holy sacrament' is the truth. It is the one area where we accept putting a religion (atheism) ahead of the discoveries of science and ultrasound photography. If we admitted that one of God's creatures was in there we could at least weight the merits of affording it reasonable protection from alcohol and drugs.
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By GEORGE P. SHULTZ And PAUL A. VOLCKER
"The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world."
That is the opening sentence of a report issued last week by the Global Commission on Drug Policy. Both of us have signed on to this report. Why?
(Drug use in the U.S. is no lower than in countries with different approaches.)
We believe that drug addiction is harmful to individuals, impairs health and has adverse societal effects. So we want an effective program to deal with this problem.
The question is: What is the best way to go about it? For 40 years now, our nation's approach has been to criminalize the entire process of producing, transporting, selling and using drugs, with the exception of tobacco and alcohol. Our judgment, shared by other members of the commission, is that this approach has not worked, just as our national experiment with the prohibition of alcohol failed. Drugs are still readily available, and crime rates remain high. But drug use in the U.S. is no lower than, and sometimes surpasses, drug use in countries with very different approaches to the problem.
At the same time, the costs of the drug war have become astronomical. Inmates arrested for consuming drugs and for possessing small quantities of them now crowd our prisons, where too often they learn how to become real criminals. The dollar costs are huge, but they pale in comparison to the lives being lost in our neighborhoods and throughout the world. The number of drug-related casualties in Mexico is on the same order as the number of U.S. lives lost in the Vietnam and Korean wars.
Throughout our hemisphere, governance and economic development have suffered because of drugs. It is no accident that the initiative for this global commission came from former presidents of Latin American nations. These countries, sometimes with American support, have made strong efforts to reduce drug supplies. But they have increasingly concluded that drug policies in the U.S. are making it more difficult for their people to enjoy security and prosperity.
The problem starts with the demand for drugs. As Milton Friedman put it forcibly over 20 years ago in the pages of this paper: "It is demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels. Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials."
We do not support the simple legalization of all drugs. What we do advocate is an open and honest debate on the subject. We want to find our way to a less costly and more effective method of discouraging drug use, cutting down the power of organized crime, providing better treatment and minimizing negative societal effects.
Other countries that have tried different approaches include Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal and Australia. What can we learn from these varied experiences, some more successful than others? What can we learn from our own experience in reducing sharply the smoking of cigarettes or in the handling of alcohol after the end of Prohibition?
Simple legalization is by no means the only or safest approach. One possibility is to decriminalize the individual use of drugs while maintaining laws against supplying them, thus allowing law-enforcement efforts to focus on the drug peddlers. Some of the money that is saved can be spent on treatment centers, which drug users are more likely to seek out if doing so does not expose them to the risk of arrest.
The situation that confronts us today is dangerous. After 40 years of concentrating on one approach that has been unsuccessful, we should be willing to take a look at other ways of working to solve this pressing problem. As the global commission concludes: "Break the taboo on debate and reform. The time for action is now."
—Mr. Shultz, former U.S. secretary of state under President Reagan, is a distinguished fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Mr. Volcker, former chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, is professor emeritus of international economic policy at Princeton University.
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Well said:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6t1EM4Onao[/youtube]
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/national/24marijuana.html?
Officials Say Drug Raids Found Clubs Were a Front
By DEAN E. MURPHY
Published: June 24, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO, June 23 - Federal authorities said Thursday that they had cracked the biggest case ever involving the use of medical marijuana dispensaries in California as a cover for international drug dealing and money laundering, which they said extended to Canada and countries in Asia.
"This organization had been operating for over four years," Javier F. Peña, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in San Francisco, said at a news conference. "It is now dismantled."
In court documents unsealed here, the federal authorities accused a 33-year-old San Francisco man, Vince Ming Wan, of leading a multimillion-dollar operation in the trafficking of marijuana and Ecstasy that used three medical marijuana clubs in the city as a front.
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Back in my telephone hotline days there were several pharmacologists who worked the phones, too. Use to have interesting conversations with them about the subjective nature or many prescription drugs, with one man's analgesic being another's psychoactive experience. Because these men of science couldn't get inside a patient's head they had little they could measure to determine if a given substance was being used prescriptively on recreationally. Well good news, not the government is gonna try to work it out for us:
The Government's Top Minds Are Working Hard to Make Painkillers 'Tightly Regulated Yet Easily Available'
Jacob Sullum | June 15, 2011
Yesterday I noted a New York Times profile of Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, focusing on her simplistic, reductionist view of addiction. I should have mentioned that she and her amanuensis at the Times, Abigail Zuger, also had some woefully misguided things to say about the conflict between drug control and pain control:
Prescription drugs, she continued, have a double life: They are lifesaving yet every bit as dangerous as banned substances. "The challenges we face are much more complex," Dr. Volkow said, "because we need to address the needs of patients in pain, while protecting those at risk for substance use disorders."
In other words, these drugs must be somehow legal and illegal, encouraged yet discouraged, tightly regulated yet easily available.
How is that possible? It isn't. Because pain cannot be objectively verified, there is an unavoidable tradeoff between providing adequate treatment and preventing people from getting high. Even if you think the latter goal is a legitimate function of government, protecting one group of people from their own bad choices simply cannot justify forcing another group of people to live (or die) with horrible pain. Morally, this is a no-brainer: It is better to let 10 addicts trick doctors into prescribing them narcotics than to let one legitimate patient suffer needlessly.
That is not how the government, as channeled by Zuger, sees it:
Treating people with the prescription drug problems is particularly challenging, because, of course, for these particular drugs, physicians are the nation's pushers.
The number of prescriptions written for potentially addictive pain medications has soared in the last decade, reaching more than 200 million in 2010, Dr. Volkow said. Surveys asking teenagers where they get pills find that relatively few buy from strangers. Many have their own prescriptions, often from dental work. Even more are given pills by friends and relatives, presumably out of other legitimate prescriptions.
Doctors may be flooding the country with narcotics, but most have never learned much about pain control. Dr. Volkow said that some data suggests that medical schools devote considerably less time to the subject than veterinary schools do. The Obama administration addressed exactly this deficiency in April with a call for doctors to undergo special training before being allowed to prescribe some of the most addictive painkillers.
"Students and residents have gotten the message that pain is undertreated," said Dr. Mitchell H. Katz, an internist who directs the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. "So they just prescribe higher and higher doses."
The official narrative that emerges from the Times article goes like this: Doctors used to be unnecessarily reluctant to prescribe opioids, but now they are erring in the other direction. Therefore we need to crack down on prescriptions, because too many people are using these drugs for nonmedical reasons. But such a crackdown inevitably hurts people in pain, because it encourages doctors to distrust their patients.
In an April column, I argued that the Obama administration's anti-diversion recommendations would limit access to pain treatment. More on pain treatment here.
http://reason.com/blog/2011/06/15/the-governments-top-minds-are
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What I don't understand is the restriction on narcs for terminal patients. It's one thing to closely monitor potentially addictive meds for someone recovering from knee surgery, something else for someone in end stage cancer.
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Amen to that. The arrogance of hubris is mind-boggling.
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Nanny state/Puritanism run amok at its finest.
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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/
Very compelling TV. Watch it all.
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http://reason.com/blog/2011/06/30/white-house-overrides-2009-mem
Obama Administration Overrides 2009 Ogden Memo, Declares Open Season on Pot Shops in States Where Medical Marijuana Is Legal
Weird timing. Med marijuana users are most likely Obama voters, so why turn on them now?
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I saw Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico (and first non PRI president ever IIRC!) on Piers Morgan last night. He is completely for ending the War on Drugs and near complete legalization.
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I saw Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico (and first non PRI president ever IIRC!) on Piers Morgan last night. He is completely for ending the War on Drugs and near complete legalization.
I bet he's for the end of the war on illegal immigration too. :roll:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws7Zp41fByE&feature=related
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I saw Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico (and first non PRI president ever IIRC!) on Piers Morgan last night. He is completely for ending the War on Drugs and near complete legalization.
Picking up on my risk/benefit analysis from Homeland Security, I understand President Vicente Fox. Mexico is spending billions of dollars to fight drugs. Worse, thousands of innocent citizens are dying. And why? Because America seems to have an insatiable appetite for drugs. Mexico doesn't have a "drug problem"; America does. So why is Mexico fighting and funding "our" war on drugs is the question I'm sure they are asking themselves.
From Mexico's perspective, why not simply end the war on drugs in Mexico; it will save pesos and more important, Mexican lives. Imagine Mexico without nearly as much drug violence and the money and police/army used to combat it saved, instead being used for productive purposes. Mexico is definitely better off. Not much down side if you think about it. I'ld be curious to see what America's response would be.
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instead of the persuasion of power:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/see-these-graphic-ads-credited-with-dramatically-decreasing-drug-usage-in-montana/
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http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20051201/marijuana-raises-risk-of-fatal-car-crash
Marijuana Raises Risk of Fatal Car Crash
French Study Shows Pot Smokers More Likely to Be Responsible for Deadly Accident
WebMD Health News
Dec. 1, 2005 - People who drive after using marijuana are nearly twice as likely to be involved in a fatal car crash.
French researchers studied all drivers involved in fatal car crashes over a two-year period and found 7% tested positive for marijuana, including nearly 3% who tested positive for a combination of marijuana and alcohol.
Although marijuana's share of fatal crashes is much lower than those attributed to alcohol, researchers say the results show that marijuana use, even in low doses, significantly increases the risk of fatal car accidents.
More Pot, More Deaths
In the study, published in the medical journal BMJ, researchers reviewed information on 10,748 drivers who were involved in fatal car crashes and took required tests for drugs and alcohol.
Twice as many drivers involved in fatal car accidents tested positive for marijuana compared with a group of other drivers.
Researchers say about 2.5% of the fatal crashes were attributable to marijuana compared with nearly 29% attributable to alcohol.
The study also showed that drivers who tested positive for marijuana were more than three times as likely to be responsible for the fatal car crash. Researchers say the likelihood of being at fault increased as the blood concentration of marijuana increased.
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Therefor if people smoke marijuana instead of drinking alchohol, there would be less car crashes, yes? :-D
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"Researchers say about 2.5% of the fatal crashes were attributable to marijuana compared with nearly 29% attributable to alcohol."
Less than 1/10th the effect of alcohol is implied, even the low number of 2.5% involves only crashes in question enough to order the test; the total may be lower yet. They mix results of trace levels with intoxicating levels. They mix correlation with causation. No mention that I saw of testing for and removing other factors, for example the drivers in fatal crashes who test positive for marijuana may have been more likely to have taken something else as well. No mention of testing for control the drivers who didn't cause fatal crashes.
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I've had a number of marijuana smokers insist that driving while high is safer than driving drunk. Also, for the "medical marijuana" user, how does one measure impairment?
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Well, based upon your data, it is :lol: :lol: :lol:
BTW, as we all know, measurable traces of pot linger in the system for a very long time after the buzz itself (weeks? months?)
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Yes, unlike alcohol, THC is fat soluble and is present in various degrees for a lengthy period. A "medical marijuana" patient who smokes daily will have THC present in their system in elevated levels at all times. Should that person be driving?
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The disagreement over what to do about the rising number of people in Colorado caught driving after using marijuana took center stage Wednesday, when members of a group charged with studying the issue presented three proposals.
The presentations at a meeting of the drug-policy subcommittee of the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice were the first step in a process that could lead to a new law during next year's legislative session. But the meeting mostly underscored how little consensus there is around the issue of driving stoned, which law enforcement officials fear is on the rise with the expansion of the state's medical-marijuana system.
"This issue is not about a person's right to use medical marijuana," Christine Flavia of the state health department's Division of Behavioral Health said at the meeting. "It's about public safety."
The debate centers on whether the state should adopt a law establishing a measurement of THC — the psychoactive component of marijuana — in the blood at which a driver automatically would be considered too stoned to drive.
But the study group examining the issue deadlocked on how to handle it, leading to Wednesday's multipronged presentation.
One group proposed reintroducing the THC limit — known, legally, as a "per se" standard — arguing that it is backed by research and would be a strong deterrent.
"We want people to be accountable, and we are concerned about the message we would be sending if we do not pass a per-se law," said Laura Spicer, a drug-addiction counselor.
Another group, though, said that the science on THC impairment is not settled and that the limits proposed were too low and would lead to the conviction of nonimpaired drivers.
Read more: Colorado panel debates stoned-driving threshold - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_18848981
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The Colorado law is a farce in terms of doctor involvement, ailments and prescriptions. Actually setting a limit fro drivers and administering a test *when justified* makes some sense, but the data and studies on the effect will not be as predictable and consistent as it is with alcohol. The effect varies more person to person. Some in moderate usage drive safer with lower speeds and greater following distances.
Strange to test for the least dangerous drug unless you also test for prescription drugs, amphetimine, coke, opiates, etc.
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Doug,
There are alcoholics that could pound down a 6 pack and show no visible signs of intoxication outside of HGN. They are still guilty of DUI despite their tolerance for alcohol.
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GM, Agree. I'm not against putting a measurable limit on driving in law if it is backed up in science. What I'm saying is that the tie between blood content and delayed reactions / loss of concentration will be more difficult to establish for THC than it was for alcohol. Before texting while driving bans were codified, distracted driving was already illegal. I hope that being totally incoherent while driving is already prohibited, no matter the drug or mental defect.
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The problem being that really impaired persons on THC are much harder to detect than imparied persons that have consumed alcohol.
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Not finding a stupid criminal category I will stick this here:
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Man Busted for Marijuana After Petting K-9
Friday, Oct 7, 2011 | Updated 8:35 AM EDT
Man Busted for Marijuana After Petting K-9
Good advice: If you have marijuana in your pocket, it's not a good idea to pet a patrolling police dog.
The Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin reports that 48-year-old Kelly Simpson was busted Wednesday after he stopped to pet K-9 Tarah, who was on foot patrol with her handler in Endicott.
Police say Tarah smelled marijuana and alerted the officer.
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Marijuana-Dog-K-9-Man-Arrest-Dumb-131317779.html (via Drudge!)
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http://www.aele.org/alert-email.html
A new article appears in the AELE Monthly Law Journal.
* Medical Marijuana and Public Safety Personnel
Marijuana is a controlled substance whose use, sale, and possession are federal crimes, regardless of any state laws to the contrary. As a result, issues have arisen as to the right of employers, including public safety employers, to discipline and terminate employees for the use of medical marijuana when it is allowed by state law.
The article discusses what some courts have said regarding the right of management to terminate employees for the use of medical marijuana.
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A book review:
http://reason.com/archives/2011/12/20/modern-day-prohibition
Reason Magazine
Modern-Day Prohibition
The eternal temptation to ban things that give people pleasure
Jeff Stier from the January 2012 issue
The Art of Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition Since 1800, by Christopher Snowdon, Little Dice, 246 pages, $19.99
The new Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary Prohibition is a five-and-a-half-hour missed opportunity to demonstrate why bans on substances are doomed from the start. Fortunately, for those who want to understand the irresistible lure of all types of prohibitions, there is Christopher Snowdon’s The Art of Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition Since 1800. Although Snowdon’s comprehensive history will never reach as many people as the PBS series, The Art of Suppression makes the case that Burns seems to go out of his way to avoid: that prohibition of products that people desire, whether alcohol a century ago or Ecstasy today, is bound to fail miserably.
Deploying a colorful cast of characters, Snowdon, a British journalist whose first book, Velvet Glove, Iron Fist (2009), documented the history of anti-tobacco campaigns, tells the story of prohibition’s broader context. He brings to the task the stinging humor reminiscent of H.L. Mencken, whom he quotes in describing one of the book’s central villains, the Anti-Saloon League lawyer Wayne Bidwell Wheeler: “He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits.” Wheeler was a prototypical activist, Snowdon says, “the undisputed master of pressure politics…no one was more skillful or less scrupulous in applying pressure to wavering politicians.”
Just as it is today, Ohio was a battleground state in the early 1900s, when Wheeler targeted popular Republican Gov. Myron T. Herrick, who had the audacity to challenge provisions of a prohibitionist Anti-Saloon League bill. Wheeler, Snowdon writes, held hundreds of dry rallies in favor of Herrick’s opponent and “scurrilously accused Herrick of being in the pocket of the drinks industry.” Seeking to make an example of the governor, Wheeler marshaled tens of thousands of churchgoers, who flooded into the polls and bounced Herrick out of office.
The result? Practical political hypocrisy on the issue of alcohol. Wheeler’s effort, Snowdon explains, was “a bleak warning to wet politicians that it was safest to drink in private and support prohibition in public.…Politicians knew that they could placate their tormentors by supporting dry laws, but they also knew they could placate drinkers by failing to enforce them.”
The wet/dry debate was a key issue in American politics for the quarter centuries before and after 1900. Issues as varied as women’s suffrage, race relations, urban vs. rural life, and religious tensions all played out in the context of alcohol prohibition.
Wheeler’s mad female counterpart was known as “Christ’s bulldog,” the “hatchet-wielding vigilante” Carrie Amelia Moore, whose 1877 marriage of convenience to David Nation gave her a “striking name that she viewed as a sign of providence.” Arriving in officially dry Wichita, Kansas, on January 21, 1901, Carrie A. Nation assumed leadership of the militant wing of the so-called temperance movement, declaring loudly, “Men of Wichita, this is the right arm of God and I am destined to wreck every saloon in your city!” Together with three Woman’s Christian Temperance Union colleagues, Snowdon writes, “she set to work on two ‘murder shops’ with rocks, iron rods and hatchets, only stopping when the owner of the second saloon put a revolver to her head.” Vandalizing illegal saloons didn’t get Nation arrested, but attacking a policeman in a hotel lobby eventually did. “Showing considerable leniency, the chief of police released the teetotal delinquent on bail on the condition that she smash no more saloons until noon the following day. Nation’s first act as a free woman was to stand on the steps of the police station and inform the waiting crowd that she would recommence her reign of terror as soon as the clock struck twelve.” As it turned out, she could not wait even that long.
Nation, who was widely believed to suffer from mental illness, may not have been a typical prohibitionist, but her antics made her one of the more conspicuous ones. Her visibility allowed outlets such as The New York Times to position themselves as moderate by condemning her tactics but not her underlying stance.
Today’s prohibitionists are less colorful but no less determined. Consider the sad story of psychopharmacologist David Nutt’s brief term as chairman of the British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Shortly after he was appointed to the position in May 2008, the Sun reported that Nutt thought Ecstasy and LSD should be removed from the legal category ostensibly reserved for the most dangerous drugs, kicking off a Fleet Street frenzy.
Instead of backing down, Nutt doubled down. In a satirical article published by the Journal of Psychopharmacology in January 2009, he analyzed “an addiction called ‘Equasy’ that kills ten people a year, causes brain damage and has been linked to the early onset of Parkinson’s disease.” Nut added that Equasy “releases endorphins, can create dependence and is responsible for over 100 road traffic accidents every year.”
Had Nutt not revealed that Equasy was simply the time-honored sport of horseback riding, activists certainly would have rushed to introduce a ban. Nutt pointed out that since Equasy causes acute harm to one out of 350 riders, it is far riskier than Ecstasy, for which the fraction is one out of 10,000. His point, of course, was that prohibition has less to do with risk than with the importance society attaches to a risky activity. As Snowdon puts it, “If the cultural baggage is put to one side, and activities are assessed on the basis of mortality rather than morality, there are glaring inconsistencies in the way laws deal with different hazards.” In October 2009, British Home Secretary Alan Johnson fired Nutt for failing to recognize that “his role is to advise rather than criticise.”
While The Art of Suppression does not include a chapter on marijuana legalization, Snowdon leaves no doubt about his position on the issue. “Legal highs may not be as good as the real thing,” he writes, “and they are often more dangerous, but at least users don’t have to worry about being arrested.”
Snowdon describes a cycle in which so-called “killer drugs” receive an inordinate amount of tabloid media attention, driving up consumer interest until the substance is finally banned based on sensationalistic claims about its dangers. Yet as soon as one chemical is banned, a newer one—often more dangerous—is created to elude the ban. “In the restless pursuit of hedonistic diversions,” Snowdon writes, “human beings will try almost any substance if more appealing avenues of pleasure are closed off.”
In addition to sardonic humor, Snowdon offers new reporting on how distorted science and unfounded health claims are driving lesser-known prohibitions in the modern world, such as the 1986 European ban on all oral tobacco products, including Swedish snus. Snowdon documents in detail how a 2003 scientific report funded by the European Commission and the Swedish National Institute of Public Health, intended to provide legal and scientific justification for the ban, was altered after leaving the hands of the scientists who wrote it. Among the many questionable editorial changes in the report was one that glossed over the fact that snus, unlike less refined oral tobacco products, does not cause oral cancer. While the original version said “there can be no doubt that the current ban on oral tobacco is highly arbitrary,” that phrase was missing from the published report.
In response to accumulating evidence supporting the use of snus as a harm-reducing alternative to cigarettes, supporters of the E.U. ban have become more brazen. Based on information from Asa Lundquist, the tobacco control manager for the Swedish National Institute of Public Health, the Swedish press reported that snus (which remains legal in Sweden) causes impotence and infertility. Luckily, Swedes, who have suffered through decades of similar scares, insisted on seeing the study behind the allegations. As it turns out, the scare itself was impotent. The supposed source, the Karolinska Institute, admitted “there is no such study.” Rather, “we have a hypothesis and plan to conduct a study among snus users after the new year.”
Here in the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to exercise its authority to ban menthol cigarettes, even though studies repeatedly have found that they are no more harmful than non- mentholated cigarettes. Drunk with power, regulators and those encouraging them are using catchy slogans such as “Menthol: it helps the poison go down easier.”
Prohibitionists ignore or belittle concerns that a ban on menthol cigarettes would turn citizens into criminals, increase unregulated youth access to cigarettes, and even encourage people to make their own mentholated cigarettes (all it takes is a regular cigarette, a cough drop, and a ziplock bag).
It is hard to miss the similarities between current prohibition campaigns and their historical predecessors. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s “stated desire was to ‘reform, so far as possible, by religious, ethical, and scientific means the drinking classes.’ ” Likewise today, says Snowdon, self-righteous activists and their allies in government do not seek to improve public health by following the dictates of science but rather use pseudoscientific arguments and “subtle deceit” to advance laws that dictate how we live.
It is easy now, as Ken Burns has masterfully done, to ridicule the prohibition of alcohol. But Snowdon does the heavy lifting of catching modern-day Carrie Nations in the act. Despite a long history of failure, the public always seems ready to enlist in prohibitionist campaigns, perhaps believing, as Snowdon puts it, that “utopia is only ever one ban away.”
Jeff Stier is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
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Times Topic: Mexican Drug Trafficking
The police force in the port city of Veracruz was dissolved on Wednesday, and Mexican officials sent the navy in to patrol. The Veracruz State government said the decision was part of an effort to root out police corruption and start over in the state’s largest city. A state spokeswoman, Gina Dominguez, said 800 police officers and 300 administrative employees were laid off. She told reporters that the former officers could apply for jobs in a state police force but would have to meet stricter standards. Thirty-five bodies were dumped in Veracruz in one of the worst gang attacks of Mexico’s drug war. The Mexican Army has taken over police operations several times, notably in the border city of Ciudad Juárez. But Veracruz is the first state to disband a large police department and use marines for law enforcement.
A version of this brief appeared in print on December 22, 2011, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Mexico: City Police Force Disbanded.
P.C.
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BBG: Snowdon's book looks to be very interesting. Thank you for sharing the review. Had I written his first book, though, it would have been titled "Velvet Glove, Iron Lung."
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BD: But when was the last time you were smacked by an iron lung?
Lotsa charts, graphs, and interesting ways of visualizing UK drug death data here:
http://neurobonkers.com/2011/12/22/the-year-in-drug-deaths-and-data-fraud/
Difficult to view this info and come to any conclusion other than drug enforcement efforts are not based on consistency or a rational assessment of sensible criteria.
Interesting to note: more people died from helium exposure in the UK than from cannabis. Time to declare was on lighter than air balloons, for the children, eh?
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Well, who could argue with the data supplied by neurobonkers.com ?
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Does that mean "The science is settled"?
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Yes, settled to protect the children from the very dysfunctions we're imposing to "protect" them. But hey, if you have any quibbles with the data Neurobonkers presented, perhaps stating them may prove more productive than again embracing the snarky ad hominem. Me, I thought the charts spoke for themselves, particularly where the current meth boogieman was concerned.
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Silly me to not treat neurobonkers.com with all the respect due it.
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BBG:
But he does snarky so well! :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Aside from meth rewiring the brain in not so wonderful ways, I think that the legal prohibitions against serves society quite well. How do you think it's death rate would compare to alcohol and tobacco if it was as legal and socially approved of as tobacco and alcohol?
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Mexico seizes 229 tons of precursor chemicals
By eec-kac | AP – 5 hrs ago
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico said Friday that it seized 229 metric tons of precursor chemicals used to make methamphetamine, the third such huge seizure this month at the Pacific port of Lazaro Cardenas, all of which were bound for a port in Guatemala.
The seizure bringing to over 534 tons the amount of meth chemicals detected at Lazaro Cardenas in less than a month.
Authorities announced on Dec. 19 that they had found almost 100 metric tons of methylamine at the port, and earlier said that 205 tons of the chemical had been found there over several days in early December.
Experts familiar with meth production call it a huge amount of raw material, noting that under some production methods, precursor chemicals can yield about half their weight in uncut meth.
The Attorney General's Office said the most recent seizure was found in 1,600 drums, and had been shipped from Shanghai, China.
All three shipments originated in China and were destined for Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala, authorities said.
The office has not indicated which cartels may have been moving the chemicals, but U.S. officials have noted that the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico's most powerful, has moved into meth production on an industrial scale.
Sinaloa also has operations in Guatemala, and given recent busts by the Mexican army of huge meth processing facilities in Mexico, the gang may have decided to move some production to Guatemala.
Lazaro Cardenas is located in the western Michoacan state, which is dominated by the Knights Templar cartel and previously by the La Familia gang.
However, a series of arrests, deaths and infighting may have weakened those gangs' ability to engage in massive meth production.
Also Friday, the attorney general's office in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz reported that it had found ten bodies in an area along the border with the neighboring state of Tamaulipas. The office said investigators were alerted to the bodies by a tip, and are working to identify them and the cause of death.
The area has been the scene of bloody battles between the Gulf and Zetas cartels.
P..C
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I think there is a valid distinction to be made between drugs which can overhwhelm free will (e.g. meht) and those that don't.
The meth trade via Mexico has been developing in Mexico for a number of years now. A few years back there was a Chinese guy in the legit pharm trade who purchased a Mexican citizenship. A house in his name was raided and in turns out that the house itself was a giant safety box containing $250 MILLION in CASH!!!
With hit teams hot in pursuit, the Chinese/"Mexican" pharm guy took off. Someone I know at DEA put the cuffs on him as he dined at a nice restaurant, somewhere in the US northeast IIRC.
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Aside from meth rewiring the brain in not so wonderful ways, I think that the legal prohibitions against serves society quite well. How do you think it's death rate would compare to alcohol and tobacco if it was as legal and socially approved of as tobacco and alcohol?
And how hard to get rid of once it's in. Look at the lengths China had to go to in order to break it's opium problem. It would be harder for us now in the same situation.
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WASHINGTON — American drug enforcement agents posing as money launderers secretly helped a powerful Mexican drug trafficker and his principal Colombian cocaine supplier move millions in drug proceeds around the world, as part of an effort to infiltrate and dismantle the criminal organizations wreaking havoc south of the border, according to newly obtained Mexican government documents.
The documents, part of an extradition order by the Mexican Foreign Ministry against the Colombian supplier, describe American counternarcotics agents, Mexican law enforcement officials and a Colombian informant working undercover together over several months in 2007. Together, they conducted numerous wire transfers of tens of thousands of dollars at a time, smuggled millions of dollars in bulk cash — and escorted at least one large shipment of cocaine from Ecuador to Dallas to Madrid.
The extradition order — obtained by the Mexican magazine emeequis and shared with The New York Times — includes testimony by a Drug Enforcement Administration special agent who oversaw a covert money laundering investigation against a Colombian trafficker named Harold Mauricio Poveda-Ortega, also known as “The Rabbit.” He is accused of having sent some 150 tons of cocaine to Mexico between 2000 and 2010. Much of that cocaine, the authorities said, was destined for the United States.
Last month, The Times reported that these kinds of operations had begun in Mexico as part of the drug agency’s expanding role in that country’s fight against organized crime. The newly obtained documents provide rare details of the extent of that cooperation and the ways that it blurs the lines between fighting and facilitating crime.
Morris Panner, a former assistant United States attorney who is an adviser at the Center for International Criminal Justice at Harvard, said there were inherent risks in international law enforcement operations. “The same rules required domestically do not apply when agencies are operating overseas,” he said, “so the agencies can be forced to make up the rules as they go along.” Speaking about the Drug Enforcement Agency’s money laundering activities, he said: “It’s a slippery slope. If it’s not careful, the United States could end up helping the bad guys more than hurting them.”
Shown copies of the documents, a Justice Department spokesman did not dispute their authenticity, but declined to make an official available to speak about them. But in a written statement, the D.E.A. strongly defended its activities, saying that they had allowed the authorities in Mexico to kill or capture dozens of high-ranking and midlevel traffickers.
“Transnational organized groups can be defeated only by transnational law enforcement cooperation,” the agency wrote. “Such cooperation requires that law enforcement agencies — often from multiple countries — coordinate their activities, while at the same time always acting within their respective laws and authorities.”
The documents make clear that it can take years for these investigations to yield results. They show that in 2007 the authorities infiltrated Mr. Poveda-Ortega’s operations. Mr. Poveda-Ortega was considered the principal cocaine supplier to the Mexican drug cartel leader Arturo Beltran Leyva. Two years later, Mexican security forces caught up with and killed Mr. Beltran Leyva in a gunfight about an hour outside of Mexico City.
As for Mr. Poveda-Ortega, in 2008 he escaped a raid on his mansion outside Mexico City in which the authorities detained 15 of his associates and seized hundreds of thousands of dollars, along with two pet lions. But the authorities finally captured him in Mexico City in November 2010.
According to the newly obtained documents, Mexico agreed to extradite Mr. Poveda-Ortega to the United States last May. But the American authorities refused to say whether the extradition had occurred.
“That’s how long these investigations take,” said an American official in Mexico who would speak only on the condition that he not be identified discussing secret law enforcement operations. “They are an enormously complicated undertaking when it involves money laundering, wires, everything.”
The documents, which read in some parts like a dry legal affidavit and in others like a script for a B-movie, underscore that complexity. They mix mind-numbing lists of dates and amounts of illegal wire transfers that were conducted during the course of the investigation.
(Page 2 of 2)
One scene described in the documents depicts the informant making deals to launder money during meetings with traffickers at a Mexico City shopping mall. Another describes undercover D.E.A. agents in Texas posing as pilots, offering to transport cocaine around the world for $1,000 per kilo.
Those accounts come from the testimony by a D.E.A. special agent who described himself as a 12-year veteran and a resident of Texas. There is also testimony by a Colombian informant who posed as a money launderer and began collaborating with the D.E.A. after he was arrested on drug charges in 2003. The Times is withholding the agent’s and the informant’s names for security reasons.
In January 2007, the informant reached out to associates of Mr. Poveda-Ortega and began talking his way into a series of money-laundering jobs — each one bigger than the last — that helped him win the confidence of low-level traffickers and ultimately gain access to the kingpins.
A handful of undercover D.E.A. agents, according to the documents, posed as associates to the informant, including the two who offered their services as pilots and another who told the traffickers that he had several businesses that gave him access to bank accounts that the traffickers could use to deposit and disperse their drug money.
In June 2007, the traffickers bit, asking the informant to give them an account number for their deposits. And over a four-day period in July, they transferred tens of thousands of dollars at a time from money exchange houses in Mexico into an account the D.E.A. had established at a Bank of America branch in Dallas.
According to the testimony, the traffickers’ deposits totaled $1 million. And on the traffickers’ instructions, the informant withdrew the money and the D.E.A. arranged for it to be delivered to someone in Panama.
Testimony by the informant suggests that the traffickers were pleased with the service.
“At the beginning of August 2007, Harry asked my help receiving $3 million to $4 million in American money to be laundered,” the informant testified, referring to one of the Colombian traffickers involved in the investigation. “During subsequent recorded telephone calls I told Harry I couldn’t handle that much money.” Still, the informant and the D.E.A. tried to keep up. On one occasion, they enlisted a Mexican undercover law enforcement agent to pick up $499,250 from their trafficking targets in Mexico City. And a month later, that same agent picked up another load valued at more than $1 million.
The more the money flowed, the stronger the relationship became between the informants and the traffickers. In one candid conversation, the traffickers boasted about who was able to move the biggest loads of money, the way fishermen brag about their catches. One said he could easily move $4 million to $5 million a month. Then the others spoke about the tricks of the trade, including how they had used various methods, including prepaid debit cards and an Herbalife account, to move the money.
The next day, the informant was summoned to his first meeting in Mexico City with Mr. Poveda-Ortega and Mr. Beltran Leyva, who asked him to help them ship a 330-kilogram load to Spain from Ecuador. The documents say the shipment was transported over two weeks in October, with undercover Ecuadorean agents retrieving the cocaine from a tour bus in Quito and American agents testing its purity in Dallas before sending it on to Madrid.
The testimony describes the informant reassuring the traffickers in code, using words like “girlfriend” or “chick” to refer to the cocaine, and saying that she had arrived just fine. But in reality, the testimony indicates, the Spanish authorities, tipped off in advance by the D.E.A., seized the load shortly after its arrival, rather than risk losing it.
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http://vitals.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/10/10098412-smoking-pot-doesnt-hurt-lung-capacity-study-shows
Weed isn't as bad as tobacco... at least for lungs.
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LOS ANGELES — One year after federal law enforcement officials began cracking down on California’s medical marijuana industry with a series of high-profile arrests around the state, they finally moved into Los Angeles last month, giving 71 dispensaries until Tuesday to shut down. At the same time, because of a well-organized push by a new coalition of medical marijuana supporters, the City Council last week repealed a ban on the dispensaries that it had passed only a couple of months earlier.
In the Eagle Rock area of Los Angeles, 15 dispensaries are within a one-and-a-half-mile radius of the main commercial district.
A Venice Beach storefront advertising medical marijuana.
Despite years of trying fruitlessly to regulate medical marijuana, California again finds itself in a marijuana-laced chaos over a booming and divisive industry.
Nobody even knows how many medical marijuana dispensaries are in Los Angeles. Estimates range from 500 to more than 1,000. The only certainty, supporters and opponents agree, is that they far outnumber Starbucks.
“That’s the ongoing, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ circus of L.A.,” said Michael Larsen, president of the Neighborhood Council in Eagle Rock, a middle-class community that has 15 dispensaries within a one-and-a-half-mile radius of the main commercial area, many of them near houses. “People here are desperate, and there’s nothing they can do.”
Though the neighborhood’s dispensaries were among those ordered to close by Tuesday, many are still operating. As he looked at a young man who bounded out of the Together for Change dispensary on Thursday morning, Mr. Larsen said, “I’m going to go out on a limb, but that’s not a cancer patient.”
In the biggest push against medical marijuana since California legalized it in 1996, the federal authorities have shut at least 600 dispensaries statewide since last October. California’s four United States attorneys said the dispensaries violated not only federal law, which considers all possession and distribution of marijuana to be illegal, but state law, which requires operators to be nonprofit primary caregivers to their patients and to distribute marijuana strictly for medical purposes.
While announcing the actions against the 71 dispensaries, André Birotte Jr., the United States attorney for the Central District of California, indicated that it was only the beginning of his campaign in Los Angeles. Prosecutors filed asset forfeiture lawsuits against three dispensaries and sent letters warning of criminal charges to the operators and landlords of 68 others, a strategy that has closed nearly 97 percent of the targeted dispensaries elsewhere in the district, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the United States attorney.
Vague state laws governing medical marijuana have allowed recreational users of the drug to take advantage of the dispensaries, say supporters of the Los Angeles ban and the federal crackdown. Here on the boardwalk of Venice Beach, pitchmen dressed all in marijuana green approach passers-by with offers of a $35, 10-minute evaluation for a medical marijuana recommendation for everything from cancer to appetite loss.
Nearly 180 cities across the state have banned dispensaries, and lawsuits challenging the bans have reached the State Supreme Court. In more liberal areas, some 50 municipalities have passed medical marijuana ordinances, but most have suspended the regulation of dispensaries because of the federal offensive, according to Americans for Safe Access, a group that promotes access to medical marijuana. San Francisco and Oakland, the fiercest defenders of medical marijuana, have continued to issue permits to new dispensaries.
In 2004, shortly after the state effectively allowed the opening of storefront dispensaries, there were only three or four in Los Angeles, experts said. The number soon swelled into the hundreds before the city imposed a moratorium. But dispensaries continued to proliferate by exploiting a loophole in the moratorium even as lawsuits restricted the city’s ability to pass an ordinance. Over the summer, the City Council voted to ban dispensaries.
Anticipating the ban, the medical marijuana industry “that historically had not worked together very well” began organizing a counterattack, said Dan Rush, an official with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which formed a coalition with Americans for Safe Access and the Greater Los Angeles Collective Alliance, a group of dispensary owners. The coalition raised $250,000, mostly from dispensaries, to gather the signatures necessary to place a referendum to overturn the ban on the ballot next March, said Don Duncan, California director for Americans for Safe Access.
Instead of allowing the referendum to proceed in March, when elections for mayor and City Council seats will also be held, the council on Tuesday voted to simply rescind the ban. José Huizar, one of only two council members to vote against the repeal, and the strongest backer of the ban, said the city was not in a position to fight an increasingly well-organized industry.
Mr. Huizar said California’s medical marijuana laws, considered the nation’s weakest, must be changed to better control the production and distribution of marijuana, as well as limit access to only real patients.
“Unless that happens, local cities are going to continue to play the cat-and-mouse game with the dispensaries,” he said, adding that the industry had fought attempts here to regulate it. “These are folks who are just out to protect their profits, and they do that by having as little regulation or oversight as possible by the City of Los Angeles.”
But coalition officials say they favor stricter regulations here.Rigo Valdez, director of organizing for the local union, which represents 500 dispensary workers in Los Angeles, said he would support an ordinance restricting the number of dispensaries to about 125 and keeping them away from schools and one another.
“We would be able to respect communities by staying away from sensitive-use areas while providing safe access for medical marijuana patients,” he said.
Such an ordinance would shut down many dispensaries catering to recreational users, said Yamileth Bolanos, president of the Greater Los Angeles Collective Alliance and owner of a dispensary, the PureLife Alternative Wellness Center. “I felt we needed a medical situation with respect, not with all kinds of music going, tattoos and piercings in the face,” she said. “We’re normal people. Normal patients can come and acquire medicine.”
But the hundreds of dispensaries that would be put out of business will fight the federal crackdown, as some are already doing.
In downtown Los Angeles, where most of the dispensaries were included in the order to close, workers were renovating the storefront of the Downtown Collective. Inside, house music was being played in a lobby decorated to conjure “Scarface,” a poster of which hung on a wall.
“We don’t worry about this,” the manager said of the federal offensive, declining to give his name. “It’s between the lawyers.”
David Welch, a lawyer who is representing 15 of the 71 dispensaries and who is involved in a lawsuit challenging a ban at the State Supreme Court, said the federal clampdown would fail.
“Medical marijuana dispensaries are very much like what they distribute: they’re weeds,” he said. “You cut them down, you leave, and then they sprout back up.”
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It's obviously time we legalized, taxed and regulated tobacco, right?
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/01/mexican-cartels-now-trafficking-cigarettes/
Mexican cartels now trafficking … cigarettes?
posted at 5:31 pm on September 1, 2012 by Jazz Shaw
Those Mexican crime syndicates certainly find their way into the news a lot, don’t they? When they’re not running guns from American government sources, kidnapping children for prostitution or shipping tons of cocaine and marijuana through tunnels they’re busy corrupting the government. But it seems that now they’ve found yet another avenue of profit, and just like in many states in the USA it popped up after the government decided to jack up the tax rate on smokes.
A Mexican industrial group said Tuesday an increase in tax on cigarettes that went into effect in 2011 has led to a proliferation of contraband, and that illegal cigarettes now account for nearly 17% of the cigarettes sold in the country.
The Confederation of Industrial Chambers, or Concamin, said tobacco consumption hasn’t declined in the year-and-a-half since the higher tobacco tax took effect, although the sale of illegal cigarettes has reached record levels.
Congress approved the higher tax on cigarettes in late 2010 despite protests from the country’s cigarette manufacturers
The new tax has a pack of smokes in Mexico going for an average of 35.5 pesos (currently $2.69 US) as compared to 20.5 pesos ($1.69) on the black market. And as more and more buyers flee to the cartels for their fix, the result is pretty much the same as we’ve seen in Illinois and New York – among other states. The anticipated tax boom fails to materialize in the government’s coffers and instead winds up financing criminal endeavors.
But this may not be bad news for everybody. As we’ve discussed before, there are a couple of international agencies who are very interested in seeing cigarette taxes go up around the world, primarily so they can get a cut of the action. They are the United Nations and the World Health Organization. They’ve made some progress already in the Philippines and would like to expand well beyond that. But as this study from Freedom and Prosperity shows, this would probably be a great idea for the W.H.O but a big loser for everyone else.
Since the bureaucrats running international organizations are not elected, such indirect control is the only way for national governments – on behalf of their taxpayers – to oversee the responsible use of funds.
This is why it would be imprudent to give international bureaucracies an independent source of revenue. Not only would this augment the already considerable risk of imprudent budgetary practices, it would exacerbate the pro-statism bias in these organizations.
Moreover, the first incidence of direct taxation to fund an international organization would unleash a tidal wave of similar direct-funding proposals. The camel’s nose would soon become an entire animal, then followed by a herd.
It’s a disturbing trend. But the good news is that it can’t be put into place here in the United States without the complicit help of the Congress. And they’d never go for that… right?
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(https://imageshack.us/a/img607/7854/13v152.gif)
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Give Pot a Chance
By TIMOTHY EGAN
SEATTLE – In two weeks, adults in this state will no longer be arrested or incarcerated for something that nearly 30 million Americans did last year. For the first time since prohibition began 75 years ago, recreational marijuana use will be legal; the misery-inducing crusade to lock up thousands of ordinary people has at last been seen, by a majority of voters in this state and in Colorado, for what it is: a monumental failure.
That is, unless the Obama administration steps in with an injunction, as it has threatened to in the past, against common sense. For what stands between ending this absurd front in the dead-ender war on drugs and the status quo is the federal government. It could intervene, citing the supremacy of federal law that still classifies marijuana as a dangerous drug.
But it shouldn’t. Social revolutions in a democracy, especially ones that begin with voters, should not be lightly dismissed. Forget all the lame jokes about Cheetos and Cheech and Chong. In the two-and-a-half weeks since a pair of progressive Western states sent a message that arresting 853,000 people a year for marijuana offenses is an insult to a country built on individual freedom, a whiff of positive, even monumental change is in the air.
In Mexico, where about 60,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence, political leaders are voicing cautious optimism that the tide could turn for the better. What happens when the United States, the largest consumer of drugs in the world, suddenly opts out of a black market that is the source of gangland death and corruption? That question, in small part, may now be answered.
Prosecutors in Washington and Colorado have announced they are dropping cases, effective immediately, against people for pot possession. I’ve heard from a couple of friends who are police officers, and guess what: they have a lot more to do than chase around recreational drug users.
Maine (ever-sensible Maine!) and Iowa, where the political soil is uniquely suited to good ideas, are looking to follow the Westerners. Within a few years, it seems likely that a dozen or more states will do so as well.
And for one more added measure of good karma, on Election Day, Representative Dan Lungren, nine-term Republican from California and a tired old drug warrior who backed some of the most draconian penalties against his fellow citizens, was ousted from office.
But there remains the big question of how President Obama will handle the cannabis spring. So far, he and Attorney General Eric Holder have been silent. I take that as a good sign, and certainly a departure from the hard-line position they took when California voters were considering legalization a few years ago. But if they need additional nudging, here are three reasons to let reason stand:
Hypocrisy. Popular culture and the sports-industrial complex would collapse without all the legal drugs that promise to extend erections, reduce inhibitions and keep people awake all night. I’m talking to you, Viagra, alcohol and high-potency energy drinks. Worse, perhaps, is the $25 billion nutritional supplement industry, offerings pills that make exaggerated health claims and steroid-based hormones that can have significant bad consequences. The corporate cartels behind these products get away with minimal regulation because of powerful backers like Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah.
In two years through 2011, more than 2,200 serious illnesses, including 33 fatalities, were reported by consumers of nutritional supplements. Federal officials have received reports of 13 deaths and 92 serious medical events from Five Hour Energy. And how many people died of marijuana ingestion? Of course, just because well-marketed, potentially hazardous potions are legal is no argument to bring pot onto retail shelves. But it’s hard to make a case for fairness when one person’s method of relaxation is cause for arrest while another’s lands him on a Monday night football ad.
Tax and regulate. Already, 18 states and the District of Columbia allow medical use of marijuana. This chaotic and unregulated system has resulted in price-gouging, phony prescriptions and outright scams. No wonder the pot dispensaries have opposed legalization — it could put them out of business.
Washington State officials estimate that taxation and regulation of licensed marijuana retail stores will generate $532 million in new revenue every year. Expand that number nationwide, and then also add into the mix all the wasted billions now spent investigating and prosecuting marijuana cases.
With pot out of the black market, states can have a serious discussion about use and abuse. The model is the campaign against drunk driving, which has made tremendous strides and saved countless lives at a time when alcohol is easier to get than ever before. Education, without one-sided moralizing, works.
Lead. That’s what transformative presidents do. From his years as a community organizer — and a young man whose own recreational drug use could have made him just another number in lockup — Obama knows well that racial minorities are disproportionately jailed for these crimes. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 25 percent of its prisoners — and about 500,000 of them are behind bars for drug offenses. On cost alone — up to $60,000 a year, to taxpayers, per prisoner — this is unsustainable.
Obama is uniquely suited to make the argument for change. On this issue, he’ll have support from the libertarian right and the humanitarian left. The question is not the backing — it’s whether the president will have the backbone.
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I haven't watched this yet but it comes recommended. Fifty minutes.
http://www.breakingthetaboo.info/view_documentary.htm
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Have We Lost the War on Drugs?
After more than four decades of a failed experiment, the human cost has become too high. It is time to consider the decriminalization of drug use and the drug market..
By GARY S. BECKER and KEVIN M. MURPHY
Stephen Webster
The American "war on drugs" began in 1971.
President Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs" in 1971. The expectation then was that drug trafficking in the United States could be greatly reduced in a short time through federal policing—and yet the war on drugs continues to this day. The cost has been large in terms of lives, money and the well-being of many Americans, especially the poor and less educated. By most accounts, the gains from the war have been modest at best.
The direct monetary cost to American taxpayers of the war on drugs includes spending on police, the court personnel used to try drug users and traffickers, and the guards and other resources spent on imprisoning and punishing those convicted of drug offenses. Total current spending is estimated at over $40 billion a year.
These costs don't include many other harmful effects of the war on drugs that are difficult to quantify. For example, over the past 40 years the fraction of students who have dropped out of American high schools has remained large, at about 25%. Dropout rates are not high for middle-class white children, but they are very high for black and Hispanic children living in poor neighborhoods. Many factors explain the high dropout rates, especially bad schools and weak family support. But another important factor in inner-city neighborhoods is the temptation to drop out of school in order to profit from the drug trade.
The total number of persons incarcerated in state and federal prisons in the U.S. has grown from 330,000 in 1980 to about 1.6 million today. Much of the increase in this population is directly due to the war on drugs and the severe punishment for persons convicted of drug trafficking. About 50% of the inmates in federal prisons and 20% of those in state prisons have been convicted of either selling or using drugs. The many minor drug traffickers and drug users who spend time in jail find fewer opportunities for legal employment after they get out of prison, and they develop better skills at criminal activities.
Prices of illegal drugs are pushed up whenever many drug traffickers are caught and punished harshly. The higher prices they get for drugs help compensate traffickers for the risks of being apprehended. Higher prices can discourage the demand for drugs, but they also enable some traffickers to make a lot of money if they avoid being caught, if they operate on a large enough scale, and if they can reduce competition from other traffickers. This explains why large-scale drug gangs and cartels are so profitable in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and other countries.
The paradox of the war on drugs is that the harder governments push the fight, the higher drug prices become to compensate for the greater risks. That leads to larger profits for traffickers who avoid being punished. This is why larger drug gangs often benefit from a tougher war on drugs, especially if the war mainly targets small-fry dealers and not the major drug gangs. Moreover, to the extent that a more aggressive war on drugs leads dealers to respond with higher levels of violence and corruption, an increase in enforcement can exacerbate the costs imposed on society.
The large profits for drug dealers who avoid being caught and punished encourage them to try to bribe and intimidate police, politicians, the military and anyone else involved in the war against drugs. If police and officials resist bribes and try to enforce antidrug laws, they are threatened with violence and often begin to fear for their lives and those of their families.
Mexico offers a well-documented example of some of the costs involved in drug wars. Probably more than 50,000 people have died since Mexico's antidrug campaign started in 2006. For perspective, about 150,000 deaths would result if the same fraction of Americans were killed. This number of deaths is many magnitudes greater than American losses in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined, and is about three times the number of American deaths in the Vietnam War. Many of those killed were innocent civilians and the army personnel, police officers and local government officials involved in the antidrug effort.
There is also considerable bitterness in Mexico over the war because the great majority of the drugs go to the U.S. drug cartels in Mexico and several other Latin American countries would be far weaker if they were only selling drugs to domestic consumers (Brazilian and Mexican drug gangs also export a lot to Europe).
The main gain from the war on drugs claimed by advocates of continuing the war is a lower incidence of drug use and drug addiction. Basic economics does imply that, under given conditions, higher prices for a good leads to reduced demand for that good. The magnitude of the response depends on the availability of substitutes for the higher priced good. For example, many drug users might find alcohol a good substitute for drugs as drugs become more expensive.
The conclusion that higher prices reduce demand only "under given conditions" is especially important in considering the effects of higher drug prices due to the war on drugs. Making the selling and consumption of drugs illegal not only raises drug prices but also has other important effects. For example, while some consumers are reluctant to buy illegal goods, drugs may be an exception because drug use usually starts while people are teenagers or young adults. A rebellious streak may lead them to use and sell drugs precisely because those activities are illegal.
More important, some drugs, such as crack or heroin, are highly addictive. Many people addicted to smoking and to drinking alcohol manage to break their addictions when they get married or find good jobs, or as a result of other life-cycle events. They also often get help from groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, or by using patches and "fake" cigarettes that gradually wean them from their addiction to nicotine.
It is generally harder to break an addiction to illegal goods, like drugs. Drug addicts may be leery of going to clinics or to nonprofit "drugs anonymous" groups for help. They fear they will be reported for consuming illegal substances. Since the consumption of illegal drugs must be hidden to avoid arrest and conviction, many drug consumers must alter their lives in order to avoid detection.
Usually overlooked in discussions of the effects of the war on drugs is that the illegality of drugs stunts the development of ways to help drug addicts, such as the drug equivalent of nicotine patches. Thus, though the war on drugs may well have induced lower drug use through higher prices, it has likely also increased the rate of addiction. The illegality of drugs makes it harder for addicts to get help in breaking their addictions. It leads them to associate more with other addicts and less with people who might help them quit.
Most parents who support the war on drugs are mainly concerned about their children becoming addicted to drugs rather than simply becoming occasional or modest drug users. Yet the war on drugs may increase addiction rates, and it may even increase the total number of addicts.
.One moderate alternative to the war on drugs is to follow Portugal's lead and decriminalize all drug use while maintaining the illegality of drug trafficking. Decriminalizing drugs implies that persons cannot be criminally punished when they are found to be in possession of small quantities of drugs that could be used for their own consumption. Decriminalization would reduce the bloated U.S. prison population since drug users could no longer be sent to jail. Decriminalization would make it easier for drug addicts to openly seek help from clinics and self-help groups, and it would make companies more likely to develop products and methods that address addiction.
Some evidence is available on the effects of Portugal's decriminalization of drugs, which began in 2001. A study published in 2010 in the British Journal of Criminology found that in Portugal since decriminalization, imprisonment on drug-related charges has gone down; drug use among young persons appears to have increased only modestly, if at all; visits to clinics that help with drug addictions and diseases from drug use have increased; and opiate-related deaths have fallen.
Decriminalization of all drugs by the U.S. would be a major positive step away from the war on drugs. In recent years, states have begun to decriminalize marijuana, one of the least addictive and less damaging drugs. Marijuana is now decriminalized in some form in about 20 states, and it is de facto decriminalized in some others as well. If decriminalization of marijuana proves successful, the next step would be to decriminalize other drugs, perhaps starting with amphetamines. Gradually, this might lead to the full decriminalization of all drugs.
Though the decriminalization of drug use would have many benefits, it would not, by itself, reduce many of the costs of the war on drugs, since those involve actions against traffickers. These costs would not be greatly reduced unless selling drugs was also decriminalized. Full decriminalization on both sides of the drug market would lower drug prices, reduce the role of criminals in producing and selling drugs, improve many inner-city neighborhoods, encourage more minority students in the U.S. to finish high school, substantially lessen the drug problems of Mexico and other countries involved in supplying drugs, greatly reduce the number of state and federal prisoners and the harmful effects on drug offenders of spending years in prison, and save the financial resources of government.
The lower drug prices that would result from full decriminalization may well encourage greater consumption of drugs, but it would also lead to lower addiction rates and perhaps even to fewer drug addicts, since heavy drug users would find it easier to quit. Excise taxes on the sale of drugs, similar to those on cigarettes and alcohol, could be used to moderate some, if not most, of any increased drug use caused by the lower prices.
Taxing legal production would eliminate the advantage that violent criminals have in the current marketplace. Just as gangsters were largely driven out of the alcohol market after the end of prohibition, violent drug gangs would be driven out of a decriminalized drug market. Since the major costs of the drug war are the costs of the crime associated with drug trafficking, the costs to society would be greatly reduced even if overall drug consumption increased somewhat.
The decriminalization of both drug use and the drug market won't be attained easily, as there is powerful opposition to each of them. The disastrous effects of the American war on drugs are becoming more apparent, however, not only in the U.S. but beyond its borders. Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon has suggested "market solutions" as one alternative to the problem. Perhaps the combined efforts of leaders in different countries can succeed in making a big enough push toward finally ending this long, enormously destructive policy experiment.
—Mr. Becker is a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago. He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992. Mr. Murphy is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Both are senior fellows of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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CONGRESS - Flanked by more than 150 advocates from around the country, U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) on Monday put forward his legislation allowing states to legalize medical marijuana in an effort to end the confusion surrounding federal pot policy.
Blumeanuer’s legislation, which has 13 co-sponsors — including GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California — would create a framework for the FDA to eventually legalize medicinal marijuana. It would also block the feds from interfering in any of the 19 states where medical marijuana is legal.
At a press conference outside the Capitol, Blumenauer didn’t attack the Drug Enforcement Agency for targeting marijuana dispensaries or blame the Justice Department for forcing marijuana businesses to operate in a legal gray zone. Instead, he pitched his legislation as a solution to the confusion surrounding federal marijuana policy.
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CONGRESS - Flanked by more than 150 advocates from around the country, U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) on Monday put forward his legislation allowing states to legalize medical marijuana in an effort to end the confusion surrounding federal pot policy.
Blumeanuer’s legislation, which has 13 co-sponsors — including GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California — would create a framework for the FDA to eventually legalize medicinal marijuana. It would also block the feds from interfering in any of the 19 states where medical marijuana is legal.
At a press conference outside the Capitol, Blumenauer didn’t attack the Drug Enforcement Agency for targeting marijuana dispensaries or blame the Justice Department for forcing marijuana businesses to operate in a legal gray zone. Instead, he pitched his legislation as a solution to the confusion surrounding federal marijuana policy.
Or, we could actually just follow the constitution and leave intrastate issues up to the state or states in question, per the 10th AMD.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/12/bill-aims-ease-federal-state-clash-over-pot-laws/
GM:
I know you favor keeping pot illegal. Question presented here: Is this a matter for state or federal law?
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/12/bill-aims-ease-federal-state-clash-over-pot-laws/
GM:
I know you favor keeping pot illegal. Question presented here: Is this a matter for state or federal law?
I think that federal law should only apply when there is an interstate or international nexus.
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A worthy answer.
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I eagerly await GM's witticisms on this one :lol:
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Marijuana Crops in California Threaten Forests and Wildlife
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Marijuana crops on private land in Humboldt County, Calif. Some medical marijuana growers follow state rules, but others do not.
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: June 20, 2013 148 Comments
ARCATA, Calif. — It took the death of a small, rare member of the weasel family to focus the attention of Northern California’s marijuana growers on the impact that their huge and expanding activities were having on the environment.
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While some marijuana farms divert and dry up streams, this grower uses conservation methods like a rainwater holding pond.
The animal, a Pacific fisher, had been poisoned by an anticoagulant in rat poisons like d-Con. Since then, six other poisoned fishers have been found. Two endangered spotted owls tested positive. Mourad W. Gabriel, a scientist at the University of California, Davis, concluded that the contamination began when marijuana growers in deep forests spread d-Con to protect their plants from wood rats.
That news has helped growers acknowledge, reluctantly, what their antagonists in law enforcement have long maintained: like industrial logging before it, the booming business of marijuana is a threat to forests whose looming dark redwoods preside over vibrant ecosystems.
Hilltops have been leveled to make room for the crop. Bulldozers start landslides on erosion-prone mountainsides. Road and dam construction clogs some streams with dislodged soil. Others are bled dry by diversions. Little water is left for salmon whose populations have been decimated by logging.
And local and state jurisdictions’ ability to deal with the problem has been hobbled by, among other things, the drug’s murky legal status. It is approved by the state for medical uses but still illegal under federal law, leading to a patchwork of growers. Some operate within state rules, while others operate totally outside the law.
The environmental damage may not be as extensive as that caused by the 19th-century diking of the Humboldt estuary here, or 20th-century clear-cut logging, but the romantic outlaw drug has become a destructive juggernaut, experts agree.
“In my career I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Stormer Feiler, a scientist with California’s North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. “Since 2007 the amount of unregulated activities has exploded.” He added, “They are grading the mountaintops now, so it affects the whole watershed below.”
Scott Bauer, of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, said, “I went out on a site yesterday where there was an active water diversion providing water to 15 different groups of people or individuals,” many of them growers. “The stream is going to dry up this year.”
While it is hard to find data on such an industry, Anthony Silvaggio, a sociology lecturer at Humboldt State University, pointed to anecdotal evidence in a Google Earth virtual “flyover” he made of the industrial farm plots and the damage they cause. The video was later enhanced and distributed by Mother Jones magazine.
Brad Job’s territory as a federal Bureau of Land Management officer includes public lands favored, he said, by Mexican drug cartels whose environmental practices are the most destructive. “The watershed was already lying on the ground bleeding,” Mr. Job said. “The people who divert water in the summer are kicking it in the stomach.”
That water is crucial to restoring local runs of imperiled Coho salmon, Chinook salmon and steelhead, which swam up Eel River tributaries by the tens of thousands before the logging era. Scott Greacen, executive director of Friends of the Eel River, said, “It’s not weed that drove the Coho to the brink of extinction, but it may kick it over the edge.” By various estimates, each plant needs at least one gallon and as much as six gallons of water during a season.
The idea that the counterculture’s crop of choice is bad for the environment has gone down hard here. Marijuana is an economic staple, particularly in Humboldt County’s rural southern end, called SoHum. Jennifer Budwig, the vice president of a local bank, estimated last year that marijuana infused more than $415 million into the county’s annual economic activity, one-quarter of the total.
For the professed hippies who moved here decades ago, marijuana farming combines defiance of society’s strictures, shared communal values and a steady income. “Marijuana has had a framework that started in the 1930s with jazz musicians,” said Gregg Gold, a psychology professor at Humboldt State University. “It’s a cultural icon of resistance to authority.”
“In 2013,” he added, “you’re asking that we reframe it in people’s minds as just another agribusiness. That’s a huge shift.”
It is a thriving agribusiness. Derek Roy, a special agent enforcing endangered species protections for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said, “These grow sites continue to get larger and larger.” Things took off after 1996, when California decriminalized the use of medical marijuana, Mr. Roy said.
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(Page 2 of 2)
The older farmers say that as the fierce antidrug campaigns waned and the medical marijuana market developed, newcomers arrived eager to cash in, particularly in the past decade, according to two growers who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“There is a gold rush,” Mr. Greacen said. “And it’s a race to the bottom in terms of environmental impacts.”
Now that Colorado and Washington voters have approved the recreational use of the drug, there is a widespread belief that the days of high prices for marijuana are nearly over.
As Mikal Jakubal, a resident of SoHum who is directing a documentary film about Humboldt County’s marijuana business, puts it, “Everyone thinks, ‘This might be the last good year.’ ” That helps fuel the willy-nilly expansion of cultivation, the tearing up of hillsides and the diversions that dry out creeks.
The worst damage is on public lands. There, extensive plantings are surrounded by d-Con-laced tuna and sardine cans placed around perimeters by the dozens, Dr. Gabriel said. Mr. Job of the land management bureau said these illegal operations have 70,000 to 100,000 plants; they are believed to be the work of Mexican drug cartels.
But small farmers have an impact, too. Mr. Bauer of the State Fish and Wildlife Department said that when he found the water diversion last week and asked those responsible about it, “these people we met with were pointing a finger all over the watershed, saying: ‘We’re not that big. There are bigger people out there.’ ”
Federal environmental agents, including Mr. Roy and Mr. Job, have brought two cases to the United States attorney’s office in San Francisco. The office declined to prosecute a case last year, they said. A new one is under review. But, they said, manpower for enforcement is limited.
Given federal prohibitions against profiting from marijuana, county officials have a limited toolbox. “We have land-use authority, that’s it,” said Mark Lovelace, a Humboldt County supervisor. He chafes at the county’s inability to establish a system of permits, for fear of running afoul of federal law. His board did just pass a resolution asking local businesses not to sell d-Con. (A representative of Reckitt Benckiser, which makes the poison, wrote a letter of protest.)
Mr. Lovelace and others contend that legalizing marijuana would open the door to regulation and put the brakes on environmental abuses.
In the meantime, the industry has begun to police itself. Some growers have benefited from a program run by a local nonprofit organization, Sanctuary Forest, that subsidizes the installation of tanks that can store water in the winter, when it is plentiful, for use in dry months.
“There may be people who grow pot in our group,” said Tasha McKee, executive director of Sanctuary Forest. “I’m sure there are. We don’t ask that question.”
A local group, the Emerald Growers Association, recently produced a handbook on sustainable practices.
“There is an identity crisis going on right now,” said Gary Graham Hughes, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center in Arcata. “The people who are really involved with this industry are trying to understand what their responsibilities are.”
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The murderous Mexican drug cartels that toast the brains of children only generate outrage in California for not following environmentally sound drug production practices.
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Marijuana "toasts the brain"?
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Marijuana "toasts the brain"?
Permanent IQ reduction and memory loss.
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The smartest guy I knew in law school would fire up a doobie before settling in to read securities regulations. He was on law review and went on to be the senior VP of legal affairs at one of the biggest studios in all of Hollywood.
There are tens and tens of millions of people who smoke pot to less effect that people who drink.
IMHO the two should face similar legal treatment.
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"The smartest guy I knew in law school would fire up a doobie before settling in to read securities regulations."
In college, there was reportedly more use by the top 10% than by the bottom. That said, a small loss of IQ for someone starting at 150-160 might make interactions with the other 99.9% more interesting, while the same loss at the low end might render one dysfunctional.
"There are tens and tens of millions of people who smoke pot to less effect that people who drink."
Agree, but less damage than the drug with the most damage brings to mind Huma claiming what she did was legal and ethical because Hillary approved it. A low bar.
Curious to hear about your choice to not drink alcohol. Maybe at my beer summit with BD. :wink:
"IMHO the two should face similar legal treatment."
Yes. Similar and different. Colorado is struggling with what to do with THC levels for driving law standards. The effect is not harmless but quite different than alcohol. Maybe we should measure remaining IQ instead of the amount lost to the drug.
"Permanent IQ reduction and memory loss."
I am reminded of the pot crazed burglars who broke in and stole from the doughnut shop but in the end they forgot to empty the register.
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"Curious to hear about your choice to not drink alcohol."
Rather simple actually; I do better without it. (BTW I do have about 3 drinks a year).
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Marijuana "toasts the brain"?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9426205/Cannabis-smoking-permanently-lowers-IQ.html
Cannabis smoking 'permanently lowers IQ'
Teenagers who regularly smoke cannabis are putting themselves at risk of permanently damaging their intelligence, according to a landmark study.
Starting smoking cannabis during one's teens can have permanent effects on the brain, found researchers. Photo: ALAMY
By Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent
8:00PM BST 27 Jul 2012
Researchers found persistent users of the drug, who started smoking it at school, had lower IQ scores as adults.
They were also significantly more likely to have attention and memory problems in later life, than their peers who abstained.
Furthermore, those who started as teenagers and used it heavily, but quit as adults, did not regain their full mental powers, found academics at King’s College London and Duke University in the US.
They looked at data from over 1,000 people from Dunedin in New Zealand, who have been followed through their lives since being born in 1972 or 1973.
Participants were asked about cannabis usage when they were 18, 21, 26, 32 and 38. Their IQ was tested at 13 and 38. In addition, each nominated a close friend or family member, who was asked about attention and memory problems.
About one in 20 admitted to starting cannabis use before the age of 18, while a further one in 10 took up the habit in the early or mid 20s.
Professor Terrie Moffitt, of KCL’s Institute of Psychiatry, who contributed to the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said “persistent users” who started as teenagers suffered a drop of eight IQ points at the age of 38, compared to when they were 13.
Persistent users meant those who used it during at least three of the ages from 18 to 38, and who said at each occasion they were smoking it on at least four days a week.
She said: “Adolescent-onset cannabis users, but not adult-onset cannabis users, showed marked IQ decline from childhood to adulthood.
“For example, individuals who started using cannabis in adolescence and used it for years thereafter showed an average eight-point IQ decline.
“Quitting or reducing cannabis use did not appear to fully restore intellectual functioning among adolescent-onset former persistent cannabis users,” she said.
Although eight points did not sound much, it was not trivial, she warned.
It meant that an average person dropped far down the intelligence rankings, so that instead of 50 per cent of the population being more intelligent than them, 71 per cent were.
“Research has shown that IQ is a strong determinant of a person’s access to a college education, their lifelong total income, their access to a good job, their performance on the job, their tendency to develop heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and even early death,” she said.
“Individuals who lose eight IQ points in their teens and 20s may be disadvantaged, relative to their same-age peers, in most of the important aspects of life and for years to come.”
The cognitive abilities of the 10 per cent of people who started in their 20s - who could loosely be classed as college smokers - also suffered while they were still smoking.
However, if they gave up at least a year before their IQ test at 38, their intelligence recovered, suggesting their brains were more resilient and bounced back.
Prof Moffitt said adolescent brains appeared "more vulnerable to damage and disruption" from cannabis than those of fully mature adults.
Reliable figures on cannabis usage among today’s British teens and twentysomethings are hard to come by.
But Prof Moffitt said there was growing concern in the US that cannabis was increasingly being seen as a safe alternative to tobacco.
“This is the first year that more secondary school students in the US are using cannabis than tobacco, according to the Monitoring the Future project at the University of Michigan,” she noted.
“Fewer now think cannabis is damaging than tobacco. But cannabis is harmful for the very young.”
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A pertinent response.
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By
JOHN P. WALTERS
You might have missed it, but on July 9 the White House quietly announced in a press release that cocaine use in the U.S. is down by over a third since 2006. This news comes on the heels of a major reduction in world-wide cocaine production, down 41% between 2001 and 2012 according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Cocaine-related deaths in the U.S. dropped 44% between 2006 and 2010. The rate of positive drug tests for cocaine declined even more steeply, down 65% between 2006 and mid-2012.
You do not have to have lived during the cocaine and crack epidemics of the 1980s and early 1990s to be grateful for this remarkable change. If you did, the progress seems miraculous. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is cutting the funds and undermining the political will that helped bring about this transformation.
Of all those who contributed to this striking success in the effort to control illegal drugs, two leaders deserve particular thanks: Alvaro Uribe, president of Colombia from 2002-10, and Felipe Calderón, president of Mexico from 2006-12.
A Coast Guard crew member from the cutter Bernard C. Webber, left, hands a bale of cocaine to a DEA police officer, Friday, April 26, 2013 at the U.S. Coast Guard base in Miami Beach, Fla.
President Uribe changed the future of Colombia by attacking the cocaine trade and violent groups on the left and right who used trafficking as a source of power. He brought the rule of law to large areas of his country where people had given up hope.
President Calderón made taking back Mexico from violent traffickers—narco-terrorists—the center of his administration. While cocaine trafficking is only a part of the cartels' criminal activity, Mr. Calderón stepped up attacks on cartel leaders; in January 2007 he even sent a planeload of his worst traffickers to justice in the United States. Because he had the courage to take on this difficult struggle, he began to see the power and violence of these criminal groups decline before he left office, as drug-related murders dropped 12% in the first five months of 2012.
Messrs. Uribe and Calderón created an unprecedented alliance with the U.S. to serve the interests of their homelands, but as in any true alliance all the partners were better for it. Democrats and Republicans stood up for these two leaders, giving critical enforcement, eradication, interdiction and adjudication support to their efforts. During their presidencies, Colombia and Mexico extradited hundreds of their worst traffickers to the U.S. to buy time for their developing judicial systems.
Recent events in Mexico indicate that enforcement successes there will be sustained. But Mr. Calderón has expressed frustration with the failure to reduce drug consumption in the U.S., and he has warned that unchecked demand could lead to drug legalization.
A 41% reduction in cocaine production, one might imagine, has something to do with a 44% reduction in cocaine overdoses. Yet the Obama administration is actually proposing to cut funding for international drug control to $1.5 billion for fiscal year 2014 from $1.9 billion in this fiscal year, a 21% reduction. In its July 9 press release, the White House tells us that it is time to spend an additional $1.4 billion to expand treatment and education, "the largest percentage increase in at least two decades."
Prevention and treatment are worthy activities, but the administration seems to have missed the point in its press release, which links the declines in cocaine use to reductions in supply. It offers no evidence that treatment and prevention played any role.
Most of all, President Obama's failure to push back against drug legalization in this country works against international anti-drug efforts. Raymond Yans, president of the International Narcotics Control Board, warned in March that allowing the implementation of legalization initiatives in Colorado and Washington "would be a violation of international law, namely the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, to which the United States is a party." The U.S. is now undermining the foundation of the very achievement the administration just announced.
President Obama is as close to an icon for the young as any president has ever been. He and many of his generation used drugs and suffered for that use—a point he makes in his 1995 autobiography, "Dreams From My Father."
The president needs once again to speak honestly about the danger. If he sat with our children and spoke to them as if they were his daughters, he would be a powerful force for prevention. How about a single speech? Perhaps he could dedicate it to America's allies and the brave men and women who have given their lives to keep us safe.
Mr. Walters, the chief operating officer of the Hudson Institute, was director of drug control policy for President George W. Bush.
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"Most of all, President Obama's failure to push back against drug legalization in this country works against international anti-drug efforts. Raymond Yans, president of the International Narcotics Control Board, warned in March that allowing the implementation of legalization initiatives in Colorado and Washington "would be a violation of international law, namely the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, to which the United States is a party." The U.S. is now undermining the foundation of the very achievement the administration just announced."
President Lawless can't be bothered by such things.
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Hemp is a very interesting thing, apparently it has many serious uses
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/groundwork-laid-growers-turn-to-hemp-in-colorado.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130806&_r=0
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http://www.rmhidta.org/html/FINAL%20Legalization%20of%20MJ%20in%20Colorado%20The%20Impact.pdf
Colorado a major exporter of illegally grown marijuana, report says
By John Ingold
The Denver Post
Posted: 08/01/2013 01:49:43 PM
Updated: 08/02/2013 01:38:49 AM MDT
Colorado has become a major exporter of illegally grown marijuana to the rest of the country, according to a new report by a network of law enforcement organizations.
Last year, police across the country made at least 274 highway seizures of marijuana that investigators linked back to Colorado. According to the report, the seized pot — 3½ tons of it in 2012 — was destined for 37 different states, most frequently Kansas, Missouri and Illinois.
Many of the cases involved multi-pound quantities of marijuana being shipped out of state. Officers also seized hundreds of thousands of dollars connected to the cases, the report states. Some of the seized marijuana was diverted from medical-marijuana dispensaries, the report alleges.
In addition, U.S. Postal Service inspectors last year seized 158 packages of marijuana being sent through the mail, according to the report. They seized 209 packages of pot in the first five months of this year alone.
All of the reported seizure numbers are significantly higher than they were several years ago. In 2005, for instance, police made 54 highway seizures of Colorado-grown marijuana, according to the report.
The report was written by the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a network of law enforcement organizations in four western states that share information on drug-running patterns.
"If you look at those trends, you have to say there's something going on here," said Tom Gorman, the director of the group, which goes by the acronym RMHIDTA. "And it certainly appears that Colorado has become a source state for destinations east of here."
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Why is it not better that American pot farmers do the business instead of Mexican narco gangs?
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Why is it not better that American pot farmers do the business instead of Mexican narco gangs?
You think it's ma and pa Kettle growing and smuggling the weed to other states? The cartels and other organized crime entities are all over this.
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Maybe it's time legalize and regulate it then?
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Maybe it's time legalize and regulate it then?
The meth from the superlabs too? Human trafficking? Kidnapping ? All of these things are profitable for organized crime.
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Heroin Makes a Comeback
This Time, Small Towns are Increasingly Beset by Addiction, Drug-Related Crimes
By ZUSHA ELINSON and ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES
With prescription drugs tougher to get, addicts are increasingly turning to heroin. Here, a 22-year-old heroin user shoots up in a Seattle park.
ELLENSBURG, Wash.—This small city east of the Cascade Mountains is known for its hay farms, rodeos and, increasingly, something more sinister: a growing heroin problem.
The drug surfaced in the past two years and is spawning a new generation of addicts. The fatal overdose of a state trooper's son in May convulsed the town—especially when the two men arrested and charged with selling him heroin turned out to be a county official's sons. They pleaded not guilty in Kittitas County Superior Court and are awaiting trial.
"It really shook our community," said Norman Redberg, executive director of Kittitas County Alcohol Drug Dependency Service. He has evaluated 27 heroin users in the fiscal year that ended June 30, compared with three in 2008. Ellensburg has 18,000 residents.
Heroin use in the U.S. is soaring, especially in rural areas, amid ample supply and a shift away from costlier prescription narcotics that are becoming tougher to acquire. The number of people who say they have used heroin in the past year jumped 53.5% to 620,000 between 2002 to 2011, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. There were 3,094 overdose deaths in 2010, a 55% increase from 2000, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Much of the heroin that reaches smaller towns such as Ellensburg comes from Mexico, where producers have ramped up production in recent years, drug officials say. Heroin seizures at the Southwest border, from Texas to California, ballooned to 1,989 kilograms in fiscal 2012 from 487 kilograms in 2008, according to figures from the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The heroin scourge has been driven largely by a law-enforcement crackdown on illicit use of prescription painkillers such as oxycodone and drug-company reformulations that make the pills harder to crush and snort, drug officials say. That has pushed those who were addicted to the pills to turn to heroin, which is cheaper and more plentiful.
"Basically, you have a generation of ready-made heroin addicts," said Matthew Barnes, special agent in charge of the DEA's Seattle division.
Given the growing supply, dealers have flooded local markets with heroin. Former users interviewed in Ellensburg, who didn't want to be identified, said dealers promoted the drug aggressively. A 21-year-old recovering addict said she made the switch from pain pills to heroin after her dealer one day held out both options in his hands and encouraged her to choose the cheaper one.
A former Marine who lives in Ellensburg said he switched to heroin after getting hooked on oxycodone prescribed to him for an injury suffered while serving overseas. "To me, it was identical," said the 28-year-old. "It's mind-numbing, an instant antidepressant." He was eventually arrested for writing bad checks; if he successfully completes drug treatment, charges will be dropped.
Drug experts say the heroin sold today is generally purer and thereby more potent than the varieties prevalent in past decades, increasing the risk of overdose. Moreover, the purity can vary enormously from one batch to the next. A baggie "may be 15% pure one day, and the next day it's 60%," said Skip Holbrook, the police chief in Huntington, W.Va., which sits in an area of Appalachia where heroin is spreading. "It's like playing Russian roulette."
View Slideshow
[SB10001424127887324564704578630304246179408]
Mike Kane for The Wall Street Journal
A 22-year-old intravenous drug user prepares a needle before injecting heroin in a park in Seattle.
More photos and interactive graphics
In contrast to the 1970s and 1980s, when heroin ravaged inner-city neighborhoods, this time it is taking hold in rural places that are often unprepared to deal with the fallout, a trend noted in this year's White House National Drug Control Strategy report. Many lack addiction-treatment options. According to data analyzed by the Maine Rural Health Research Center, 93% of facilities nationwide with treatment programs for opioids, a class of pain-relief drugs including heroin, are located in metropolitan areas.
Small-town police forces strain to handle the additional narcotics investigations and drug-related crimes such as burglaries. Some afflicted areas are far from hospital emergency rooms, raising the risk that an overdose will be deadly. In Ellensburg, Kim Hitchcock, who works at a nonprofit public-health organization, has started a needle-exchange program in her spare time and taken young addicts released from the hospital following overdoses into her home. "There's a tremendous lack of services in our area," she said.
In Marinette, Wis., some employers are having difficulty filling positions because so many applicants are testing positive for heroin, said state Rep. John Nygren. The problem prompted the local chamber of commerce in April to begin assembling a consortium of community organizations to address the problem. Meanwhile, a sharp rise in heroin-related crime has fed a 31% increase in the inmate population at the 164-bed local jail over the past two years, said administrator Bob Majewski.
The town of 11,000 has no residential treatment centers for addicts. "If somebody says, 'I'm at bottom, I need help,' there's nothing that we have to give them," said Sgt. Scott Ries of the Marinette Police Department. "It's really sad."
The only option is to head to cities such as Green Bay, an hour away.
In some rural areas of Kentucky, communities "are experiencing heroin literally for the first time," said Bill Mark, director of the Northern Kentucky Drug Strike Force. Last year, 28 of the state's 120 counties logged their first heroin arrests since he started tracking such data in 2008, he said.
Back in Huntington, W.Va., heroin became the top drug problem in the city of around 50,000 about six months ago, said Mr. Holbrook, the police chief. Last month, a local task force nabbed 3.7 pounds of the drug, one of the largest seizures ever in the region. And police are contending with a steady increase in property crimes like larceny, driven by addicts trying to feed their habit.
The drug "transcends all areas of our town," Mr. Holbrook said. "It is absolutely the most pressing issue that we face."
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Second post of day
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/08/health/gupta-changed-mind-marijuana/index.html
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http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/08/health/gupta-changed-mind-marijuana/index.html
Very interesting post and good points but I don't find it fully convincing. From the title I assumed he looked at Colorado and changed his mind in the other direction.
Doesn't want his kids to try until their brains are fully formed in their mid-20s. Under full legalization and state sanctioning, good luck with that.
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http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=3ad9c34c3647fc7c1f237dc8f&id=1c6b6a6b0f
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324463604579043023597697440.html?mod=trending_now_2
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/us/politics/us-says-it-wont-sue-to-undo-state-marijuana-laws.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130830&_r=0
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http://news.yahoo.com/john-mccain--‘maybe-we-should-legalize’-pot--192226634.html
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/science/the-rational-choices-of-crack-addicts.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130917
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/us/few-problems-with-cannabis-for-california.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131027&_r=0
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http://www.clarionproject.org/news/christians-iran-get-80-lashes-drinking-communion-wine
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The Motley Fool
5 Jaw-Dropping Facts About Legal Marijuana
By Brian Orelli | More Articles
November 30, 2013 | Comments (25)
The legal use of marijuana for both medical use and adult recreational use is on the rise. Here are five facts that might just surprise you about the drug.
Source: Chuck Coker, Flickr.
1. Marijuana could be the best-selling legal drug. Ever.
According to ArcView Market Research, the national market for legalized marijuana could hit $10.2 billion in five years. Pfizer's (NYSE: PFE ) Lipitor currently holds the record for prescription drugs at about $13 billion. If ArcView's prediction is correct, it's not hard to see how marijuana could surpass that record in the following year. It's growing from a base of just $1.44 billion this year.
And unlike Pfizer, which saw Lipitor sales crash once generic versions hit the market, there isn't likely to be a cliff that causes sales to drop precipitously, short of having the federal government decide to crack down on state laws. Of course, unlike Lipitor, you can't invest in one company to capture all the revenue.
2. 14 states could join Colorado and Washington legalizing marijuana for recreational use
In fact, that's one of the driving forces behind ArcView's growth prediction. The sentiment has shifted recently; a majority of Americans now favor legalization. If they vote the same way they answer poll questions, it's likely that we'll see many more states where marijuana use is legal in the coming five years.
The driving force for the states is the potential revenue from taxes. They want to get their cut, which they don't get on illegal sales now.
It'll be interesting to watch Colorado and Washington as they try to deal with how to tax what many consider to be a drug to help people -- which are typically not taxed -- compared with a recreational drug, which, like cigarettes and alcohol, are typically highly taxed.
3. The government sends out marijuana cigarettes each month
It's part of a study to see if marijuana could help patients with glaucoma. At its peak, there were 30 patients enrolled in the study, which stopped accepting new participants in 1992. Those still enrolled get sent their prescriptions from a special farm on the University of Mississippi campus that provides the drug for medical research.
4. Only 6% of studies on marijuana investigate its potential benefit.
According to CNN's Sanjay Gupta, the other 94% investigate its potential harm. The problem, as Gupta points out, is that it's very hard to run clinical trials on marijuana use since it's still illegal at the national level. While the University of Mississippi farm can provide the medication legally for studies, it's apparently not that all that easy to acquire medication from it.
Researchers also have to gain approval from the NIH's National Institute on Drug Abuse, which has a mission "to lead the nation in bringing the power of science to bear on drug abuse and addiction." That's not exactly a ringing endorsement for potential benefits of drugs.
5. The receptor that marijuana activates has been an (unsuccessful) drug target
Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, one of the active drugs in marijuana, is available as a prescription drug called Marinol, developed by Abbott's drug arm, now called AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV ) , to stimulate appetite and control nausea and vomiting in patients taking chemotherapy. But the drug isn't widely used because it's absorbed by different people at different levels, making it hard to get the right dosage .
Sanofi (NYSE: SNY ) tried to do the opposite and block the receptor, thus controlling appetite. While Sanofi's obesity drug, Acomplia, was fairly good at helping patients shed the pounds, it had psychiatric side effects including depression. The FDA never approved the drug, and Sanofi had to remove it from the market in Europe in 2008.
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My thoughts: On #1 Best selling drug? Who would grow it and sell it?
On #2 Kind of sad that the driving force for legalization is tax revenue. Just another example how everything is money. I guess one could make similar claims for gambling and prostitution where those are also legal. Alcohol and maybe a sugar tax. The latter suddenly could be labeled a vice.
On #3 I didn't know the government was sponsoring studies on use of marijuana for glaucoma. It can lower intra-orbital pressures but my understanding is the affects were too erratic and there are so many better drugs that the use for this is dubious. I met an eye doctor in Florida who got into trouble with the ATF for testing this. He claimed they ruined his life and his wife eventually committed suicide over it. I only know his side of the story. This was about ten years ago. He was in his seventies.
On # 4 Old drugs do make comebacks. Gupta noted that most studies looked at the harms not the benefits. Remember thalidomide? The drug given to pregnant women in Europe that led to horrible birth defects? Just the mere mention of it afterwards gave everyone the shivers. Now it is a beneficial drug used for other diseases.
On # 5 The Sanofi drug did work to help people lose weight but then a suicide was reported and that was that in the US. I don't know what the experience was in Europe since it was approved there and later taken off their market.
I left the comments from some other readers here:
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Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 5:25 AM, VikingBear wrote:
Legalize everything.
Let the herd cull itself.
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 8:46 PM, Kalamakuaikalani wrote:
Hard to take your article seriously when you title it "5 Jaw-Dropping Facts ....." & then subtitle number 1: 1. Marijuana could be the best-selling legal drug. Ever. ................... It's not a FACT if marijuana COULD BE. It either is or it isn't & THEN, that would be a FACT.
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 8:53 PM, glenns45 wrote:
Controlled Substance Act of 1971 signed by a President who was forced to resign or be prosecuted. The DEA was created to make sure the right people were selling the Drugs and supporting the NWO. The Feds are the ones who bring in the drugs this is on public record do some research.
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 9:23 PM, towolf2 wrote:
When it smacks somebody upside the chops, then you know what is a fact and what isn't. That's 35 years as a pro grower speaking. Say hey to The Duke for me!!
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 9:26 PM, towolf2 wrote:
Which part am I reading? The educated humorous enriching part, or is this the NASCAR Channel. Caught out again.
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 9:53 PM, oldmutt1949 wrote:
5 other jaw breaking facts about marijuana.
1. It has 424 compounds that turns into over 2000 when lit.
2. Those 2000 compounds release numerous poisons including hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide.
3. French Academy of Science using the atomic microscope has shown long term use of marijuana can alter a person DNA ( Science Daily )
4. Total number of people killed in the drug war in Mexico, central and Latin America exceeds the number of U.S. casualties in VIet Nam.
5. A lot of hippies from my generation who smoked this polluted crap are no longer here.
And last but not least their isn't a single study that has confirmed that all the substances in marijuana are safe evident by he emergency rooms a In Denver and other cities kept busy treating kids poisoned by this stuff because their parents are so dumb down they can't provide their children a safe environment.
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 9:59 PM, fixer wrote:
Hemp used to be such a valuable crop that in George Washington's time ,farms we're required to plant a percentage of their fields with hemp.The oil from the seeds was a good lamp oil and the fiber made strong cloth and rope.
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 10:21 PM, southernhippy wrote:
Old mutt is lying his butt off, Just look at old willie Nelson to see the truth, Pot smoking does not affect your age. Off course old mutt is talking about smoking and not one work about eating.
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 10:24 PM, junior wrote:
something else you forgot oldmutt1949, there was talk about leagalizing it in my state. Even if it does become legalized, we were told by the plant manager that if our random pee test revealed any THC we would still loose our job.
This is why I agree with Vikingbear. Let the herd cull itself. The job market may open up so that someday I can find a job where I can afford a pack of store bought cigarrettes
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 10:32 PM, southernhippy wrote:
BTW mutt lets add some other facts to that mix..
Pot smokers tend to be closer to normal weight...
Higher good cholesterol.
Also lets add the fact that smoking pot don't increase you chances of lung or any other cancer. Not to mention and numerous medical uses of MJ among those would be nausea, seizure control, pain management. So when do we decide when the good outweighs the bad? Almost every war on Pot argument has been debunked, when do you see anything other than hate?
BTW us hippies are alive and well living a great and healthy life style, after all it was us hippies who came up with the who vegetarian thing long before anyone else, peace out...
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 10:57 PM, imnxtc2001 wrote:
"evident by he emergency rooms a In Denver and other cities kept busy treating kids poisoned by this stuff" Yeah oldmutt, them hospital rooms are just packed with them pot smoking whippersnappers. Too funny! If you have any time between your naps and your shuffleboarding league, you can take a few minutes to look up that marijuana by itself equals the same amount of emergency room visits as OTC sleep medicine. I will give you the benefit of the doubt, that you may have been mistaken for synthetic marijuana which is extremely dangerous.
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 10:57 PM, OldSkewel wrote:
Oldmutt1949 is NOT lying southernhippy. ANYONE with at least 1/2 a brain knows it is NOT natural OR healthy to take smoke of ANY kind into a healthy set of lungs.
What I find truly ironic is the very same people that use to jump all over big time tobacco companies and the dangers of smoking absolutely sound like hypocrites now touting the oh so many benefits of cannabis which EVERYONE knows the most popular form of use is the SMOKING thereof.
While we're on the subject of cannabis, somebody please remind me, isn't hashish addictive? What, basically; is hashish comprised of...?
As far as the economic impact is concerned, it WOULD make sense to legalize it but that's the ONLY reason and EVEN THEN, the economic benefits would be relatively short term compared to the devastating social and moral impact (especially considering America's children) that would no doubt occur as you just as well can take America's public education school system and pitch it out the window, not that it works that well now but can you imagine what would happen if "chronic" was legalized...?
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 11:08 PM, imnxtc2001 wrote:
Just one more observation while I'm still laughing....I'm not perfect with punctuation or grammar, but someone that doesn't smoke marijuana telling me: "jaw breaking" instead of "jaw dropping"...."their" instead "there"....."he" instead of "the"....."a In" instead of just plain out "in" minus the "a" and capital "I".....Geez, I need to smoke a bowl to even make sense of your comment at all.
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 11:09 PM, southernhippy wrote:
Odds of MJ addiction is the same as gambling, Pot has no chemical addiction. You also have the same chance of becoming a workaholic or any other habit that could be considered a bad or good life choice. Pot has been around for more than 10k years and has not stopped any progression of mankind. BTW CBD's that are found in pot are also anti-cancerous, also naturally lowers blood sugars and even can protect the brain in the event of a heart attack or stroke. BTW we are also talking about Eating the plant, y'all do know it's non-toxic and impossible to overdose on right? Y'all are just looking that that lovely drug free propaganda against a persons right to live as they chose too. BTW one other note, Pot does have 5 natural nero keyways in the brain that can open up nero pathways(hence why there is enhanced sight, smells, and creativity.) Pot is indeed a natural product the human mind knows very well. MJ has been demonized for decades for no real reason other than sobriety, nothing else.
I do agree on one Idea though, kids under 21 should not get access and should be treated like booze and advertising should be the same as tobacco when it comes to kids.
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 11:21 PM, imnxtc2001 wrote:
Old Skewel: Is it natural or healthy to drive a car? But you do it anyways don't you? Your trip to the store tomorrow will produce more pollutants into EVERYBODYS air, than one pot smoker can produce in a year. btw....I don't know if you've been asleep the past 50 years, but kids in school(if they choose to)get pot just as easy now, as they would if it was legal and fell under same laws as tobacco. As far as hash...it is basically the same as marijuana, just made from different parts. And the same studies you got your information that it was addictive, are the same ones that say marijuana is also.
Report this Comment On December 01, 2013, at 11:36 PM, HMull81 wrote:
Let’s get a few things right:
First - the problem with legalizing any previously illegal substance isn’t a morally grounded issue; being that most of these substances are vices are not socially accepted when overly indulged anyway.
Second – look up some history and consider why hemp production was ground to a halt in the first place, I’ll give you a hint……
It wasn’t because pothead hippies were overrunning the world with their outrageous free love and open minded way of living, that didn’t come until the 60s.
It is all economic and taxation that has put at spin on what any generation finds acceptable.
It doesn’t matter if you are for or against the legalization of pot, it matters where it would lead to based off of the revenue gained cause face it, the government has stopped doing for the people a long time ago, and if you are current with what is popular; the Kim and Kanye saga get more press than real issues such as legalizing pot, gun law, government debt, and not to forget my favorite government shut down.
I know that if I quit working when I was a soldier in the U.S. Army there were consequences which usually ended with me in a bad kind of way.
Report this Comment On December 02, 2013, at 12:05 AM, allykat7825 wrote:
This will be the first step in finishing off the Regan inspired War against drugs which has cost so many billions over the years. It put the lotteries to shame when the taxes are added up and make many more people happy. Add cocaine to the list and the cartels are a thing of the past, which should please oldmutt. Oldmutt is probably not as old as I am and despite rumors to the contrary, and what many others might think, I still have my wits about me. .
Report this Comment On December 02, 2013, at 1:03 AM, Sniper2013 wrote:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf07aK_5004
Report this Comment On December 02, 2013, at 2:05 AM, uniquelyNzaneSam wrote:
Where oldMutt1949 is investment advice?: anti-pesticidal controls against garden herbivores? Bet on that eliminates most carcinogens' category of compounds. Good alarm oldMutt about marijuana combustion: extreme diarrhea treatment on terminal illness cases will not intrest as much financial and mental risk as combustibles, crack and meth. Expect ascending physical medicine values from home-brewed tea-therapy thereby more versatile prescriptions flavorful hashish gel-capsuled and milligram-tweeked synthetically. Noncombusted eliminates psychological addiction injuring only nervous system like brain damages from psychotropic over-use.
>Behavioral health dermal patches prescribing "thc" will dominate nicotine futures into oblivion. Chemical, money lust, even commercialed availability are not the gateway drugs guaranteeing stupefied economics. Anti-faith religious propaganda misinterpretation-poisoning scorches your love into an emptying black-holes to drain away everyone&thing appreciable. Artificial counterfeits especially joy inducements cannot possibly satisfy longest-term spiritual-nature provisions. Will algebraic naturals ever displace monetary abstracts? Where oldMutt1949 is investment advice?: anti-pesticidal controls against garden herbivores? Bet on that eliminates most carcinogens' category of compounds. Good alarm oldMutt about marijuana combustion: extreme diarrhea treatment on terminal illness cases will not intrest as much financial and mental risk as combustibles, crack and meth. Expect ascending physical medicine values from home-brewed tea-therapy thereby more versatile prescriptions flavorful hashish gel-capsuled and milligram-tweeked synthetically. Noncombusted eliminates psychological addiction injuring only nervous system like brain damages from psychotropic over-use.
>Behavioral health dermal patches prescribing "thc" will dominate nicotine futures into oblivion. Chemical, money lust, even commercialed availability are not the gateway drugs guaranteeing stupefied economics. Anti-faith religious propaganda misinterpretation-poisoning scorches your love into an emptying black-holes to drain away everyone&thing appreciable. Artificial counterfeits especially joy inducements cannot possibly satisfy longest-term spiritual-nature provisions. Will algebraic naturals ever displace monetary abstracts? Someday Where oldMutt1949 is investment advice?: anti-pesticidal controls against garden herbivores? Bet on that eliminates most carcinogens' category of compounds. Good alarm oldMutt about marijuana combustion: extreme diarrhea treatment on terminal illness cases will not intrest as much financial and mental risk as combustibles, crack and meth. Expect ascending physical medicine values from home-brewed tea-therapy thereby more versatile prescriptions flavorful hashish gel-capsuled and milligram-tweeked synthetically. Noncombusted eliminates psychological addiction injuring only nervous system like brain damages from psychotropic over-use.
>Behavioral health dermal patches prescribing "thc" will dominate nicotine futures into oblivion. Chemical, money lust, even commercialed availability are not the gateway drugs guaranteeing stupefied economics. Anti-faith religious propaganda misinterpretation-poisoning scorches your love into an emptying black-holes to drain away everyone&thing appreciable. Artificial counterfeits especially joy inducements cannot possibly satisfy longest-term spiritual-nature provisions. Will algebraic naturals ever displace monetary abstracts? Perhaps after college graduations? How might one economically invest private citizen properties, hide them secure from theft, or accelerate prosperity to make defrauding obsolete?
Report this Comment On December 02, 2013, at 2:50 AM, gareball wrote:
"Only 6% of studies on marijuana investigate its potential benefit.
According to CNN's Sanjay Gupta, the other 94% investigate its potential harm. The problem, as Gupta points out, is that it's very hard to run clinical trials on marijuana use since it's still illegal at the national level. While the University of Mississippi farm can provide the medication legally for studies, it's apparently not that all that easy to acquire medication from it".
If the FDA were to subject ANY drug from Big Pharma to the same skewed testing there wouldn't be a new drug on the market for decades. I'm betting that the drugs 'oldmutt' or 'Old Skewel' take to stay alive would never have passed such rigorous testing, and probably contain more virulent side effects than marijuana ever could.
Step into the 21st century, guys, and realize that it's time to put the idiotic and woefully expensive "war on drugs" to rest. It hasn't, and never will, work.
By the way 'old' fellas.....I'm 64 myself and have been a regular pot user for more than 45 of those years. I'm the picture of good health, thanks to a vegetarian diet, and will probably outlive both of you pot demonizers by a decade, at least. Oh, and 'Old Skewel', hashish IS NOT addictive, it's basically the resin from the marijuana flower and is nothing more than a more potent delivery device for THC. The sum total of what you anti-pot "experts" DON'T know is astounding. Then again, when you rely on anti-pot propaganda for your "facts" you're deliberately being fed a pack of lies designed to keep Big Pharma, the Liquor Lobby, and the 'for profit' prison system in customers for years to come. Try thinking for yourself, for once, and do the research so you'll be armed with REAL facts!
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http://www.upworthy.com/why-the-war-on-drugs-looks-even-stupider-when-you-see-what-other-countries-do-4
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http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/12/31/marijuana-opponents-predict-hogwild-colorado-trainwreck
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http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/19/drug-warriors-kidnap-and-sexually-assaul
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A rather thoughtful piece from a POTH columnist
Weed: Been There. Done That.
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: January 2, 2014 1459 Comments
For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships.
("At a certain point you realize that pot isn't really something to be proud of. ... One thing that definitely needs to be changed is jail time for its possession. That's just excessive." JBClamence, NYC)
But then we all sort of moved away from it. I don’t remember any big group decision that we should give up weed. It just sort of petered out, and, before long, we were scarcely using it.
We didn’t give it up for the obvious health reasons: that it is addictive in about one in six teenagers; that smoking and driving is a good way to get yourself killed; that young people who smoke go on to suffer I.Q. loss and perform worse on other cognitive tests.
I think we gave it up, first, because we each had had a few embarrassing incidents. Stoned people do stupid things (that’s basically the point). I smoked one day during lunch and then had to give a presentation in English class. I stumbled through it, incapable of putting together simple phrases, feeling like a total loser. It is still one of those embarrassing memories that pop up unbidden at 4 in the morning.
We gave it up, second, I think, because one member of our clique became a full-on stoner. He may have been the smartest of us, but something sad happened to him as he sunk deeper into pothead life.
Third, most of us developed higher pleasures. Smoking was fun, for a bit, but it was kind of repetitive. Most of us figured out early on that smoking weed doesn’t really make you funnier or more creative (academic studies more or less confirm this). We graduated to more satisfying pleasures. The deeper sources of happiness usually involve a state of going somewhere, becoming better at something, learning more about something, overcoming difficulty and experiencing a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.
One close friend devoted himself to track. Others fell deeply in love and got thrills from the enlargements of the heart. A few developed passions for science or literature.
Finally, I think we had a vague sense that smoking weed was not exactly something you were proud of yourself for. It’s not something people admire. We were in the stage, which I guess all of us are still in, of trying to become more integrated, coherent and responsible people. This process usually involves using the powers of reason, temperance and self-control — not qualities one associates with being high.
I think we had a sense, which all people have, or should have, that the actions you take change you inside, making you a little more or a little less coherent. Not smoking, or only smoking sporadically, gave you a better shot at becoming a little more integrated and interesting. Smoking all the time seemed likely to cumulatively fragment a person’s deep center, or at least not do much to enhance it.
So, like the vast majority of people who try drugs, we aged out. We left marijuana behind. I don’t have any problem with somebody who gets high from time to time, but I guess, on the whole, I think being stoned is not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure and should be discouraged more than encouraged.
We now have a couple states — Colorado and Washington — that have gone into the business of effectively encouraging drug use. By making weed legal, they are creating a situation in which the price will drop substantially. One RAND study suggests that prices could plummet by up to 90 percent, before taxes and such. As prices drop and legal fears go away, usage is bound to increase. This is simple economics, and it is confirmed by much research. Colorado and Washington, in other words, are producing more users.
The people who debate these policy changes usually cite the health risks users would face or the tax revenues the state might realize. Many people these days shy away from talk about the moral status of drug use because that would imply that one sort of life you might choose is better than another sort of life.
But, of course, these are the core questions: Laws profoundly mold culture, so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture? What sort of individuals and behaviors do our governments want to encourage? I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.
In legalizing weed, citizens of Colorado are, indeed, enhancing individual freedom. But they are also nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be.
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I double checked before posting and found this is a HOAX. Not very funny IMO.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/overdose.asp
Marijuana Overdoses Kill 37 in Colorado On First Day of Legalization
January 2nd, 2014
893242-drugs-overdoseColorado is reconsidering its decision to legalize recreational pot following the deaths of dozens due to marijuana overdoses.
According to a report in the Rocky Mountain News, 37 people were killed across the state on Jan. 1, the first day the drug became legal for all adults to purchase. Several more are clinging onto life in local emergency rooms and are not expected to survive.
"It's complete chaos here," says Dr. Jack Shepard, chief of surgery at St. Luke's Medical Center in Denver. "I've put five college students in body bags since breakfast and more are arriving...
"We are seeing cardiac arrests, hypospadias, acquired trimethylaminuria and multiple organ failures.
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New York State Is Set to Loosen Marijuana Laws
Joining a growing group of states that have loosened restrictions on marijuana, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York plans this week to announce an executive action that would allow limited use of the drug by those with serious illnesses, state officials say.
The turnabout by Mr. Cuomo, who had long resisted legalizing medical marijuana, comes as other states are taking increasingly liberal positions on it — most notably Colorado, where thousands have flocked to buy the drug for recreational use since it became legal on Jan. 1.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/nyregion/new-york-state-is-set-to-loosen-marijuana-laws.html?emc=edit_na_20140104
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/17/man-gives-75-cents-to-a-homeless-man-minutes-later-he-was-in-handcuffs-in-the-back-of-a-police-cruiser/
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USA Today seems to think this statement from this politician is shocking . . .
The Republican governor of Texas supporting less jail time for pot users?
Gov. Rick Perry, a staunch conservative, riled the Lone Star state Thursday when he told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that he supports the decriminalization – though not the legalization – of marijuana use.
"As the governor of the second-largest state in the country, what I can do is start us on policies that can start us on the road towards decriminalization" by introducing alternative "drug courts" that offer treatment and softer penalties for minor offenses, Perry said during an international panel on drug legalization at the summit. Perry was speaking alongside former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.
Perry emphasized that he is not for the legalization of marijuana but defended states' rights to make those choices. He said it's perfectly constitutional for states like Colorado to experiment with decriminalization and that Washington should stay out of those decisions.
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"by introducing alternative "drug courts" that offer treatment and softer penalties for minor offenses,"
Offer treatment? What does he mean? What treatment? Who pays for that? For smoking dope?
How the hell do you treat that?
Minor offense?
This sounds ridiculous.
Why bother with half measures. It is either legal or not.
Perry is trying to have it both ways and at least to me sounds even more absurd by muddying the issue even more.
Might as well make it legal.
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Addendum clarification to my previous post:
The thought of having legalized pot does not bother me. The thought of government regulating it from top to bottom (yes, I know the funds could go to drug treatments, education, and more wonderful ladeedaa things for "our children") gives me a headache.
Is there any cure for government metastasizes?
Government regulation really is a societal cancer. No cure but slow and painful death.
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Let them smoke all the pot they want, maybe they will get less done!
"The one good thing about taxes is that we don't get all the government we pay for." Will Rogers
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"Let them smoke all the pot they want, maybe they will get less done!"
I would rather this then a new giant divisions of the DEA, ATF (Alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and ? marijuana?) regulating everything about it along with hoards of State government bureaus, and endless cottage industries designed for now better purpose then to make money off the expanded bureaucracy and how to circumvent it.
Just make it legal already. Enforcing the law as it is now is and has been a farce anyway since the 60's.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/01/28/drugs-vs-the-drug-war-a-response-to-michael-gerson/
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Sativa or Indica? Say what? In my day (I heard rumors) it was Mexican, Jamaican, Columbian, Panama Red, Thai sticks, Hash, or Hash oil. Somewhat in that order, so I was told.
I think the THC content was at most 2 to 10 %. Only oil was more. Now the THC content in the run of the mill stuff is more. A lot more.
From the Economist:
****Marijuana legalisation
High time
Colorado embarks on an unprecedented experiment
Jan 11th 2014 | DENVER | From the print edition
Sativa or indica?
FOR reasons as hazy as a cloud of Sour Diesel smoke, the number 420 is cherished by America’s stoners. So it was fitting that on January 1st, 420 days after Coloradans awoke to discover that, along with Washington state, theirs had become the first jurisdiction in the world to vote to remove the criminal prohibition on recreational marijuana, around 40 state-licensed pot shops flung open their doors to all-comers. Four-hour queues snaked along the streets of Denver and other cities. Swamped by newbies, many from out of state, shop staff toiled to explain the difference between sativa (which delivers a “cerebral”, energetic high suited to daytime use) and indica (a depressive effect; better consumed late).
“Should’ve done it 40 years ago!” growls a middle-aged man making his first purchase at Medicine Man, one of Denver’s biggest retail outlets. (A home-grower, he later confides that he got bored smoking the same old strains.) For optimists, the votes in Colorado and Washington suggest that America’s war on drugs is finally winding down. The casualties have been legion: 750,000 people are arrested each year for marijuana alone; the subsequent blotted records can derail lives. Some 40,000 people languish in prison for pot-related offences. Murderous gangs fill the supply gap created by prohibition.
Public opinion appears to have reached a tipping point. Most Americans now favour legalisation; something that was unthinkable a generation ago (see chart). Advocates have waged savvy campaigns, gaining footholds by legalising marijuana for medical purposes (so far in 20 states and Washington, DC) and presenting a clean-cut, besuited image worlds away from the tie-dyed stereotypes. More states may free the weed before long.
Yet legalisation is just the beginning of a process, and Colorado and Washington have taken different routes. Colorado has built on the foundations of its medical-marijuana system. Until October (and 2016 in Denver) only medical-marijuana operators may receive licences to serve recreational customers, which is why many of the shops that welcomed newcomers on January 1st have names like Citi-Med and Evergreen Apothecary. (Retailers exult that they are no longer obliged to speak of “medicine” and “patients”.) During this time Colorado’s retailers must grow at least 70% of the marijuana they sell.
Washington, by contrast, is creating a recreational market from scratch; this is why its shops are not expected to open until May or so. It will have a three-tier system, with separate licences for cultivation, processing and retail. The state will determine, Soviet-style, consumers’ annual needs in advance and cap overall production. The fate of its medical system, more chaotic than Colorado’s, is uncertain.
Under federal law, marijuana remains illegal. The feds have pounced on dispensaries in states with badly run medical systems. But in August the Department of Justice suggested it would let the experiments in Washington and Colorado proceed if they did not impede eight “enforcement priorities”, including stopping pot from being trafficked by gangs, sold to minors or smuggled into other states.
Worryingly for Colorado, its record in these areas is not stellar. Plenty of teenagers are getting their hands on medical marijuana procured by adults. Police in neighbouring states such as Kansas complain of Coloradan marijuana flooding border areas. Colorado has a fat rule book and most dispensaries are well run, but they can do little about customers passing pot to children or taking it across state lines. And in Colorado (but not Washington) anyone may grow up to six marijuana plants without a licence.
Legalisation may prompt people to smoke and eat more marijuana. Prices for recreational pot are comparable to those in the illicit market ($55-$60 for an eighth, according to Darin Smith of the Denver Kush Club, a retail outlet). Some non-tokers will surely be tempted to take up the habit now that they need not deal with intimidating criminals in dark alleys; others may get high more often.
The ill-effects of marijuana, including cognitive impairment and a risk of dependency, are fairly well documented (though more research would help). Around 20% of users account for 80% of consumption; as Mark Kleiman, an analyst, points out, it is in a profit-seeking industry’s interest to target these problem users. Set against this is the genuine pleasure that smoking or eating marijuana brings millions of adults. Moreover, increased marijuana use may turn out to be a net positive for public health if, as some studies suggest, it replaces some consumption of alcohol—a far more destructive drug by most measures.
That is not the only reason for officials to welcome legal weed. Hefty excise and sales taxes will boost state coffers. In Colorado the Department of Revenue oversees regulation; this, says Sam Kamin, a law professor at the University of Denver, is good news for the industry, for “marijuana may not be addictive, but money certainly is”. The costs of enforcement—including 22 field inspectors—will be more than covered by the fresh revenue.
Perhaps the biggest sign of change is that even foes of legalisation accept the need to try to make it work. All-out drug warriors are hard to find in Colorado. For their part, campaigners now focus on technical matters. For example, many pot businesses struggle to obtain basic financial services because banks fear violating federal money-laundering rules. Colorado’s experiment will doubtless hit many hurdles along the way, but if it looks like working, others will copy it.
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http://healthyliving.msn.com/health-wellness/fatal-car-crashes-involving-pot-use-have-tripled-in-us-study-finds-1#scpshrjwfbs
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http://benswann.com/federal-government-legalizes-hemp/
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The world wide marijuana movement. Stamp out soda and smoke this instead:
http://news.yahoo.com/us-drug-policy-fuels-push-legal-pot-worldwide-130121981.html;_ylt=AoeN_rK_rDWzNjRpynun2yvQtDMD;_ylu=X3oDMTBsNGg1aHNnBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwM0BHNlYwNzcg--
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http://reason.com/archives/2014/02/17/why-we-have-drug-scares
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Meth Mouth and Other Meth Myths
Jacob Sullum|Feb. 23, 2014 8:00 am
Alberto Gonzales, George W. Bush's attorney general, called it "the most dangerous drug in America." A physician quoted by The New York Times described it as "the most malignant, addictive drug known to mankind." A police captain told the Times it "makes crack look like child's play, both in terms of what it does to the body and how hard it is to get off."
Meanwhile, doctors routinely prescribe this drug and others very similar to it for conditions such as narcolepsy, obesity, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). If these drugs are as dangerous as Gonzales et al. claim, how can millions of Americans—including schoolchildren—safely consume them on a regular basis?
Columbia neuropsychopharmacologist Carl Hart explores that puzzle in a new report that aims to separate fact from fiction on the subject of methamphetamine. Hart and his two co-authors—University of North Carolina at Wilmington philosopher Don Habibi and Joanne Csete, deputy director of the Open Society Global Drug Policy Program—argue that hyping the hazards posed by meth fosters a punitive and counterproductive overreaction similar to the one triggered by the crack cocaine panic of the 1980s, the consequences of which still afflict our criminal justice system. "The data show that many of the immediate and long-term harmful effects caused by methamphetamine use have been greatly exaggerated," Hart et al. write, "just as the dangers of crack cocaine were overstated nearly three decades ago."
The report, published by the Open Society Foundations, begins by considering the addictive potential of methamphetamine. Despite all the talk of a "meth epidemic," the drug has never been very popular. "At the height of methamphetamine's popularity," Hart et al. write, "there were never more than a million current users of the drug in the United States. This number is considerably lower than the 2.5 million cocaine users, the 4.4 million illegal prescription opioid users, or the 15 million marijuana smokers during the same period." Furthermore, illicit methamphetamine use had been waning for years at the point when Newsweek identified "The Meth Epidemic" as "America's New Drug Crisis."
Although methamphetamine is commonly portrayed as irresistible and inescapable, it does not look that way when you examine data on patterns of use. Of the 12.3 million or so Americans who have tried it, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), about 1.2 million (9.4 percent) have consumed it in the last year, while less than half a million (3.6 percent) have consumed it in the last month (the standard definition of "current" use). In other words, more than 96 percent of the people who have tried "the most addictive drug known to mankind" are not currently using it even as often as once a month. A 2009 study based on NSDUH data found that 5 percent of nonmedical methamphetamine consumers become "dependent" within two years. Over a lifetime, Hart et al. say, "less than 15 percent" do.
Even heavy methamphetamine users have more self-control than is commonly thought, as Hart's own research shows:
Under one condition, methamphetamine-dependent individuals were given a choice between taking a big hit of methamphetamine (50 mg) or $5 in cash. They chose the drug on about half of the opportunities. But when we increased the amount of money to $20, they almost never chose the drug.
Laboratory research also has found that "d-amphetamine and methamphetamine produce nearly identical physiological and behavioral effects," Hart et al. write. "They both increase blood pressure, pulse, euphoria, and desire to take the drug in a dose-dependent manner. Essentially, they are the same drug." That observation helps put methamphetamine's risks in perspective, since d-amphetamine, a.k.a. dextroamphetamine, is one of the main ingredients in Adderall, a stimulant widely prescribed for ADHD. Hart et al. note that methamphetamine, like dextroamphetamine, increases heart rate and blood pressure, but "well below levels obtained when engaged in a rigorous physical exercise."
When given to research subjects, "the drug didn't keep people up for consecutive days, it didn't dangerously elevate their vital signs, nor did it impair their judgment." Contrary to tales of meth-induced murder and mayhem, "There is no empirical evidence that suggests that even long-term users of methamphetamine pose a threat to those around them." Hart et al. note that "incredible anecdotes are usually disseminated uncritically by the popular press and accepted as sound evidence by an undiscerning public." One example from my book Saying Yes: In 1994 Reader's Digest described the rape and murder of an 18-month-old girl in California as a "meth-related child killing." Yet neither newspaper coverage of the case nor the California Supreme Court's 87-page decision rejecting the murderer's appeal made any mention of the drug.
What about long-term effects? Shocking as it may be to anyone who has accepted at face value the gruesome images featured in anti-meth propaganda, the drug does not make you ugly. "Meth mouth"—the extreme tooth decay supposedly characteristic of heavy users—is said to be caused by meth-induced dry mouth. Yet widely consumed prescription stimulants such as Adderall produce the same side effect, Hart et al. note, and "there are no published reports of unattractiveness or dental problems associated with their use." Allegedly meth-related physical characteristics such as rotten teeth, thinning hair, and bad complexions, they say, "are more likely related to poor sleep habits, poor dental hygiene, poor nutrition and dietary practices."
Hart also questions research linking heavy methamphetamine use to brain damage. He argues that studies in which large doses are repeatedly given to animals that have never been exposed to the drug before bear little resemblance to human consumption patterns, which feature gradual escalation. "This difference is not trivial," Hart et al. write, "because the harmful neurobiological and behavioral changes that occur in response to repeated large doses of methamphetamine can be prevented with prior exposure to several days of escalating doses."
In studies of people, Hart says, researchers exaggerate the practical significance of their findings and fail to properly control for pre-existing difference between meth users and the general population. "The brain imaging literature is replete with a general tendency to characterize any brain differences as dysfunction caused by methamphetamine," Hart et al. write, "even if differences are within the normal range of human variability."
Over-the-top warnings about methamphetamine—encapsulated in the slogan "Meth: Not Even Once"—aim to scare people away from a drug that might harm them (but probably won't). By contrast, Hart argues, exaggerating the hazards posed by methamphetamine causes definite damage by encouraging harsh criminal penalties (such as a five-year mandatory minimum for five grams), fostering distrust of accurate warnings about drugs, suppressing useful information that could reduce drug-related harm, driving users toward more dangerous routes of administration (as efforts to reduce meth purity, if successful, predictably would do), and justifying ineffective policies that impose substantial costs on large numbers of people for little or no benefit (such as restrictions on the methamphetamine precursor pseudoephedrine, a cheap, safe, and effective decongestant that is now absurdly difficult to obtain). In other words, hyperbole hurts.
This article was originally published by Forbes.
http://reason.com/archives/2014/02/23/meth-myths-exposed
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Breaking not-so-bad? I guess all the really horrific things I've seen from meth never really happened.
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Breaking not-so-bad? I guess all the really horrific things I've seen from meth never really happened.
Yes because anecdote justifies a war on drugs that has utterly failed by any sane measure. Let us double down on failed methods using the same propaganda techniques over and over that always prove grossly inflated in hindsight. For the children.
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My opposition to most of the War on Drugs is on record in this thread, but FWIW my sense of things is that meth is really destructive.
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Is it a war on alcohol to enforce laws on DUI or public consumption or underage consumption/sales?
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Is that an answer or a change of subject? If the former, please do flesh out your thought process a bit , , ,
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The war on drugs can mean different things. Should a drug dealer face legal jeopardy for selling to middle school kids? Is it the war on drugs if school authorities for forbid students from getting high at school.
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Not sure why it became necessary in the middle of my agreeing with there being some areas where the law has a place, but yes your rhetorical point acknowledged.
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The key point being that even if illegal drugs are decriminalized/legalized, there will still be law enforcement enforcing laws related to illegal drugs.
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Umm , , , not sure that anyone was saying otherwise, but yes your statement is true.
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Umm , , , not sure that anyone was saying otherwise, but yes your statement is true.
Oh, the Big L Libertarians are convinced that everything will be wonderful when you kid can buy meth at the corner store. What could go wrong?
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I'm wondering what happens when the US starts having cartel style violence happen on the scale that it does here, you know, where daughter's fingers start getting cut off while they're on the phone with you...
I'm just saying, law enforcement doesn't stop anything, especiall once the criminals figure out that there are just better ways to keep law enforcement officers in line, longarms, soft targets, etc. It's all a charade.
The thing that I would worry about, is fixing the economy. That is the ony thing that keeps crime in check. I've found out all about it living and working here. It certainly isn't "The LAW:" :mrgreen:
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I'm wondering what happens when the US starts having cartel style violence happen on the scale that it does here, you know, where daughter's fingers start getting cut off while they're on the phone with you...
I'm just saying, law enforcement doesn't stop anything, especiall once the criminals figure out that there are just better ways to keep law enforcement officers in line, longarms, soft targets, etc. It's all a charade.
The thing that I would worry about, is fixing the economy. That is the ony thing that keeps crime in check. I've found out all about it living and working here. It certainly isn't "The LAW:" :mrgreen:
We may just find out. However, there is nothing new about badguys targeting cops. There were old school responses to such things that established lines that were respected. Borders can be crossed both ways.
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I'm wondering what happens when the US starts having cartel style violence happen on the scale that it does here, you know, where daughter's fingers start getting cut off while they're on the phone with you...
I'm just saying, law enforcement doesn't stop anything, especiall once the criminals figure out that there are just better ways to keep law enforcement officers in line, longarms, soft targets, etc. It's all a charade.
The thing that I would worry about, is fixing the economy. That is the ony thing that keeps crime in check. I've found out all about it living and working here. It certainly isn't "The LAW:" :mrgreen:
We may just find out. However, there is nothing new about badguys targeting cops. There were old school responses to such things that established lines that were respected. Borders can be crossed both ways.
Indeed. It's all about who has the most to lose, wins. That, or the most brutal. Most people don't belong in law enforcement. Not really. Especially when they aren't targeting cops, but their families. The economy is key... give everyone a chance to win... at least a chance, and I hate Obama...not saying to give it away, but at least make it possible. I don't know though...economics aren't my thing. I <3 my FAL.
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http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2014/apr/23/4th-graders-pot-sale-sparks/
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http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/05/us-pot-farmers-are-putting-mexican-cartels-out-business
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http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/05/us-pot-farmers-are-putting-mexican-cartels-out-business
Yes, now US farmers are growing marijuana for the cartels here. No border to worry about crossing.
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http://rt.com/usa/colorado-crime-change-legalization-study-017/
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http://rt.com/usa/colorado-crime-change-legalization-study-017/
:roll:
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http://www.newser.com/story/187136/teen-faces-life-sentence-over-pot-brownies.html
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second post:
==========================
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has long had a clear policy on marijuana: It doesn't hire anyone who has smoked it in the previous three years.
But the bureau is rethinking that stance, according to FBI Director James B. Comey, who addressed the issue at an annual conference in New York on Monday.
Mr. Comey said that the FBI may have to loosen up its stance in order to attract talented new agents, especially those equipped to go after some of the world's most sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals. He spoke on the same day that the Justice Department indicted five Chinese army officers, alleging they hacked into U.S. companies' computers, a charge that Beijing denied.
Congress has authorized the FBI to add 2,000 personnel to its rolls this year, and many of those new recruits will be assigned to tackle cybercrimes, a growing priority for the agency. That is a problem, said Mr. Comey, as a lot of the nation's top computer programmers and hacking gurus are also fond of marijuana.
"I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cybercriminals, and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview," Mr. Comey said. He added that the agency was now "grappling" with how to amend its marijuana policies.
With two states having recently legalized marijuana use, the FBI isn't alone in having to reconsider its attitudes toward the plant. In January, National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell said the league would consider allowing medical marijuana usage by players if medical experts recommended it.
The FBI last relaxed its marijuana policy in 2007, when it shelved rules that disqualified anyone who had used marijuana more than 15 times in their lives, in favor of the three-year rule. For other illicit substances, the bureau bans any use for the previous 10 years, according to the FBI's website.
The FBI has one of the toughest hiring policies when it comes to drug use of any agency in the federal government. The Central Intelligence Agency, by contrast, only requires applicants to forgo drug use for 12 months before applying to the agency, according to the CIA's website.
The CIA says on its website that "illegal drug use prior to 12 months ago is carefully evaluated during the medical and security processing."
One conference attendee on Monday asked Mr. Comey about a friend who had shied away from applying because of the policy. "He should go ahead and apply," despite the marijuana use, Mr. Comey said.
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Rules for the Marijuana Market
By VIKAS BAJAJAUG. 4, 2014
As voters and lawmakers in more states decide to legalize marijuana, policy makers will have to answer a fresh and difficult question: How should governments regulate the production and sale of the drug?
Beyond keeping marijuana out of the hands of minors, a good regulatory system has to limit the increase in drug abuse that is likely to accompany lower prices and greater availability after legalization. It should protect consumers from both dangerous and counterfeit products, reducing the physical risk from a psychoactive substance. And a well-regulated system should undermine and eventually eliminate the black market for marijuana, which has done great damage to society.
The experiences of Colorado and Washington, where sales of recreational marijuana started this year, will prove instructive. While there are important differences in their approaches, both states have licensed businesses to grow, process and sell marijuana while imposing strict rules and high taxes on them. Other states that legalize will probably adopt a similar model, because it resembles how the federal and state governments regulate tobacco and alcohol.
A Better Way to Tax Policy makers trying to regulate the drug will face challenges similar to the ones American lawmakers faced at the end of Prohibition in 1933. Like alcohol during Prohibition, marijuana is widely available across the United States today. But it will become much more accessible after legalization, when businesses engaged in its production and sale no longer operate in the black market nor engage in violence. The pretax price of the drug could fall by 90 percent after legalization, according to Robert MacCoun, a law professor at Stanford, and fellow researchers. Moreover, marijuana businesses will have a financial incentive to get a broad population to use the drug regularly. A recent report prepared for the Colorado Department of Revenue concluded that nearly 90 percent of the demand for marijuana in the state this year would come from only 30 percent of users, those who use the drug 21 to 31 days a month.
Regulators will have to design policies that allow licensed businesses to undercut the illegal market but keep prices high enough so dependence on the drug does not increase a lot. One important way to curb use is to tax marijuana heavily, following the post-Prohibition template of replacing criminalization with regulation and taxes. Colorado and Washington have imposed high tax rates that are based on price, much like existing sales taxes. But Mark Kleiman, a public policy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, rightly warns that those taxes will lose their bite when prices inevitably decline as marijuana businesses become more efficient at production. A better approach would be to tax the drug based on its potency — which can be measured in various ways, including by the amount of the component THC in a batch — and increase the rate over time to keep up with inflation.
Lawmakers should not repeat the mistakes they made on alcohol in recent years, taxing it too lightly and allowing the industry to become highly concentrated. (Just two companies control about 75 percent of the American beer market today.) Federal excise taxes on alcohol are levied at fixed rates by volume; there are different rates for liquor, wine and beer. For example, the tax on a 31-gallon barrel of beer is $18, or 5 cents per 12-ounce can. But those tax rates were last increased in 1991, even though the Consumer Price Index has increased 75 percent since then. Most states have also kept their excise taxes steady in recent years, in part because of the heavy lobbying and big money of the beverage industry. The median state excise tax on beer is 20 cents per gallon, or about 2 cents per 12-ounce can.
Continue reading the main story
States with an existing medical marijuana market will also have to make sure that users are not abusing it to evade taxes. In Colorado, for example, there are more than 111,000 people with medical marijuana cards. Those users can buy the drug at much lower tax rates than people buying recreational marijuana; in Denver, cardholders pay combined city and state taxes of 7.62 percent, compared with the 21.12 percent in taxes paid by recreational users.
The problem is that almost anyone can get a card on a doctor’s recommendation. Regulators need to tighten access to cards and penalize doctors who churn out recommendations by the hundreds. Otherwise, tax rates on recreational marijuana will be easily subverted.
Continue reading the main story Video
Play Video|2:28
Marijuana for Sale
Marijuana for Sale
This short video looks at the first dispensary to legally sell recreational marijuana in the state of Colorado.
Video Credit By Elaine McMillion Sheldon on Publish Date August 4, 2014.
Don’t Market to Minors One of the most important lessons from the country’s long battle with the tobacco industry is advertising’s outsize role in creating and sustaining an addiction to nicotine, particularly among teenagers and young adults. Though marijuana is far less addictive than tobacco, states that choose to legalize it must impose limits on the promotional activities of marijuana businesses. The controls should emulate the restrictions on targeting young people, banning outdoor advertising and product placements that the tobacco industry accepted as part of its settlement with state attorneys general in 1998.
States must require proper labeling and packaging of products that contain mind-altering substances. Beau Kilmer, a drug policy expert at the RAND Corporation, said regulators can restrict the sale of foods like candies, beverages and cookies made with marijuana or limit how much of the drug’s active ingredients are in each serving. The ingredients should also be distributed evenly throughout the product, and regulators must test samples for harmful levels of pesticides, mold and other impurities often found in illicit cannabis.
To discourage the use of marijuana with alcohol, states can require that they be sold in different places and ban the use of cannabis at bars and restaurants. Experts say using marijuana and alcohol together is much more dangerous than using them separately. One study on the effects of marijuana use on driving published in the American Journal on Addictions in 2009 found that combining the two drugs “results in impairment even at doses which would be insignificant were they of either drug alone.”
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html
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A friend in the DEA sent me this:
======================================
Despite push to legalize pot, the war on drugs still matters
Denver Post
By Jason Tama
With multiple state marijuana initiatives winning voter approval in the 2014 midterm elections, legalization proponents are already hard at work in states like California, where passage of a comprehensive initiative in 2016 could provide the policy "legitimacy" reformers are seeking. However, states should proceed cautiously as it is too soon to fully assess the complex economic and public health and safety implications of state-by-state legalization. More broadly for the nation, it is also important to address what the legalization debate has thus far either ignored or oversimplified: the effects on international illicit drug markets, transnational organized crime and American foreign policy.
The illicit drug economy is a complex system run by resilient criminal networks. Despite the move toward legalization, the destabilizing influence of illicit economies and transnational crime will endure, and a sustained national effort will still be needed to address this evolving threat.
Assuming state-by-state commercial legalization continues, illicit marijuana markets will persist until legal and black market prices converge and interstate arbitrage opportunities disappear. Neither of these outcomes is likely in the near-term. States face the very difficult task of managing consumption levels via unique regulatory regimes that promote scarcity, while simultaneously trying to price out illicit suppliers. Further, with no regulatory harmonization among states - and no credible movement to legalize federally - interstate arbitrage opportunities persist and are ripe for exploitation by illicit traffickers. This is not necessarily an argument against experimenting with legalization, but rather an acknowledgement of market dynamics and the agility of modern criminal networks. The good news is marijuana traffickers should face shrinking profit margins in commercially regulated states that progress toward competitive pricing.
Let's also acknowledge that well-established illicit economies have staying power. If marijuana legalization sufficiently erodes market share for transnational criminal networks, they will migrate toward more profitable segments of the illicit market, not just drop out, and will continue to threaten stability in the Western Hemisphere. For example, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines continue to cross our borders via robust networks, and in most cases, cocaine being the exception, consumption in the United States is on the rise.
Transnational crime is an evolving national security threat, as well. The boundaries between drug, human, and weapons trafficking, as well as cyber-crime and terrorism continue to blur. This problem is not unique to the United States, as criminal networks supply globalized illicit markets and pose destabilizing and perhaps existential threats to several nations where the United States has important interests. Acknowledging this reality, the Obama administration distanced itself from the much maligned war on drugs, and instead reframed the problem as a persistent public health issue, with international focus shifting to the broader goal of combatting transnational criminal networks. On balance, this approach better recognizes the enduring nature of the challenges.
While marijuana legalization is no panacea for the illicit drug problem, history suggests new ideas are desperately needed. Deliberate and limited regulatory experimentation makes sense in this context. However, illicit economies and criminal networks will persist, and so must the international effort to combat them. This includes sustaining some important elements of the "War on Drugs," a historic misnomer - such a war can never be "won" - that persists in popular culture and is sadly now used to marginalize efforts to address the broader transnational criminal threat.
Some of the criticisms levied against the "War on Drugs" are well justified. However, its shortcomings should not be misinterpreted as reason to abandon the fight against illicit drugs and transnational crime; indeed public health, regional stability, and national security are all at stake. Instead, illicit economies continue to adapt, and so must our strategies to address them. Specifically we must adjust our strategies to better address the resilient nature of illicit economies and their ability to respond to an evolving domestic drug policy landscape. This will require a coordinated, flexible, systems approach, with the following critical elements for the United States:
• Reducing U. S. demand for illicit drugs. The impacts of state-by-state marijuana legalization on numbers of users, incidence of addiction, and consumption of stronger illicit drugs remain an open question. This is a critical area to monitor as legal markets evolve and data becomes available from new prevention and treatment programs funded by marijuana tax revenue in states like Colorado.
• Continuously improving supply-side strategies. Interdicting threats beyond our borders remains a vital capability regardless of the illicit commodity. This includes advancing national capabilities, reducing barriers to interagency collaboration, and increasing partner nation capacity building and information sharing, particularly regarding the effects of changing domestic policy.
• Improving governance and economic growth. Redoubling and sustaining the difficult work of improving governance and opportunities for licit economic growth in nations with deeply embedded illicit economies such as Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
The strategic goals of this macro-effort should be to improve governance, prosperity, and regional stability by reducing the size and extent of illicit markets and their associated criminal networks. In addition to the obvious considerations inside our borders, the evolving experiment in marijuana legalization must also be debated within this broader, more complex international context.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/04/colorado-pot-taxes-back-to-residents_n_6612292.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/04/colorado-pot-taxes-back-to-residents_n_6612292.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063
A head scratcher, indeed. Just returned from the Top of the Rockies and visited a shop while there. Heard the salesman tell how great the tax is, going straight to the schools to build needed facilities. (That use is now in doubt.) Money goes to drug education, telling people how harmful it can be to children in particular, while the industry very convincingly says do it for the children.
The point of drug legalization I thought was to take the money and profit out of it whereby the illegal drug industry is squeezed out and the related crimes disappear. Instead, the taxing authorities tax it right back to market price before legalization, actually helping the illegal trade. Meanwhile none of the more dangerous drugs were legalized so the illegal drug industry adapts and prospers.
I read in a local paper while I was there of a local couple busted off of a home search and charged with multiple felonies for the grow operation in their house. So much for legalization. The article says the burden is on the accused to prove their innocence, because the government has no record of them applying for the licenses and permits that would make it legal.
They didn't make it legal in Colorado; they made it government controlled, heavily taxed and regulated, at least up until it leaves the store and finds it way back to the streets and schools.
Gov. Hickenlooper (a Dem) is saying this was a mistake. He opposed it before it passed and now says other states should wait while the Colorado experiment develops. Besides the above issues, it is still against federal laws that apply to Colorado but aren't being enforced. The industry is caught up in banking issues, and SEC issues, etc. and also jurisdictional issues. Who has jurisdiction over the Denver International Airport? Possession is against airport rules, but as an unenforced civil violation, not a criminal violation. TSA mostly gives back what it finds to the person to dispose of, yet they are federal agents witnessing federal crimes.
I argued previously that decriminalization at this point is a better path than legalization.
We need our liberties back but drug availability isn't the best place to start and the government can't grasp the idea of legalization anyway. When the government is responsible your healthcare expenses and outcomes, for example, then every activity you choose and everything you eat, smoke or consume is really is the government's business.
Instead, get the penalties down to a petty misdemeanor that stays off a person's record for what is believed to harm no one else. Get the enforcement down to match the low risk. Put the money collected into drug education if wanted, but don't bring us the message of for how great it is while charging taxpayers to put out the opposite message.
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http://dailycaller.com/2015/02/09/legal-marijuana-drug-cartels/
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http://dailycaller.com/2015/02/09/legal-marijuana-drug-cartels/
Not very accurate. The cartels north of the border are enjoying the legalization in safe haven states.
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http://dailycaller.com/2015/02/09/legal-marijuana-drug-cartels/
Not very accurate. The cartels north of the border are enjoying the legalization in safe haven states.
I'm wondering how many actual members of the Cartel Mr. Jonah Bennett has actually met, and how he got his numbers from how many people die in Mexico. It's a fair question.
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http://stuppid.com/meth-energy-drinks/
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A profound exploration of the folly and abject failure of the WOD.
Johann Hari is a British journalist who has written for many of the world’s leading newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Slate, El Mundo, and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was an op-ed columnist for The Independent for nine years. He graduated from King’s College, Cambridge with a double first in social and political sciences in 2001.
Hari was twice named “National Newspaper Journalist of the Year” by Amnesty International. He was named “Environmental Commentator of the Year” at the Editorial Intelligence Awards, and “Gay Journalist of the Year” at the Stonewall Awards. He has also won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for political writing.
Hari’s latest book is the New York Times best seller Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. You can follow him on Twitter @johannhari101.
* * *
S. Harris: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, Johann. You’ve written a wonderful book about the war on drugs—about its history and injustice—and I hope everyone will read it. The practice of making certain psychoactive compounds illegal raises some deep and difficult questions about how to create societies worth living in. I strongly suspect that you and I will agree about the ethics here: The drug war has been a travesty and a tragedy. But you’re much more knowledgeable about the history of this war, so I’d like to ask you a few questions before we begin staking out common ground.
The drug war started almost exactly 100 years ago. That means our great-grandparents could wander into any pharmacy and buy cocaine or heroin. Why did the drug war begin, and who started it?
J. Hari: It’s really fascinating, because when I realized we were coming up to this centenary, I thought of myself as someone who knew a good deal about the drug war. I’d written about it quite a lot, as you know, and I had drug addiction in my family. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to.
And yet I just realized there were many basic questions I didn’t know the answer to, including exactly the one you’re asking: Why were drugs banned 100 years ago? Why do we continue banning them? What are the actual alternatives in practice? And what really causes drug use and drug addiction?
To find the answers, I went on this long journey—across nine countries, 30,000 miles—and I learned that almost everything I thought at the start was basically wrong. Drugs aren’t what we think they are. The drug war isn’t what we think it is. Drug addiction isn’t what we think it is. And the alternatives aren’t what we think they are.
If you had said to me, “Why were drugs banned?” I would have guessed that most people, if you stopped them in the street, would say, “We don’t want people to become addicted, we don’t want kids to use drugs,” that kind of thing.
What is fascinating when you go back and read the archives from the time is that that stuff barely comes up. Drugs were banned in the United States a century ago for a very different reason. They were banned in the middle of a huge race panic. After the Civil War, Reconstruction failed, and what you had were African Americans and Chinese Americans who—rightly—were pissed off. At various points they showed their anger—in fact, given how extreme their oppression was, it’s surprising they didn’t show a lot more anger. Many white Americans explained this growing rebelliousness at the start of the 20th century by saying that African Americans and Chinese Americans were forgetting their place, using drugs, and attacking white people. If this sounds bizarre, that’s because it was.
The official statements are extraordinary. A typical one said, “The cocaine nigger sure is hard to kill.” Sheriffs across certain parts of the United States increased the caliber of their bullets because they believed African American men were taking cocaine and ravaging and attacking white people. The main way I tell about that in the book is through the story of how the founder of the war on drugs, Harry Anslinger, played a crucial role in stalking and killing Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer, which blew my mind when I first learned it.
S. Harris: I’d like to underscore this background fact. Many people are aware that the war on drugs has caused disproportionate harm to the black community. But I think people don’t generally know that racism had anything to do with its origins. Can you say a bit more about what the link was?
J. Hari: I think a good illustration is that in California there was a really deep bigotry against Chinese Americans. There were actually mass lynchings of them in Los Angeles, for example. In San Francisco they tried to forcibly relocate Chinatown out of the city and into an area reserved for pig farming. Chinese Americans challenged it all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ruled that they couldn’t be forcibly evicted.
Very soon afterward, the white authorities shifted and said, in effect, “Oh, okay, well, these Chinese Americans brought opium dens with them. We’ll attack them for their opium dens.” They went in and burned large parts of Chinatown. The drug war provided a legal excuse to do what they wanted to do already—unleash real force against ethnic minorities.
One of the best places to start, when it comes to African Americans, is that story about Billie Holiday. Harry Anslinger was probably the most influential person that no one’s ever heard of. He took over the Department of Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition was ending, so he had this big government bureaucracy with very little to do. And he was driven by two intense hatreds: One was a hatred of addicts, and the other was a hatred of African Americans.
He was regarded as an extreme racist by the racists of the 1930s. This is a guy who used the “N” word in official memos so often that his own senator said he should have to resign. He found out at about the same time that three famous Americans were addicts, and he treated them very differently. I think that tells you something.
Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, and Joe McCarthy were all addicts. Judy Garland was told to take slightly longer vacations, and Anslinger reassured the studio she was going to be fine. Joe McCarthy was given a safe and legal prescription for opiates from a pharmacy in Washington, D.C. And Billie Holiday was stalked onto her deathbed, arrested, and completely destroyed.
In 1939 Billie Holiday first sang “Strange Fruit,” the famous anti-lynching song. That night the Federal Bureau of Narcotics told her to stop singing the song, because according to Anslinger, it represented everything that was wrong with America.
S. Harris: He had an incredible antipathy toward jazz as well. Didn’t he consider it a sign of some sort of moral failure?
J. Hari: He saw it as a sign of chaos and disorder. It’s really funny going through his files—bleakly funny—because he got these reports from his agents quoting jazz lyrics. They said things like (I’m paraphrasing) “The negro jazz singer sang, ‘When he gets the motion, he thinks he can walk across the ocean.’” And Anslinger writes, “He really does believe that.” He thought jazz was just crazed babble. At one point he said he was going to lead a crackdown on musicians. Then he said, “Not the good musicians, the jazz type.” He really wanted a kind of pogrom of all jazz musicians.
But a fascinating thing about the jazz world is that it had an extremely high degree of solidarity, and no one would snitch. The one exception was Billie Holiday’s scumbag pimp husband, who did, in fact, inform on her to Anslinger.
The Bureau gives this order to Holiday to stop singing her anti-lynching song. She had grown up in Baltimore when it was a segregated city, and she had promised herself as a little girl that she would never bow her head to any white man. So she said, in effect, “F*** you. I’m an American citizen and I’m going to sing my song.”
That’s the point at which Anslinger resolved to break her. He hated employing African Americans, but you couldn’t really send a white guy into Harlem to stalk Billie Holiday. So he employed this African American agent named Jimmy Fletcher.
Fletcher followed her around for two years, and Holiday was so amazing that Fletcher fell in love with her. For the rest of his life he was ashamed of what he did. He busted her, and she was put on trial. She said, “The trial was called ‘The United States vs. Billie Holiday,’ and that’s how it felt.” And she went to prison.
But the cruelest thing is what happened next. She got out, and there was hardly anywhere she could sing anymore, because you needed a license to perform anywhere where alcohol was served. Her friend Yolande Bavan said to me, “How do you best act cruelly?...It’s to take something that’s the dearest thing to that person away from them.” That’s what we do to addicts in Britain and America every day—we give them criminal records that cut them off from any access to the legal workforce.
Billie Holiday relapsed on heroin and alcohol and fell back into a very bad addiction problem. In her early 40s she finally collapsed and was taken to the hospital. She was convinced that Anslinger’s men were going to come for her in the hospital, and she was right. She said to one of her friends, “They’re going to kill me in there. Don’t let them. They’re going to kill me.” I spoke to the last surviving person who had been in the room with her. Holiday was handcuffed to the bed. The police knew she had liver cancer by this point, but they handcuffed her to the bed and didn’t let her friends in to see her. They took away her record player, her candies, and everything else. One of her friends managed to insist that she be given methadone because she had gone into heroin withdrawal—which is very dangerous when you’re as weak as she was. Once on the methadone, she started to recover—but then they cut off the methadone and she died.
I think this story tells us so much about the origins of the drug war—the degree to which it was about race, then and now, and how they prefigure what we do to addicts today. People who are addicts are in terrible pain—Billie Holiday was raped and prostituted as a child—and we take these people and inflict more pain and suffering on them, and then we’re surprised they don’t stop taking drugs.
S. Harris: We’ll talk about the phenomenon of addiction, and discuss the novel understanding of it you arrive at in the book. But first I think we should acknowledge that drugs and alcohol can cause social harms that every society has an interest in preventing. It’s not hard to see why some people think that the appropriate response to the chaos these substances often cause is to prohibit them.
Consider alcohol. We know, of course, that Prohibition was a disaster. But when you consider what cities were like before the Women’s Christian Temperance Union got working—with men abandoning their jobs and families, spending all day in saloons, and winding up just hammered in the gutter—it’s not hard to see what people were worried about. Ken Burns’s documentary on Prohibition explains this history in a very colorful way. As you and I race to the conclusion that prohibition of all sorts is both unethical and doomed to fail, I think we should acknowledge that many drugs, alcohol included, have the potential to ruin people’s lives.
And it wasn’t completely crazy to think that banning the use of specific drugs might be a good way, ethically and practically, to mitigate their harms. But ever since Prohibition we’ve known that the cure is worse than the disease. When you ban substances that people enjoy using so much that they’ll break the law to do it, you create a black market with huge profits. And since purveyors of illicit drugs have no legal way to secure their investment, the trade will be run by increasingly violent criminals.
In a single stroke, therefore, prohibition creates organized crime and all the social ills attributable to the skyrocketing cost of drugs—addicts are forced to become thieves and prostitutes in order to afford their next fix. Why isn’t the stupidity of prohibition now obvious to everyone?
J. Hari: What’s fascinating is that it was obvious at the time. The drug war really began in the 1930s, when Harry Anslinger was the first person to use the phrase “warfare against drugs”—and it was massively resisted across the United States and across the world. This is a forgotten and suppressed history, and I was startled to uncover it.
I tell it mainly through the story of this extraordinary doctor, Henry Smith Williams, who at the birth of the drug war prophesied all of it. It’s worth remembering that when drugs were first banned, doctors resisted to such a degree that 17,000 of them had to be rounded up and arrested because they insisted on continuing to prescribe to drug addicts. The mayor of Los Angeles stood outside a heroin-prescribing clinic and said, effectively, “You will not close this down. It does a good job for the people of Los Angeles.” The early drug war was hugely contested, and many people rightly pointed out why it wouldn’t work. This is a really important thing to remember. And one of the most fascinating things for me was seeing how much the arguments at both the beginning of the drug war and in societies where they have finally end it have echoed each other.
I’ll give you an example that happened in California. When drugs were first banned, in 1914, a big and deliberate loophole was written into the law that said it did not apply to addicts. Addicts could go to a doctor and get a prescription for these drugs. So what happened was that in loads of places doctors just kept on prescribing drugs to basically anyone who wanted them, because they figured, “Well, it’s better you get it from me than from a gangster who’s going to f*** up the product and potentially kill you.”
So this carried on, and it was shut down state by state, mainly by Anslinger. One of the last states to shut it down was California, and we now know why. The Chinese drug gangs in California were really pissed off, because the authorities in Nevada had stopped doctors from prescribing opium, so addicts had to go to gangsters to get their drugs. But in California they could still go to a doctor—so the gangsters were losing that big, profitable chunk of business. So the Chinese drug gangs bribed the federal narcotics agents to introduce the drug war faster, because it worked so well for them.
It tells you something. The only people who have ever won from the drug war are the armed criminal gangs who are handed the whole industry.
In Colorado, I saw the same pattern playing out. For example, Steve Fox is a great guy who was one of the leaders of the legalization campaign in Colorado. He wanted to go on the radio during the campaign and say, “One of the great advantages of legalization is we’ll bankrupt the cartels.” A radio station in Colorado was too afraid that the cartels would come and hurt them in Colorado to let him say that on the air.
I think what you said a little bit before this is really important and true: It’s not inherently irrational to look at the harm caused by drugs and think the solution is to ban them. I think one of the reasons the debate about the drug war is so charged is that it runs through the hearts of each of us as individuals. There are times when I look at the addicts in my life and I think, “Someone should f***ing stop you, and someone should stop you by force.”
We all have a Harry Anslinger inside us. And if we’re decent people, we have a compassionate side to us as well. So I think that these emotions are very natural. And I also think this debate is slightly different from, say, the gay rights debate. People like you and me, who believe in the equality of gay people, are ultimately—when we clash with homophobes—arguing with people who simply have irreconcilably different beliefs from ours. Obviously, we should try to persuade them, we should try to win them round, but ultimately there’s a chasm between us and them on a fundamentally different moral value. We think gay love is equal to heterosexual love; they don’t. We have to prevail over them.
I actually don’t think that’s quite the case with the drug war. If you look at the reasons people give for supporting the drug war, one of the things that strikes me is that their goals drive me, too: They don’t want kids to use drugs, they don’t want people to become addicted, and they want to reduce the amount of criminality in the world. Actually, I’m passionate about every one of those goals.
The only disagreement is about how to achieve them. And I think we can prove—by looking at places that have pursued alternatives—that in fact those goals are better achieved by a very, very different approach. The drug war makes all the problems that all sides want to deal with far worse, for reasons I can talk about, if you like. But I think you’ve gone to a really important part of the debate, which is that this is actually a narrower disagreement than a lot of the political arguments that you and I engage in.
S. Harris: Yes, except I would say that some of the hostility toward drugs does resemble homophobia—and is, to a significant degree, inspired by religion. Homosexuality is anathema because it entails, by definition, a search for sexual pleasure independent of a desire to have children. And pleasure and piety have always had a very uneasy relationship. Many religious people will support unconscionable misuses of state power to prevent their neighbors from enjoying themselves in harmless but irreligious ways. As I wrote in my first book, The End of Faith, this is essentially a concern about idolatry—which is viewed as a distraction from the most important task of life, which is to love God and fully submit yourself to His will.
So I agree that many people are worried about dysfunction and the obvious waste of human life that one sees with certain forms of drug use. But that doesn’t account for all the opposition to drugs. If one were really concerned about harm, one would ban cigarettes long before banning drugs like MDMA and LSD.
J. Hari: I think that what you’ve just said is really important. But I would put it slightly differently. I would say that if you look at it historically, you see that what the religious tend to fear in drug use is a rival sense of transcendence.
For example—I talk in the book about this—at the Temple of Eleusis, every year for 2,000 years there was a kind of revelry, and many very famous people, such as Sophocles, Aristotle, and Cicero went there. It would look very familiar to somebody who has been to Burning Man. Huge numbers of people would attend, and what we now know was a hallucinogenic fungus would be passed around, and people would go into a kind of Dionysian frenzy, and anyone could go, and so on.
It shut down when Constantine converted to Christianity and imposed it as the official state religion. This 2,000-year party crashed into official Christianity and was shut down and never came back—although people have been building their own private Temples of Eleusis ever since, one way or another.
Another good example is the arrival of the Spanish settlers in Latin America—or, rather, their invasion of Latin America, as we should think of it. They discovered that the indigenous peoples had access to all these different psychoactive substances and hallucinogenic plants, and part of forcibly Christianizing them was stamping out their use of indigenous plants. What the Spanish said at the time really reeks of fear of a rival. These plants gave the indigenous peoples the sense they were getting close to God—but of course the only way they were allowed to get close to God under state-imposed Christiantity was through the official rituals.
So I think you’re totally right. It’s very dangerous for religious groups if people realize you can get all that ecstasy and transcendence and none of the f***ing religion and theology.
Harry Anslinger was fanatically religious. He loved Seventh-Day Adventists. They were his main supporters. He said he wanted his successor at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to be a Seventh-Day Adventist. There is definitely an element of puritanism there. Oscar Wilde defined puritanism as the fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.
But it’s worth thinking about how quickly puritanism can bleed away. Rightly, you referred earlier to alcohol prohibition, and the movement for that was one of the largest mass movements in American history. It’s quite hard to get our heads around how enormous the movement for Prohibition was, driven by exactly these motives. And then it just evaporated—Daniel Okrent’s history of Prohibition brilliantly details this. Once alcohol prohibition was over, virtually no one ever argued for it to come back. This entire mass movement, based on this puritan distaste for alcohol, was tested to destruction and evaporated.
You can say, “Oh, the puritanism transferred to other substances.” And there’s some truth in that. But actually I think it does tell you that that kind of puritanism is not immutable—it can be dissolved and discredited.
S. Harris: That’s very interesting. And it does seem that with respect to both drugs and gay marriage we’ve made considerable progress in the past few years. How hopeful are you that we’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on these issues?
J. Hari: I am optimistic—for reasons I can give—but I don’t think the drug war is anything close to over. I think in the analogy of the gay rights movement we’re at 1970, which is a lot better than being at 1950, but we’ve got a long way to go before we get to 2015. I would say that it entirely depends on the size of the movement of ordinary citizens that forms to oppose the drug war.
The best way I can describe what needs to happen now is through a story I tell in the book about the most inspiring person I met—and that means something, because I met a lot of inspiring people in the process of researching the book.
In 2000 there was a homeless street addict in Vancouver named Bud Osborne, who was watching his friends die all around him. He was in the downtown east side of Vancouver, which was notorious for having the highest concentration of addicts in North America, quite possibly in the world.
Addicts there would shoot up behind Dumpsters so that the cops wouldn’t see them. But obviously if you’re hidden away and you start to overdose, no one can see you. You just die. Bud thought, “I can’t just watch this happen—I can’t just watch my friends die all around me—but what can I do? I’m just a homeless junkie.” Those are the terms he would have used. He had a really simple idea. Basically, he got together a lot of the addicts and said (I’m paraphrasing), “When we’re not using”—which even for hard-core addicts is most of the time—“why don’t we just draw up a timetable, and we’ll patrol the alleyways, and when we spot someone overdosing, we’ll just call an ambulance.”
The addicts started to do this. And within a few months the overdose rate started to plummet in Vancouver, which was an amazing thing in itself, because it meant people were living who would otherwise die. But it also meant the addicts started to think about themselves differently. They started to think, “Oh, maybe we’re not pieces of s**t. Maybe we can do something.”
They started to turn up at public meetings convened to discuss the menace of addicts. Bud and his friends would sit at the back, and after a little while they’d put up their hands and say (all this is paraphrasing; Bud’s exact words can be heard on the book’s website), “Oh, I think you’re talking about us. Is there anything we can do differently?” Sometimes people would be angry, and sometimes they’d ask for specific things, such as “Go and pick up your needles.” And Bud would say, “Fine, we’ll go and do that.”
But what’s really interesting is what happened next. I think it’s one of the keys to how we unlock this. Bud started reading about how in Frankfurt, in Germany, they had safe injecting rooms for addicts, and overdose had virtually ended in Frankfurt. And he thought, “Well, we’ve got to do that here.” But there had been nothing like that in America since Anslinger went to war against the doctors in the 1930s.
So the addicts, a very large and active group of addicts and their friends and families and supporters, decided to start stalking the mayor of Vancouver, Philip Owen—a right-wing, very rich businessman who said the addicts should all be taken and detained at the local military base. If you picture Mitt Romney, you’ve got some idea of who Philip Owen was. For two years they stalked Philip Owen everywhere he went, and they carried a coffin, which said something like “Who will die next, Philip Owen, before you open a safe injecting room?”
For two years this went on, and they got really disheartened because nothing was changing. After two years, to his credit, Philip Owen one day just said, “Who the f*** are these people?” He went incognito to the downtown east side and met with addicts. And he was totally blown away. He had no idea their lives were like this.
Owen went to meet with Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, who was really good on this issue, partly because he had grown up in Chicago during Prohibition. When he came back, Owen held a press conference with the chief of police, the coroner, and some of the addicts. He said, “We’re going to open the first safe injecting room in North America. We’re going to have the most compassionate drug policy in North America. Just you wait and see.”
He opened the first safe injecting room in North America in 70 years. His right-wing party was so horrified that they de-selected him. But his party was then beaten by the left-wing candidate, who kept the injecting room open. When I went to the downtown east side, it was 10 years since it had opened. Overdose was down by 80%, and the average life expectancy of a downtown east sider had improved by 10 years, which is virtually unheard of in epidemiology. You only get that when wars end. Which is what this was.
Philip Owen told me it was the proudest thing he ever did, and that he would sacrifice his whole political career all over again. Bud died last year, after I got to know him—and when he died, they shut down the streets of the downtown east side where he had lived as a homeless person. They had this incredible memorial service, with loads of people in that crowd who knew they were alive because of what Bud had done.
What I would say about Bud’s story—I think it’s a really interesting model—is that it’s very like the gay movement. You had a movement of ordinary, deeply stigmatized citizens, and lots of good and decent people who had nothing to do with their struggle except that they recognized that they, too, were human beings. They didn’t wait for a leader, they didn’t wait for permission from the top, they just started. And you also had Philip Owen, not someone I would normally be politically sympathetic to, who had the decency to eventually listen to them.
I think we need both ends of that. We need citizens’ movements of people demanding this. Some will be marijuana users demanding liberty, and some will be heroin addicts demanding the right to life, and there will be all sorts of different people on the spectrum in between. But you need to start somewhere, and you need a movement of people demanding it. Virtually every civilizing improvement in the democratic world happens because ordinary citizens demand it, not because politicians decide to hand it down. What is it Frederick Douglass said? “Power concedes nothing without a struggle.”
So I think things are absolutely ripe for ordinary democratic citizens to demand this thing. The polling shows overwhelmingly that people know the drug war has failed. They know it doesn’t work. What they need is for our voices to be louder than the voices of the forces who support the drug war, like the private prison industry; the alcohol industry, which doesn’t want competitors; the prison guard unions, and so on and so on. We also need to persuade people that their totally legitimate fears about the alternatives are in fact not matched by the evidence in societies that have actually tried the alternatives.
S. Harris: Perhaps we should speak about that. What about Portugal? When we pass through the looking glass and invert all our drug laws, where do we arrive?
J. Hari: I think one of the most important things to say about this is that it’s not an abstract conversation. Too often when we talk about the alternatives to the drug war, people start using this slightly weird and arid philosophical tone of voice, where it’s all kind of hypothetical. There’s no excuse for hypothetical conversations on this subject. The alternatives have been tried, they are being tried across the world, and the results are in, and they are unambiguous.
So I could talk about a few places, and Portugal is one. In 2000 Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of extraordinary. Every year they tried the American way more and more: They arrested and imprisoned more people, and every year the problem got worse. One day the prime minister and the leader of the opposition got together and in effect said, “We can’t go on like this. We can’t have more and more people becoming heroin addicts. Let’s figure out what would genuinely solve the problem.”
They convened a panel of scientists and doctors and said to them (again I’m paraphrasing), “Go away and figure out what would solve this problem, and we will agree in advance to do whatever you recommend.” They just took it out of politics. It was very smart. It was as if Obama and Boehner agreed in advance to abide by whatever the panel on drug reform said. It’s hard to imagine Obama and Boehner agreeing on the time of day, but grant that thought for a moment.
The panel went away for a year and a half and came back and said: “Decriminalize everything from cannabis to crack. But”—and this is the crucial next stage—“take all the money we used to spend on arresting and harassing and imprisoning drug users, and spend it on reconnecting them with society and turning their lives around.”
Some of it was what we think of as treatment in America and Britain—they do do residential rehab, and they do therapy—but actually most of it wasn’t that. Most of it, the most successful part, was really very simple. It was making sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. It consisted of subsidized jobs and microloans to set up small businesses.
Say you used to be a mechanic. When you’re ready, they’ll go to a garage and they’ll say, “If you employ Sam for a year, we’ll pay half his wages.” The microloans had extremely low interest rates, and many businesses were set up by addicts.
It’s been nearly 15 years since this experiment began, and the results are in. Drug use by injection is down by 50%, broader addiction is down, overdose is massively down, and HIV transmission among addicts is massively down.
Compare that with the results in the United States over the past few years. In Portugal I interviewed a guy named Joao Figueira, who was the leader of the opposition to decriminalization at the time—the country’s top drug cop. He said a lot of the things a lot of people reading this will totally reasonably be thinking. Surely if you decriminalize all drugs, you’ll have all sorts of disasters? Figueira told me that everything he had predicted would happen didn’t happen—and everything the other side predicted came to pass. And he talked about how ashamed he felt that he’d spent 20 years arresting and harassing drug users, and he hoped the whole world would follow Portugal’s example.
One thing that is most striking to me: Everywhere I went that had moved beyond the drug war, it was hard to find people who wanted to go back. It was like Prohibition when it was over and people saw the alternatives in practice. It’s very similar to what you see in the polling on marijuana legalization. I’m sure your readers know that Colorado and Washington both have legalized marijuana, by 53%. The polling in Colorado and Washington after they had seen it in practice showed much higher margins supporting legalization. Once people see these things in practice, they discover that it’s not the kind of scary anarchy they had imagined.
Switzerland, a very conservative country, legalized heroin for addicts, meaning you go to the doctor, the doctor assigns you to a clinic, you go to that clinic every day, and you inject your heroin. You can’t take it out with you. I went to that clinic—it looks like a fancy Manhattan hairdresser’s, and the addicts go out after injecting their heroin to their jobs and their lives.
I stress again—Switzerland is a very right-wing country, and after its citizens had seen this in practice, they voted by 70% in two referenda to keep heroin legal for addicts, because they could see that it works. They saw that crime massively fell, property crime massively fell, muggings and street prostitution declined enormously.
I think one of the really important things, particularly in winning the debate in America, is to look at what arguments won in these places and what arguments didn’t. We found that in the places that successfully decriminalized or legalized, liberty-based arguments for ending the drug war were very unpopular. I’m philosophically sympathetic to the argument that it’s your body and you’ve got a right to do what you want with it. But it turns out that’s a politically toxic argument—people really don’t like it, and it only works with people who already agree.
The arguments that work well in persuading the people we still want to reach are order-based arguments. I think the Swiss heroin referenda are good models for that. Basically, what they said was drug war means chaos. It means unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to unknown users, all in the dark, in our public places, filled with disease and chaos. Legalization is a way of imposing regulation and order on this anarchy. It’s about taking it away from criminal gangs and giving it to doctors and pharmacists, and making sure it happens in nice clean clinics, and we get our nice parks back, and we reduce crime. That’s the argument that will win. And it’s not like it’s a rhetorical trick—it’s true. That is what happens.
S. Harris: And the virtue of that argument is that it separates the problem of drug dependency from all the associated criminality and chaos that isn’t intrinsic to the act of taking drugs, whatever one’s level of dependency. The fact that drugs are as expensive as they are, necessitating the desperate and dangerous efforts we see addicts making to obtain them, is entirely the result of their legal status. Once the laws change, and we have well-behaved people showing up at clinics to get legally prescribed medication, then we can talk about whatever medical, psychological, and social problems remain. We shouldn’t confuse the problem of taking the wrong drugs, or the right ones too often, with the problem of criminal gangs and their associated violence, or with the misbehavior of desperate addicts trying to get their fix.
I think it’s a great insight to emphasize the pragmatic case for legalization, as opposed to the ethical one. It is always tempting to try to lead people through the door of personal liberty, arguing that peaceful, honest adults should be free to seek any experiences they want, as long as they don’t harm others in the process. I still think that this is the deeper argument to make. But it is, as you point out, very often ineffective.
J. Hari: Yes. As you say that, I think of all the horrors that come from the drug war, and I saw many of them. I went out with a chain gang of women in Arizona who were forced to wear T-shirts saying “I was a drug addict” and dig graves. I spoke to survivors of the gulag that is built for drug addicts in Vietnam. I could give you a long list here—they are all told through human stories in my book. But of all the horrors, far and away the worst is what you are alluding to—the violence created by drug prohibition.
I learned that mainly from Chino Harden, a transsexual former crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, whom I got to know over three and a half years, and from Rosalio Reta, who was a hit man for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel. From the age of 13 to 17, Rosario killed—best estimate—about 70 people, butchered and beheaded them. I tell their stories in the book, and they really helped me to understand how drug prohibition drives this part.
The best way to explain it is this: If you and I go to your local liquor store and try to steal the beer or the vodka, they’ll call the cops, the cops will take us away, and that’s fine. That liquor store doesn’t need to be violent or intimidating. But if we go up to a local weed dealer or coke dealer and try to steal what they’ve got, obviously they can’t call the cops. The cops would arrest them. So they have to fight back. Now, obviously, as a dealer, you don’t want to be having a fight every day, so you establish a reputation for being so terrifying that no one will dare to f*** with you.
The sociologist Philippe Bourgois says that prohibition creates a culture of terror. These people have to be frightening. I really saw that with Chino. Chino is one of the wisest people I know, and one of the most empathetic people I know, and yet he committed heinous acts of violence to maintain his position in this drug war hierarchy on his block in Brownsville. It’s what the system we have created demanded of him.
And Rosalio, not a person I admire, was nonetheless forced into much more extreme acts of violence than he would have committed otherwise, as I learned when I interviewed him. Sometimes we look at the Mexican drug war violence, which is like something out of the Saw movies, and it just seems like psychosis. It seems like Jeffrey Dahmer–style madness. It’s not. It’s important for people to understand that. It is created by prohibition: In the culture of terror created by prohibition, if you are prepared to push the moral limit a little bit further than the other guys, you gain a brief market advantage, because people will back off when they’re scared.
If you’re the first person who says, “We’re not just going to kill our opponents. We’re going to kill our opponents’ pregnant wives,” you get a brief competitive advantage. If you’re the first person to say, “We’ll not only kill their pregnant wives, but we’ll film it and put it on YouTube,” you get a brief competitive advantage. If you’re the first person to say, “We won’t just do that, we’ll cut off their faces, sew their faces onto a football, and post it to their families”—and this is a real thing that happens—you gain a brief competitive advantage.
I tracked how this dynamic works through the story of Rosalio, who is in constant solitary confinement in Texas. It is insane violence. But it’s insane violence within the structure and demands of prohibition. It is caused by prohibition.
There’s a very interesting study by Professor Paul Goldstein that I cite in the book, because it looks at one of the big distortions, where people often talk about “drug-related violence.” They look at the violence associated with the drug war and they think that somehow it’s caused by drugs themselves.
S. Harris: Yes, people sometimes imagine that the perpetrators of this violence are actually on drugs while they’re committing it.
J. Hari: Exactly. It’s like thinking that Al Capone was drunk and that’s why he shot people. It’s an error of judgment, and we can measure it exactly. Professor Goldstein did a study of all the murders that were described as drug-related in New York City in 1986. What he found is that in 7.5% of the killings, somebody was on drugs. (That doesn’t necessarily mean the drugs made them kill, of course.) In a further 2% an addict was committing property crime in order to feed his habit and got caught or it went wrong, and he killed someone.
All the rest, the vast majority, were rival drug gangs killing each other to control their patch, or to gain control of a patch, or to fend off rivals, or somebody getting caught in the cross fire between them.
Well, none of that is drug-related. That’s drug war−caused. If we banned milk and people still wanted milk, the milk trade would work that way. We wouldn’t call it milk-related violence, but it would make as much sense. Milton Friedman calculated that there are 10,000 additional murders every year in the United States as a direct result of this drug war violence. That’s a figure from the 1980s; we expect it to be somewhat lower now, because overall murder rates are lower, but the underlying dynamic remains the same. Look at the news from Chicago any day of the week—it happened under alcohol prohibition, and it happens in the same place under drug prohibition. So I think what you’re saying is exactly right.
This is atrocious enough. But now apply that to Mexico. Imagine a housing project in Brownsville, where Chino is from. Let’s say 5% to 10% of that economy is in the hands of armed criminal gangs. That will be a miserable place to live. In Ciudad Juárez, where I went, on the Mexican side of the US border, 70% of the economy is in the hands of armed criminal gangs. That doesn’t just cause horrific violence—it means that these gangs can outbid the state.
One of the most chilling moments for me in the research for the book was being shown around by Julian Cardona, the Reuters correspondent in Juárez, who was my fixer. He kept telling me stories of people who had been killed by the police. At some point I said, “Well, Julian, this is important, but I’ve got to meet the families of people who have been killed by the cartels.” And Julian just laughed and said words to the effect of “No, you don’t understand, Johann—when the cartels want to kill someone, they pay the police to do it. They’re not separate forces.”
S. Harris: That’s very depressing.
J. Hari: The state works for the cartels. Michelle Leonhart, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, was asked about the 60,000 civilian deaths in Mexico over the past seven years. That’s an underestimate, that figure. And she said—these were her exact words—that they were “a sign of success in the war on drugs.”
That should be a national scandal, that someone whose wages you pay describes the death of innocent civilians as a sign of success. She’s should be forced to explain—what do we gain for this mass slaughter of innocents? Are fewer drugs getting into the United States? No—we know that because the price hasn’t gone up.
S. Harris: What was it like to spend time in Juárez? How concerned were you for your own safety?
J. Hari: I’ve been to lots of dangerous places before, like Iraq, the occupied territories, the Congo, the Central African Republic, and various other places. Generally, I would stay overnight in El Paso and walk across the bridge every day into Juárez, which was itself a fascinating thing. That bridge is such a weird place. When you walk over it, the first thing you see is this sign to the left that says something like “Welcome to Historic Downtown Juárez” and shows the old tourist map. But the map is just covered with images of missing women. It’s a perfect symbol of what’s happened to Juárez.
I was with a journalist, Julian, whom I deeply respect, and who I knew would not take me into any situation that was needlessly dangerous. I think this is an important enough subject that people need to know about it. It was of course scary, but I knew there was no way I could get the story in full except by going in.
And that goes generally to what I wanted to do with the book, which is related to what we were saying before. I think part of the curse of how this subject is discussed is that it’s discussed in this abstract way, as if we were in a philosophy seminar. Now, as you know, I’ve spent a lot of time in philosophy seminars, and I love them, but that’s not a sensible way to talk about this subject.
I went into this because of the people I love who are addicts. What I wanted to do was sit with real people whose lives have been affected by this one way or another, all over the world, and listen to them about what has happened to their lives, and convey to readers who they are. They are an amazing range of people—from a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn searching for what happened to his mother, to a scientist feeding hallucinogens to a mongoose to see what would happen, to the president of Uruguay, who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years and emerged to end the drug war in his country. I did it this way because I think the drug war can continue only because we’ve dehumanized the people it’s harmed, whether they’re drug users, drug dealers, cops, or the people who live along the supply routes.
I think if we acknowledge that the people whose lives are being destroyed are in fact people with hopes, dreams, and fears just like ours, it’s much harder to support this war and the massive horror that it causes. I think if most people in America had met Chino, or Bud, or Leigh Maddox, the cop I met in Baltimore who very bravely came out against the drug war, or President Mujica of Uruguay, and had heard their stories, they couldn’t support the continuation of this war. I think the main job we have in ending the drug war is to re-humanize the people at its heart.
S. Harris: Part of the problem is that it has been happening in the dark, as far as most people are concerned. At one point people were being locked up for decades for marijuana possession. I’m talking not about hardened criminals but about paraplegics and cancer patients, and owners of garden supply stores whose customers were caught growing marijuana. And our property-seizure laws were just ruining people. A woman whose grandson was found to be growing pot in her basement would lose her home, with no recourse. It was just insane, and very few of us realized that peaceful people were having their lives destroyed in this way. In fact, I may be out of touch on this point myself, because I haven’t followed how our laws have changed nationwide in much detail. I can’t imagine anyone’s being locked up for years today for marijuana possession, but I could be wrong about that.
J. Hari: Oh, they are. A lot of that is still going on. The wonderful Drug Policy Alliance—which I urge anyone who cares about this to sign up with and support—has been doing some documentation on this. Some of these cases are absolutely outrageous. I saw this for myself when I went to Estrella Women’s Jail, better known as Tent City, in Arizona, where the women in chain gangs I mentioned were incarcerated.
S. Harris: Were they recently incarcerated, or had they been convicted years ago?
J. Hari: No one’s in Tent City for more than two years, and I was there a bit more than two years ago. These were recently incarcerated people. And for the prison system in the United States, some of the figures are extraordinary. I give this stat in the book: The United States has such an enormous prison population relative to any other human society there’s ever been, and rape is so endemic in its prisons, that the US today is almost certainly the only society in human history where more men have been raped than women. There’s a shining Tent City on a hill for you.
One of the things that blew me away when I was in Arizona was my interview with a woman named Donna Leone Hamm, an amazing woman who works for prisoners’ rights in Arizona. I asked her my standard question, “Tell me about something that shocked you.” She went down this long list, and somewhere down the list she said something like “There was the time they put that woman in a cage and cooked her. That was quite bad.” And then she carried on with her list. I said, “Sorry, Donna, could you go back a second?”
She told me about this woman named Marcia Powell, about whom very little was known when I started doing the research, who was a chronic meth addict. She kept being put in prison either for having meth or for prostituting herself to get meth. One day she woke up in prison and she was suicidal. The doctor refused to believe she was suicidal, but to shut her up they put her in a holding cage, which is literally a cage exposed to the desert, and left her there. She begged for water, and she shat herself, and in the end she collapsed. By the time they called an ambulance, she had been cooked.
No one was ever criminally prosecuted for what they did to Marcia Powell. To me, this tells you so much about how we’ve devalued addicts’ lives. There’s been a hashtag—#BlackLivesMatter—which I entirely endorse, and it’s made me think we need a #AddictsLivesMatter. We need to really absorb that truth, because what other minority group could you just brazenly murder a member of without there being any proper investigation? I think addicts are one of the most outlying of all minority groups.
S. Harris: This brings us to the topic of addiction. Is addiction an easily defined physiological state that is purely a matter of which substance a person takes and how regularly he takes it? Or is it largely the product of external variables? In your book, you make the latter case. And I think most people would be surprised to learn that in a context where drug use is more normalized, a heroin addict, for instance, can be a fully productive member of society. There’s nothing about regularly taking heroin that by definition renders a person unable to function. So let’s talk a bit about what addiction is and the various ways it changes with its social context.
J. Hari: This is the thing that most surprised me in the research for the book. I thought I knew quite a lot about addiction, not least because I’ve had it in my life since I was a child, with my relatives. But if you had said to me four years ago, “What causes, say, heroin addiction?” I would have looked at you as if you were a bit simpleminded, and I would have said, “Heroin causes heroin addiction.”
For 100 years we’ve been told a story about addiction that’s just become part of our common sense. It’s obvious to us. We think that if you, I, and the first 20 people to read this on your site all used heroin together for 20 days, on day 21 we would be heroin addicts, because there are chemical hooks in heroin that our bodies would start to physically need, and that’s what addiction is.
The first thing that alerted me to what’s not right about this story is when I learned that if you step out onto the street and are hit by a car and break your hip, you’ll be taken to a hospital where it’s quite likely that you’ll be given a lot of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It’s much more potent than what you get on the street, because it’s medically pure, not f***ed up by dealers. You’ll be given that diamorphine for quite a long period of time. Anywhere in the developed world, people near you are being giving loads of heroin in hospitals now.
If what we think about addiction is right, what will happen? Some of those people will leave the hospital as heroin addicts. That doesn’t happen. There have been very detailed studies of this. It doesn’t happen. You will have noticed that your grandmother was not turned into a junkie by her hip operation. We know that. I just didn’t know what to do with it.
I didn’t know until I went and interviewed Bruce Alexander, who’s a professor in Vancouver and, I think, one of the most important figures in addiction studies in the world today. He explained to me that our idea of addiction comes in part from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They’re really simple experiments, and your readers can do them at home if they’re feeling a bit sadistic. You get a rat, you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles: One is water, and the other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. The rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and will almost always kill itself. So there you go. That’s our theory of addiction. You might remember the famous Partnership for a Drug-Free America ad from the 1980s that depicted this.
But in the 1970s, Bruce Alexander came along and thought, “Hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do except use these drugs. Let’s try this differently.”
So he built a very different cage and called it Rat Park. Rat Park was like heaven for rats. They had everything a rat could possibly want: lovely food, colored balls, tunnels, loads of friends. They could have loads of sex. And they had both the water bottles—the normal water and the drugged water. What’s fascinating is that in Rat Park they didn’t like the drugged water. They hardly ever drank it. None of them ever drank it in a way that looked compulsive. None of them ever overdosed.
An interesting human example of this was happening at the same time; I’ll talk about it in a second. What Bruce says is that this shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are flawed. The right-wing theory is that it’s a moral failing—you’re a hedonist, you indulge yourself, all of that. The left-wing theory is that your brain gets hijacked, you get taken over, and you become a slave.
Bruce says it’s not your morality and it’s not your brain. To a much larger degree than we’ve ever before appreciated, it’s your cage. Addiction is an adaption to your environment.
The good human example I just mentioned was called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam 20% of American troops were using a lot of heroin. And if you look at the reports from the time, they were really sh***ing themselves, because they thought, “My God, we’re going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the United States when the war ends.”
Actually, this was studied very closely, and the overwhelming majority—95%—of the men who had been using lots of heroin in Vietnam came home and just stopped. They didn’t go to rehab, didn’t get any treatment. They just stopped. Because if you’re taken out of a hellish, pestilential jungle where you could die at any moment, and you go back to your nice life in Wichita, Kansas, with your friends and your family and your human connections, that’s the equivalent of being taken out of the first cage and put into Rat Park.
This has enormous implications for the drug war. What we do at the moment is take people who are addicted because they are isolated, distressed, and in pain, and inflict more isolation, distress, and pain on them in the hopes that it will make them stop. Think about what we did to Billie Holiday, and all those women I met in Arizona—they’re never going to work again in the legal economy.
When I went to that prison in Arizona, they took me to the segregation unit, which they call The Hole, and I saw these women who are addicts put in these tiny little stone cages for a month. I thought, “Wow, this is the closest you could possibly get to a literal human re-creation of the cages that guaranteed addiction in those rat experiments.” And we think this will stop addiction?
Gabor Mate, a doctor in Vancouver, said to me, “If you wanted to design a system that would make addiction worse, you would design the system that we have now.” We can understand why the Portuguese system works so well, because it’s all about reconnecting people with the collective, with the group, with the society, giving them a purpose. We can see why that works so much better than either prohibition or even residential rehab, which has a pretty poor success rate.
But this has much wider implications for the way we live—much wider than drug policy. We’ve created a society where life for a lot of our fellow citizens is more like that first cage and less like Rat Park. Bruce discusses how we talk a lot in addiction circles about individual recovery, and that’s really important, but we need to think much more about social recovery. Something’s gone wrong with us not just as individuals but as a group.
I’m interested in thinking about this in relation to religion and atheism—issues you and I obviously care about a lot. I haven’t thought about them in anything like as much detail as I’ve thought about stuff in my book, but I’d be interested to know if you think this frame would apply in some way to religion. I wonder if isolation and distress and pain drive people toward addiction and also play a crucial role in driving them toward religious belief. What do you think, Sam?
I don’t think it’s a coincidence, for example, that Scandinavia is the least religious society in the world, and Somalia is the most religious society in the world. Scandinavia looks a lot like Rat Park, and Somalia looks a lot like the worst rat cages you can imagine. Scandinavia has very low levels of insecurity and very high levels of social solidarity and social engagement. Somalia is obviously an anarchic nightmare. I wonder if there’s some connection there. I haven’t teased it out in my mind, but I suspect it has implications for how atheist campaigning and fighting should proceed. What do you think?
S. Harris: I’m worried that they’re not actually analogous. The one thing that jumps out at me immediately is that many people overcome their social isolation through religion—indeed, community is one of its main selling points. The most theocratic societies tend to engender profound social cohesion. In many places on this earth, one need only shout the words “She burned the holy Qur’an!” to summon a lynch mob. So a lack of social cohesion is the least of one’s problems here.
But the basic claim is that, in “Rat Park,” most people can have all drugs available to them without becoming addicts.
J. Hari: Yes, and that shouldn’t seem surprising to people if they relate it to their own lives. While we’re talking, I’ve got a bottle of water in front of me, and you’ve probably got a drink in front of you. Forget the drug laws for a second. You and I could both be drinking vodka now, right? You and I have probably got enough money in the bank that we could spend the next year drinking vodka and never stop. We could just be drunk all the time. But we don’t. And the reason we don’t is not because someone’s stopping us but because we want to be present in our lives. We’ve got relationships. We’ve got friends. We’ve got people we love. We’ve got books we want to read. We’ve got books we want to write. We’ve got things we want to do. Most of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life.
And by the way, that’s true not just of drug addiction. If you’ve ever known a gambling addict, you see that the pleasure he’s getting is not the pleasure of the specific bet. It’s the pleasure of not being present in his own life. It’s the pleasure of being taken out of himself, even to what I regard as a very squalid and depressing world. It’s the same with sex addiction. There’s a continuity between drug addictions and other addictions that I think tells you something fundamental.
For the book I went—with the permission of the people present—to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Vegas, at a gambling addiction treatment center. It was just like a meeting of Narcotics Anonymous—it was really so analogous, I felt I was looking at the same thing. And yet no one thinks that you snort a roulette wheel or inject a game of craps. Most people now acknowledge that you can have all of the addiction and none of the chemicals. Well, that tells you something about the degree to which addiction is driven by things other than chemical components.
That’s not to say that there’s no chemical component. It’s important to stress that. The chemical component is real—and we can measure it. There’s no need, again, to have an abstract conversation about it. There’s a broad scientific consensus that one of the most physically addictive drugs available to us is tobacco. And we’ve isolated the part that’s chemically compelling—it’s nicotine. So when nicotine patches were invented in the early 1990s, there was this massive wave of optimism: Great, you can give smokers all the drugs they’re addicted to without the filthy carcinogenic smoke. Progress. You will see a huge fall in smoking.
Actually, the US surgeon general’s report found that only 17% of smokers stopped with nicotine patches. Now, it’s important to stress that 17% is a lot. It’s not nothing. That tells us that 17% of these addictions are chemically driven—or at least that 17% of people can stop when the chemical component is met. That’s huge. That tells us that the story we’ve been told up to now is not false. But it also tells us that it’s only 17% of the story, and that 83% has to be explained in some other way. These social and environmental factors should be a very big part of the conversation and the discussion.
S. Harris: Isn’t it also true that addiction to a drug like heroin, in a legal context, can still be compatible with living a decent life?
J. Hari: I guess there are two things to say about that. It will seem weird to people to hear that you can be an addict, you can take quite a lot of a drug, and you can carry on having a pretty functional life. But actually, that was the norm in the United States. There was a study, which I cite in the book, that was done by the US government before drug prohibition really kicked in—a study of addicts, not users. It found that heroin addicts prior to drug prohibition were no more likely to be poor than the rest of the population. They were spread throughout the population. They were no more likely to be criminal than the rest of the population. They were of course debilitated by their addiction to some degree, as a functional alcoholic today is. But they weren’t what we now associate with heroin addiction.
And yet, of course, as you were saying before, when it’s banned, instantly the price skyrockets. That’s because gangsters charge higher prices, because they’ve got to take the risk of going to prison in order to sell the product—so they demand a quite high risk premium. Everyone along the supply chain demands that risk premium, so the price goes way up. Therefore, you suddenly have two crime waves. One is the organized crime and all the violence that comes with it—as we were discussing. The other is the crimes that addicts have to commit in order to meet this massively inflated price—prostitution, property crimes, and so on.
So you’re totally right. One of the best ways to understand that is to look at the start of the drug war and then at places where the war has ended. In Switzerland, where they legalized heroin, when you start on the program, you set your own dose of heroin, and you can stay on it for as long as you want. There’s never any pressure to stop, which surprised me. I actually was taken aback by that.
So anyone on that program can just stay on it their whole life, right? You can just carry on. The program’s been running for 20 years. But it’s interesting—there’s almost nobody on the program now who was on it at the start.
I said, “Well, how come that happened?” And they said that the chaos of street use, of scrambling to pay this grossly inflated price, ended, because people were given heroin as a medical prescription. The people in the clinic support you, they help you get housing, and they help you look for a job. So the majority of the people there get jobs, get homes, so they choose entirely of their own will to gradually cut down their heroin use over time, and eventually they stop. Because their lives become more bearable. Because they want to be more present in their lives. Because their lives slowly im
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Can't wait to see what GM has to say about this!
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015/04/15/the-us-finally-admits-cannabis-kills-cancer-cells/
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Can't wait to see what GM has to say about this!
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015/04/15/the-us-finally-admits-cannabis-kills-cancer-cells/
:roll:
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Portugal's and other nations' experience when decriminalizing drugs:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y7LKfLxVtzE?feature=oembed&wmode=transparent
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http://reason.com/blog/2015/07/07/dea-steals-44000-from-nail-salon-owner-a#.he6obh:USrt
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Same tactics, different substances, outcomes remain the same. An institutionalized embrace of self-righteous folly:
It's Time We Learned from Sin Taxes' Impressive History of Failure
Reason Magazine by J.D. Tuccille
Samuel Johnson reportedly joked that a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. But marriage at least has sex to recommend it. The screwing that politicians give us when they return to the same failed policies time and again are far less enjoyable. But return they do, most recently to sin taxes on cigarettes, booze and, now, junk food and sugary drinks. They promise that these taxes will both discourage disfavored behavior and stuff government coffers with proceeds mugged from ill-living sinners—mutually incompatible goals that such taxes have never fulfilled.
And, in their courting of false hope and spurning of actual experience, politicians ignore the unintended consequences that sin taxes always have delivered.
In budgets adopted last month, Connecticut, Kansas, and Nevada hiked state cigarette taxes amidst flurries of predictions of a new influx of cash nabbed from the nicotine-stained fingertips of smokers. Nutmeg State advocates predicted that a $1.50 hike in Connecticut "would yield more than $60 million annually while driving tens of thousands of state residents away from tobacco." (Connecticut ultimately boosted the take by $0.50 to $3.90 per pack.) Nevada's one dollar rise to $1.80 per pack would "prompt more than 15,400 adult smokers in Nevada to quit, all while raising more than $192 million in new revenue in the first two years," insisted Christopher W. Hansen, President of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. The Kansas City Star editorial board similarly called a cigarette tax hike ($0.50 to $1.29 per pack) "a victory for a healthier Kansas while generating a few more dollars to keep the state out of debtor's prison."
But legislators can only hope to reap cash rewards while punishing smoky pleasures by ignoring history. After Connecticut's recent sin tax victory dance, The Hartford Courant noted that cigarettes sales have dropped for years, not necessarily inspired by the tax rate. "From 2012 through the first few months of 2015, when there haven't been any tax increases, the average monthly consumption rate for the year as a whole has decreased by 7.4 percent from the prior year."
The cigarette tax take has similarly eroded, along with sales. The newspaper concluded that declining smoking rates doomed efforts to turn tobacco into a revenue bonanza. That may be true, but it's also true that cigarette taxes have become so punitive, and so disparate across jurisdictions, that the ranks of remaining smokers—dedicated to their vice and resistant to efforts to make them quit—are acquiring their smokes outside the usual channels, in defiance of efforts to empty their pockets or scrub their lungs.
It's "Prohibition by price," Michael LaFaive tells me. He's an economist with Michigan's Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which, among other things, studies the effects of skyrocketing cigarette taxes. And just as overt efforts to snatch booze from Americans spawned a dynamic and dangerous black market in smuggled liquor, his organization's research reveals that implicitly prohibitionist schemes to make tobacco unaffordable have already done the same.
In New York, where authorities boasted just weeks ago of busting a $3 million smuggling ring, 58 percent of all cigarettes sold in the state are smuggled. With state taxes at $4.35 per pack, and New York City imposing another $1.50 charge, it's a no-brainer to load trucks at Virginia's $0.30 per pack rate and illegally drive them up Interstate 95 to customers suffering the country's most onerous tax.
The recent tax hikes "are going to fuel additional smuggling," LaFaive warns.
Scott Drenkard, an economist with the Tax Foundation, which co-publishes cigarette tax studies with Mackinac agrees.
"I think it's very likely that cigarette tax increases in Kansas will contribute to new smuggling activity there, especially because bordering Missouri has the lowest cigarette excise tax in the country at $0.17 per pack," he says. Fifteen percent of Kansas's smokes are already purchased on the black market; that figure isn't going down.
Both economists expect Connecticut to see similarly increased smuggling, and Drenkard even fingers the likely source: New Hampshire, where cigarettes are taxed at a far cheaper $1.78 per pack.
LaFaive points out that the modern phenomenon of illicit "loosie" sales of single cigarettes are a direct descendant of Prohibition-era sales of single shots of whiskey outside factory gates. Even as we try to reinvent policy, we recreate old mistakes, and their unintended consequences.
Or maybe we just go back to the source and stupidly copy them over again.
Kansas Governor Sam Brownback (R) originally wanted to hike liquor taxes too, though that plan was shot down. Connecticut doubles down on the stupid by taxing consumers without profiting state coffers—the state sets minimum prices for retailers. These schemes are in keeping with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Community Preventive Services Task Force which "recommends increasing the unit price of alcohol by raising taxes based on strong evidence of effectiveness for reducing excessive alcohol consumption and related harms."
So… how high is high enough?
The Tax Foundation helpfully reveals that excise taxes range across the country from zilch in Wyoming to $35 per gallon of liquor in Washington. That range of rates is an open invitation to fill the backs of trucks and haul loads of booze across borders, which is exactly what happens.
Mackinac's LaFaive points to the Michigan-Indiana border as a high-traffic area for liquor smugglers. Michigan's state government maintains a wholesale monopoly on spirits, and charges $11.90 per gallon in taxes. Indiana allows a competitive market with taxes at $2.68 per gallon.
The result, as the Michigan Liquor Control Commission complained (PDF) in 2007 is that alcohol smuggling contributed to a "conservative annual estimate of $14 million dollars in loss to the state" in revenues. Indiana and Wisconsin (PDF) were fingered as the major sources of the black market stuff.
But should prohibitionists at least give themselves a pat on the back for sacrificing a little revenue in the name of blessed sobriety?
Really no.
Britain's Institute of Economic Affairs reported in 2012 that high alcohol taxes don't discourage drinking anywhere they looked on the planet. "[T]his research shows that the amount of drink consumed in high tax countries is exactly the same as in low tax countries."
Taxes just fuel black markets, including smuggling and illegal production.
The latest frontier in government efforts to tax us into a future of healthy virtue and budgetary black ink involves levies on sugary drinks and junk food. In April, the Navajo Nation became the first U.S. jurisdiction to impose a specific tax on chips, cakes, and other foods the experts say we're not supposed to eat. The tribal government adopted the measure shortly after Berkeley, California voters subjected themselves (and their unwilling neighbors) to a penny-per-ounce tax on sodas, sports drinks, sweet teas and other sugary beverages.
Learning from past experience, could we be in for the cakes and cokes Mafia?
Actually, maybe not. LaFaive and Drenkard say that these sorts of taxes are even more problematic than those on booze and smokes, since they target tastes rather than specific products. Junk food and sugary drinks have lots of substitutes, and it's impossible to chase them all down.
Chips can be replaced by popcorn that you salt and butter yourself, LaFaive points out.
"The health literature on soda taxes shows that they decrease soda consumption, yes, but people just increase their calorie intake from other sources to make up the difference," notes Drenkard. "A 2010 study showed that adolescents often switch to milk (which actually has more calories), and a 2012 study showed that older consumers switch to beer."
So people want what they want and aren't so easy to bully into preferred behavior—or be forced to pay for the privilege. You don't say. Maybe that's a lesson politicians should have gleaned from the historical evidence long ago.
And maybe we all should have learned by now, despite our hopes to the contrary, that politicians and their control freak friends don't acknowledge their failures.
http://reason.com/archives/2015/07/21/its-time-we-learned-from-sin-taxes-impre
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It means more money for Indian tribes selling tobacco.
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Good points BBG, thanks for posting this. The so-called sin tax is a bad strategy except as Crafty may point out, when I T goes to pay for some direct, external cost.
Funding healthcare with declining cigarette revenues and funding Colorado schools with excessive and easy to bypass pot taxes are bad ideas. Sin tax revenues pose their own moral hazard for policy makers.
Regarding an earlier post, yes, why not decriminalization - first.
On another topic, why not legalize widely available and relatively safe prescription drugs and also other basic medical supplies and procedures to the public away from the govt sanctioned medical cartel? Does anyone else see that logic. Like a gun you would have to learn to use things responsibly. But maybe we don't need a 300 per hour doc and a thousand per hour room to receive a tetanus shot or freeze a skin spot. Just a libertarian thought.
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http://www.newsweek.com/states-medical-marijuana-painkiller-deaths-drop-25-266577
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http://www.newsweek.com/states-medical-marijuana-painkiller-deaths-drop-25-266577
A friend that works for a big city PD in Colorado says that his district in that city has an average of 10 calls a day for medical/psych calls related to marijuana, all of which mean a ride in an ambulance to the ER.
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http://www.newsweek.com/states-medical-marijuana-painkiller-deaths-drop-25-266577
A friend that works for a big city PD in Colorado says that his district in that city has an average of 10 calls a day for medical/psych calls related to marijuana, all of which mean a ride in an ambulance to the ER.
http://www.cpr.org/news/story/denver-emergency-room-doctor-seeing-more-patients-marijuana-edibles
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Yes, edibles do present such questions.
Reasonable regulation specifying how to make THC content clear/dosage size, etc. could be helpful here-- just like a list of contents at the supermarket.
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http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-medical-pot-20141216-story.html
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/05/world/americas/mexico-supreme-court-marijuana-ruling.html?emc=edit_na_20151104&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
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Legalization of even MJ is something that I have not been able come to a personal decision on. I can see the viewpoints of both pro and anti groups. And also the Libertarian aspects.
I also see how it can be of benefit for health reasons, but also see it as a gateway drug. And I have seen how in some people, continuous use has "deadened" brain cells and motivation.
Can someone present clear and logical arguments, both pro and con, so that I might be able to better understand this mess?
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Legalization of even MJ is something that I have not been able come to a personal decision on. I can see the viewpoints of both pro and anti groups. And also the Libertarian aspects.
I also see how it can be of benefit for health reasons, but also see it as a gateway drug. And I have seen how in some people, continuous use has "deadened" brain cells and motivation.
Can someone present clear and logical arguments, both pro and con, so that I might be able to better understand this mess?
I agree. Seems like a small distinction but I favor 'decriminalization' over legalization. We don't need small time users in jail or with criminal records, but we don't need to sanction it with prime time tv advertising and everything else.
Curious, so I asked about the local tax on it in my other hometown of Leadville CO and the proprietor said the tax was a great thing - funding the new school and all these programs. Buy it and smoke it for the children, in other words.
Gov. Hickenlooper (D-Colo) says: Do not follow us. We don't have this figured out yet.
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Thanks. Your distinction of decriminalization does have some sense to it. But I wonder how long that it would take for advocates to expand upon the decriminalization to other drugs or even selling?
Of course, there is legalize everything in all amounts and let the addicts overdose and die. Wish that would happen to one person down the street. It is so bad that the parents make him sleep outside in all weather and he must go down to the local gas station for restroom use. And...............I don't blame them one bit. Each time he gets out of jail, break ins occur in the neighborhood.
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Once healthcare became a right, legalization of everything fun, harmful or risk taking became in jeopardy, from meth and heroin to stick fighting, to extreme skiing, my vice.
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Exactly the logic that is often used for mandatory seat belts and motorcycle helmets.
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Exactly the logic that is often used for mandatory seat belts and motorcycle helmets.
Yes. Each idea sounds so good but putting someone else in charge of our own personal safety and choices is to lose our individual liberties in more ways than we can see.
Meanwhile, the government won't do its own job like securing the border.
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Another example where failed policy produced the problem it was putatively created to address, with solutions emerging when the policy was abandoned and prohibition no longer embraced:
http://en.institutomanquehue.org/countries/bolivia/with-no-dea-in-sight,-bolivia-keeps-reducing-coca-crops.html
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/12/28/federal-judge-drinking-tea-shopping-at-a-gardening-store-is-probable-cause-for-a-swat-raid-on-your-home/
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http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-fbi-cant-find-hackers-that-dont-smoke-pot
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in:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3404956/Is-proof-El-Chapo-trying-escape-Digging-maximum-security-prison-sparks-fears-Mexican-drug-lord-plotting-jailbreak.html
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in:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3404956/Is-proof-El-Chapo-trying-escape-Digging-maximum-security-prison-sparks-fears-Mexican-drug-lord-plotting-jailbreak.html
It puts a whole new spin on it, when your own brothers in uniform are corrupt and will kill you. We just had some more here, that were found to be working for the other side.
Not everyone in Mexico is corrupt.
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"We just had some more here"
Are in in Mexico?
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"We just had some more here"
Are in in Mexico?
I am.
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http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2016/01/27/coyotes-high-on-mushrooms-possibly-to-blame-for-strange-incidents-on-highway/
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I don't know we need more Federal money to treat drug addiction. I am tired of the genetic excuses for cause of every drug addict now. This is a treatment lobby getting lots and lots of money spent on it just like academic lobby. Has anyone seen the price of health care stocks now compared to several years ago? Who knows of anyone whose health insurance went down.
I would rather we give capital punishment to drug dealers like in Singapore and stop the Mexicans from flooding out markets with drugs. With prescription drugs there certainly are doctors who abuse it to make money but I would say it is hard to draw the line when it is reasonable (medically justified) and when it is just for cash. But we need strict punishments for them too. In the 90's all we heard was the popular notion that doctors did not treat pain enough so there was this big push to be more liberal with pain meds. I am not surprised at the outcome.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/10/the-radical-way-the-presidents-spending-plan-would-change-the-drug-war/
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"Every solution creates a problem."
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Among the many perverse incentives and outcomes the WOD graces us with, none is more profound than its unabashed embrace of creating the exact environment that propagates drug use:
http://theunboundedspirit.com/drugs-dont-cause-addiction-this-short-animated-video-will-change-your-view-on-drugs-forever/
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Among the many perverse incentives and outcomes the WOD graces us with, none is more profound than its unabashed embrace of creating the exact environment that propagates drug use:
http://theunboundedspirit.com/drugs-dont-cause-addiction-this-short-animated-video-will-change-your-view-on-drugs-forever/
Well, if a cartoon on YouTube says it, it must be true!
In a homicide investigation class I took some years back, we studied a case in my state where formerly middle class parents that got addicted to meth burned their house down with their young children inside so they could get the tiny life insurance policies on the kids. I have seen plenty of firsthand cases where addicts turned away from friends and family to chase their addictions.
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Over the years I have had many patients coming in asking for narcotics.. Their excuses, their reasons, their scams are quite remarkable. They know all the tricks, cons and buzz wards. They use sad stories, try to get us to feel sorry for them, they compliment us. When I walk into an exam room and the new patient comes over to introduce himself smiling from ear to ear and tells me he heard I am the best doctor and he is so glad to meet me immediately I know I am being scammed. The real problem for us is what to do the patient really does have reasons to be in a lot of pain and nothing other than narcotics either works or does not cause listed side effect. Yet we cannot be sure there is no abuse. Unless we hire a private detective one cannot know for sure what is going on.
Addiction is really tough. The trend now is the usual progressive trend toward love.
Such as those in jail all just needed good homes.
Such as all those in ISIS just need good jobs.
Such as all addicts just are unlucky to be born with bad genes.
No one is responsible for the choices they make. Either bad genes or bad environment or both.
This may be true for some and to some extant. But the people who espouse this stuff all seem to be the ones who make a living off it.
Just my 2 cents. But I am with GM. Enough of the phony love and excuses. I for one have less sympathy for many if not most of these drug abusers.
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Nonetheless I think the video makes a contribution to the conversation, one that is worthy of keeping in mind.
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"Nonetheless I think the video makes a contribution to the conversation, one that is worthy of keeping in mind."
Point taken. I just don't agree with the trend for everything (not just drug abuse) that people do not have responsibility for their actions. It has a big 'political correctness" influence to it.
The only people who seem to be responsible for their actions and thus are "bad" so to speak, are conservatives or Republicans. Maybe we just have bad genes or bad upbringings. :-P
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/03/legal-marijuana-is-finally-doing-what-the-drug-war-couldnt/
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/03/legal-marijuana-is-finally-doing-what-the-drug-war-couldnt/
I know from recent training that the cartels are moving super lab meth to Colorado, and trading it for Colorado weed for distribution to the rest of the country.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/03/legal-marijuana-is-finally-doing-what-the-drug-war-couldnt/
I know from recent training that the cartels are moving super lab meth to Colorado, and trading it for Colorado weed for distribution to the rest of the country.
As Dem Gov John Hickenlooper (my pick for the Dem nominee) says to other states, don't follow our lead, we don't have this figured out yet.
Transporting pot out of Colorado across state lines is still a violation of state and federal law. Pot sales aren't legal in Colorado; they are just state sanctioned. If you and I make a private, consensual transaction, it isn't legal. They can't stop the movement of the drug so now they try to ban money!
Stated previously, we didn't need legalization and state sponsorship (the tax builds schools, do it for the children), we needed decriminalization for private behavior that isn't criminal.
Yes, I wonder what part of the heroin and meth epidemics are a direct result of pot revenues squeezed. As BBG has argued, people are going to have a curiosity about mind and body altering substances. Laws come into play when you are harming others. Drug abuse harms others.
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The wide open border helps very pure meth and heroin move into the US, the lack of immigration enforcement helps the drug distribution networks mature.
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The wide open border helps very pure meth and heroin move into the US, the lack of immigration enforcement helps the drug distribution networks mature.
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Not to mention that when drug lords control the border, terrorists with money are also welcome.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2016/03/05/probable-cause/
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Money laundering from drug trafficking accounts for 6% of banking as much as oil and gas?
Though bank employees are complicit none ever go to jail, unlike the nickel and dime drug pusher on the corner:
http://takimag.com/article/narco_liquidity_hargreaves_allen#axzz42Vz4Qvnw
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Money laundering from drug trafficking accounts for 6% of banking as much as oil and gas?
Though bank employees are complicit none ever go to jail, unlike the nickel and dime drug pusher on the corner:
http://takimag.com/article/narco_liquidity_hargreaves_allen#axzz42Vz4Qvnw
Too big to jail.
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Legalization hit the cartels bottomline, among other things.
http://time.com/3801889/us-legalization-marijuana-trade/
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Legalization hit the cartels bottomline, among other things.
http://time.com/3801889/us-legalization-marijuana-trade/
Not true. They trade super lab meth and heroin for high grade Colorado weed for domestic distribution. Funny how the legalization advocates keep missing this part of the story.
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In early December I underwent rotator cuff surgery. Turned out to be a major tear that could not be addressed arthroscopicly, resulting in a 6 inch incision on my dominant shoulder where they went in and set screws around which they rebuilt my 'cuff.
I was told that recovery would be painful and it has proven to be, with rehab proving particularly perplexing. Unmedicated sleep proves illusive, which has made Percocet something of a godsend. My usual bedtime regimen involves 4 ibuprofen and 2 melatonin. If I'm still awake an hour after that I take a Percocet and that does the trick for four hours or so.
Or at least use to. At my last follow up with my ortho surgeon I was informed federal and state scrutiny would prevent future Percocet scripts. With full recovery forecast to take until December that bodes a number of unpleasant months. Thanks drug warriors; here's a piece from an MD noting similar folly:
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/physicians-face-moral-dilemma-conscription-war-drugs
I note GM provides another unsourced and unresponsive critique to a post of mine, all while failing to realize the War on Drugs he doggedly supports creates the endless perverse incentives he blithely cites as reason to continue policies that have utterly failed by any rational measure. I've stopped responding to posts here--and many other worthwhile voices have been stifled--due to GM's intransigence and unpleasant rhetorical habits. This is Crafty's list and he's welcome to measure benefits and costs as he pleases, but a lot of folks have been driven out of the conversations by the unresponsive, snarky, authoritarian badgering GM traffics in.
Don't believe me? Watch this:
GM: can you name a single criteria by which the War On Drugs can be measured a success? You failed to do so before, launching into all sorts of facile sophistry rather than answer the question at hand. So respond to the fucking question. Can you name a single criteria by which the WOD can be considered a success? If you can't name one will you stop supporting a policy that has failed by any sane measure?
If that past is a predicate GM won't answer the question, or provide any rational measure of success, all while continuing to ardently support folly that has lead to the warehousing of millions of Americans, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, gross abuse of founding principles, all without rates of addiction falling while banned substances continue to cost less in terms of real dollars, and then castigating anyone who points out the gross counterproductivity of it all. Sigh.
This question wasn't answered the first dozen times I asked it; I won't be around to see how it's answered the 13th time. Crafty, feel free to drop me a line should it become possible to ask a simple question here without contending with a circular, ad hominem response that fails to address the matter at hand.
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Actually I thought I chased you off the board. In any case your posts are appreciated and enjoyed. I hope you would reconsider posting.
And yes the policy makers have intruded big time into the medical field with regards to narcotics. In the 90s and early 2000s doctors were criticized big time for being too wary of prescribing narcotics for pain.
Now we are told we are too lax.
Truth is we are very limited in what we can do for pain. pain specialists will send patients for injections and procedures less for their value and more because they make mucho dollars.
From the CDC which for some reason is involved. I guess because of an epidemic of people buying selling and using these drugs illicitly.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/rr/rr6501e1.htm
One can perhaps find similarities among narcotics throughout recent history and society
After the Civil War it became apparent veterans were becoming junkies to morphine. Remember the cocaine in COKE and the realization of how that was a disaster? Go ask Sigmund.
How about the great movie 'Monkey on my Back' about the true story of Bennie Ross becoming an addict.
Who ever invents a medicine that can SAFELY relieve pain that is either not an NSAID or a narcotic will become the biggest "drug dealer" and the most deservedly rich one the world has ever know.
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Woof BBG:
LOVE having you participate here. Please give me a call. You have PM.
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"The war on drugs" is a poor metaphor. Just as the war on crime isn't really a war. Is there an endpoint or just something that has to be done to preserve some semblance of civilization.
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"The war on drugs" is a poor metaphor. Just as the war on crime isn't really a war. Is there an endpoint or just something that has to be done to preserve some semblance of civilization.
Also the 'war on poverty' has just prolonged whatever we define as poverty. Of course the results the 'war on drugs' include failure. For one thing, driving up the price drives up the incentives for trafficking, etc. We are the side of recognizing and criticizing unintended consequences yet seem to have no answer for this.
WOD failures don't necessarily mean legalize all drugs or remove all drug laws. I would like to see innovative thinking toward strategies other than total prohibition or total legalization. (I don't have an answer for that.)
BBG, your posts and viewpoints are appreciated here!
From a libertarian viewpoint, in theory, our liberties extend out until they adversely affect someone else.
I would like to see drug use or drug possession laws and prosecution apply only when it is connected with adverse affect on others.
Obviously, there are times when drug use or abuse affects others, contributing to crime and tragedies.
One major setback on drug use and many other things is the idea that your healthcare is now a public good, not your private business, based on bad policy choices and wrongly decided Supreme Court cases. Personal risk taking is now everyone's business.
I don't like to see meth, heroin, etc on an equal footing with pot in the legalization discussion. I don't think it advances the cause.
I have a house, ski and spend a lot of time in Colorado. Everybody has an opinion about how pot 'legalization' is going. A topic in itself. Latest news is the crackdown and prosecution of 'unlicensed' grow houses. Legalization is a funny word to use. Reminds me of gambling and Fast and Furious gun sales where it is legal only if the government does it.
Generally speaking, I prefer decriminalization to legalization and government sanctioning. Also prosecutorial discretion over mandatory sentences for activities that are widely accepted, if not harming others.
As I have posted on privacy issues, we need to take stock of what liberties we have lost, rank them in order of priority and possibility of getting them back, and start working out some strategies to gradually get them back. Right now we are moving swiftly in the opposite direction. Our side is divided and the statists are still advancing.
Even pot legalization in places like Colorado looks to me like a big government takeover.
Further complicating legalization is the question of prescription drugs. Hit by a car at 17, I felt about like BBG does now. My mom turned down pain prescriptions for me when I left the hospital; she said dad could write a prescription if needed. In teenager fashion I figured, whatever, I'll get what I need at school. A year later I lost a cousin to some kind of drug accident. It could have been almost any of us.
If drugs were truly legal, pharmacies wouldn't need a back room and many ailments would be self addressed, especially with information available today on the internet. We could use our own wisdom and discretion of what we want or need. The practice of medicine would be drastically changed, partly for better, partly (mostly?) for worse.
Some of the free choice thinking doesn't fully fear or appreciate the power of addiction. Also mal-use and mis-dosage.
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http://gazette.com/black-market-is-thriving-in-colorado/article/1548305
Not going well.
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Recently read Vivek Murthy's report on drug abuse. He points out how in the 90's medical experts were running around saying we "under treat" pain and that those who are legitimately treated with narcotics for real pain DO NOT get addicted. I even recall a Purdue drug rep (makers of oxycontin) telling myself and group of my colleagues the same thing. We all looked around at each other with disbelief that she could be serious when she makes this claim. Lawyers, politicians, and media types jumped on the bandwagon all pointing out with stoic outrage that doctors would just let people suffer for "fear of causing addiction" rather than use enough opioids . He points this out and I agree this was the case back then.
Now we know we were right to be careful all along and now the medical "experts", followed by pols like Vivek Murthy, media and lawyers are pointing out we contribute to the epidemic by prescribing too many narcs.
But now Murthy and others are telling us essentially drug abusers have no responsibility for they have a disease. We should treat them with medical care, with love, with more money for treatment, etc.
Now the pendulum is completely the opposite.
I agree with GM. These same poor creatures victims of bad genes, culture, or environmental issues are destroying others' lives, stealing from friends, relatives, destroying families, and all the rest.
My philosophy is that people do have FREE will. We are not the genetic robots like ants. Yes we can all make mistakes and do bad things. I can forgive anyone for that . But not if they continue to do the same. Drug addicts know right and wrong like the rest of us.
And yeah I know the films showing rats pushing levers for cocaine over food. Blah blah blah.
The answer for the treatment of pain lies in this kind of research:
http://www.internalmedicinenews.com/specialty-focus/pain/single-article-page/newly-isolated-spider-venom-compounds-could-relieve-chronic-pain/e1731b1c69dc14fb1a6fea8ab74d031d.html
My subject heading for this post is, "The left. Only Republicans have free will."
What I mean by this is according to the left only Republicans are to be held responsible for their alleged cruelty bigotry racism sexism and of course LBGTism. Everyone else is a victim. Even the low lives who spend there days running around robbing stealing and lying to get high.
Most people in jail are victims of oppression Islamic murderers just need jobs and all the rest. But those bastard Republicans......
Personal responsibility, honesty, integrity or the pursuit of it is out the window.
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Is now the war on hating of drug pushers and drug users:
"Yet the entire criminal justice system is now being branded as racist and oppressive. Disgraceful."
Yes. And now all drug users are to be treated with love compassion and billions in dollars for a whole new hoard of Wall Street invested business just foaming at the mouth to get in on the pending avalanche of tax dollars for the whole new emphasis on "treatment". As if there at this time NO treatments already available:
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/04/11/oreilly-blacks-committing-crime-proportion-groups-racial-component-blacks-prison/
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Actually I was not aware of this. I don't think I would label this "fueling" the epidemic but it certainly is another burden on us. Drug users are extraordinarily manipulative and "hip" on knowing all the "correct" things to say in order to try to get us to write scripts for them. There is no shortage of "hard luck" stories they tell us. Most experienced physicians learn these tricks and red flags.
But it is still not easy sorting out legitimate needs from the illicit ones. It is frankly impossible to be able to 100% perfect. I am also sure that some doctors have become so frightened to write prescriptions for pain meds that there policy is to write zero. I certainly do not agree with this. On the other hand I have seen a very small minority (thank God) write scripts for cash. These doctors are no different than heroin or cocaine dealers. It seems difficult to go after them even when it is plainly obvious what they are doing.
http://time.com/4292290/how-obamacare-is-fueling-americas-opioid-epidemic/
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As an aside I am now doing work wherein I get feedback from all the patients.
I seem to do well except occasional patients who want antibiotics for common colds. I go out of my way to explain why they would not work, more then 95% get better without antibiotics, risk of side effects, concerns for resistance to antibiotics becoming more prevalent for "over Use". No matter for some patients. They rate me poorly because I wouldn't prescribe the antibiotic; even if I negotiate with them to call back at no charge in the usual days recommended and if at that time they sound like it might help I will write a rx.
Not long ago I had a patient asking for a long term supply of decongestants. On questioning I found out she had a coronary stent and I then explained decongestants are contraindicated with someone with heart disease and indeed can be dangerous. They all have warnings about this on their labels. Especially is she wants to take it for a month or more for sinus allergies. (these meds are no longer sold in large quantities without a prescription because they are used to make methamphetamine though I did not suspect that here - OTOH never say never)
Naturally though I thought I was doing her a service by warning orf the danger and I offered other options instead. She gave me a very poor review.
I suppose it is like this in every "customer" service industry though. Can't please everyone.
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Contrast this to the US where he would be suing the taxpayers for "hate crime" and discrimination against his civil rights, get the marine fired and and shamed in the NY Times, the President would feign his outrage and Black Lives Matters and Rev Al would all be descending on the location where this picture was made demanding riots, firings, civil settlements, reforms and then MSNBC would cry police brutality 24/7, and that despicable racism is rampant in the US, and of course, lets not forget Hillary would be pretending this was all about the 'obvious racism' in front of Latino audiences while claiming she fought for Latino rights 'all her life' and probably throw in a few comments about needing to bring in more Latino immigrants if only we can get those evil hate mongering, war mongering Republicans out of the way for good measure:
http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/04/18/exclusive-mexican-cartel-hitmen-forced-wear-womens-lingere-after-capture/
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https://news.vice.com/article/ungass-portugal-what-happened-after-decriminalization-drugs-weed-to-heroin?utm_source=vicenewsfbads
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The article is interesting indeed! I noticed this following statement. So what I think this means is drug *use* but not sales is legal. So it is only partial decriminalization.
Heroin use is down but is that due to the availability of other drugs? NO IV drugs? and hence the drop in HIV? Are the drugs being sold legally by the State? I didn't see that. Well William F Buckley called for decriminalization in part to take the criminal element out.
I guess i could do a search and read more about this.
"Today, Portuguese authorities don't arrest anyone found holding what's considered less than a 10-day supply of an illicit drug — a gram of heroin, ecstasy, or amphetamine, two grams of cocaine, or 25 grams of cannabis. "
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Trafficking is still a crime in Portugal.
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Montezuma County sheriff: Legal pot attractive to drug traffickers
May 6 Mancos bust nabs Kentucky man, $18,000
By Jim Mimiaga
The Journal Article Last Updated: Thursday, May 12, 2016 10:37pm
Montezuma County Sheriff Steve Nowlin says an increase in drug trafficking in the area is a result of Colorado’s legalization of recreational marijuana.
“Colorado has become a source state for drugs, and that is causing more and more problems,” Nowlin told Montezuma County commissioners.
He said Colorado marijuana suppliers are being contacted by out-of-state drug dealers, including the Mexican cartel, to sell them large amounts of pot for out-of-state sale.
Two recent drug busts illustrate the problem, the sheriff’s office said.
On May 6, an undercover sting in Mancos led to an arrest of a Kentucky man and confiscation of a vehicle and $18,000 in cash.
According to the sheriff’s report, the suspect requested an undercover agent provide him with 10 pounds of marijuana and 1 ounce of cocaine and methamphetamine. He had driven from Kentucky for the purchase.
After the undercover narcotics sale concluded, the suspect was confronted by law enforcement, brandished a firearm and fled on foot. After a short foot and vehicle chase, he was found hiding under a vehicle and arrested.
“The suspect arrested in this case intended to transport and distribute the marijuana in Kentucky upon his return,” the police report claimed.
On March 18, a vehicle suspected to be trafficking cash related to narcotic sales and the Mexican drug cartel was stopped on U.S. Highway 160, and $22,000 in cash was found hidden in the vehicle.
According to the sheriff’s report, “the currency was packaged in a way commonly used by Mexican drug cartels to smuggle large amounts of cash.”
The cash seizure was turned over to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to investigate its origin.
The suspect had been released at the scene of the original stop pending evidence gathered during the search warrant. Case records are sealed as the investigation continues.
The sheriff said that the Highway 160 corridor is commonly used as a smuggling route for drug cartels to move narcotics and then transport the cash back to Mexico.
Recent legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado has added a twist to the situation.
“Blackmail is a real possibility for marijuana dispensaries here,” he said. “They are cutting into (the cartel’s) profits, who say it’s time to pay up. That puts everyone in jeopardy.”
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/05/13/when-smuggling-colo-pot-not-even-skys-limit/83623226/
Funny how this works.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/21/opinion/legalized-pot-free-trade.html?emc=edit_th_20160521&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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I cannot make up my mind whether marijuana should be legalized or not.
I suppose we may as well and study it though with the knowledge that if the costs turn out to be greater than the benefits that rolling back the legalized status will be nearly impossible.
As for medical marijuana I would prefer we get pharmaceutical companies to come up with drugs that are specific to particular cannabinoid receptors with specific actions with more targeted affects then just giving a prescription to say here go get high and relieve your depression, your pain , your anxiety, your PTSD blah blah blah.
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http://www.durangoherald.com/article/20160524/NEWS01/160529830/Police-say-marijuana-robbery-led-to-killing-of-Fort-Lewis-College-student
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http://www.durangoherald.com/article/20160524/NEWS01/160529830/Police-say-marijuana-robbery-led-to-killing-of-Fort-Lewis-College-student
Must be a fluke!
http://www.durangoherald.com/article/20150316/NEWS01/150319682/Shots-fired-at-Iron-Horse-Inn-
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http://www.durangoherald.com/article/20160524/NEWS01/160529830/Police-say-marijuana-robbery-led-to-killing-of-Fort-Lewis-College-student
Must be a fluke!
http://www.durangoherald.com/article/20150316/NEWS01/150319682/Shots-fired-at-Iron-Horse-Inn-
http://www.durangoherald.com/article/20150202/NEWS01/150209957/‘Customer’-at-pot-shop-arrested--
In the above case, the suspect made a serious attempt to disarm the female officer that first encountered him. It was a brutal fight for her to retain her sidearm.
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marijuana-robbery-led-to-killing-of-Fort-Lewis-College-student
Must be a fluke!
http://www.durangoherald.com/article/20150316/NEWS01/150319682/Shots-fired-at-Iron-Horse-Inn-
http://www.durangoherald.com/article/20150202/NEWS01/150209957/‘Customer’-at-pot-shop-arrested--
In the above case, the suspect made a serious attempt to disarm the female officer that first encountered him. It was a brutal fight for her to retain her sidearm.
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I'm not sure what to make of individual crime stories. I wonder whether these non-Colorado people were attracted in because of legalization. Some of it is counter-intuitive like gun laws, that criminals and thugs care what is legal.
Statistics seem to say crime is up:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-a-sabet-phd/crime-is-up-in-colorado-w_b_5663046.html
http://wspa.com/2015/10/30/how-is-colorado-doing-since-marijuana-legalization/
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/12/colorados_crime_rate_was_declining_until_they_legalized_marijuana.html
One point made is that since it is not legal federally, it is largely a cash business, inviting crime. A point I would add is that fracking added crime to North Dakota. Sudden change and an economic boom brings new people and those who can relocate that quickly and easily are not always the ones most grounded in good behavior.
From the American Thinker link:
(http://admin.americanthinker.com/images/bucket/2015-12/195690_5_.png)
Retail stores opened in 2014. This does not look good, but 1 or 2 data points is fairly short trend.
http://www.denverpost.com/2016/02/17/marijuana-legalization-unlikely-to-blame-for-denver-crime-increase/
Marijuana-related crimes in Denver make up less than 1 percent of all offenses counted in the Uniform Crime Report and less than a half-percent of all NIBRS offenses.
[I wonder if there is a definitional issue in that?]
US crime rate trend:
(https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRLt5UgSKkcQDgb-bq7llmZCJ5w00grQf5BAsE09ACUvuFu_ZZetG50qA)
How come we don't have 2015 data, and part of 2016?
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"How come we don't have 2015 data, and part of 2016?"
Because it's UGLY. I was recently in a gang class at Rocky Mountain HIDTA (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area) and the instructor was a former Maryland State Trooper that worked many specialized units and task forces in his career. He did a lot of work in Baltimore, including using Title III wiretaps against drug trafficking gangs, right when "The Wire" first came out.
On a break, I asked him what BPD and other agencies were doing after the riots. He responded pretty much only responding to drug seizures at Baltimore International Airport ot at the Ports. No more proactive investigations, just sheltering in place and waiting for retirement. So, the entire drug market in metro Baltimore is virtually legal. Funny enough, the crime rate has only skyrocketed.
Not just Baltimore, all across the US, this is happening.
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One of my patients, a retired police officer who had worked in Baltimore. He said the whole scenario was predictable.
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"I'm not sure what to make of individual crime stories. I wonder whether these non-Colorado people were attracted in because of legalization. Some of it is counter-intuitive like gun laws, that criminals and thugs care what is legal."
Colorado has seen a massive influx of bipedal garbage since the "green rush" started. All sorts of homeless with criminal histories and warrants. It has changed the character of the small town I was born and raised in, to be sure.
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My visits to Colo (Leadville and ski towns mostly) have not shown much change. Otherwise law abiding people (it would seem) walk into government controlled stores. Must have a DL to even see the products. Not much need to sell retail illegally because users can buy it so easily. Heavy users all have medical licenses, can you say "chronic pain"? They buy the same product, avoid much of the tax. I don't see much more open use of it on the sidewalks or ski areas than before or elsewhere. Of course I don't see the real crimes that happen out of plain view.
To my way of thinking, highly taxed and regulated is still not "legal". You can't buy it - except through them. You can't sell it. You can't grow it - beyond 6 plants. You can't take it out of state. We can look at arrests in neighboring states to see the product leaving Colo. Nebraska and Wyoming Highway patrol are on the lookout. (By private message I would be interested in what state you are in.) Out of state visitor can buy 1/4 oz per visit. In state, 1 oz. That isn't going to help a major dealer no matter how many visits made. If a legal grow operation sells out the back door illegally, I assume they face loss of license, are put out of business. I'm sure the cash register and the product inventories are targets for burglaries like a bank is, or liquor or jewelry store. If those were new industries, they would attract new criminal attention too.
My questions, after the newness of this passes:
Do people smoke or ingest more legally than if still illegal? Probably yes.
Do more people partake because it is legal? Probably yes.
Do drivers under the influence drive worse? That is still illegal but probably more widespread if usage is up.
Do marijuana users rape, murder, assault, burglarize more? I would think mostly no. They are just attracting a worse element from elsewhere.
Do more users of an entry, legal drug lead to more users of illegal heavier drugs, meth, heroine, etc.?
On the other side of it, will people who would otherwise have a criminal record for petty possession now have a clean record, get better jobs, etc.? Apparently no, if the crime rate is up.
Paraphrasing Gov. Hickenlooper, We don't have this figured out yet, don't follow our lead.
New medical marijuana law in MN: Must have terminal illness. Must be in final year of your terminal illness. I wonder if they will wait until the end of the year to prosecute, to see if you were telling the truth.
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Funny enough, the people with medical Marijuana cards in Colorado seemed to be 20-somethings with dreadlocks and the sort of terminal illness that allows you to snowboard 5 days a week.
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Funny enough, the people with medical Marijuana cards in Colorado seemed to be 20-somethings with dreadlocks and the sort of terminal illness that allows you to snowboard 5 days a week.
Might also want to cross check disability payments and food stamps with the snowboarder season pass rolls. Not a bad life... And now free health care as long as you don't work.
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Kind of unfair to blame Baltimore crime increase on anything other than the political leadership and the riots.
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Kind of unfair to blame Baltimore crime increase on anything other than the political leadership and the riots.
The Ferguson effect is of course, nationwide, but there are some places worse than others. Baltimore is paticularly bad for the reasons you cite above.
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**I wish people would read Reason magazine so they would know that legalization would get rid of the crime associated with marijuana cultivation.**
http://www.durangoherald.com/article/20160526/NEWS01/160529713/Deputies-seek-marijuana-thieves-in-home-invasion
Deputies seek marijuana thieves in home invasion
3 men sought in La Plata County crime
By Shane Benjamin Herald staff writer Article Last Updated: Thursday, May 26, 2016 12:37pm
Keywords: Crime, Marijuana,
A home invasion eerily similar to the one that occurred Tuesday in Durango was reported a week earlier in La Plata County, law enforcement said Thursday.
Related stories
Bail set for suspects in slaying of Fort Lewis College student
Police say marijuana robbery led to killing of Fort Lewis College student
In last week’s incident, three men reportedly entered a home in the 800 block of La Posta Road (County Road 213) south of Durango and stole $16,000 to $18,000 worth of marijuana, said Lt. Dan Bender, spokesman with the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office.
Upon entering the house, the suspects said they were Drug Enforcement Administration agents, handcuffed the two occupants, put pillow cases over their heads and released pepper spray, Bender said.
The robbers made a clean getaway.
“We have no suspect information at this time,” he said.
The residents were in legal possession of the marijuana, Bender said, suggesting they had a license of some kind. Efforts to reach the county Thursday for information about marijuana licenses that have been issued in that area were unsuccessful.
The victims, who were not injured, reported the incident at 3:37 a.m. Tuesday, May 17 – eight minutes earlier than this week’s home invasion and robbery, which was reported at 3:45 a.m. Tuesday.
Law enforcement officials don’t believe the incidents are connected.
“Even though there are some similarities, there’s no connection between the two cases,” Bender said.
In this week’s incident, three men entered a home in the SkyRidge subdivision, used zip ties to restrain the occupants, and planned to steal a “large amount” of marijuana, according to the Durango Police Department.
Something went wrong, and one of the suspects shot Samuel Xarius Gordon, 20, once in the abdomen. He died from his injuries.
Police found at least 10 pounds of marijuana inside the house.
Four suspects, including a getaway driver, were stopped and arrested while leaving the scene. They are being held on suspicion of first-degree murder.
The robbers from last week’s home invasion remain at large.
The Sheriff’s Office declined to release further information, saying the case remains under investigation. Anyone with information is asked to call Crimestoppers at 247-1112.
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Good story for a change:
http://www.businessinsider.com/duane-jackson-kashflow-interview-2016-5
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http://kdvr.com/2016/05/24/prosecutors-colorado-sees-increase-in-murders-motivated-by-marijuana/
Prosecutors: Colorado sees increase in homicides motivated by marijuana
POSTED 9:58 PM, MAY 24, 2016, BY DAVID MITCHELL, UPDATED AT 06:40AM, MAY 25, 2016
DENVER -- Some prosecutors in Colorado say they're noticing a new trend: An increase in murders motivated by marijuana.
In Aurora, the last 10 of 15 drug-related homicide cases were connected to marijuana.
Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler said it's not the big-time dealers who are involved. For the most part, it has been the small-time ones on the streets.
In Jefferson County, a burned-up car had a dead body inside, and investigators later determined the victim was harvesting marijuana nearly 100 miles away in Agate. When he was killed, he was stuffed into the trunk.
"There is increased crime, sometimes violent crime, associated with legalization of marijuana," Brauchler said. "That's not what you'd expect. You'd expect the harder-core drugs."
Man recent marijuana murder cases involve small-time street dealers getting killed for their marijuana and money.
"If cash is the only way to acquire marijuana, crime follows cash," Brauchler said.
Mark Chafant, 19, is one of many victims. He was allegedly trying to sell a bag of marijuana to some teenagers when he was shot and killed. Calvin Banks and two other juveniles were charged with the crime.
Other cases involve local dealers accused of killing tourists. Brauchler believes the legalization of marijuana is partly to blame for the rise in crime.
"It is easier for there to be black market in a legalized system than there was before," he said.
Brauchler said until law enforcement figures out a way to slow the flow of black market marijuana and the cash that comes with it, the marijuana-related death rate in the state will continue to grow.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/buprenorphine-suboxone-hhs_us_574f850fe4b0c3752dcc7ec3?utm_hp_ref=politics
"Under current federal regulations, doctors can treat only 30 patients at a time in the first year they’re certified to prescribe buprenorphine (commonly sold in the U.S. as Suboxone), a medication that can reduce opioid cravings and ward off harsh withdrawal symptoms. Doctors can receive authorization to treat as many as 100 patients in subsequent years. Access to the medication can be especially difficult in rural counties. Addicts may have to drive hundreds of miles to find a doctor who can prescribe them the life-saving medication."
Oh THIS IS TERRIBLE. The addicts may have to drive hundreds of miles to save their lives. Big deal . Poor babies.
I can tell you from experience they will drive THOUSANDS of miles to pick up drugs to get high or/and to sell and to party.
Look addicts have to WANT to quit. They have to make a decision. As usual the libs are going too far.
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http://thefreethoughtproject.com/legal-marijuana-killing-cartels/#wwaMPuK2hqopphGH.01
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http://thefreethoughtproject.com/legal-marijuana-killing-cartels/#wwaMPuK2hqopphGH.01
I have already debunked these loonatarian talking points. Mexican DTOs and other criminal organizations are involved in producing and dealing Colorado marijuana nationwide. Now, Mexican super lab meth gets traded for Colorado weed for distribution. It's got the cartels operating in Colorado.
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"Mexican DTOs and other criminal organizations are involved in producing and dealing Colorado marijuana nationwide."
GM
How? by funding front businesses? by bribery? political corruption at the local and state levels. How is a legitimate company cannot supply people?
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"Mexican DTOs and other criminal organizations are involved in producing and dealing Colorado marijuana nationwide."
GM
How? by funding front businesses? by bribery? political corruption at the local and state levels. How is a legitimate company cannot supply people?
http://www.weeklystandard.com/it-wasnt-supposed-to-work-this-way/article/2002373
It Wasn't Supposed to Work This Way
Foreign drug cartels come to Colorado.
MAY 23, 2016 | By DANIEL HALPER
Elaborate conversions of homes into pot factories require sophisticated--but illegal and dangerous--electrical infrastructure.
Credit: Pueblo County Sheriff's Office
Colorado Springs
Local authorities in Pueblo, just 40 miles south of Colorado Springs, were recently alerted by a vigilant resident to a possible illegal marijuana grow operation. Within days, on March 31, sheriff’s deputies from the Special Investigations Narcotics Section raided a single-family home that was in the process of being converted into a "grow house." Authorities discovered 127 marijuana plants, over $100,000 in growing equipment, and two Cuban nationals.
At first, no one seemed to take particular note of the individuals, Adriel Trujillo Daniel, 28, and Leosbel Ledesma Quintana, 41, who had recently moved to Colorado from Florida. They were arrested on felony drug charges but local authorities initially believed it was an isolated event.
But in the span of the next week and a half, local authorities would arrest at least four more individuals in the Pueblo area in similar cases, with similar backgrounds. All were recent transplants to the state. All were reported by neighbors or by other Pueblo residents who had witnessed suspicious activity. All were transforming residential homes into elaborate marijuana grow operations. And all were Cuban nationals.
"We have quite a bit of evidence" to believe they are members of "Cuban cartels," Pueblo sheriff Kirk Taylor says in an interview.
Local, state, and federal officials believe it's not just isolated to Pueblo. "It's across the entire state of Colorado," DEA assistant special agent in charge Kevin Merrill says. "It's just basically taken over the state, these residential grows."
Merrill likens the danger to that of meth labs in homes. Besides the criminal element, turning a house into a greenhouse invariably destroys the home. "The destruction of the homes and neighborhoods is even greater."
It is what Colorado Springs mayor John Suthers calls "the total nightmare" scenario, a byproduct of the state's recent legalization of first medicinal, and later recreational, marijuana.
People from out of town or even foreign countries move to Colorado and "buy or lease houses by the hundreds if not thousands," explains Suthers, who previously served 10 years as attorney general of the state.
The new residents then convert the residential homes to industrial grow operations. They're "basically trashing the houses because they're making so much freaking money they don't care, and growing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of plants in each house. And transporting it out of state to marijuana markets nationally and internationally. Literally. Marijuana is going back to Mexico from Colorado," asserts Suthers.
This criminal activity undermines a key argument used for legalizing marijuana in the first place. "One of the big arguments was, we're going to get the cartels out of the marijuana business. Because we're going to have all these legitimate businesses selling it. The Mexican cartels are going to dry up and go away," he says.
But now things are different. "Mexican cartels are no longer sending marijuana into Colorado, they're now growing it in Colorado and sending it back to Mexico and every place else."
With legalization of medicinal and recreational marijuana came the ability for locals to grow up to six plants at home—and sometimes up to 99, if they are a designated caregiver under the state law that legalized medicinal marijuana. "That has created an enforcement nightmare for the police," the state's former top cop says. "But it's going beyond that. Because of that aura of no enforcement, organized crime has come to Colorado to grow the marijuana."
"The surprising element is Cuban—Cuban cartels," Suthers says.
The DEA official insists the international element is increasing. "It's not just Cubans. We have Vietnamese-based organizations, Russian organized people. But we have seen a large influx of Cubans coming here. And we believe that all the organizations are here because we have a perceived lack of enforcement."
Thanks to the ubiquity of marijuana in the state of Colorado, when they come, "they don't really have to hide," says the DEA official. "Their [main] risk of arrest or prosecution is when they move the marijuana outside the state."
Another reason the problem is particular to Colorado—and not in the other 22 states and the District of Columbia that have some form of legal marijuana—is that Colorado has uniquely loose medical marijuana laws, which are meant to allow the ailing to grow substantial crops at home. "In Colorado, if you go to a physician and you get a recommendation, you can grow 99 plants, so if you live with four others, you can grow almost 500," says Merrill, the DEA official. He has never seen any sort of mid- to large-scale home operation actually being used for medical marijuana. It is one of "the unintended consequences of the medical marijuana" law, Merrill contends.
The state's marijuana czar appears to agree with Merrill's contention—and has called for further regulation. "There has been evidence that people will abandon the black market for a regulated market, even at higher prices. However, as long as there is both an economic incentive to grow in Colorado and ship out of state, as well as legal loopholes to allow unlicensed individuals to grow large quantities of marijuana, it will be difficult for law enforcement to shut down the black and gray markets," says Andrew Freedman, the coordinator of marijuana policy for Colorado. "Interestingly, these loopholes are found in our medical marijuana laws, not in our recreational marijuana laws."
Which suggests John Suthers may find widespread support when he soon proposes to the legislature to eliminate the influx of foreign crime by outlawing home grows. That's a law even the legal growers and sellers of marijuana will likely support.
"A few more of these huge busts, and there will be lots of them over the next several months," Suthers predicts, and "I think they're going to say, give me a break, let's clean that problem out."
Daniel Halper is online editor of The Weekly Standard.
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Thanks GM
Perhaps the answer to this is make marijuana legal in all 50 states. So simply using Colorado as a base for growing and then transporting across states lines to sell is not so profitable.
That said I am very ambivalent about legalized marijuana in the first place and also it's medicinal value which I think is very highly exaggerated by pot heads and those seeking profit.
OTOH we may as well try making it legal say for a defined period of time to see if it works overall.
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"Local authorities in Pueblo, just 40 miles south of Colorado Springs, were recently alerted by a vigilant resident to a possible illegal marijuana grow operation. Within days, on March 31, sheriff’s deputies from the Special Investigations Narcotics Section raided a single-family home that was in the process of being converted into a "grow house." Authorities discovered 127 marijuana plants, over $100,000 in growing equipment, and two Cuban nationals.
At first, no one seemed to take particular note of the individuals, Adriel Trujillo Daniel, 28, and Leosbel Ledesma Quintana, 41, who had recently moved to Colorado from Florida. They were arrested on felony drug charges but local authorities initially believed it was an isolated event."
Kind of an obvious point, what they were doing is NOT legal in Colorado, keywords illegal and felony drug charges.
100k of equipment involves heavy electric usage that is detectable in a rapid leap on the utility bill. If law enforcement doesn't know about it, Xcel Energy does. Large grow houses are visible on infrared aerial photography. (Freedom from Electric usage monitoring and aerial photography are two areas of liberty I assume we already lost!) 127 flowering plants have to breathe and 'exhale'. With the right breeze, the neighbors know they live next to a large floral garden.
You are allowed 6 plants (in Colo), which if done widely and sold or shared in moderation with friends (illegally) would serve to take the wind out of the sails of the cartels at least on this one drug. Beyond 6 plants, I would assume the electrical alterations required are all illegal and break residential zoning laws etc beyond the original violation. Like the mafia, they are also breaking tax laws.
G M would know better than me, but I think it is a law enforcement choice of how hard to hunt down illegal grow operations and prosecute them. My main point is that what is described here is no more legal in Colo than in a non-'legalized' state.
There is a contention between state and federal laws in Colo. What the state should do in compromise to the dispute is hand over all the activity that goes beyond the limits of Colorado law to the Feds. Use the personal level legalization as a trap for cartel activity, especially the inter-state and international types. I don't think Colo wants to be safe haven for this. The question that still remains is whether our open border Feds want to enforce or prosecute the laws either.
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"You are allowed 6 plants (in Colo), which if done widely and sold or shared in moderation with friends (illegally) would serve to take the wind out of the sails of the cartels at least on this one drug. "
Oh.
So it is a matter of scale. Well then what is the point of drug cartels moving to Colorado then?
May as well stay in Florida and where ever else they are now?
Question is may we may as well make it legal Federally?
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"Oh. So it is a matter of scale. Well then what is the point of drug cartels moving to Colorado then?"
I suppose that because it is only a matter of scale, neighbors getting a whiff of it might be less inclined to make a complaint of it. G M might know better whether any collection of these anecdotal stories means there is more activity coming in than otherwise would. One of his points is that 'legalization' did not make the illegal activities cease. I think the perception of legalization is giving the state a friendlier perception attracting these types, cartels and young males not tied to the traditional responsibilities of job, marriage and mortgage. But if law enforcement is up to the task, that lure becomes a trap. Serving a federal felony time in Colo won't be much different or better than serving it in Florida or wherever else.
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"Oh. So it is a matter of scale. Well then what is the point of drug cartels moving to Colorado then?"
I suppose that because it is only a matter of scale, neighbors getting a whiff of it might be less inclined to make a complaint of it. G M might know better whether any collection of these anecdotal stories means there is more activity coming in than otherwise would. One of his points is that 'legalization' did not make the illegal activities cease. I think the perception of legalization is giving the state a friendlier perception attracting these types, cartels and young males not tied to the traditional responsibilities of job, marriage and mortgage. But if law enforcement is up to the task, that lure becomes a trap. Serving a federal felony time in Colo won't be much different or better than serving it in Florida or wherever else.
It's now a matter of looking for a needle in a pile of needles. The sheer numbers overwhelm Colorado's law enforcement capacity at this point.
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http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nevada/more-incidents-workplace-pot-use-reported-after-legalization-colorado-expert-says
Unexpectedly!
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Testing is difficult and fraught with legal implications due to the prolonged positive results from testing in smokers.
Here is one site already warning and notifying people in my opinion on how to beat a test:
http://www.leafscience.com/2014/04/22/how-long-thc-stay-system/
Therefore someone could ALWAYS use a Hillary like defense, "test is positive" because I smoked when I was off over weekend". End of story.
I suppose if employer could document odor on clothing or breath etc. but that becomes she said he said or subjective and becomes a legal nightmare.
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It's now a matter of looking for a needle in a pile of needles. The sheer numbers overwhelm Colorado's law enforcement capacity at this point.
Very interesting. And no turning back.
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I never knew there is a DEA museum:
https://www.deamuseum.org/ccp/opium/index.html
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This is exactly what I figured would happen with the love-a-thon with addiction:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/addiction-treatment-industry-ethics_us_575f3fa5e4b0e4fe5143865c?section=
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This is weird. Paying with drug money?
And why is this drug lord still so rich to begin with?
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mexican-drug-lord-pay-families-victims-including-murdered-us-agent-1m-1601096?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=rss&utm_content=/rss/yahoous&yptr=yahoo
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Please post in Mexico thread as well.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/09/stoned-drivers-are-a-lot-safer-than-drunk-ones-new-federal-data-show/?utm_term=.b2c2707a8244
:lol:
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http://livingresistance.com/2017/02/22/president-trump-legalizing-drugs-will-end-violent-cartels/
http://reason.com/blog/2017/02/23/white-house-expects-greater-enforcement
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https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/04/american-carnage?utm_source=jolt&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Jolt%203/13/2017&utm_term=Jolt
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From above posted article:
***Today’s opioid epidemic is, in part, an unintended consequence of the Reagan era. America in the 1980s and 1990s was guided by a coalition of profit-seeking corporations and concerned traditional communities, both of which had felt oppressed by a high-handed government.***
Get the F out of here. Trying to pin this on Reagan now. Give me a break
It was not all due to Purdue pharmaceuticals and oxyconin either. Many academics and attorneys and doctors where all pushing for the concept that it is more unethical to not treat "pain"
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Too bad BBG isn't here to tell us how if a 5 year old can't buy black tar heroin out of a gumball machine, then we aren't really free.
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BBG's view is welcome anytime. Personal responsibility is still a factor, not just legalization, criminalization.
Trump and the Feds need to do something about federal law not matching state laws (and state constitutions) and I doubt if sending troops into these (swing) states is the best answer.
Colorado's law partly failed and partly succeeded. Now it's 4 or 5 states.
We don't need legal heroin or legal meth or legal cocaine or five year olds using drugs. But we also don't need coercive paternalism to be the law of the land for all personal behavior, soda, french fries, etc.
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"BBG's view is welcome anytime."
Heartily concur. He is intelligent, thoughtful, and well-informed.
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BBG's view is welcome anytime. Personal responsibility is still a factor, not just legalization, criminalization.
Trump and the Feds need to do something about federal law not matching state laws (and state constitutions) and I doubt if sending troops into these (swing) states is the best answer.
Colorado's law partly failed and partly succeeded. Now it's 4 or 5 states.
We don't need legal heroin or legal meth or legal cocaine or five year olds using drugs. But we also don't need coercive paternalism to be the law of the land for all personal behavior, soda, french fries, etc.
BBG would argue that attempting to use law enforcement to keep heroin from the five year old is a failed policy that should be abandoned.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/05/17/legalized-marijuana-turns-colorado-resort-town-into-homeless-magnet.html
Legalized marijuana turns Colorado resort town into homeless magnet
By Joseph J. Kolb Published May 17, 2017 Fox News
From his sidewalk vantage point in front of an outdoor equipment store in downtown Durango, Colo., Matthew Marinseck has seen a transformation in this mountain resort town.
The picturesque town near the New Mexico border, once a vibrant, upscale community dotted with luxury hotels, is being overrun by panhandlers – thanks, in part, to the legalization of marijuana.
The town suddenly became a haven for recreational pot users, drawing in transients, panhandlers and a large number of homeless drug addicts, according to officials and business owners. Many are coming from New Mexico, Arizona and even New York.
“Legalized marijuana has drawn a lot of kids here from other states and the impact has not all been good,” said Marinseck, 58, while holding a cardboard sign asking for “help.”
Several people holding cardboard signs could be seen along the streets of Durango now. Some just ask for marijuana, or imply that’s what they want with a photo of a green pot leaf. But it’s not just pot users being drawn to Durango.
“[The] city really started freaking out when they started seeing needles in the streets” said Marinseck, a self-avowed former hippie.
Caleb Preston, a store manager in a gift shop and a former “street entertainer,” said the homeless and panhandling issue in Durango has gotten out of hand since the state legalized marijuana.
“Just this year there has been a major influx of people between 20 to 30 who are just hanging out on the streets,” Preston said. “The problem is while many are pretty mellow, there are many more who are violent.”
Preston said he’s become accustomed to kicking out vagrants who perch themselves in front of his store.
“Most of the kids here are from out of state, and I would say it has a lot to do with the legalized pot,” said Preston.
He said he’s also noticed an uptick in crime in the area. Shoplifting, he said, has become a major problem in Durango and business owners are becoming fed up.
The city’s Business Improvement District held a meeting May 12 to review the results of a survey completed by local businesses on how to address the panhandling issue, which has become an urgent matter as the city enters its busy summer tourist season.
Among the suggestions were stricter laws for panhandling and loitering, strategic placement of obstacles such as bistro tables and flower boxes to discourage sitting and lying on sidewalks. They also proposed launching a campaign discouraging tourists to give money to the pan handlers. A rudimentary effort is already in place with handwritten signs encouraging donations be made to charities that help the homeless rather than handing panhandlers’ money directly.
Related Image
durango pot charityExpand / Collapse
A hand-scrawled sign asking people to donate to homeless groups rather than to panhandlers directly. (Joe Kolb/Fox News)
Tim Walsworth, executive director of Durango Business Improvement District, said he is frustrated. He said he has to walk a tightrope between the civil liberties of the homeless population and the reputation and attractiveness of the downtown area, which for years has been a hot tourist destination.
“We’re hoping to discourage the transient and professional panhandlers that are impacting the perceived safety and cleanliness of our downtown, as well as help those who are truly in need,” Walsworth said in a statement.
Conspicuously absent from the busy downtown: The presence of police patrols.
Durango Police Chief Kamran Afzal said he has only been on the job for a month and is still assessing where the needs are in the town. With a department of 50 officers and only five per shift who cover 20 square miles, the challenge is daunting, he said. He said the property crime rate is 12 percent higher than the national average.
FEDERAL CRACKDOWN ON LEGAL WEED COMING?
“At this point, since I’m new here, I can’t definitively say this number is related to our homeless population,” Afzal said.
But he would not go so far as to say that the rise in panhandlers is directly attributed to the legalization of marijuana.
Related Image
durango pot business districtExpand / Collapse
Durango, Colo. is a vibrant, mountain resort town. (Joe Kolb/Fox News)
“We are going to look at the behavior of individuals who cause discomfort for residents and visitors,” he said, through a Community Engagement Team. But, he said, the tricky part is figuring out when panhandlers cross the line to criminals.
Panhandlers like Marinseck may not exactly pose a threat to pedestrians shopping at the boutiques, souvenir stores or microbreweries in downtown Durango. But they don’t exactly evoke the wholesome image the business district wants to project.
Still, the city recently settled a lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union allowing the homeless population to panhandle.
A clerk at a local hotel who declined to give her name told Fox News that since marijuana has become legal in Colorado, the quality of life in Durango has worsened.
She said she’s frequently harassed when she goes to the supermarket or local WalMart. Some of the local parks, she said, have been taken over by the homeless.
“I’ve lived here my entire life and don’t feel safe here anymore,” the clerk said. “If it wasn’t so beautiful here, I would probably move.”
Joseph J. Kolb is a regular contributor to Fox News.
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"the city [Durango] recently settled a lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union allowing the homeless population to panhandle."
Panhandling might be the biggest growth industry under Obama. It's the last business to fight off taxes and regulation. Sadly I wish the IRS would monitor it the way they treat everyone that does productive work. Too bad people give, with no information about who or for what purpose.
The fracking boom in North Dakota experienced some of those same problems. In that case they came for the high paying laborer jobs. But the people who came tended to be male, young, not burdened with responsibilities like college, wife, mortgage. Young males without family responsibilities don't have the best behaviors. The crime rate went up accordingly, drugs, prostitution, bar fights etc.
My point with the comparison is that it is not necessarily the pot, but the people that pot legalization attracts. Colorado is the cool place to relocate for many. Amazingly beautiful, great climate, wonderful recreation. Legal marijuana. Housing prices have doubled in the decade I have been involved there. The 'crash' was of no significance. http://www.denverpost.com/2017/03/30/northern-front-range-epicenter-rising-home-unaffordability/
I wonder what the effect in Colorado will be with more states legalizing.
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http://kdvr.com/2017/03/03/black-market-marijuana-business-booming/
Black market marijuana business booming in Colorado
POSTED 6:20 PM, MARCH 3, 2017, BY CARISA SCOTT, UPDATED AT 07:52PM, MARCH 3, 2017
Black market marijuana business booming
DENVER -- The Denver Police Department said Colorado’s illegal marijuana business is thriving.
"The black market marijuana is booming," Cmdr. James Henning said.
Last year, Denver police arrested 242 people for illegally growing, selling or extracting marijuana. Henning's team seized 8,913 pounds of marijuana last year.
“That’s driven simply by the old laws of supply and demand. People are buying marijuana for a low price and buying low and selling it high," he said.
Local police work with the Drug Enforcement Administration to eradicate illegal grows across the state, including several outdoor cultivation sites in Pueblo, Mesa, El Paso and Garfield counties.
Pictures released by the DEA and police show hundreds of potted, pruned and THC-producing plants confiscated on the black market. Police say the illegal business is not only booming, it’s increasingly more dangerous.
“We are finding more weapons, They are a little edgier. We know that in that black market, there’s a lot of ripoffs and robberies going on, but nobody reports it to us because you don’t report that you are robbed while doing an illegal activity," Henning said.
Law enforcement said the illegal market is flooded with high-quality Colorado medicinal marijuana. Red card users can buy 2 ounces a day for $100 to $150. Users can turn around and sell an ounce for $350 to $400.
Statistics from state patrol agencies across the country show Colorado marijuana mainly goes to seven states, with 65 percent of the weed coming from Denver.
In just three years, law enforcement across the country have seized about 4.5 tons of marijuana from Colorado.
Ads on Craigslist promise “safe dealings” and “overnight delivery” to out-of-state buyers. Police say it’s all buying and selling on the black market.
“We also have many local investigations anywhere from your small Craigslist operation where a guy is on Craigslist saying or offering you marijuana right now or I can ship marijuana anywhere in the United States. It’s all 100 percent illegal,” said Henning.
Users said Colorado’s marijuana market might have stopped low-quality weed from coming into the state, but it has opened the door for millions worth of top quality illegal weed to be sold tax free outside the state.
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http://kfor.com/2017/06/28/colorado-announces-largest-pot-bust-since-drug-was-legalized/
Colorado announces largest pot bust since drug was legalized
POSTED 5:15 PM, JUNE 28, 2017, BY AP WIRE AND KATRINA BUTCHER
DENVER – Dozens of Coloradans are accused of running a marijuana trafficking ring in which they pretended to be growing weed for sick people but illegally shipped the drug out of state.
A Denver grand jury has indicted 62 people and 12 businesses in a case that involved federal and state agents executing nearly 150 search warrants in 33 homes and 18 warehouses in the Denver area.
The indictment was returned June 9 and announced Wednesday by state Attorney General Cynthia Coffman.
According to KDVR, two former Bronco players, Erik Pears and Joel Dreesesen, fell victim to the trafficking ring. They thought they were “investing in a legal grow.”
Around 2,600 illegally cultivated marijuana plants and another 4,000 pounds of marijuana were seized during the operation.
The enterprise was producing more than 100 pounds a month of illegal pot for shipment to Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma.
Coffman says it is the largest illegal marijuana operation since Colorado legalized the drug in 2014. She says that “the black market for marijuana … continues to flourish.”
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Correction: Taxed and regulated in the government takeover, not legalized - or this wouldn't be illegal.
State tax revenue $200 million. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/marijuana-tax-revenue-hit-200-million-in-colorado-as-sales-pass-1-billion-2017-02-10 Not counting the big money jump in tourism, tax on tourism and inward migration. Who's addicted to it now?
Quoting a wise man (G M), finding illegal grow operations in Colorado is "like finding a needle in a needle stack"
"4,000 pounds of marijuana were seized" Will they donate this back to the schools to help children in need?
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I think we need more Duarte tactics on the pushers and scammers:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/04/the-heroin-crisis-in-trumps-backyard-215328
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A newscast supporting a point made here recently by G M:
http://video.foxnews.com/v/5500645764001/?#sp=show-clips
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A newscast supporting a point made here recently by G M:
http://video.foxnews.com/v/5500645764001/?#sp=show-clips
Unpossible! Libertarian doctrine says that only good things come from drug legalization!
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"...Working but unable to afford the rising cost of housing."
For another thread, why is the cost of housing going up?
Homeless but stoned. A consensual transaction.
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"...Working but unable to afford the rising cost of housing."
For another thread, why is the cost of housing going up?
Homeless but stoned. A consensual transaction.
Well, you've got to have priorities!
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http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/07/oregon-poised-to-decriminalize-meth-cocaine-and-heroin/
Oregon Poised To Decriminalize Meth, Cocaine And Heroin
Photo of Anders Hagstrom
ANDERS HAGSTROM
12:59 PM 07/07/2017
The Oregon legislature passed two bills Thursday decriminalizing small amounts of six hard drugs, including cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and ecstasy.
The first of the two bills now headed to the governor’s desk, HB 2355, decriminalizes possession of the drugs so long as the offender has neither a felony nor more than two prior drug convictions on record, according to the Lund Report. The second, HB 3078, reduces drug-related property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.
Republican State Sen. Jackie Winters claimed the war on drugs as it currently exists amounts to “institutional racism” due to how more frequently minorities are charged with drug crimes than whites.
“There is empirical evidence that there are certain things that follow race. We don’t like to look at the disparity in our prison system,” Winters said during a hearing. “It is institutional racism. We can pretend it doesn’t exist, but it does.”
The second bill reduces mandatory minimum sentences for many property crimes and also increases the number of previous convictions necessary for a felony charge. It provides $7 million in funding for diversion programs to help lower Oregon’s prison population.
Winters and other supporters of the bills argue the answer to America’s drug crisis is treatment, not prison time.
“It would be like putting them in the state penitentiary for having diabetes,” Democratic Rep. Mitch Greenlick told the Lund Report. “This is a chronic brain disorder and it needs to be treated this way.”
Follow Anders on Twitter
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https://durangoherald.com/articles/174148-details-emerge-in-lightner-creek-shooting-death
Details emerge in Lightner Creek shooting death
Victim reportedly lunged at suspect before being killed
By Shane Benjamin Herald Staff Writer
Friday, July 21, 2017 5:01 PM Updated 13 hours 49 minutes ago
Follow @shane_benjamin
A Durango man who was shot and killed during a marijuana robbery apparently lunged at the gunman before being shot in the chest, according to an arrest affidavit made public this week.
The robbery occurred about 11:35 a.m. May 14 in the Lightner Creek Mobile Home Park, 907 County Road 207 (Lightner Creek Road), a few miles west of Durango.
If proven, it is at least the fourth home-invasion robbery involving marijuana in the past three years in La Plata County. Three of the robberies resulted in shooting deaths.
The most recent case involves three suspects from Texas – Michael Jones, 19, Kevin Goff, 27, and Alysse Rios, 19, who have all been charged with first-degree murder.
Jones is suspected of firing the gun that killed David Gaytan, 34, according to the arrest affidavit.
The La Plata County Sheriff’s Office summarized its conclusions about what may have happened inside the home based on several interviews with witnesses, including two who were inside the house at the time of the shooting.
According to investigators, the trio set up an illegal marijuana transaction and intended to rob the people of the marijuana rather than purchase it.
Rios was seen sitting in a black sedan with the engine running before the shooting, according to the affidavit. The vehicle was backed into the driveway, as if the driver had planned a quick getaway, according to the affidavit.
Goff and Jones were inside the home during the robbery. Jones pointed a gun at those inside the home and demanded the victims empty their pockets and hand over their wallets, the affidavit says. Goff grabbed the marijuana.
“This again indicates premeditation and shows there was no intent to actually purchase the drugs, and there was complicity with the two males to rob the victims,” the affidavit says.
At some point, Gaytan lunged toward Jones, and Jones fired his weapon, hitting Gaytan in the chest.
CPR efforts were unsuccessful.
Goff and Jones fled the residence, entered the car and were seen speeding away.
Witnesses obtained a partial license plate number, and an off-duty police officer observed a black sedan speeding northbound through the intersection at U.S. Highway 550/160 and Camino del Rio. Dispatchers aired a vehicle description, and the vehicle was found later that evening on U.S. Highway 50 near Salida.
A Colorado State Patrol trooper arrested all three suspects without incident.
“(The trooper) said all the suspects were very cooperative during the contact,” the affidavit says.
All three are scheduled for preliminary hearings Sept. 27, at which time prosecutors must present probable cause to convince a judge that a crime was committed and the defendants are connected to it.
All three are being held at the La Plata County Jail.
shane@durangoherald.com
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" Oregon Poised To Decriminalize Meth, Cocaine And Heroin "
Why not make all this legal
and tax it like alcohol cannabis, tobacco, soda and gambling and while they are at it prostitution.
Just get it over with rake in more dough and buy more votes.
and pay off the Dem voters for Gods sake. :x
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" Oregon Poised To Decriminalize Meth, Cocaine And Heroin "
Why not make all this legal
and tax it like alcohol cannabis, tobacco, soda and gambling and while they are at it prostitution.
Just get it over with rake in more dough and buy more votes.
and pay off the Dem voters for Gods sake. :x
Although this isn't the thread for it, I think using the rural Nevada model is the best policy regarding prostitution.
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Remember when Buckley argued for legalization?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/383913/war-drugs-lost-nro-staff
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http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/marijuana-crackdown-session-coming/2017/07/23/id/803262/
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https://www.axios.com/many-americans-are-too-drugged-out-to-work-2467304330.html
No problem, right?
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Yes, this is the LA times writing about supply side economics.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-high-marijuana-taxes-could-keep-black-1509381838-htmlstory.html
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Where is Brock to call them JV team?
we may need to go after these thugs like we are going after ISIS
http://www.chron.com/news/us-world/border-mexico/article/New-report-shows-how-Mexican-cartels-are-12320888.php
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Where is Brock to call them JV team?
we may need to go after these thugs like we are going after ISIS
http://www.chron.com/news/us-world/border-mexico/article/New-report-shows-how-Mexican-cartels-are-12320888.php
We really need to.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/magazine/the-coast-guards-floating-guantanamos.html?emc=edit_th_20171126&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/magazine/the-coast-guards-floating-guantanamos.html?emc=edit_th_20171126&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
Awwwww! Pobrecitos!
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https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/13/marijuana-and-nicotine-vaping-popular-among-teens-according-to-study.html
Nearly one-quarter of teens are using pot
Of eighth, 10th and 12th graders surveyed, 24 percent said they've used marijuana in the past year, according to research from the University of Michigan.
Fewer high school seniors disapprove of using marijuana and see "great risk" in smoking it occasionally.
Students are vaping marijuana and nicotine. Critics warn it's not just the flavors but the sleek and discreet design of some e-cigarette brands, such as market leader JUUL, that attract kids.
Angelica LaVito
Published 13 Hours Ago Updated 2 Hours Ago
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Nearly one quarter of teens are using marijuana, according to a new survey.
Of eighth, 10th and 12th graders surveyed, 24 percent said they've used the drug in the past year, according to research from the University of Michigan. The 1.3 percent increase is the first significant rise in seven years.
The increase in teens using marijuana comes as more states legalize pot for medical and recreational use.
This year, 14.1 percent of high school seniors said they see "great risk" in smoking marijuana occasionally, down from 17.1 percent last year. Also, 64.7 percent said they disapprove of using the drug regularly, down from 68.5 percent last year.
Those statistics indicate marijuana use among teens could continue to grow, the study's principal investigator Richard Miech said.
"It should raise eyebrows," Miech said. "And people should be alert to the possibility that marijuana is about to launch."
Marijuana's popularity has flipped with cigarettes', the survey found. The percent of seniors smoking cigarettes daily has plummeted to 4.2 percent from 24.7 percent at its peak in 1997. Meanwhile, marijuana use has increased to 5.9 percent from its lowest point in 1992.
Vaping has become a popular mechanism for using marijuana and nicotine. Within the past year, 1 in 10 high school seniors reported vaping marijuana, and 19 percent of them said they vaped nicotine, according to the survey.
Percent
Daily smoking rate among high schoolseniors has plummeted over the past 20years
1995
2000
2005
2010
2015
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
Source: University of Michigan
"We're certainly surprised by (the number of seniors vaping nicotine), and it speaks to how popular these devices have become and how this represents a new concern for public health officials, parents and others that take care of or care about teens," said Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the survey.
The findings are likely to give ammunition to public health advocates who have argued sleek devices and unique flavors are appealing to kids. The already fiery debate over e-cigarettes received even more fuel this summer when the Food and Drug Administration delayed impending regulations on the products until 2022.
Anti-smoking advocates like the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids argue flavors entice adolescents. The 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act prohibited cigarettes from containing characterizing flavors, excluding menthol. Yet they're pervasive in vaping products.
Critics warn it's not just the flavors but the sleek and discreet design of some e-cigarette brands, such as market leader JUUL, that attract kids.
Percent
More teens are vaping
6.6%6.6%
3.5%3.5%
1.6%1.6%
5.3%5.3%
13.1%13.1%
8.2%8.2%
16.6%16.6%
11%11%
4.9%4.9%
9.7%9.7%
8th Graders
10th Graders
12th Graders
Any vaping
Nicotine
Marijuana
"Just flavoring"
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
Source: University of Michigan
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pointed to the devices when he called for the FDA reverse its decision.
"We're very concerned about anecdotal reports that JUUL has become a trendy popular new product with kids and young adults, and that's the kind of product the FDA ought to be reviewing now to see if it is attracting kids. Waiting four years to do that will likely be too late if these products do grow in popularity," said the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids' vice president of communications Vince Willmore.
Like other e-cigarette makers, JUUL says its products are meant for adult smokers who are looking to switch from conventional products. In response to reports of adolescents using its products, the company has invested in education and prevention efforts such as "secret shoppers" who test to make sure retailers are not selling to minors.
"It's a really, really important issue," said JUUL Labs' chief administration officer Ashley Gould. "We don't want kids using our products."
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/us/politics/marijuana-legalization-justice-department-prosecutions.html?emc=edit_na_20180104&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
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every time I try to think the pot thing through I wind up concluding legalization is not good. it will promote even more use and how in any way is that a good thing?
while there are likely some true medicinal affects of some cannabinoids most of the claims are clearly all BS .
since legalization will spread due to the profit and taxes raised I hope Walmart and Amazon get into it and crush the hippies and other druggies out of the market.
:wink:
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http://www.oklahoman.com/article/5571976?access=271bc4bd30590a3723082980c3da7fef
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http://ushealthtimes.com/scientist-reveal-what-cannabis-does-to-your-bones/
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http://www.bbc.com/news/health-41608984
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https://durangoherald.com/articles/219917-illegal-pot-busts-are-booming-across-colorados-forests-are-cartels-to-blame
Illegal pot busts are booming across Colorado’s forests. Are cartels to blame?
By David O. Williams As Originally Reported by Colorado Politics
Sunday, April 22, 2018 5:03 AM
Deep in Colorado’s national forests, shadowy teams of people are clear-cutting underbrush, trenching hillsides for cultivation, diverting and damming streams to create reservoirs and using chemicals that are killing fish and wildlife.
They leave behind animal carcasses, garbage and human waste, polluting mountain streams.
And the destruction is spreading.
In a state where growing and selling cannabis have been legal for years, illegal marijuana grow operations on national forests have been on the rise for at least the last three years, officials say.
In 2017, 71,000 pot plants were eradicated in the U.S. Forest Service’s five-state Rocky Mountain Region.
That’s up from 45,000 plants in 2016, 23,000 plants in 2015 and just 3,000 plants in 2014 – the vast majority in Colorado.
Last October, Forest Service officials, the Fremont County sheriff’s department and other agencies seized 4,200 marijuana plants growing on the San Isabel National Forest and arrested four suspects living in the U.S. illegally.
The month before, a raid of a five-acre site near Carbondale on the White River National Forest netted 2,700 pot plants. And in July 2017, 7,400 plants were seized from two Pueblo County sites on the San Isabel National Forest.
All this has some lawmakers sounding an alarm that foreign drug cartels are behind the problem, although officials on the ground say evidence of widespread cartel involvement is lacking.
And despite popular notions of pot plantations guarded by heavily armed criminals and boobytraps, the region’s top U.S. Forest Service law enforcement official says illegal grows on public lands pose more of an environmental threat than a public-safety one.
“The time I’ve been here, fortunately, we haven’t had any armed confrontations, but we’re always prepared for that just like any law enforcement officer going to serve a search warrant on a house in a city environment,” Kent Delbon, special agent in charge for the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Region, told Colorado Politics. “Our biggest concern really is the environmental component.”
The Lakewood-based region includes Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas.
Delbon has been its top special agent for two years, and before that he served for six years as an assistant special agent for the Forest Service in California after stints with both the Los Angeles Police Department and the U.S. Secret Service.
In his eight total years with the Forest Service, Delbon said he’s helped eradicate more than 100 illegal grow sites, and has never once seen a boobytrap.
“It’s not like you have snipers out waiting for people or law enforcement to come into the grow site,” Delbon said. “Fortunately, the experience I’ve had, even in California, the growers themselves are typically the low worker bees. (When a raid happens), they want to get out of there and avoid arrest.”
Most grows, for obvious reasons, are way off the beaten track and far from recreation areas, campgrounds and marked trails, Delbon added. “So, for the vast majority of the public recreating on our posted trails, the risk is very low.”
Still, concern runs high about illegal grows on public land and their impact.
More illegal plants are being discovered and destroyed on Forest Service land in Colorado since voters approved growing, selling and consuming recreational marijuana with the passage of Amendment 64 in 2012, officials say. All of those activities are still illegal on national forests, Bureau of Land Management acreage and other federally owned land, which covers about a third of the state.
Some Republican politicians from Colorado have taken notice of the increase, linking the spike in illegal grows to Mexican drug cartels. That narrative aligns with the current push by President Donald Trump and others for increased border security.
“Our area’s federal lands have been exploited by drug cartels who use the land for illegal marijuana grows,” U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colorado Springs, said in a recent press release. “These sites are often protected by heavily armed cartel members who pose a serious safety risk to those who utilize our public lands for recreational activities, as well as for Forest Service and BLM staff.”
A spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Cortez, whose 3rd Congressional District includes large areas of public lands on the Western Slope, told Colorado Politics that “while we don’t know who is responsible for all of the grows, ... the congressman has met with representatives from the Drug Enforcement Agency and local police officials to discuss the prevalence of cartel activity in the 3rd Congressional District and believes it is imperative that we secure the U.S.-Mexico border to stop the illegal flow of drugs and money.”
But while federal and local law enforcement officials acknowledge safety concerns stemming from the growing pot trend, some say it’s premature to make the leap to assume widespread cartel activity is behind it.
Eagle County Sheriff James Van Beek – whose county includes huge swaths of White River National Forest, the most visited national forest in the nation – said no illegal grows in Eagle County have been linked to cartels.
“There have been trends throughout the U.S. where it is believed ... the cartels are behind many of the major grows. ... Here in Eagle County, we suspected a couple may have been, but cannot confirm that to be the case,” Van Beek said.
Back in 2015, then-U.S. Attorney for Colorado John Walsh, an Obama administration appointee, said: “We have concern (that) ... drug trafficking organizations from Mexico are involved in growing marijuana here in Colorado. Outside drug trafficking organizations may come to Colorado with the notion it may go unnoticed because of the amount of marijuana activity.”
Since Trump took office, Bob Troyer, an Obama-administration holdover, has been serving as U.S. attorney in Colorado.
Asked now about the illegal-grow situation, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office would not comment on any cartel connections.
“The prosecution of marijuana grown on federal public land has been, and remains, an enforcement priority for the United States Attorney’s Office,” the spokesman said in an email statement. “We work closely with our partners in the state and federal government to prosecute these cases.”
In a review of court files from several prosecutions stemming from raids in 2017, Colorado Politics found examples of Mexican nationals working in coordination with outside groups to grow pot on public lands. In plea agreements, growers described moving to the state to be “weed farmers” for $200 a day, while being supplied by and connected to trafficking organizations.
And while several nationals of Mexico and other Latin American countries have been arrested and successfully prosecuted for growing marijuana on Colorado’s public lands, it’s unclear how many of those grow operations have connections to organized Mexican drug cartels.
“Generally, we find that it’s a mix, whether it’s local residents or maybe some other group that comes into the area, but to specifically tie it back to cartels, that’s probably not appropriate to make those connections at this point,” Delbon, the Forest Service agent, said.
Neither Delbon nor Van Beek would speculate on the nature of the black market for illegal grows on public lands and whether the pot is being sold out of state. The Denver office of the Drug Enforcement Administration did not return a call seeking comment.
Of the five states that make up the 40-million-acre Rocky Mountain Region of the Forest Service, only Colorado has legalized marijuana for either medical or recreational use. But nationally, eight states with huge tracts of federal land — from Alaska to Nevada – have voted to legalize pot for recreational use. And the majority of states have approved medical use.
Delbon said he can’t weigh in yet on whether there’s a correlation between Colorado legalizing recreational marijuana in 2012 and the increased number of plants being illegally grown on federal lands in the state.
“Maybe the better answer for me is it’s too soon to tell,” Delbon said.
In any event, while the number of plants is going up on public lands, Delbon said law enforcement resources have stayed about the same in recent years, with one Forest Service officer assigned to each ranger district and a special agent assigned to each of Colorado’s eight national forests.
Delbon declined to provide the exact number of Forest Service agents, but one of those eight national forests – the Pike-San Isabel National Forest and Cimarron and Comanche National Grasslands, administered jointly — has six ranger districts plus the two grasslands encompassing 3 million acres. That’s a lot of territory to cover for about seven Forest Service cops.
The Forest Service partners with local, state and other federal agencies to take down grow operations, which mostly consists of destroying pot plants and mitigating the damage.
While hunters way off the main trails looking for game sometimes discover grows, Delbon said the good old-fashioned police work of local sheriffs’ departments leads to the highest number of eradicated plants.
“When grows are found on public lands, depending on their size, we may monitor them for a few days to see if we can discover who is growing them, but more often than not we just destroy the operation,” said Van Beek, the Eagle County sheriff.
Forest Service land often provides more lush, hidden-away locations for illegal growers, and while the chances of stumbling onto such a site are low, Forest Service officials ask the public to be vigilant and to take note of the location, get out quickly and call the local sheriff if a grow site is discovered.
While Colorado’s generally higher, well-watered national forests have seen steady expansion of illegal marijuana grows, that’s less the case on the state’s lower, more arid BLM lands.
“We are taking the same actions we have taken in previous years, and we have not seen a dramatic increase in illegal grows or the eradication of illegal grows,” said BLM spokesman Steven Hall.
The U.S. Department of the Interior – parent of the BLM and National Park Service, among other lands agencies – is using drones in the fight.
“To help local law enforcement in targeting trafficking operations, (Interior) is implementing the use of Unmanned Aircraft Systems as a means to detect hard-to-reach grow sites for law enforcement as well as a tool to proactively identify high-probability grow areas that could become compromised in the future,” Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift said in an email to Colorado Politics.
As for bolstering efforts to deal with illegal grows on public lands, more enforcement help from the state is on the way, said Shelby Wieman, spokeswoman for Gov. John Hickenlooper. She pointed to the governor’s signing last year of House Bill 1221, which created a $6 million grant program to support local law enforcement in cracking down on marijuana black-market activities.
“Public health and safety are our top priorities. The state is committed to working with federal law enforcement to eliminate the black market,” Wieman said.
The spokeswoman for Tipton said the congressman has asked for additional funding for the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program for the 2019 fiscal year. It’s a program that aims to provide assistance to federal, state and local agencies operating in areas deemed to be “critical drug-trafficking regions,” including several Colorado counties that contain public lands.
But Delbon said that while local sheriffs have been of great help combating illegal growing on public lands, other law enforcement agencies in Colorado tend to be focused elsewhere.
“It’s been my perception at least that the state has been focusing more on the indoor grows, the house grows, the (legal growing) compliance, that side of it, where if we have a grow out on the forest, we’re working with our sheriffs, whether it’s Eagle County, Pueblo County, Custer County,” Delbon said. “Those folks are the ones that we’ve been working with directly, and they’ve been providing support.”
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http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/the-quest-to-make-californias-weed-the-champagne-of-cannabis/
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http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/the-quest-to-make-californias-weed-the-champagne-of-cannabis/
If so, they had better get it trademarked.
https://trademarks.justia.com/773/86/champagne-77386424.html
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In the early 70 s it was from worst to best (I was told): mexican , jamaican, columbian , panama red , hash, thai sticks , hash oil.
Leave it to American ingenuity to make California number one .
If only we can come with a cure for the common cold - not THAT would be progress!
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https://psilocybintechnology.com/cannabis-psilocybin-mushrooms-similarities/?fbclid=IwAR3oqrEDj4qg-FCbf4KhPrKOFCR2x0pYG3LmomDQRHiE1CdpFMp3aAsPhVs
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Washington Needs to Legalize Cannabis
Voters in four states may relax the rules Tuesday, bringing the total to 32.
586 Comments
By John Boehner
Nov. 4, 2018 3:04 p.m. ET
Citizens in four states vote Tuesday on ballot initiatives to legalize some form of cannabis. Residents of Missouri and Utah will decide on its medical availability, Michigan and North Dakota on recreational consumption for adults. If all four measures pass, the tally of states that allow some sort of cannabis use will jump to 32, nearly two-thirds of the U.S.
The trend could not be clearer: Cannabis prohibition is coming to an end. A Gallup poll last month found 66% of Americans favor legal marijuana.
I am now one of those Americans. It began when a friend of mine who suffered from chronic back pain found relief using medical cannabis. Intrigued, I looked deeper into the uses of marijuana. I learned that in April the Food and Drug Administration approved medication called Epidiolex, which can reduce the number of seizures epileptic children have to endure. It contains only nonpsychoactive components of cannabis plants.
This June 6, 2017, photo, Utah resident Doug Rice, prepares to administer the CBD oil Haleigh's Hope, a cannabis compound used by his daughter Ashley at their home in West Jordan, Utah. Utah lawmakers balked again this year at joining more than half of all U.S. states and passing a broad medical marijuana law. Rice says Utah's approach means his daughter, who has a genetic condition, is missing out on the one drug that eliminates her frequent seizures. Utah already allows cannabidiol to be used by people with severe epilepsy, as long as they obtain it from other states. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
This June 6, 2017, photo, Utah resident Doug Rice, prepares to administer the CBD oil Haleigh's Hope, a cannabis compound used by his daughter Ashley at their home in West Jordan, Utah. Utah lawmakers balked again this year at joining more than half of all U.S. states and passing a broad medical marijuana law. Rice says Utah's approach means his daughter, who has a genetic condition, is missing out on the one drug that eliminates her frequent seizures. Utah already allows cannabidiol to be used by people with severe epilepsy, as long as they obtain it from other states. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) Photo: Rick Bowmer/Associated Press
Marijuana is helping people across the country. Since joining the board of cannabis operator Acreage Holdings this past spring, I’ve spoken with countless senior citizens, baby boomers and millennials about their experiences medicating with cannabis to thwart the rigors of chemotherapy, ease muscle pain, relieve anxiety and much more. Convinced as I am by mounting scientific and anecdotal evidence, what resonates most with me is that one by one, our states have spoken.
Until cannabis is legalized federally, Washington needs to respect states’ rights to regulate it within their borders. The 10th Amendment clearly protects states’ prerogative to do so, and we must not allow the federal nanny state to dictate otherwise. The bipartisan Strengthening the Tenth Amendment Through Entrusting States Act, introduced in the House and Senate in June, is a step in the right direction. It would let states make their own decisions about the possession, manufacture and sale of cannabis, without federal interference.
The Drug Enforcement Administration must also soon stop classifying marijuana as a Schedule 1 narcotic, the same category as heroin. This status prevents many federally funded research institutions from studying how cannabis could treat sick Americans. It keeps major banks from investing in an industry that could create 654,000 jobs if marijuana were legalized in all 50 states today, according to a study from New Frontier Data. And most cruelly, the Schedule 1 classification prevents veterans from gaining access to medical marijuana.
Because cannabis is still illegal at the federal level, hospitals run by the Department of Veterans Affairs cannot treat service members suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder or chronic pain with any form of medical marijuana. Instead, VA doctors prescribe various opioids, fueling a crisis that killed 42,000 Americans in 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since leaving public office, I’ve become convinced that cannabis reform is needed so we can do research, help our veterans and reverse the opioid epidemic ravaging our communities.
As a congressman, I learned that government works best when it listens to its constituents. Representatives must use what the people tell them to question constantly which policies are serving the greater good. It’s past time for government to rethink how it approaches cannabis.
Mr. Boehner, an Ohio Republican, served as a U.S. representative (1991-2015) and House speaker (2011-15).
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Boehner the Stoner :lol:
rumors in the news is he likes his ETOH too!!!
maybe he needs to drop in to the Betty Ford place.
I wonder how much he is being paid to push this stuff..............
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ETOH?
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ETOH?
Ethanol. = alcohol. ?
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ETOH?
Ethanol. = alcohol. ?
Yes
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Ah.
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Ah.
Common medical chart notation for intoxicated subjects. The things you learn taking arrestees for a medical clearance...
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:lol:
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https://www.westernjournal.com/trooper-discovers-enough-fentanyl-kill-25-million/
a 25 *microgram* patch placed on skin every 3 d is a potent dose for those not used to opiods let alone pounds of the stuff
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https://thereisnews.com/two-altar-boys-was-arrested-for-putting-marijuana-in-the-censer-burner3333/?fbclid=IwAR19HMvwNXn8hv7h5attrWV91GlCJMtxhRfJd1rTXdO0uuszUnV-nSRENss
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https://thereisnews.com/two-altar-boys-was-arrested-for-putting-marijuana-in-the-censer-burner3333/?fbclid=IwAR19HMvwNXn8hv7h5attrWV91GlCJMtxhRfJd1rTXdO0uuszUnV-nSRENss
Strange to read of altar boys being suspects rather than victims.
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Our master of snark shows his chops once again!
:-D
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https://www.thisisinsider.com/denver-decriminalize-magic-mushrooms-psychedelic-drug-research-2019-2?utm_content=buffer22a46&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer-style&fbclid=IwAR1rIAe0MqH2eObj4JdB5s2oafUY6SAni3bUPlDgUeFf8_NMZlp7ngZPFjk
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https://thefreethoughtproject.com/small-town-cops-set-giant-international-money-laundering-scheme-rake-millions-illegally/?fbclid=IwAR10FGOa4XBBCegIKMHxfkX8URjLt3dbxJ_owuwfrdIQC1fhZPXYgwE3uN8
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2019/05/31/federal-appeals-court-rules-dea-federal-govt-must-promptly-reassess-marijuanas-illegality/?fbclid=IwAR3i-cOrSkQFDvdVqxPhTeyTiuI3PCh5BqVwXrIty_tIHatlTif87buwE0Y#3bc00bae7be9
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https://fee.org/articles/i-was-sentenced-to-life-without-parole-for-a-non-violent-first-drug-offense/?utm_source=zapier&fbclid=IwAR3KELfId9MRchVcOd5hdSRaTFFxyWuVxSLKNXz3gKmlVQc7TVXuz0ZxHbs
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That seems terrible. Maybe he will get out with a Trump pardon. My proposal is to rate all the prisoners on all the factors, for prison budget and space purposes if nothing else, and let one out for every new one we put in. How bad was their offense? How bad was their prior record? How long have they served? How likely are they to re-commit? etc. What is the cost/benefit of holding them longer. This is just one more example of what government does badly.
On the other side of it, I am amazed at how small the penalties are for certain crimes. This man sitting in a cell for decades shows us that no one is really looking at the big picture or the details or the consistency of it over time.
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http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2019-09-11.html#read_more
It took Coulter to state the obvious .
Anyone born after 2000 would never know anything she reminds about listening to the leftist do gooders now.
(and including Jarrod)
now of course many place all this in the addiction is a disease category
if violent crime stays down it will because the criminals are moving to electronic modes of crime instead.
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Violent crime isn't staying down.
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2019-09-11.html#read_more
It took Coulter to state the obvious .
Anyone born after 2000 would never know anything she reminds about listening to the leftist do gooders now.
(and including Jarrod)
now of course many place all this in the addiction is a disease category
if violent crime stays down it will because the criminals are moving to electronic modes of crime instead.
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http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2019-09-11.html#read_more
It took Coulter to state the obvious.
...
Yes. We got tough on crime in black neighborhoods to protect black victims. Someone has to correct Democrats on their false memory syndrome. Next is for someone to expose the Democrats massive welfare system's role in perpetuating poverty that leads to drugs and violence. We've only known about the connection for about 50 years.
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Does Getting Stoned Help You Get Toned? Gym Rats Embrace Marijuana
Fitness junkies are making weed a part of their workout routines; ‘feel the blood flow through each specific muscle’
Nutritionist Pauline Nordin says cannabis cookies help her recover from her punishing workouts. Photo: Pauline Nordin
By Rob Copeland
Sept. 29, 2019 1:13 pm ET
Pauline Nordin is a trainer, model and licensed nutritionist. Earlier this year, she replaced the frozen peas in her freezer with 2,000 cookies.
The shortbread treats are laden with cannabis—the equivalent of about 1,500 joints. Ms. Nordin, 37 years old, says she can’t recover from her punishing workouts without them. She eats two each night before turning in.
“My lifestyle is a Ferrari and my body is a well-tuned machine,” she says. “I would never do something destructive.”
As marijuana moves into the mainstream, more athletes and fitness junkies are making weed a part of their workout routines. The burning question: Are they onto something—or just on something?
Workout aid?
Many workout fiends insist that a few drags add an extra hit to their workouts. They say it helps them ignore pain, stem off boredom and concentrate on small muscle groups that require repetitive movements.
Eleven states have legalized marijuana for adults, while twice as many allow it to treat certain medical conditions. Canada last year legalized it countrywide.
In May, a nonprofit representing more than 100 former professional athletes, including boxer Mike Tyson and cyclist Floyd Landis, petitioned the world antidoping authority to remove marijuana from its list of banned substances. Some ultramarathoners say it helps them through long races. The aroma of weed is common these days at San Francisco boot-camp fitness classes, Denver climbing walls and jiu jitsu tournaments.
“I’ll have a toke before the gym,” says Peter Kloczko, 29, of London, Ontario, “and it’s like, damn, I’m on point today.”
Share Your Thoughts
Weed and weights: Good idea or ridiculous? Join the discussion below.
Los Angeleno Artemus Dolgin, 35, at times smokes as many as 14 joints a day, many on the stoop of his gym or at home while bench pressing. Mr. Dolgin, who describes his profession as “hustler,” says it pumps up his biceps, and his self-confidence.
“You definitely feel the blood flow through each specific muscle,” he says. “The epitome of muscle building is the mind-muscle connection, which doesn’t come right away. Weed really enhances that.”
Keith Humphreys, a professor of behavioral sciences at Stanford University who specializes in addiction, says: “There’s no evidence of that whatsoever. Sort of by definition, we are not good at observing our behavior when we are under the influence of a drug.”
Sam Moses says he switched from dietary supplements and even steroids to marijuana. Photo: Sam Moses
Harvard University researchers have found that smoking marijuana raises the resting heart rate and carries other health risks.
The World Anti-Doping Agency, based in Montreal, includes marijuana on its list of banned substances for athletes competing in the Olympics and other international competitions. “Cannabis can cause muscle relaxation and reduce pain during post-workout recovery. It can also decrease anxiety and tension, resulting in better sport performance under pressure,” the agency says on its website.
The other reason WADA is harsh on weed: It might contribute to injury. The drug, it says, “can increase focus and risk-taking behaviors, allowing athletes to forget bad falls or previous trauma in sport, and push themselves past those fears in competition.”
Sam Moses of Daytona Beach, Fla., can relate. He says he was regularly using dietary supplements and even steroids when his deceased sister appeared to him in a dream. “She said, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s just weed. It’s natural. You know your limits,’ ” says Mr. Moses, 26.
Mr. Moses, an emergency-medicine student and dedicated powerlifter, took that as a green light to switch to grass. One problem: He began getting confused about balancing weight evenly across a barbell. He recently was squatting 315 pounds of weight when he heard a crack and felt a whoosh of pain at his waist. “And that’s about when I went: F—- it, I’m getting more stoned,” he says.
Former athletes looking to reverse the ban argue that many stoners have it wrong: Weed doesn’t provide a sporting edge. While marijuana and other cannibanoids support wellness “by aiding in pain relief and rest,” the athletes wrote in a petition, “there is no evidence that they enhance sport performance.”
A series of Brazilian jiu jitsu tournaments, dubbed “High Rollerz BJJ,” aren’t waiting around for a reversal. The organization requires opponents to smoke a joint together before the start of each match. The tournament prize is a brick of pot. The audience is encouraged to light up, too.
Paul Roney says he works out right away after getting high so he doesn’t fall asleep. Photo: Paul Roney
Electrician Paul Roney discovered yet another risk to mixing weed and weights. A few weeks ago, the 45-year-old consumed a bit more than usual and then ran into a buddy at the gym. He wound up forgetting to exercise altogether.
“You have to go straightaway if you smoke a fattie,” he advises. “Wait an hour and you’re just going to be asleep on the floor.”
One thing he likes, though, is that it gives him the munchies when it’s time to load up on healthy fare such as egg whites, boiled chicken and oat bran. “You can eat all of your diet food,” he says.
Ms. Nordin, the nutritionist who emptied her freezer for the habit, estimates that 5% of her daily calorie intake is cannabis cookies, sold under the brand Dr. Norm’s.
The siblings who run the company say they named it after their late father, a dermatologist. They say they have no idea what he thought about the benefits of marijuana. He did believe, however, that laughter was the best medicine.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/22/vicente-fox-legalizing-drugs-is-the-way-to-combat-cartels.html?__source=sharebar%7Cfacebook&par=sharebar&fbclid=IwAR39DcmqhNynQ2U9sqBMNEeHkrUjNgCh8nrHHx426RMJI_Ocnu-SAFSPQCY
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https://www.cato.org/blog/more-evidence-pours-cold-water-false-narrative-prescriptions-caused-opioid-crisis?fbclid=IwAR11pxyx8lNkK74AMIKtCuaqMhEv7jmj8E9VPDeIYlA4HWNA-eoxoGAITwE
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The Vaping-Marijuana Nexus
Another unintended consequence of celebrating pot use.
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 25, 2019 1:43 pm ET
Opinion: Vaping and Marijuana Are a Dangerous Combination
As marijuana use has become more socially accepted in the United States, those pushing for legalization should examine the recent harm that vaping has inflicted on thousands of people, many of whom were using marijuana products. Image: Tony Dejack/AP
A surge in vaping related lung illnesses this year caught the medical community by surprise, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reporting more than 2,500 lung illnesses and 54 deaths. Politicians are targeting e-cigarettes, but the CDC reported last week that marijuana is so far the greatest common denominator.
This is another reminder that America is undertaking a risky social experiment by legalizing and especially destigmatizing cannabis, and the potential effects are hard to foresee or control. The same political culture that is in a fury over legal opioids, and is trying to bankrupt drug companies as compensation, seems to have no problem celebrating a drug that may be damaging young brains for a lifetime.
In October the CDC reported that 86% of 867 patients with available data had used products containing THC shortly before the onset of their symptoms while 64% reported using nicotine products. Only 11% reported using exclusively nicotine e-cigarettes. The CDC has also found that Vitamin E acetate, which is often added as a thickener to marijuana vaping fluids, is a “very strong culprit.”
Democratic Governors such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo and California’s Gavin Newsom, who have supported legalizing marijuana, are attacking nicotine e-cigarettes while ignoring the striking links to marijuana. Yet pot products unlike those with nicotine are only lightly regulated by the 11 states where cannabis has been legalized for recreational use.
One vaping-related death last month was linked to a device purchased from a legal pot shop in Oregon. A state audit this year found only 3% of recreational marijuana retailers had been inspected, and state marijuana production is seven times higher than consumption. The implication is that most pot grown in Oregon is exported to states where it is illegal.
One argument for legalizing and regulating pot is that it would shrink the black market, but there’s little evidence that it has. The California Department of Food and Agriculture found that only 16% of the 15.5 million pounds of marijuana produced in the state each year is also consumed in the state.
An audit by the United Cannabis Business Association this year turned up 2,835 unlicensed dispensaries in California—more than three times the number that are licensed. The California Department of Public Health since June has linked more than 120 cases of lung illness to recently purchased vape-pens including many bought at unlicensed shops.
Teens can’t legally purchase pot in any state, but a survey by Monitoring the Future this month found that youth marijuana vaping has nearly tripled since 2017. While overall pot use has remained flat for the past two years, daily use has increased by two-thirds. This is especially troubling since chronic use of marijuana in adolescents has been linked to cognitive impairment, anxiety and psychosis later in life.
About 95% of heroin and cocaine users report first using pot, and studies show that marijuana users require more opioid medication to cope with pain than non-users. Like all drugs, marijuana has different effects on different users that are still not well understood. While some say pot helps them relax, it can cause paranoid tendencies in others.
Older generations don’t realize that the pot grown and sold today is on average four to five times more potent than what they smoked in college. There’s also a misconception that pot is no more addictive than alcohol. About 40% of people who used pot in the last month used it daily compared to 10% of alcohol drinkers.
***
Political leaders and cultural trend-setters have removed the social stigma around pot use, so it is socially acceptable even where it remains illegal. Rarely can you take a walk in New York City without marijuana smoke wafting into your nostrils.
While tobacco and e-cigarettes are denounced, smoking a joint is chill, man, and young people get the message. A mere 30.3% of 12th graders this year said smoking pot regularly was risky, down from 77.8% in 1990 and 52.4% a decade ago, according to the Monitoring the Future study. Teens say pot is less risky than e-cigarettes (38%) and easier to obtain (78.4%) than regular cigarettes (72.4%).
A large business lobby is now pushing for pot legalization. The rash of vaping deaths and illnesses shows that pot is more dangerous than people realize, and Americans should pause on the rush to legalize until we understand how much medical and social harm it is doing.
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Our finest Libertarian theorists told us this was UNPOSSIBLE!!!!!!!
The Vaping-Marijuana Nexus
Another unintended consequence of celebrating pot use.
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 25, 2019 1:43 pm ET
Opinion: Vaping and Marijuana Are a Dangerous Combination
As marijuana use has become more socially accepted in the United States, those pushing for legalization should examine the recent harm that vaping has inflicted on thousands of people, many of whom were using marijuana products. Image: Tony Dejack/AP
A surge in vaping related lung illnesses this year caught the medical community by surprise, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reporting more than 2,500 lung illnesses and 54 deaths. Politicians are targeting e-cigarettes, but the CDC reported last week that marijuana is so far the greatest common denominator.
This is another reminder that America is undertaking a risky social experiment by legalizing and especially destigmatizing cannabis, and the potential effects are hard to foresee or control. The same political culture that is in a fury over legal opioids, and is trying to bankrupt drug companies as compensation, seems to have no problem celebrating a drug that may be damaging young brains for a lifetime.
In October the CDC reported that 86% of 867 patients with available data had used products containing THC shortly before the onset of their symptoms while 64% reported using nicotine products. Only 11% reported using exclusively nicotine e-cigarettes. The CDC has also found that Vitamin E acetate, which is often added as a thickener to marijuana vaping fluids, is a “very strong culprit.”
Democratic Governors such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo and California’s Gavin Newsom, who have supported legalizing marijuana, are attacking nicotine e-cigarettes while ignoring the striking links to marijuana. Yet pot products unlike those with nicotine are only lightly regulated by the 11 states where cannabis has been legalized for recreational use.
One vaping-related death last month was linked to a device purchased from a legal pot shop in Oregon. A state audit this year found only 3% of recreational marijuana retailers had been inspected, and state marijuana production is seven times higher than consumption. The implication is that most pot grown in Oregon is exported to states where it is illegal.
One argument for legalizing and regulating pot is that it would shrink the black market, but there’s little evidence that it has. The California Department of Food and Agriculture found that only 16% of the 15.5 million pounds of marijuana produced in the state each year is also consumed in the state.
An audit by the United Cannabis Business Association this year turned up 2,835 unlicensed dispensaries in California—more than three times the number that are licensed. The California Department of Public Health since June has linked more than 120 cases of lung illness to recently purchased vape-pens including many bought at unlicensed shops.
Teens can’t legally purchase pot in any state, but a survey by Monitoring the Future this month found that youth marijuana vaping has nearly tripled since 2017. While overall pot use has remained flat for the past two years, daily use has increased by two-thirds. This is especially troubling since chronic use of marijuana in adolescents has been linked to cognitive impairment, anxiety and psychosis later in life.
About 95% of heroin and cocaine users report first using pot, and studies show that marijuana users require more opioid medication to cope with pain than non-users. Like all drugs, marijuana has different effects on different users that are still not well understood. While some say pot helps them relax, it can cause paranoid tendencies in others.
Older generations don’t realize that the pot grown and sold today is on average four to five times more potent than what they smoked in college. There’s also a misconception that pot is no more addictive than alcohol. About 40% of people who used pot in the last month used it daily compared to 10% of alcohol drinkers.
***
Political leaders and cultural trend-setters have removed the social stigma around pot use, so it is socially acceptable even where it remains illegal. Rarely can you take a walk in New York City without marijuana smoke wafting into your nostrils.
While tobacco and e-cigarettes are denounced, smoking a joint is chill, man, and young people get the message. A mere 30.3% of 12th graders this year said smoking pot regularly was risky, down from 77.8% in 1990 and 52.4% a decade ago, according to the Monitoring the Future study. Teens say pot is less risky than e-cigarettes (38%) and easier to obtain (78.4%) than regular cigarettes (72.4%).
A large business lobby is now pushing for pot legalization. The rash of vaping deaths and illnesses shows that pot is more dangerous than people realize, and Americans should pause on the rush to legalize until we understand how much medical and social harm it is doing.
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I like e cigarettes for people who have trouble quitting smoking cigarettes
but not for kids being cool
We have had nicotrol inhalers by prescription for many yrs
Allowing them over the counter has made more problems than solving problems it seems.
But probably another good way to tax the shit out of people which is the ultimate source of power for those "who serve" in government.
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legalize all drugs
https://disrn.com/news/pete-buttigieg-calls-for-decriminalization-of-all-drugs
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legalize all drugs
https://disrn.com/news/pete-buttigieg-calls-for-decriminalization-of-all-drugs
I wonder if Little Peter has thought through the consequences of legalizing prescription drugs - isn't that part of 'all' drugs? Maybe decriminalize other 'medical' treatments by street and sidewalk professionals as well. Let the market sort it out.
I kind of like the idea; it would break down the entire medical cabal, no offense to our ccp.
My point is, this will never happen. Pete hasn't thought that far through it. He is just blowing smoke and pandering for votes.
Cooking up a little meth for friends and family has HUGE environmental, health and safety risks, is a form of vandalism in that it can get a house condemned - and we are going to legalize it?? Maybe we can save money by building prisons with no doors, locks or guards, make attendance voluntary - right while we make government service mandatory.
The idea that we are "over-incarcerating" is a myth. These people aren't doing life for minor possession of harmless substances. Turning the supply chain over to the government is not legalizing it. Decriminalizing small amounts has not taking organized crime or violence out of the business.
Require people to take responsibility for their own heathcare before we start encouraging reckless body and brain experimentation.
Securing the border would do more than any of these ideas to get the crime out of the drug trade.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/mexico-el-chapos-daughter-ties-205755559.html
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Los Angeles to Dismiss 66,000 Marijuana Convictions
Largest such move in California comes amid nationwide push for criminal-justice reform and relaxing drug laws
California voters legalized recreational marijuana use in 2016.
PHOTO: JOSH EDELSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Christine Mai-Duc and Dan Frosch
Updated Feb. 13, 2020 5:00 pm ET
Los Angeles County will vacate nearly 66,000 marijuana convictions dating back to the 1960s, part of a growing national effort to reduce drug convictions.
The move, announced Thursday by Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey, will dismiss convictions for tens of thousands of individuals, the majority of whom are black or Latino.
“As a result of our actions, these convictions should no longer burden those who have struggled to find a job or a place to live because of their criminal record,” Ms. Lacey said in a press conference Thursday.
She said she believed it is the largest mass dismissal of cannabis cases to date in California.
Of the cases, about 62,000 were felony convictions that prosecutors asked a Los Angeles Superior Court to dismiss this week. Another 3,700 were misdemeanor possession charges stemming from 10 L.A. County cities.
California voters legalized recreational marijuana use in 2016 with a ballot measure that also made individuals previously convicted of growing, possessing, selling or transporting marijuana eligible for reduced sentences.
But the process for seeking relief from courts has been criticized by advocates as onerous and so far only about 3% of those eligible statewide have received it, according to nonprofit group Code for America.
A state law signed by former Gov. Jerry Brown in 2018 required the California Department of Justice to compile a database of individuals who may be eligible to have their old marijuana pot cases reviewed—a number the department estimates to be about 190,000 individuals. Under the law, counties are also required to review those cases by July of this year, though not necessarily to dismiss any.
Ms. Lacey, who runs the country’s largest district attorney’s office, had previously said her team wouldn’t automatically clear drug convictions. In a statement after Proposition 64’s passage, Ms. Lacey encouraged those affected to petition the courts “rather than wait for my office to go through tens of thousands of case files.”
But the process has moved more quickly since her office began working with Code for America, which developed software that identifies people who may be eligible to have past convictions overturned in states where marijuana is now legal or will be legal. For more than a year, the group has worked with five California counties—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Joaquin and Contra Costa—as part of a pilot program to review old pot cases.
In 2019, then San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón said his office cleared 8,132 marijuana-related convictions as a result of the pilot program. Last month, Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton said that her office would dismiss 3,264 marijuana convictions.
The L.A. County cases that were overturned resulted in approximately 53,000 people being cleared. Of those, 32% are African-American, 20% are white, 45% are Latino and 3% are other or unknown, Ms. Lacey and Code for America said.
With the pilot program done, Code for America has made its software available to all of California’s 58 counties.
The group is also teaming up with the top prosecutor in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, to review old marijuana convictions there.
Ms. Lacey is running for re-election in a race in which her leading opponent is Mr. Gascón, who left his San Francisco office last year. He has said that she is not active enough on criminal-justice reform, a key plank of his campaign.
A spokesman for Ms. Lacey’s campaign said that Ms. Lacey began the program that led to Thursday’s dismissals last April. “The facts and the timeline show that this decision was based on seeking justice for all, not politics,” he said.
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Psychedelics-Drug Startup Raises $24 Million Ahead of IPO
Drugmaker is pursuing trials of hallucinogen’s efficacy for treating addiction, other mental-health conditions
JR Rahn, co-founder of MindMed, which is pursuing trials of a nonhallucinogenic treatment for addiction derived from the psychoactive compound ibogaine.
PHOTO: MINDMED
By Shalini Ramachandran
Feb. 27, 2020 11:49 am ET
Mind Medicine Inc., a psychedelics-based medicine startup backed by Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, closed a $24.2 million funding round ahead of plans to go public next week.
It is the first among a new crop of companies pursuing psychedelics-based therapies to go public, in a test of investors’ appetite to back drugs that have shown promise in treating mental-health ailments but remain illegal in many countries including the U.S.
Co-founded by JR Rahn, a former Uber employee and Y-Combinator alumnus, MindMed will make a direct listing March 3 through a reverse takeover of Broadway Gold Mining on the NEO Exchange, based in Toronto.
Mr. Rahn says MindMed is developing what he hopes will become the “antibiotic for addiction,” based on a nonhallucinogenic derivative of ibogaine, a psychoactive compound that has been used for more than 50 years to treat addiction.
Ibogaine comes from iboga, a West African plant whose yellowish root bark induces powerful psychedelic experiences. Hallmarks of ibogaine trips include vivid autobiographical recalls with intense visions. Iboga has been used for centuries as part of rites of passages and healing ceremonies among various African peoples.
Ibogaine centers for addiction treatment exist outside the U.S. It has been illegal in the U.S. for more than 50 years.
Some investors are biting, including Toms Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie, Bail Capital, Cannell Capital and Grey House Partners, all of whom participated in the pre-public funding round.
Mr. O’Leary said he agreed to invest only after Mr. Rahn promised MindMed wouldn’t look to create recreational drugs and would focus solely on medicinal use. “If this can actually cure opioid addiction, that is a big, big opportunity,” Mr. O’Leary said. “Why wouldn’t I want a piece of that?”
But it will be a battle to appeal to a wider investor base, given the hurdles to getting psychedelic-inspired drugs in the hands of patients. Some investors who haven’t invested in psychedelic-based drug companies said they were wary of the governance and management issues that have plagued some Canada-listed cannabis companies, and cannabis stocks have fallen sharply in recent months. Investors also worry that access to capital will be strained as long as psychedelics remain federally illegal.
Still, MindMed sees opportunity. The company last year acquired a team developing 18-MC, an ibogaine derivative without the hallucinogenic effects. Its lead researcher, Dr. Stanley Glick, discovered 18-MC in the 1990s but struggled to find funding to test the drug on humans, even though animal trials showed promise for curing addiction.
Later this year, MindMed hopes to test 18-MC’s effectiveness on human patients suffering from opioid withdrawal in New York. The company says its Phase I trial demonstrated that 18-MC doesn’t have the negative cardiac effects that have been associated with ibogaine.
MindMed is also preparing a Phase II clinical trial in Europe to test how microdosing LSD relates to increased focus for adults with ADHD. Phase II trials test efficacy and safety. “We plan to build the largest portfolio of clinical trials for psychedelics,” Mr. Rahn said. The company says it is anticipating a valuation of $63.9 million when it goes public.
Among MindMed’s rivals are ATAI Life Sciences, which also is exploring an ibogaine-based drug treatment for addiction. The path to developing psychedelics-inspired drugs is costly. Investors believe that such companies will have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on clinical trials, and it could take years to get federal approval.
—Gabe Johnson contributed to this article.
Write to Shalini Ramachandran at shalini.ramachandran@wsj.com
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second post
https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/psychedelics-michael-ehlers?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-secret-lives-of-fungi?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Magazine_051820&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9d3fa3f92a40469e2d85c&cndid=50142053&hasha=52f016547a40edbdd6de69b8a7728bbf&hashb=e02b3c0e6e0f3888e0288d6e52a57eccde1bfd75&hashc=9aab918d394ee25f13d70b69b378385abe4212016409c8a7a709eca50e71c1bc&esrc=Auto_Subs&utm_term=TNY_Magazine
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/18/us/forced-entry-warrant-drug-raid.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article
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even pushers now charged with misdemeanor offense :
https://www.westernjournal.com/oregon-decriminalizes-hard-drugs-heroin-crack-meth-possession-no-longer-considered-criminal/
My expectation is drug use will go up a lot.
If someone wants to sell heroin - go to Oregon
safe haven state for drug dealers now
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/nyregion/nj-marijuana-legalization.html
has been for 50 yrs anyway
only difference is this is
another source of taxation
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The War on Drugs appears to be over. Drugs have won.
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The War on Drugs appears to be over. Drugs have won.
I'd submit that Freedom won.
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But apparently my effort at wit did not. :-D
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https://www.popsci.com/story/health/psilocybin-hallucinogens-spiritual-science/?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=email&tp=i-1NGB-Et-Rku-1AZCwi-1c-16U2a-1c-1AYX7x-l5KJzKA0Au-2BUppN
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https://www.denverpost.com/2017/06/01/dea-gang-that-sold-millions-worth-of-colorado-grown-pot-outside-state-not-unusual/
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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-china-cartels-specialreport-idUSKBN28D1M4?utm_source=pocket-newtab&fbclid=IwAR2OVQ9olkBYbxKbIXwfa2KQlsE7owvIo_lkesNFUkw3R8PeLGz-6hy-S_8
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https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2021/02/15/Teen-pot-use-increases-with-adult-recreational-legalization-study-finds/2251613421785/
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/02/19/columbia-university-professor-carl-hart-heroin-work-life-balance-recreational-drug-use-decriminalization/
probably has tenure
does not need to go to jail
just needs help
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https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2021/02/15/Teen-pot-use-increases-with-adult-recreational-legalization-study-finds/2251613421785/
https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/homicides/las-vegas-man-faces-murder-charge-in-marijuana-sale-slaying-2235085/
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ASSESSMENTS
The Impact of Mexican Cannabis Legalization
8 MIN READApr 20, 2021 | 09:00 GMT
View of a cannabis plant planted by the Mexican Cannabis Movement on March 10, 2021, in front of the Mexican Senate in Mexico City.
View of a cannabis plant planted by the Mexican Cannabis Movement on March 10, 2021, in front of the Mexican Senate in Mexico City.
(CLAUDIO CRUZ/AFP via Getty Images)
Editor's Note: This security-focused assessment is a part of one of many such analyses found at Stratfor Threat Lens, a unique protective intelligence product designed with corporate security leaders in mind. Threat Lens enables industry professionals and organizations to anticipate, identify, measure and mitigate emerging threats to people, assets and intellectual property the world over. Threat Lens is the only unified solution that analyzes and forecasts security risk from a holistic perspective, bringing all the most relevant global insights into a single, interactive threat dashboard.
Mexico is on the cusp of legalizing cannabis amid a shifting economic relationship with the United States and lingering internal security concerns. A proposed law making its way from the House to the Senate that would legalize marijuana stands to soon make Mexico only the third country in the world to permit all aspects of cannabis production and distribution. The measure represents a sweeping change to governmental policy on cannabis, and may pressure U.S. officials to open a legal avenue to the U.S. market. With a population of approximately 125 million, Mexico will become the world's largest fully legal marijuana market, followed by Canada and Uruguay; the medical use of the drug is legal in dozens more countries. The bill, which Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has indicated he will sign into law, had been expected to be approved during an April 2021 legislative vote, although recent senatorial maneuvering most likely will delay the vote until the September 2021 session.
The Mexican Supreme Court issued two rulings in late 2018 that, along with three previous rulings dating back to 2015, effectively declared the country's ban on recreational use of marijuana unconstitutional.
The country’s current General Health Law allows a person to legally possess 5 grams of marijuana; the new law will officially legalize recreational use and allow adults 18 years and older to possess up to 28 grams and to grow as many as eight plants for personal use.
Commercial production will also become legal with governmental regulatory approval to issue licenses to cultivate, research and export cannabis.
Current U.S. Status of Cannabis
With 16 states and the District of Columbia allowing recreational use of marijuana and 36 states allowing some form of medical use, an expanding U.S. market may provide Mexico with a large and rich nearby customer. The United States could become Mexico's largest consumer of cannabis if it moves toward cannabis legalization, or even decriminalization, and Mexican growers are allowed to export across the border. Soon to be sandwiched on both the northern and southern borders between two of the three legal marijuana markets in the world, the United States will experience significant pressure to move to some form of legalization.
Three out of four U.S. states that border Mexico have approved, or will approve, recreational marijuana use, pressuring neighboring states and opening convenient lanes of trade despite the current U.S. federal ban.
California has been at the forefront of U.S. cannabis legalization efforts by passing the Compassionate Use Act in 1996 to authorize medical use and the Adult Use of Marijuana Act in 2016 to legalize recreational use. California also hosts a thriving state-regulated cultivation and production industry.
Arizona permanently legalized medical marijuana in 2010, with recreational use following in 2020.
New Mexico approved medical use in 2019. On April 12, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a law to fully legalize, regulate and tax cannabis for adults 21 and older, making New Mexico the newest state to do so.
Texas is an outlier compared to most other border states in its outlook toward cannabis legalization; little indicates this will change soon. While medical use is technically legal, the current restrictions on what conditions qualify for a cannabis prescription severely limit medical approval. Texas legislators have over 40 cannabis-related bills in the current congressional session, which range from proposals for decriminalization to medical use, but none that has a chance of significantly expanding legal cannabis use is likely to pass.
Nearby states with more permissive positions on cannabis, which eventually could result in a changed Texas policy on legalization through constituency pressure and/or after evaluating the potential tax revenue. Colorado was one of the first states, along with Washington, to fully legalize cannabis and has maintained a sustained commercial market. New Mexico is on the cusp of recreational and commercial legalization. Oklahoma approved medical use in 2018 and, although a prescription currently requires state residency, a proposed bill would make it legal to prescribe to out-of-state customers. If it passes, the Oklahoma medical marijuana market would suddenly be within easy driving distance to politically connected cities like Dallas/Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio and Houston.
A Map Showing the Legal Status of Marijuana in North America
Over 40% of Americans currently live in states with full legalization, and a Gallup poll in November of 2020 showed that over 68% of the country supports national legalization, an all-time high. While cannabis is still prohibited at the U.S. federal level, national legalization, or at least decriminalization, is a realistic possibility with Democratic control of both Congress and the White House.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer signaled in an interview with Politico on April 3 that he is ready to bring national marijuana reform legislation to a vote and is currently crafting a bill with Democratic senators Cory Booker and Ron Wyden.
Schumer appears confident that U.S. President Joe Biden will be open to discussion of the matter. Although Biden has not indicated whether he will sign off on national legalization, he said during his campaign that he was willing to hear experts weigh in on rescheduling cannabis.
With Democratic control to bring bills to the floor and marked national popularity for legalization, repealing cannabis prohibition may be an issue with at least partial bipartisan support.
Mexican National Security Issues and Cartel Response to Legalization
Mexican marijuana legalization will not lessen crime, rampant corruption and cartel violence, disappointing advocates who hoped legalization would be a significant step toward decreasing the cartels' grip on the country. Cartels have taken steps to diversify from drug trafficking and are otherwise poised to exploit potential opportunities. As these entrenched criminal organizations take advantage of a burgeoning new market, they could contribute to a risk of increased crime and violence. Mexico would have to impose broad governmental reforms to combat corruption before a decrease in overall cartel control would diminish in the country. Large cartels are prepared for marijuana legalization through other illegal income streams, and in some cases are well prepared to take advantage of new opportunities legal cannabis will provide. As small to midsize cartels shift strategies to fill gaps left by larger organizations or compete for a share of a diminished illicit marijuana market in the wake of federal cannabis legalization, related criminal activities are likely to increase.
Cartels have significant resources dedicated to the production and trafficking of synthetic drugs. They have also diversified their income streams into other activities such as fuel theft, cargo theft, heroin production and cocaine trafficking.
Even though cannabis smuggling was once a significant source of cartel income, marijuana trafficking offenses in the United States have nonetheless steadily decreased by over 50% from 2015-2019 as cartels diversified to other avenues of criminality and the United States refocused law enforcement resources to combat cocaine, heroin and synthetic drug smuggling and human trafficking.
An uptick in cartel-related crime will likely have the most noticeable human toll at border areas with the United States, possibly affecting diplomatic decisions between the Biden and Obrador administrations. Asylum seekers and migrants held up in border areas would face increased risks of spillover violence and exploitation as human smuggling and extortion expand as criminal organizations ramp up such operations.
A Chart and Map Showing Mexican Cartel Control of Border Cities
The two largest cartels, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) and Sinaloa, have well-diversified narcotic revenue streams that will reduce the impact of cannabis legalization and have steadily decreased their reliance on cross-border marijuana smuggling for income. Even though the Sinaloa Cartel has traditionally been more dependent on cannabis smuggling for revenue than the CJNG, both cartels have many other avenues of illicit income from drug smuggling. Cartels continue to produce and traffic large quantities of other narcotics besides cannabis, including South American cocaine and Mexican heroin, with large portions of drug smuggling profits coming from synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine and fentanyl. The CJNG is particularly insulated from any significant revenue dip that legalization would potentially cause, as the cartel's dependence on illicit marijuana for income has been relatively minor compared to that of the Sinaloa.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/president-biden-marijuana-policy-white-house-shacarri-richardson-suspension-183640381.html
imho
he was correct
the decision is up to the Olympic Committee
typical American arrogance to claim he should intervene
into an international body on behalf of one person
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Posting this does not necessarily mean that I agree, but the search for Truth means that it should be considered:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/libertarians-were-wrong-about-marijuana-legalization/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202021-08-14&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/why-fentanyl-dangerous-illicit-drug-120507501.html
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From deep down in the USA article
"He said drug increases are likely due to a massive increase to illegal migration."
that should be in headline
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Tucker had a really strong segment on this last night.
Must say that this aspect of my libertarian proclivities continues to recede.
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https://nypost.com/2022/04/28/james-molinaros-grandson-busted-with-100-pounds-of-pot/
I really confused
we have other states legalizing it
every quack in the world telling how much it is good for us
and people telling how it treats pain , depression , anxiety
insomnia seizures etc
and probably anything else one can dream of to throw in the mix
we have the Biden people allowing fentanyl to run rampant
and yet this kid is suddenly the biggest drug ho in the world .
I just don't get it.
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https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm
does not get the attention it deserves
not even listed here :
https://www.finder.com/what-are-the-top-20-causes-of-death-in-united-states
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https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2022/07/its-always-about-reefer-madness.html?m=1
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Interesting article but I do note it does not seem to grasp that higher potency can be and often is offset by lesser consumption.
=======================
How Modern Marijuana Changes the Brain
BY HEALTH 1+1 AND MARINA ZHANG TIMEAUGUST 1, 2022 PRINT
Big things are happening for the humble marijuana (or cannabis) plant. On July 21, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) introduced a bill to legalize marijuana at the federal level with Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.).
Booker released a statement on the bill on July 21, saying this can undo the damage done by the War on Drugs.
Meanwhile anti-legalization advocates like Kevin A. Sabet are doing all they can to prevent the bill from passing the Senate and becoming law.
However, regardless of the outcome, this bill is likely to change the discourse around cannabis for years to come.
State legalization and subsequent commercialization of marijuana has given the drug a glow up. The drug, once associated with potheads, illicit dealings, and pungent herbal smells is fast becoming a legal, family-friendly, trendy, and Instagram-worthy herbal medicine.
The expectation was that after legalization, marijuana would become more controlled and safe. The states that have made moves to legalize first medical marijuana, then recreational marijuana, however, observed increases in illicit dealings, hospital admission rates, and cannabis addiction and use.
Potency and concentration of cannabis and its derivatives, car crashes involving cannabis and abuse, and use in young people have also met new highs.
Marijuana is getting a foothold into medicine and households. It has been the most-consumed illicit drug globally and in the United States (pdf) for decades, though marijuana use is still far behind alcohol and tobacco.
The two words cannabis and marijuana are often used interchangeably, but there are differences in nuance. Cannabis generally refers to the entire cannabis plant, while marijuana refers to products made from cannabis such as dried leaves, or flowers. The word marijuana also implies that it is a cannabis product high in tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main constituent and the psychoactive derivative of cannabis.
Since legalization and commercialization, the THC content of cannabis products has been increasing. It has gone up from less than 2 percent (prior to the 1990s) to the current levels of 17 percent, and possibly even 30 percent as consumers seek bigger highs.
Recreational Marijuana: A Changed Product
Some parents’, grandparents’, and educators’ memory of recreational weed is that of its humbler eras of 2 to 4 percent THC. There is a mismatch in perception, as high-THC level products are being packaged into innocent-looking gummies, candies, vapes, drinks, and many more. Though these are only legal for adult consumption, younger people are using it more than ever. Teenagers and young adults, whose brains are still in development, are consuming marijuana at unprecedented potencies. Marijuana use is linked with mental disorders, and memory and cognitive decline, with younger people the most at risk.
To add the cherry on top, researchers such as psychiatrist and professor Dr. Deepak D’Souza from Yale University, believes the high potencies, longer periods of use, may make findings from studies in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s irrelevant to the current marijuana landscape.
“It’s the potency…the weed that’s available now [is] so different from what it was in the 1960s,” D’Souza told The Epoch Times.
Back then, weed was less accessible, less potent, and most people used it sporadically. Today, marijuana is more accessible, easily obtained in both licensed and unlicensed stores, increasingly potent, with an increased demographic of people taking the drug in the long-term.
“Studies done in the past would suggest that only about one in 10 people would develop a cannabis use disorder (addiction to cannabis),” D’Souza said. “I think more recent studies … in the current landscape of marijuana would suggest that that number is actually a lot higher than we previously thought.”
How Marijuana Works
Marijuana acts on the endocannabinoid system that exists in the brain and spinal cord.
Researchers are not exactly sure how marijuana creates its euphoric effects, but studies suggest that it is the binding of THC to the endocannabinoid receptors in the brain that creates euphoria. There are two endocannabinoid receptors, CB1 receptors are in the brain and CB2 receptors are in the spinal cord. THC and most cannabinoids can bind to both.
Apart from THC, there is also another common cannabinoid: cannabidiol (CBD).
CBD, the second most common cannabinoid, also interacts with the endocannabinoid system, though its actions are more complex. CBD, however, does not give users the high found in THC. CBD is generally the active ingredient in medicinal marijuana, and there are many studies linking the cannabinoid with therapeutic properties including pain and seizures.
Since the 1900s, the potency of THC in recreational marijuana has been increasing, while CBD percentage has decreased. One can find 99 percent THC oils being dispensed. Consumers can add this to their vapes, or for other forms of consumption.
Recreational Marijuana: The Young and Mental Health
Though the general advice for younger people is to stay off the drug until adulthood, D’Souza senses that an increasing number of younger people are using weed recreationally, often unaware of the exact implications of consumption.
“More and more young people … are using cannabis, and they are getting younger,” he said. “And they’re using more potent forms.”
He is not wrong. Cannabis use in young people is reaching record rates, increasing from 37 percent in 2014 to 43 percent in 2019. Teenagers of today are also more likely to consume marijuana than tobacco.
Many studies have suggested that cannabis, especially its THC component, may affect neurodevelopment in growing brains, as it disrupt processes in the brain. The brain only completes its full maturation at about the age of 25 to 26. Some studies suggest maturation may come even later than that. During adolescence, brains go through “pruning,” which is a process where necessary brain cells and connections are strengthened and the unnecessary neurons are removed.
“The process of pruning is important, it’s really important in preparing the brain for the demands of adulthood,” D’Souza said.
The endocannabinoid system is also important in neurodevelopment. In our bodies we produce two chemicals that can bind to CB1 and CB2 receptors.
“One is called anandamide, named after the Sanskrit word meaning bliss,” he said. “And the other is called 2-AG.”
When the endocannabinoid system is activated, these chemicals will be released and bind to the receptors. The chemicals are specific. They act on a small targeted area and “produce the effects for just milliseconds before…they are inactivated.”
Researchers believe that the binding of these chemicals allows the brain to select what neurons will be strengthened and what neurons will be removed in neurodevelopment, according to D’Souza.
Whilst these two natural chemicals act for a very short, transient time, THC does not.
THC in the body can last for minutes to hours, smoked joints give a quick and strong burst in minutes but consumed THC in gummies and other food start slow and last for hours. THC is also non-selective and will bind to all the areas of the brain with these receptors, distorting the targeted communication in the brain.
“The scientific term we use is that THC produces effects that are … non physiological effects, and those … effects may have far reaching consequences.”
If the endocannabinoid system is, as researchers believe, “really important in directing … neurodevelopmental processes, you could imagine that when an adolescent whose brain is still maturing smokes cannabis, it may disrupt that process,” said D’Souza.
The prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain in charge of critical thinking and decision making, is the last area to fully mature. Research suggests that the maturation in this area is what separates teenagers and young adults from fully matured adults.
Brain scans of drug abusers often show a decreased brain matter volume in the prefrontal cortex, suggesting increased in impulsivity and poor decision making.
Since younger people have immature prefrontal cortexes, this may be why early marijuana use increases risks of addiction and brain impairment. A study found 10.7 percent of teenagers between the age of 12 and 17 developed an addiction to cannabis within 12 months of use, and 20.1 percent developed addiction after 3 years. For young adults aged 18 to 25, 6.4 percent developed addiction in a year, and 10.9 percent in three years.
Cannabis use is also linked to mental health disorders, especially in younger people, particularly those at risk of certain mental health disorders, including depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia.
Though it should be noted that not everyone who uses cannabis will develop mental health disorders and other health conditions, studies in younger people have linked the drug with various mental disorders including psychosis, schizophrenia (some studies suggest a causal link), anxiety, and depression. Some studies also link cannabis consumption with an exacerbation of present psychiatric symptoms. Schizophrenia has lifelong consequences and patients will need to be treated or monitored over their lifetime.
The majority of endocannabinoid receptors in the brain reside in the hippocampus, a seahorse structure deep in the brain important for memory formation and storage. Studies on long-term and short-term effects of cannabis have both found that cannabis affects learning and episodic memory.
Studies on adolescents have also found that cannabis use was associated with a reduced brain matter volume, a 2021 study found that it has been linked with brain aging, especially in the prefrontal cortex. Persistent use of cannabis in adolescence has also been associated with permanently reduced IQ by 5 to 13 points.
Epoch Times Photo
Topographical overlap between age-related thinning, cannabis effect, and cannabinoid 1 (CB1) receptor availability (courtesy of Dr. Matthew D. Albaugh and the Journal of the American Medical Association)
Though parenting plays a role in preventing teens from abusing cannabis and severe adverse effects, it can be hard for parents and educators to make the connection when their image of cannabis is mostly benign.
The industry is also trying to make cannabis appealing to the younger generations despite regulations prohibiting minor use.
D’Souza argued that the age limit that has been set is “disingenuous,” due to the investment in products that are enticing to pre-teens and teenagers.
“Companies are making gummy bears, gummy bears, I would hardly think that adults would be interested in gummy bears. That’s just a disingenuous way of marketing to young adults below the age,” D’Souza said.
“We really have done a poor job at educating the public.”
Marijuana is weighed at a medical marijuana dispensary
Marijuana is weighed at a medical marijuana dispensary in Vancouver, Feb. 5, 2015. (The Canadian Press/Jonathan Hayward)
Medical Cannabis: A Ticket to Becoming Recreational?
Studies shown that medicinal cannabis does have therapeutic effects against pain, chemo-therapy induced nausea and vomiting, and spasticity from multiple sclerosis.
There is also anecdotal evidence of the drug’s effects against seizures in neurodegenerative diseases and epilepsy.
However, regulation of medicinal marijuana use varies drastically across different states.
Connecticut, for example, approves medicinal marijuana use for over 40 conditions including cancer, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, and many others. New York sets no limit on the number and type of conditions.
There are also states with strict laws; Wyoming only approved CBD-oils in 2015 and limited its use to seizures only.
Some studies also suggest benefits in Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and depression, but “for the overwhelming majority of those conditions, there is very little evidence to support the benefits of marijuana for these conditions, with some exceptions,” said D’Souza.
Studies also found that most (around 90 percent) people taking medical marijuana reported that it reduced their symptoms, and two-thirds of them used less prescription medicines.
For the medical marijuana users that report addiction, around 80 percent use recreational marijuana.
Medical marijuana has helped people, but D’Souza argued that there are political motivations behind medicinal marijuana legalization. “Those who wanted to legalize marijuana realized and planned very early on that if they could get the public at large to accept medical marijuana, then it would be a very short step from there to make marijuana completely legal.”
“And that is exactly what is happening.”
Currently, 38 states have approved medical marijuana and 18 of these states also approved recreational marijuana use in adults.
The states first to approve marijuana medically were often also the first to approve it recreationally, with some exceptions:
Colorado and California were leaders in approving medical marijuana, doing so long before the movement for legalization gained momentum. Recreational approval only came after the movement gained momentum, thus these two states took 12 and 20 years respectively to legalize recreational marijuana. There are also states that were late to the overall medical marijuana program, but quickly approved recreational use, such as Massachusetts, and the district Washington DC. They legalized medical marijuana just ahead of the push for legal recreational marijuana use, and it took these two states only around 4 years to approve recreational marijuana.
Full legalization of cannabis often opened doors to commercialization. Each new policy further opened the doors for cannabis access, but these are not without health implications.
A study on youths from 2008 to 2016 in four states that legalized recreational cannabis (Colorado, Washington, Alaska, and Oregon) found that cannabis addictions reported in teenagers 12 to 17 increased from 2.18 to 2.72 percent—a 25 percent increase.
Colorado: A Case Study
Colorado legalized medical marijuana in 2000, and was the first state to legalize recreational marijuana in 2012, before commercializing it in 2014.
Since its legalization, it saw increases in marijuana-involved traffic accidents, use and abuse in teenagers, hospital presentation from cannabis adverse effects, and poison center presentation for children and pets who unwittingly ingested cannabis from medicinal cabinets.
Hospitalizations for cannabis related adverse effects increased by 45 percent (pdf) between 2006 and 2008 (pre-commercialization of medical marijuana) to 2009 to 2012.
From Colorado’s post-commercialization period to 2013 to 2014 (legalization and commercialization period for recreational marijuana), hospitalizations for cannabis-related conditions increased by another 66 percent (pdf).
These hospitalizations do not come without repercussions, and hospitals are reporting financial losses from cannabis-related treatments. A study (pdf) examining one hospital in a municipality in Colorado found that from 2009 to 2014, hospitalizations from cannabis-related bills increased by 375 percent and emergency department (ED) submissions increased from 9 percent to 15.3 percent.
It should be noted that the municipality did not legalize cannabis under Amendment 64, however the hospital saw an increasing presentation to the ED for people experiencing adverse effects from marijuana, with the majority of hospitalizations mental health involved, including suicide ideation, depression, and so on.
From 2009 to 2014, the hospital incurred at least $20 million in losses from cannabis patients not paying their bills. Other studies examining hospital presentations in Colorado found that from 2000 to 2015, hospitalization rates with marijuana-related billing codes doubled from 274 in 2000 to 593 per 100,000 hospitalizations in 2015. ED visits from mental illness were five times higher for bills that had marijuana-related codes than bills without.
A study on poison center reports in Colorado found that child reports of cannabis ingestion doubled from 1.2 per 100 000 population in 2009 to 2.3 per 100,000 population in 2015, and half of these reports were from children ingesting cannabis-containing gummies, and brownies, both of which are appealing to children. Though arguably, the reports are less than crayon poisoning reports every year, however as legalization invariably increases marijuana exposures, poisoning from cannabis in children is only going to increase as the drug becomes increasingly socially acceptable.
Additionally, traffic deaths involving drivers who tested positive for marijuana also increased since legalization of recreational marijuana. Traffic deaths involving marijuana more than doubled from 55 people killed in 2013 to 115 in 2018. In 2019, there were 163 alcohol-impaired traffic deaths in Colorado.
Cannabis use in teenagers and young adults in Colorado have also mostly showed an increasing trend. In 2019, 15.5 percent of teenagers aged 15 and younger consumed cannabis in the past 30 days, compared to 15.4 percent in 2013. Teenagers aged 16 to 17, and 18 and older also saw general increases, reaching 24.4 and 27.5 percent respectively as compared to 22.5 and 25.3 percent in 2013.
D’Souza likened the popularity among the younger generation and commercialism of cannabis with tobacco and alcohol. “Even though alcohol is supposed to be sold only to people over the age of 21, it’s very easy for young people, adolescents to get their hands on alcohol, and likewise I would expect no different…with cannabis.”
Correction: A previous version of this article marked the 2009 to 2012 period as “(post-commercialization)” under the section Colorado: A Case Study. The terminology quoted from the report caused confusion and has since been removed. Colorado legalized recreational marijuana use in 2012 and state-licensed retail sales, or commercialization, in 2014.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here.
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"Interesting article but I do note it does not seem to grasp that higher potency can be and often is offset by lesser consumption."
- Agree and good point. The article is filled with data and science but seems to raise more questions than it answers. Some of the usage numbers have small increases but don't mention self reports of use get more honest with legalization. The traffic death numbers are relatively small, don't identify levels or causation and don't mention they likely test more for thc after legalization than before. Addiction is not defined and use and abuse, micro-dosing and heavy usage are, in part, used interchangeably.
They don't mention the product itself becoming safer from impurities with legalization and seed to dispensary control, cf paraquot. "Medical" and "recreational" are the same product taxed differently, at least in Colo.
Noted, the brain isn't fully developed until well into the 20s but we let them drive, including mountain roads in blizzards (article focuses on Colo) at 16, vote at 18, enlist and go to war at 18?
M. use surpasses tobacco use with the young, but isn't tobacco use down? Maybe not with young people vaping.
Numbers of children eating presumably their parents gummies is low but terrible. Couldn't that be addressed in law by not selling legal edibles in candy form?
Back to the article :
"Cannabis use is also linked to mental health disorders, especially in younger people, particularly those at risk of certain mental health disorders, including depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia."
Doug: The individual odds on this are small, young people having psychotic breaks, but I think this the greatest danger.)
"Persistent use of cannabis in adolescence has also been associated with permanently reduced IQ by 5 to 13 points."
Doug: This seems like a hard thing to measure, your intelligence versus what it would have been.
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No cease-fire talks in war on drugs with furious China
Flood of fentanyl means more overdose deaths
BY BILL GERTZ THE WASHINGTON TIMES
China’s decision to suspend counternarcotics cooperation with the United States to protest House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan is fueling fears of a sharp increase in overdose deaths from Chinese-supplied stocks of fentanyl.
The Chinese suspension of the bilateral talks was announced Aug. 5, and current and former U.S. officials are warning of the fallout from increased drug trafficking into the country by Mexican cartels working with Chinese criminal gangs to move fentanyl, the chemicals used to make it and other illicit drugs.
Fentanyl seizures were already soaring before the talks ended, according to statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In July, a total of 2,130 pounds of fentanyl was seized. That was nearly as much fentanyl seized for all of 2019.
White House drug czar Rahul Gupta warned of more drug shipments and called on China last week to resume the talks. Unless Beijing does more, “fentanyl and methamphetamine synthesized with
precursors made in China will continue to flood the world,” Dr. Gupta told The Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Gupta called China’s suspension of the talks “unfortunate” and noted that the Chinese government in May 2019 cracked down on fentanyl-related exports. The amount of the drug reaching U.S. shores sharply declined.
“But since those actions, North America has been flooded with precursor chemicals from China, stifling international efforts,” he said.
Dr. Gupta made no mention of whether the lack of controls on the border and influx of illegal immigrants are partly to blame.
China’s halt in the narcotics talks was among eight canceled or suspended bilateral exchanges with the United States in response to Mrs. Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Beijing said the Democratic delegation’s visit violated the long-standing “one China” policy regarding the island’s status.
“At a time when the overdose epidemic continues to claim a life every five minutes, it’s unacceptable that the PRC is withholding its cooperation that would help to bring to justice individuals who traffic these illicit drugs and who engage in this global criminal enterprise,” Dr. Gupta said earlier on Twitter, referring to the official People’s Republic of China moniker.
David L. Asher, a former State Department official, said the Chinese action will lead to even more fentanyl precursor shipments to Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels. Those criminal groups are working with chemical manufacturers producing fentanyl in China.
“Based on their actions, communist China is in a covert opioid war with the U.S., and PRC operatives have taken over money laundering across the U.S. and Canada,” said Mr. Asher, now with the Hudson Institute’s China Center. “That, alone should be the basis for a [racketeering] prosecution, but the Justice Department and Office of National Drug Control Policy instead are relying on cooperation from China that is a total ‘dead letter item,’” he said.
In 2018, the Chinese government cracked down on direct shipments of fentanyl into the United States through the mail and inside backpacks of so-called drug mules. The slowdown followed a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Trump and an agreement by China to curb fentanyl and related exports.
Within 90 days of the December 2018 agreement, which was reached during the Group of 20 summit in Argentina, direct Chinese fentanyl shipments to the United States nearly ended, former U.S. counternarcotics officials said.
The flow of Chinese-produced fentanyl, a synthetic opioid blamed for the overdose deaths of 100,000 people in the U.S. last year, instead shifted to Mexico.
The Biden administration’s troubles securing the southern border have allowed Mexican drug cartels to ship massive amounts of fentanyl into the United States, former officials said.
James Carroll, a White House drug czar under Mr. Trump, said his agreement with Mr. Xi resulted in a sharp decline in direct fentanyl shipments, only to have the supply routes redirected to Mexico.
Mr. Carroll said the diminished shipments of fentanyl from China show that Beijing can stop the illicit trade if it wants. “[The Chinese] denied they were sending it to Mexico,” he said in an interview.
The failure to control the border with Mexico is a major factor in the increased fentanyl imports. “Almost all the fentanyl that is in the U.S. has come across the southwest border,” Mr. Carroll said.
Uttam Dhillon, acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration during the Trump administration, predicted that the suspension of counternarcotics talks would lead to an increase in fentanyl shipments and a rise in overdose deaths of Americans.
“Any lack of cooperation with any country — but especially with a country like China that is already providing the Mexican drug cartels with enormous amounts of fentanyl, fentanyl precursors and methamphetamine precursors — will almost certainly result in an increase in the ability of the Mexican drug cartels to produce and distribute those drugs in the United States,” Mr. Dhillon said.
Large seizures of fentanyl indicate that traffickers are moving larger quantities of the drug into the United States than in previous years, he said.
The former acting DEA chief said the problem of Chinese drug trafficking has been compounded by a significant deterioration in the level of U.S.-Mexican law enforcement cooperation under President Biden and leftist Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Mexico’s government enacted legislation restricting DEA agents’ work and now requires the U.S. drug agency to disclose all aspects of its counternarcotics efforts to Mexican officials.
Given the corruption and links between Mexican law enforcement and drug organizations, the law has made it difficult for the DEA to work in the country, Mr. Dhillon said.
Extraditions from Mexico for drugrelated prosecutions also have sharply declined, and Mexico City has halted DEA aircraft operations in the country.
“So the combination of China basically telling the U.S. they are no longer going to cooperate on drug trafficking issues, and the ability of Mexican drug traffickers to operate undeterred in Mexico without concerns about U.S. law enforcement, you’re creating a perfect storm for far more drugs entering this country,” Mr. Dhillon said.
Drug cartels control transportation corridors throughout Mexico and up to U.S. borders, he said.
The increase in illicit drug trafficking is not limited to fentanyl. The cartels also are increasing shipments of methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin.
“Almost certainly, you’ll see drug overdose deaths in all of those categories going up,” Mr. Dhillon said.
Mr. Carroll, the former drug czar, said the Biden administration did not appear to be putting pressure on China to crack down on fentanyl shipments to Mexico even before the cutoff of talks. The White House national drug control strategy issued in April emphasized bilateral engagement and multilateral cooperation as keys to dealing with the drug crisis.
A Congressional Research Service report issued last month said the Biden administration’s policy toward China in countering drugs seeks increased collaboration and continued engagement to reduce fentanyl precursor shipments.
After its cooperation, the Chinese government has voiced frustration that its efforts have not led to progress in other areas of its ties with the U.S., such as lowering trade tariffs imposed by Mr. Trump.
China also is upset by Treasury Department sanctions on 20 Chinese and Hong Kong entities linked to fentanyl trafficking.
Beijing threatened to cut off cooperation after the Institute of Forensic Science, a unit of the Ministry of Public Security, the federal police and intelligence service, was added to the Commerce Department’s trading blacklist in May 2020. The blacklisting was imposed in response to the institute’s reported role in the repression of ethnic Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang province.
Chinese counternarcotics cooperation appears to have been in trouble since before the Pelosi delegation’s Taiwan visit on Aug. 2.
The Chinese government announced in September 2021 that the U.S. move to sanction the Ministry of Public Security institute “seriously affected China’s examination and identification of fentanyl substances and hindered the operation of its fentanyl monitoring system.” The government said the action “greatly affected China’s goodwill to help” in counternarcotics.
The Congressional Research Service report said some U.S. goals for cooperation with China on curbing fentanyl “remain unmet.”
After controlling some fentanyl precursors, China failed to take action to control other chemical precursors, including those identified as 4-AP, 1-boc-4-AP and norfentanyl.
Pandemic restrictions also prevented in-person meetings with the two U.S.China forums that are the main conduits for the now-suspended talks, the Bilateral Drug Intelligence Working Group and the Counternarcotics Working Group.
A former State Department official said recent Chinese cooperation on counternarcotics was limited to dialogue, without action from Beijing.
“China wanted to do something abstract without taking specific actions,” the former official said. “Beijing is hostile to the U.S. and, therefore, the cooperation talks sought to neutralize political elites while allowing fentanyl to do harmful things to the United States.”
China has dismissed official U.S. concerns about the lack of counterdrug cooperation. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said the United States is to blame for the breakdown in anti-drug cooperation.
“The responsibility of undermining China-U.S. counternarcotics cooperation rests entirely with the U.S. side,” Mr. Wang told reporters Aug. 12.
Mr. Wang said the sanctions on the MPS Institute of Forensic Science undermined cooperation because the institute is in charge of detecting and controlling fentanyl-like substances.
The ending of counternarcotics talks was among eight punitive actions the Chinese government announced after the Pelosi visit to Taiwan. Beijing launched large-scale war games shortly after the visit that U.S. officials said appeared to be practice for an invasion of the self-ruled island state.
In addition to halting counternarcotics talks, the Chinese canceled three forums for U.S.-Chinese military talks.
Chinese cooperation on repatriating illegal immigrants and on transnational crime and talks on climate change were also suspended.
Mr. Carroll said the U.S. government needs to take greater action to identify and stop shipments of fentanyl, which he called a “weapon of mass destruction.”
“We’re on track to have the highest record of fatal overdoses in the history of our country,” he said. “We need to attack the supply problem because we are making great strides in the U.S. on the demand side.”
Progress is being made in treating addiction, but stopping drug imports must be a key element of a counterdrug strategy. “We need to hold China and Mexico accountable,” he said.
Said Mr. Dhillon, the former acting DEA administrator: “In order to effectively attack America’s drug overdose problem, we need a secure southwest border, and Mexico must be forced to reengage and allow U.S. law enforcement to operate in Mexico effectively.”
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Biden’s Marijuana Pardon Won’t Release a Single Inmate
Incarceration rates are driven by violent crime, not drug crime. Democrats don’t like that story.
Jason L. Riley hedcutBy Jason L. RileyFollow
Oct. 11, 2022 6:26 pm ET
Even Democrats who sympathize with President Biden’s decision to pardon thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession under federal law might question his timing.
...
Republican candidates across the country have made crime control a major issue in this year’s midterm elections, and Mr. Biden’s order could inadvertently help the GOP advance a narrative that Democrats are preoccupied with coddling criminals.
What trumps that concern for the White House, however, is that Democrats have their own narrative to push, which is that the war on drugs has led to the mass incarceration of people who are disproportionately black and is therefore racist. Following the White House announcement, an NAACP official told National Public Radio, “We’ve seen since the 1970s that marijuana policy was intentionally and malevolently constructed to target the African-American community.” President Obama made a similar claim in 2015. “Over the last few decades, we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before,” he said. “And that is the real reason our prison population is so high.”
What civil-rights activists often conveniently omit from this history is the role that black community leaders and the black press played a half-century ago in getting tougher drug laws passed. They also leave out the key role of black lawmakers in advancing legislation that created sentencing disparities for drug offenses. The fight in Congress in the 1980s and ’90s was led by black liberal Democrats, including Harlem’s Rep. Charles Rangel and Brooklyn’s Rep. Major Owens. A majority of the Congressional Black Caucus voted in favor of the law that created much harsher penalties for crack-cocaine offenses than for powder-cocaine offenses.
Whatever you think of the wisdom of this approach in hindsight, the claim that the initial war on drugs and subsequent escalations were motivated by racial animus toward blacks is nonsense.
There are strong libertarian arguments that the drug war, much like alcohol prohibition in the past, has on balance been a failure and that it’s time to cut our losses. Given that polls now show a majority of Americans, including about half of Republican voters, favor decriminalizing pot, the White House announcement might resonate with people in both parties. But if the goal is to address mass incarceration and racial imbalance in the prison system, then focusing on drug offenders is the wrong approach.
Even Mr. Biden had to concede that no one is in federal prison for simple marijuana possession. What he didn’t say is that even among those housed in state prisons—which hold about 90% of the country’s incarcerated population—a relatively small percentage is there on drug offenses, and almost all of those were convicted of trafficking, not for being caught with small amounts of drugs for personal use. “As a percentage of our nation’s incarcerated population, those possessing small amounts of marijuana barely register,” writes Yale law professor and former District of Columbia public defender James Forman in his book, “Locking Up Our Own.” “For every ten thousand people behind bars in America, only six are there because of marijuana possession.”
The reality is that what drives incarceration rates is violent crimes, not drug crimes. According to the Justice Department, as of 2019 some 58% of people imprisoned by states had been sentenced for violent offenses, 15% for property offenses, 14% for drug offenses and only 4% for drug possession. Put another way, drug offenders are less than a quarter of the violent offenders, and more than 85% of the prison population is there for something other than a drug offense. The U.S. regularly tops the list of advanced countries with the largest prison population, but if we sent home every incarcerated drug offender tomorrow, we’d still top the list.
Nor would releasing drug offenders do much of anything to address the racial imbalance among inmates, which results primarily from the fact that blacks are about 13% of the U.S. population yet are responsible for almost two-thirds of the nation’s violent crime. So long as this racial gap in violent offenses persists, so will the racial gap in incarceration rates. “The racial disparities in prison populations would barely budge if all the people serving time for drug crimes were immediately released,” writes John Pfaff, a professor of criminal law at Fordham University, in his book, “Locked In.” And “it seems likely that scaling back the drug war would not on its own necessarily alter offending or enforcement patterns enough to bring about real change.”
Messrs. Forman and Pfaff are not indifferent to the problems of mass incarceration and racial inequality. What distinguishes both scholars is a desire to have an honest debate about what’s driving the phenomenon and, as important, what isn’t. Which is more than can be said about the Biden administration.
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https://nypost.com/2022/10/22/san-diego-er-seeing-up-to-37-marijuana-cases-a-day/
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https://www.aier.org/article/dea-whistleblower-claims-mass-fraud-and-corruption-is-anyone-surprised/
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how demoralizing to read
like serpico
most are on the take and all simply look the other way
good vs evil
evil winning
once asked an old friend from a different gov agency if he knew any FBI agents who could help us
he got back to me and said the agents who he spoke to could not with 100% confidence be sure that anyone would not turn around and accept bribes to rip us off
i have small faith in humanity left anymore
after he looked
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"good vs evil
evil winning"
- That could be the name of the documentary of our time here.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/heres-deadliest-drug-related-public-204318219.html
had two separate parents call in the past 2 weeks
who were grieving for lost child due to fentanyl OD
yet only mention is from Fox and conservative media
maybe beady eyed Anderson Cooper mentioned it
but of course never in same sentence with Joe Biden where most of the blame rests.
Can't we call the cartels "terrorists" for this reason among others?
If Mexico can't fix it then we should at least seriously consider this :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Border_War_(1910%E2%80%931919)
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What Is a Narco-State, and Why Does It Matter?
undefined and Director of Analysis at RANE
Sam Lichtenstein
Director of Analysis at RANE, Stratfor
14 MIN READFeb 10, 2023 | 15:50 GMT
Seized marijuana bricks are incinerated in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Seized marijuana bricks are incinerated in Guadalajara, Mexico.
(ULISES RUIZ/AFP via Getty Images)
The term ''narco-state'' usually brings to mind countries in Latin America where the influence of drug cartels is so vast that they are at least as powerful as the state itself, if not more. In some cases, this is despite the best efforts of a government. But in others, it may be with the direct connivance of top leaders themselves. Prime examples of both phenomena include Panama in 1980s under the dictatorship of Manuel Noriega, Colombia in 1980s and 1990s as cartels violently battled for supremacy, and Mexico in the early 2000s when cartels' influence became so great that the military began a major (and many would say largely failed) crackdown.
In reality, narco-states exist along a spectrum of severity and are far more geographically dispersed. And while each narco-state may look different, all can have major implications — from the strategic level of geopolitics, to the operational one of business activities and to the tactical one of travel security — not only within their borders but often far beyond. With these wide-ranging impacts, it makes sense to review what the ''narco-state'' term means today as the label has become much more fluid and is increasingly featured in media.
A Sliding (Drug) Scale
Definitions of a ''narco-state'' vary. Some focus on the connection between drugs and the economy (i.e. a country where the drug trade makes up a large portion of the economy), others focus on the role of institutions (i.e. complicity in the drug trade by politicians, the judiciary, law enforcement, the military, etc) and still others highlight the level of insecurity (i.e. that the drug trade fuels rampant violence and lawlessness).
To be sure, all three components apply to some of the most notorious examples of narco-states, such as those described above. But surveying the current global security environment reveals a variety of countries that receive the ''narco-state'' label but otherwise have little in common with each other. At one extreme, take North Korea. While most feared for its nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs (alongside a variety of other criminal activity like cybercrime, money laundering and arms trafficking), Pyongyang also oversees a thriving business in producing and trafficking illicit drugs and knockoffs of legal pharmaceuticals. Trustworthy profit estimates are scant, though numerous defectors have told a similar story of a regime that generates millions of dollars in much-needed hard currency through selling illegal and counterfeit drugs. It is impossible to know exactly how much revenue this drug business generates for the North Korean economy (for context, one well-regarding firm estimates that Pyongyang raked in at least $1.7 billion via cryptocurrency hacking operations in 2022, dwarfing the estimated value of its legal exports by a factor of 10). But no one would accuse the repressive state of having a problem with drug-linked insecurity. By contrast, North Korea's totalitarian regime directly oversees its drug business and does not permit any sort of competition or dissent that could challenge its authority or lead to violence.
On the other extreme, take the Netherlands and Belgium, two liberal democracies that could not be more different than North Korea. They, too, however, have received warnings — initially from government officials and since then reinforced by media coverage — that they are becoming narco-states amid an uptick in violence linked to the drug trade. The reason for the increase is clear: Rotterdam and Antwerp are Europe's two busiest ports and therefore provide crucial conduits for traffickers to move their goods to the continent. For both countries, the recent wave of brazen attacks is certainly out of the ordinary and no doubt raises real security risks. After all, violence has not been confined merely to criminals attacking each other, but has included public attacks that have killed bystanders. Yet despite these realities, it is hard to seriously consider Belgium or the Netherlands as suffering from rampant violent crime, a complete penetration of state institutions by drug gangs or a drug-dependent economy.
And then of course there are a wide variety of countries that fall somewhere in between these extremes. Ecuador, for example, has seen a dramatic surge in drug-related violence over the past three years, along with allegations of corruption and an increasingly prominent drug trade. Ecuador has always been vulnerable to spillover violence due to its geographic proximity to neighboring Colombia and Peru, the world's two largest cocaine producers. But up until recently, the country had never suffered from the sort of repeated bouts of mass violence that have led the government to institute multiple states of emergency. Observers attribute the dramatic escalation in violence and associated rise in corruption to a variety of factors, including the arrival of Mexican drug cartels and changes in trafficking routes that have made Ecuador's Pacific coast much more attractive. But while certainly far more serious than what has been seen in Belgium and the Netherlands, Ecuador still seems far from being a tragic example of criminal state capture, let alone a scenario in which the state itself directs drug production and trafficking operations.
From Narco Presidents to Street Dealers
The range of these examples illustrates that the ''narco-state'' definition is fluid. In particular, the inclusion of countries in Western Europe, even if at the lower end of the risk spectrum, shows that the impacts of the drug trade are not confined to developing countries or remote areas of the world. In fact, the global nature of the drug trade and the vast sums involved (estimates suggest hundreds of billions of dollars per year) means that the activities of narco-states (no matter where they lie on the spectrum) have vast implications at the strategic, operational and tactical levels.
Start at the strategic level of geopolitics and examine Syria. By some measures, Damascus has become the largest drug dealer in the world. Faced with bleak economic prospects after years of civil war and abetted by massive corruption at the highest levels, the regime has turned to producing and trafficking captagon at an industrial scale. Captagon is a synthetically produced amphetamine stimulant used in everything from boosting the energy of fighters before battle to providing a party high at nightclubs. The drug is commonly found across the Middle East and increasingly beyond. According to a widely cited estimate, $5.7 billion in Syrian captagon was seized in 2021, but the regime likely raked in multiple times that amount since it is safe to assume that, as with all illegal drugs, only a fraction of the captagon was interdicted. For context, Syria's estimated legal exports that year were approximately $900 million, meaning the amount earned from the captagon trade is by far the regime's most valuable export and source of hard currency.
Unsurprisingly, Damascus puts the profits to use to fund its domestic repression and ongoing military campaign to reclaim territory. But the Syrian regime isn't the only one in on the action; a variety of militia forces and rebel groups also make money from the captagon trade. This ensures that there is plenty of cash to fuel the ongoing civil war that continues to be a flashpoint for regional instability amid Russian, Turkish, U.S. and other countries' military involvement. And if that is not concerning enough, even terrorist groups like Islamic State have allegedly used sales of captagon and other drugs to fund their operations.
The captagon trade also shows how the Syrian narco-state has clear regional — and increasingly global — impacts. There is hardly a nearby country that does not seem to be struggling to combat the drug's proliferation, ranging from next door Lebanon (where profits help fund Hezbollah and its Iranian backers) to Saudi Arabia (where experts have accused Syria of using the drug as a crude form of coercion: either give us financial support or we will continue to flood the Saudi market with pills). Illustrating Riyadh's concern over the drug's impact at home, it temporarily banned fruit and vegetable imports from Lebanon in 2021 after finding 5.3 million pills hidden in a shipment of pomegranates. The Syrian narco-state is also beginning to attract greater concern beyond the region as seizures of captagon increasingly occur across the world. Illustrating this, the 2023 U.S. National Defense Authorization Act included the Countering Assad's Proliferation, Trafficking and Garnering of Narcotics (CAPTAGON) Act, which requires U.S. authorities to develop an interagency strategy to combat narcotics networks linked to the Assad regime.
Similar narratives can be found across the globe. In Latin America, Venezuela's state-sponsored involvement in the drug trade (both via the direct involvement by top leaders and by providing safe haven to myriad criminal groups) funds its own repression at home and violence elsewhere in the region, most immediately across the border in Colombia. Similarly, in Southeast Asia, recent estimates show a sharp uptick in drug production throughout Myanmar since its coup two years ago; profits are not only helping to finance the junta, rebel forces and ethnic militias, but are also crowding out legitimate commerce as a way for farmers to simply make ends meet. Unsurprisingly, this dynamic is fueling growing concern in neighboring countries like Thailand about the likely spillover impacts.
The pernicious impacts of narco-states also extend down to the operational level of business activities. Aside from bringing violent risks (more on that below), the drug trade creates clear complications for companies operating in or near narco-states. The most obvious is corruption, which accompanies drugs wherever they go. For the drug trade to become influential, let alone institutionalized, there needs to be complicity from people whose jobs are supposed to be doing the opposite. Driven by a mixture of greed and fear, everyone from judges and tax collectors to police officers and customs inspectors (and at times national leaders and industry titans) can be found on the take.
For businesses, the perniciousness of corruption has clear and deleterious impacts. Most obviously, when officials start accepting drug-linked bribes, they also often start making demands of legitimate businesses as a culture of graft takes root. This manifests as everything from demanding small payments to secure local permits to massive fraud involved in awarding government contracts. In some places, this is merely seen as the proverbial cost of doing business, but it nonetheless drains corporate budgets and brings compliance and legal risks. There can also be major reputational considerations, if at all seen to be connected to illicit schemes or helping to prop up corrupt governments — even if only tangentially. Things are even more complicated when foreign companies work through local third parties (which is a common practice, especially when moving into a new market), making proper due diligence all the more difficult. And since other crimes (like human trafficking and money laundering) typically accompany the drug trade, evaluating supply chain risks becomes a lot harder as well.
The drug trade also causes a wide variety of secondary corporate harm that, over time, can have far worse consequences than the immediate complication of confronting corruption. After all, the drug trade can crowd out space for legitimate business activities, redirect potential talent, lower human capital, and reduce productivity — all of which harm a country's attractiveness for investment. Moreover, governments fighting the drug trade have to redirect a lot of resources (not least their attention, but also a lot of money and personnel), which could otherwise go to improving infrastructure, education or other business-friendly pursuits. And for those governments that are in cahoots with criminals, policymaking generally becomes much more opaque and the rule of law erodes, with clear negative consequences for companies. In addition, when the drug trade becomes deeply institutionalized, popular grievances rise and good (or, in some places, any) governance falls — a poor combination for either economic development or political stability. Finally, the drug trade undermines (and sometimes even silences) free and independent media through violent intimidation, making it all that much harder for businesses to understand what is truly happening on the ground.
The third and final way to consider the dangerous impacts of narco-states comes at the tactical level: namely, the drug trade's impact on travelers. It goes without saying that the illegal drug business is a violent one and, even when criminals seek to contain their rivalries and not attract undue attention, the realities of fierce competition mean that bystanders can suffer physical harm or other disruptions to their daily lives.
Take Mexico as an example. While cartels usually try to avoid harming foreigners in their brazen violence, a series of attacks in late 2021 and early 2022 along the Riviera Maya, one of the most important tourist spots in Mexico, illustrated how no location can truly be safe. Among other incidents in this timeframe, two foreign tourists were killed in Tulum in October 2021 during a shootout between rival gang members at a restaurant just off the city's main street. The following month, a dozen gunmen stormed a beach outside a luxury hotel in Cancun, killing two rival gang members and sending foreign tourists scrambling for cover. And in January 2022, a hitman broke into a luxury hotel in Playa del Carmen, where he killed two foreigners and injured a third (though the victims appear to have been involved in drug trade rather than innocent bystanders). 2022 also saw cartels essentially shut down major border cities like Tijuana and Mexicali for multiple days — trapping foreigners and locals alike — as a show of force against the government.
Of course, such violence is not unique to Mexico but tragically haunts many other countries that have received the ''narco-state'' label — raising real safety risks for not only foreign travelers, but the locals who almost always suffer the most. Local residents are usually aware of what areas to avoid, certainly more than tourists. But narco-states are so dangerous precisely because the drug trade cannot simply be separated from mainstream society; it infects everything.
'Just Say No'
Drug liberalization and the rise of synthetics are the two key (and somewhat opposing) global developments that will greatly affect the way these dynamics develop in the future. In recent years, there has been a growing global push to loosen rules around cannabis, and some governments are even making noises about doing the same for hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. More broadly, there is widespread recognition that the ''war on drugs'' will never be won and some sort of a policy rethink is required. Thus, on one hand, there is a force at least somewhat seeking to break criminals' hold over the drug trade by bringing at least a portion of it into the legal or at least gray market.
But on the other hand, there is the rising global popularity of synthetic drugs. Unlike many drugs that are created from otherwise natural substances that can only be grown in certain areas, synthetics are chemical compounds that can be produced in a lab anywhere on the planet. This gives synthetic drugs a number of advantages, including generally being cheaper to produce, easier to hide and capable of having their formulas constantly adjusted to ensure the right potency and skirt regulations — all of which make them much more profitable, but also much more harmful. Look no further than the deadly toll fentanyl and other synthetic opioids — whose precursor chemicals are shipped from China to Mexico before being transported across the border — has taken on the U.S. populace in the past few years.
When evaluating these two forces, the second appears to be much more powerful than the first, indicating that the ''narco-state'' label will likely grow to encompass only more countries in the future. This, of course, bodes ill for geopolitical, operational and security risks — and suggests that the list of future narco-states may very well look different from those today.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/californias-cannabis-market-crashes-northern-counties-brace-for-impact_5240536.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge&src_src=partner&src_cmp=ZeroHedge
California’s Cannabis Market Crashes, Northern Counties Brace for Impact
A cannabis growing operation in the Santa Ynez Valley northwest of Santa Barbara, Calif., on Aug. 6, 2019. (David McNew/AFP via Getty Images)
A cannabis growing operation in the Santa Ynez Valley northwest of Santa Barbara, Calif., on Aug. 6, 2019. (David McNew/AFP via Getty Images)
Travis Gillmore
By Travis Gillmore
May 4, 2023Updated: May 5, 2023
biggersmaller Print
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California’s cannabis industry is in a free-fall, with some municipalities in the northern part of the state making plans for significantly reduced tax revenues as a result of a collapse in wholesale prices.
Once selling for more than $4,000 per pound, bulk buyers are now shopping in the $300 to $500 range for fresh harvests, according to experts, and some growers reported clearing out their crops for less than $200 per pound for fear of being stuck with product.
The price represents a sharp drop from recent years, according to industry insiders.
“It’s been a steady decline since we got here in 2010, but with the passage of Proposition 64 in 2016, prices accelerated downward quickly,” Rachel Greene, a longtime grower with experience in Mendocino and Humboldt Counties’ cannabis programs, told The Epoch Times. “It was a combination of a lot of people getting in the game and the old corporate warfare model of operating at a loss to drown out the competition.”
Prop. 64—known as the Adult Use of Marijuana Act—was passed by voters and made recreational sales legal, creating the beginning of a regulatory framework to manage the industry.
Legitimate and illegitimate family businesses were severely impacted by the plunge in profits and salability of a once easy-to-move commodity, according to farmers.
Epoch Times Photo
Marijuana greenhouses in Carpinteria near Santa Barbara, Calif., on August 6, 2019. (David McNew/AFP via Getty Images)
“I used to pay trimmers $300 to manicure each pound, and now I can’t even sell them for that,” a Mendocino County local who asked to be called Jack, for fear of retaliation, told The Epoch Times. “This was a business that benefited families all over the mountains here, and now there are growers and their helpers looking for work. Nobody knows what to do.”
Farmers are reporting a “perfect storm” of conditions, with inflation causing the cost of doing business to escalate significantly over the last two years, while the saturated market in California has left many growers with few options.
“There were a bunch of pounds composted out here last year, and a lot of hopes and dreams went up in smoke with the crash,” Jack said. “We’re all kind of stunned by how fast it happened, and it’s not just us hurting. Look at all the empty storefronts. We were the lifeblood of this economy.”
Lost Tax Revenues
Plummeting prices are affecting more than just the cannabis market, as rural regions of the state have become reliant on the industry supporting retailers and the taxes generated by increased cashflows in the area.
The city of Ukiah, the county seat of Mendocino, is preparing for an estimated $1 million drop in tax revenues, in part due to the weakened cannabis industry.
Revenues grew steadily year over year until experiencing a dip last year, with the busiest shopping season—the last three months of the year—resulting in a drop of nearly ten percent compared to 2021, according to city records. However, the records don’t specify how much tax revenue was related to cannabis.
“This doesn’t make the impacts any less real, as we’re seeing the declines in numerous types of businesses, but they are difficult to measure,” Shannon Riley, deputy city manager for Ukiah, told The Epoch Times.
Garden supply sales were down nearly 13 percent in Ukiah last year, and sales taxes collected overall were down nearly 6 percent in 2022 compared to the year prior, according to HdL Companies—a firm providing audit, operations, and revenue management services to public agencies.
The state experienced 4 percent growth in overall sales tax revenues during the same period.
Compared to other cities in northern California facing tax revenue declines, Ukiah is uniquely positioned in the area, acting as a hub for surrounding communities, with medical facilities and shopping available for thousands of residents not living in the city, according to the deputy city manager.
“Ukiah is very well prepared for this type of adjustment and will continue to plow ahead with major infrastructure projects, street improvements, recreation programming and events, and more,” Riley said.
Other areas have not fared as well, with small towns in Northern California that once experienced a boom-and-bust moment with the loss of the logging industry now going through similar circumstances.
Epoch Times Photo
Marijuana plants grow at the Green Pearl Organics marijuana dispensary in Desert Hot Springs, Calif., on Jan. 1, 2018. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)
From Boom to Bust
Known as the Emerald Triangle for the region’s renowned cannabis production, the counties of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity grew in population and in economic activity following the passage of Proposition 215 in 1996, the first in the nation allowing for the plant’s medicinal use.
While census data shows modest growth for each county—approximately 11 percent for Mendocino and Humboldt and more than 20 percent for Trinity—in the 27 years since legalization, residents say those numbers don’t account for the actual number of people that moved in.
The discrepancy lies in the pattern of behavior for many who came to the region to set up their operations from other states, yet never registered to get California driver’s licenses, and returned to their home state once the harvest was complete, according to farmers and local authorities.
In addition, from August to November, a sizable number of people traveled into the area in search of work as trimmers and laborers every year.
“It felt like the population doubled, and we’re a small community so it’s easy to notice the newcomers,” Juan Aguilar of Ukiah told The Epoch Times. “For part of the year during grow season, and especially at harvest, we’d have huge crowds in the grocery stores, people all over town.”
Small businesses flourished in tiny towns up and down Highway 101 during the height of the Green Rush—the term used to describe the thousands of people that flocked to the region in search of opportunity from the industry—with a slew of restaurants and retailers opening and closing in a short time with the quick demise of the local cash cow.
Property prices in the area appear to be correlated with the price of cannabis, as evidenced by the number of transactions, price per acre of raw land, and home sales over the last two years, according to real estate brokers in Mendocino County.
For sale signs can be seen on practically every street, even in areas where demand once far outpaced supply, and the increase in available properties is depressing prices.
Legal vs. Illegal Cannabis
While cannabis remains federally illegal, listed as a Schedule 1 narcotic with no medicinal value, 40 states plus the District of Columbia have medical provisions allowing for personal consumption.
Regulations preventing interstate distribution and limiting advertising hamper the ability for producers to reach potential target markets, according to industry analysts.
All legal cannabis grown in California is required by law to be sold in the state, and the 20 largest farms are capable of producing more than 2.6 million pounds—enough to supply the Golden State’s legal market—according to recent estimates from HdL.
More than 3,000 companies currently hold approximately 7,500 licenses, capable of growing 16 million pounds annually. With the state’s legal commercial market only capable of consuming 15 percent of this capacity, more than 70 percent of licensees are expected to experience net losses this year, based on HdL data.
More than 60 percent of cannabis grown in the state is unlicensed, according to law enforcement estimates, and their totals are not included in the above statistics, adding to the deeply oversaturated market.
Epoch Times Photo
There are roughly 5,000 greenhouses illegally cultivating marijuana in Siskiyou County, Calif., according to the county’s Sheriff’s Department. (Courtesy of the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department)
Some of these illegal grows are “massive operations run by cartels,” a detective with decades of experience—who asked to remain anonymous for fear of his family’s safety—told The Epoch Times. “There are two families that control the majority of the production up here, and while we haven’t seen the violence that Mexico has, we know they’re here.”
With the emergence of legal cannabis in the state, it became easier for the cartels to grow in California instead of Mexico, and with no international border crossing needed to move their crops, profit margins increased and incentivized others to move their operations to Northern California, according to the detective.
“We’ve seen a steady influx of young workers from Sinaloa, Mexico coming in over the last few years,” he said. “Things have changed in the community, to say the least, and for every illegal site we take down, three more pop up.”
Taxes at the county and state level add to the financial burden for producers and consumers, according to experts.
“One of my neighbors’ invoices was for $55,000, and what he got back after county and state taxes and distribution fees was close to $6,000,” the once-licensed farmer Greene said. “It was astonishing to see how little he walked away with, and it was disheartening for farmers like us and others that thought we were doing the right thing.”
Greene and others reported feeling let down by the policies designed to regulate the market.
“We thought the state of California was going to have our backs and help us succeed,” she said.
Two Assembly Bills related to the dueling legal and illegal cannabis markets passed the Assembly Judiciary Committee on May 2, both attempting to give licensed operators legal recourse against unlicensed competitors.
These proposals come as sales across the state fell by 8.2 percent last year, totaling $5.3 billion, the first drop since the recreational market opened in 2018, but this decline follows a 68 percent increase in 2020 and another 23 percent spike in 2021.
With market forces at play affecting producers and communities, the state’s coffers have benefited from the regulatory structure. As of the fourth quarter of 2022, California has collected $4.6 billion in cannabis tax revenue since 2018, according to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration.
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https://www.pingthread.com/thread/1654138816394035210
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had one chronic user state he was beginning to notice hallucinations
I think he was in late 20 s or early 30s
had a few hyperemesis syndrome callers as well
seems to be in those who imbibe daily for prolonged period
but think of the revenue it brings in ....
like gambling ....
great for the big spenders in the bureaucracy
:wink:
next we should tax sex .....
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The THC level in current MJ is off the charts when compared to what the Boomers kind of remember...
had one chronic user state he was beginning to notice hallucinations
I think he was in late 20 s or early 30s
had a few hyperemesis syndrome callers as well
seems to be in those who imbibe daily for prolonged period
but think of the revenue it brings in ....
like gambling ....
great for the big spenders in the bureaucracy
:wink:
next we should tax sex .....
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" when compared to what the Boomers kind of remember..."
:-D
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/oregonians-turning-against-mistake-drug-decriminalization-amid-record-ods-dystopian-nightmare/?bypass_key=bFQ1WXVXVXF5OVRYK3hONks0TFdLQT09OjpVMEl6T0hoRFZFRkxVazgyVlVka1REbHBaelJyZHowOQ%3D%3D?utm_source%3Demail&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=32402130&utm_source=Sailthru
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https://geopoliticalfutures.com/trends-in-global-drug-use-and-production/?tpa=YmNmODA5NDc0NjEzN2Q0ZGJjNGFkZTE2OTU5MTU3NDE2MDExYTk&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https://geopoliticalfutures.com/trends-in-global-drug-use-and-production/?tpa=YmNmODA5NDc0NjEzN2Q0ZGJjNGFkZTE2OTU5MTU3NDE2MDExYTk&utm_content&utm_campaign=PAID%20-%20Everything%20as%20its%20published
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Amazing story BBG (another thread).
In MN, we went from illegal to legal, all past offenses expunged, to SUBSIDIZED, in 3 months.
https://m.startribune.com/cannabis-manufacturing-facility-planned-for-former-timber-mill-in-grand-rapids-400-jobs-67-million/600312888/
I was satisfied with decriminalization.
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I’m not quite sure how to take this. It may very well lower drug mortality in the US, but doesn’t do much to address any underlying incentive, and the cartel will sell something in its place while some other cartel will certainly fill any vacuum created:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/mexicos-largest-cartel-orders-ban-on-fentanyl-trafficking/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mexicos-largest-cartel-orders-ban-on-fentanyl-trafficking
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https://www.talkingdrugs.org/review-how-to-regulate-psychedelics-a-practical-guide/
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I just did a medical review online course on psychedelics
some do have suggestions of value
but the evidence if VERY lacking on their effectiveness and risk
much beyond anectodal reports
I would copy you on them but it is propriety so probably not legal or ethical to do so.
How can one even study the effectiveness
It is hard to do a control placebo group with group that gets drug
since obviously the controls would know they are not getting anything
what doses do we use
some may be effective at microdoses below cognitive effects but help things like depression anxiety etc.
a few studies have used benadryl for the control group but people can tell the difference
then some study participants may be biased due to their expectations
most magic mushrooms
PSILOCYBIN ("magic mushrooms")
and
MESCALINE (peyote) ( a cactus)
I always thought they were the same :-o
have variable active ingredients depending:
For most plants, the time of year that harvesting occurs, as well as the methods used to harvest and process the plant, can also significantly alter chemical composition.
As a result even anectodal reports are unclear since the actual dose would be unknown.
The review was not against there use only that we don't really have a handle on them.
Reported side effects for example:
"The use of nonstandardized psilocybin mushrooms has been associated with multiple cases of toxicity. For example, seizures, myocardial infarction, and acute kidney failure have been reported in some patients [11,87,88].
There is also a growing body of literature on the adverse effects of purified psilocybin. Most clinical research agrees that the most common side effects noted at therapeutic doses are headache, nausea, anxiety, and transient elevations in blood pressure and heart rate."
"the most commonly reported adverse effects with peyote are nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. These effects typically occur within 30 to 60 minutes of ingestion. It has also been reported to cause mydriasis, sweating, tremor, and elevations in blood pressure and heart rate within one hour after ingestion [95,96].
The hallucinations that occur with peyote have also been associated with anxiety, paranoia, fear, and emotional instability that has the potential to lead to self-inflicted or accidental injury [95,97,98].
Mescaline, the major active constituent of peyote, has been reported to cause respiratory depression when used in large doses (20 mg/kg or more) and, rarely, death. Most symptoms seen with mescaline subside within 24 hours of use
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I am told that in the tropics psilocybin mushrooms can be found in cow turds the morning after it rained at night.
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https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=fa0b1df5a98444eee5677945f4b93f7e_659577e1_6d25b5f&selDate=20240103
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HEALTH
PHARMA
HEARD ON THE STREET
Psychedelics Are Going Mainstream. Investing in Them Hasn’t.
Drugs like LSD have shown potential for treating psychiatric disorders. Wall Street and big pharma aren’t convinced.
Startups and big pharmaceutical companies are exploring medical uses of psychedelics like LSD, MDMA and psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in ‘magic mushrooms’ like the ones shown. KEVIN MOHATT FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By
David Wainer
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Jan. 5, 2024 10:00 pm ET
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Psychedelics spent a half-century in political and medical purgatory. Now they’re starting to go mainstream. Respected academic institutes and billionaires are funding research into their therapeutic benefits, and the Food and Drug Administration could soon approve MDMA (known more commonly as ecstasy) for a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
The therapeutic potential of these drugs looks promising, but Wall Street and big pharma are still not convinced of the financial potential. Intellectual property is one big concern. While new compounds discovered in a lab can often lead to over a decade of exclusive profits for a pharma company, psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in “magic mushrooms,” have been around for a long time. This makes patenting them more controversial. Companies are patenting formulations of the drugs and even things like the cozy furniture in a treatment room, but questions about patent protection abound.
Then there are the trips, which can take patients on whirlwind journeys through the recesses of their minds, lasting six to eight hours. From a therapeutic perspective, the altered perceptions might be the whole point: The trips have shown the potential to rewire the brain in a process known as neuroplasticity. (There are also companies developing tweaked versions of those drugs that reduce the highs while hoping to still provide therapeutic benefits.) But from a financial perspective, the inconsistency of psychedelic experiences and the fact that they require hands-on psychological therapy make for a difficult investment pitch. Treatment is typically administered in a specialized facility under supervision by psychiatric professionals, which is costlier and harder to scale up than simply providing medicine.
“It’s not the same as going to your pharmacy and picking up a pill bottle,” says Brian Abrahams, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets.
The industry’s market performance reflects such fears, which are magnified at a time when higher rates make riskier stocks harder to own. While many psychedelic companies listed in the stock market with much fanfare in recent years and surged as the biotech bubble peaked around 2021, the industry has nosedived more recently. The AdvisorShares Psychedelics ETF is down over 80% since its 2021 inception. Shares in Atai Life Sciences, a prominent startup backed by billionaire Peter Thiel, are down over 90% since going public at a $3 billion valuation.
True, the entire biotech industry has been negatively affected by higher rates. But there is still plenty of investor appetite for high-quality biotech companies, many of which are getting snapped up by big pharma at massive premiums these days. That is especially the case in the psychiatric realm, where available treatments are far from ideal and many patients are stuck with no helpful options. Yet save for Otsuka Pharmaceutical’s $59 million acquisition last year of Mindset Pharma, the industry has steered clear of psychedelics.
While big pharma dollars may not be pouring in yet, the industry has still been able to raise money in recent months through a flurry of financing including a $100 million stock sale by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit leader.
MAPS Public Benefit Corp., which has raised money from billionaires like New York Mets owner Steven Cohen, last month filed an application with the FDA for approval of MDMA in combination with talk therapy to reduce the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The fact that the first possible approval for MDMA could go to a nonprofit underscores how it’s been idealism, and not just profits, pushing the industry forward.
The questions swirling around the economics of psychedelics don’t mean there won’t be money to be made, or that this isn’t a therapeutic area worth investigating. Many of the biggest proponents of such drugs, in fact, are very worried about corporations profiting from the “gifts of nature.” Serious researchers are also concerned about potential blowback if things move too quickly. “Many people forget that there were years of glowing reviews in the 1950s and 1960s before the press turned alarmist and a government clampdown prevented research progress for decades,” David Yaden, a professor in psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins University, wrote with two other colleagues.
For businesses that can navigate the FDA hurdles, medical reimbursement coding and intellectual-property fights, there could yet be a significant market. The path is being paved by big pharma. Johnson & Johnson’s Spravato, a chemically related version of ketamine that was approved by the FDA in 2019 for treatment-resistant depression, is carving out a new business model. Sales of Spravato, which must be administered in a treatment center, are expected to climb to about $1 billion this year, according to analysts polled by Visible Alpha. (Matthew Perry’s recent death from acute effects of ketamine sparked controversy around the anesthetic, though the concentration in his system suggested that he had taken it at home without supervision.)
Compass Pathways is seeking to be the first to receive FDA approval for a synthetic formulation of psilocybin. PHOTO: KEVIN MOHATT FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Ketamine can produce out-of-body, hallucinogenic sensations, but it is nothing like magic mushrooms or LSD. For one, side effects tend to peak at 40 minutes, versus hours for other psychedelics. Yet its growing use sets a precedent, says Thomas Shrader, an analyst at BTIG. If the number of sites administering Spravato continue to grow, they will help expand the new world of “interventional psychiatry,” he said.
Compass Pathways has the largest market capitalization among psychedelic companies and is seeking to be the first to receive FDA approval for a synthetic formulation of psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms. The company is currently conducting a late-stage study that is likely to wrap up next year. If successful, it could lead to FDA approval sometime in 2026, according to Chief Executive Kabir Nath, who has held leadership positions at pharma companies like Otsuka and Bristol-Myers Squibb. If Compass’s drug receives FDA approval, Nath sees a similar trajectory to J&J’s Spravato, which is holding up well despite competition from ketamine clinics.
Psychedelics won’t bring world peace and they probably won’t be huge blockbusters either. But in the difficult field of treatment for mental illness, their revival could be a helpful advance for some patients, and some long-patient innovators
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Posted primarily as I’ve seen sundry “weed causes psychosis” pieces tither and yon of late:
https://www.cato.org/blog/wall-street-journal-columnist-triggers-reefer-madness-flashback
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Review of book about the rise of women in Latin America:
SWJ EL CENTRO BOOK REVIEW – NARCAS: THE SECRET RISE OF WOMEN IN LATIN AMERICA’S CARTELS
Articles
Tue, 02/06/2024 - 4:03pm
SWJ El Centro Book Review – Narcas: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America’s Cartels
Nathan P. Jones
Narcas
Deborah Bonello, Narcas: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America’s Cartels. Boston: Beacon Press, 2023 [ISBN-13: 978-0807007044, Hardback; 166 pages]
Deborah Bonello’s Narcas: the Secret Rise of Women in Latin America’s Cartels brings to light the role of women in the drug trafficking industry; an often-overlooked phenomenon. Deborah Bonello masterfully provides a window into the lives of the women who have become major drug traffickers and, more often, minor players (p. 90). Through interviews, archival research, and the meticulous review of court documents, Bonello provides important empirical case studies with journalistic flair, bringing nuance to an understudied issue.
Informants
Bonello makes important points that are valuable broadly to the study of drug trafficking. One point she highlights in the context of one of the women she profiles, is the need to protect informants. In one case one of the women she profiled had both of her sons murdered while she was meeting with Colombian authorities and US DEA. The subject attributed those meetings in which she continued to be incarcerated in Colombia as leading to the murder of her sons (p. 128). Thus, she ultimately did not cooperate so that other family members would not be killed. The lesson that she learned was that any cooperation could result in the death of her family as her lawyer argued on her behalf (p. 131). This is an important issue related to informants impacting both men and women in the organized crime world.
Las Buchonas
The concept of buchonas has in recent years drawn increased attention in the study of Mexican drug trafficking (pp. 107–115). Buchonas are the attractive girlfriends and wives of drug traffickers (or traffickers themselves). This lifestyle which focuses on a very specific aesthetic has drawn significant attention and impacted the lives of women participating in and in the orbit of drug trafficking in Mexico and beyond. Here Bonello elucidates how women can become both victims and victimizers/active participants with their own agency in the world of Mexican drug trafficking. Bonello brings to this discussion a self-reflective view of the women who participated in these extensive surgeries in pursuit of an aesthetic which increasingly supports a broader narcocultura promoted and diffused by narcas like Emma Coronel, the wife of extradited Chapo Guzmán, former head of the Sinaloa Cartel.
Women and MS-13
Nowhere is the issue of women as victims versus participants more acute than in the case of women and their role in MS-13. Bonello describes the girlfriends of MS-13 members visiting their boyfriends in Central American prisons; the power and agency their relationships entail, but also the victimization those relationships imply from the police, MS-13, and society more broadly. It would be interesting to see these discussions updated as the security crackdown of President Bukele, who was reelected (Feb 2024) plays out. All analysts of the region are carefully watching the security gains accompanied by likely human rights violations. Bonello further discusses the role of women as MS-13 members themselves and the various policy changes the MS13 leadership in Central America has implemented related to the membership of women.
A Powerful Read
Narcas is an excellent look into the role of women in Latin American drug trafficking which includes case studies spanning Guatemala, Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, and the United States. It would be excellent for any course in criminology looking at Latin America, a political science course on drug trafficking or security issues, or various sociology courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. It is a fast and enjoyable read built upon the research of an intrepid reporter for Vice News; an outlet which has been impressive on Latin American security reporting. Bonello is particularly good at getting access to high level female traffickers and then drawing the general from the specific.
There are few places where I can suggest any improvement to this book. I hoped to read on the role of women like Rosalinda González Valencia, the wife of El Mencho the leader of the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG). She came from the Valencia family, which was important in the Milenio cartel, a precursor to the CJNG. She has been identified by numerous publications such as El País as critical to the money laundering operations of the CJNG and is an example of a woman in drug trafficking meriting further study. This is not a critique of the book, rather an acknowledgement that we can always cover more and that the inherently difficult to study drug world will always leave us waiting for the revelations of case studies such as this.
Conclusion
Deborah Bonello’s fine work on the role of women in Latin American drug trafficking gives us a richer more nuanced view of the role they play. This view demonstrates women may have far more agency and capacity to use nonviolent mechanisms to move to the top of the drug trafficking world than we realize. One of her key points is that women are more able to remain invisible in the face of state action and rival cartels. This is a critical point for anyone studying the sociology of drug trafficking and women’s ability to survive and thrive in an increasingly globalized world where borders are easily penetrated by illicit flows.
Categories: SWJ Book Review - Mexico - drug cartels
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/swj-el-centro-book-review-narcas-secret-rise-women-latin-americas-cartels
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Piece argues increase in OD deaths not cause by legalization, but oh well:
Did the Fentanyl Wave Hit Oregon Just as Voters Decriminalized Drugs?
Cato @ Liberty by Jeffrey A. Singer / Feb 6, 2024 at 3:09 PM
Jeffrey A. Singer
Three years after its first‐in‐the‐nation drug decriminalization measure (Measure 110) went into effect, Oregon’s lawmakers are poised to re‐criminalize possessing and using drugs. Lawmakers note that Oregon’s overdose rate has risen dramatically and exceeded the national average since Measure 110 took effect in 2021.
I have argued here that policymakers were mistaken if they believed decriminalizing drugs would necessarily lead to a drop in overdoses. Decriminalizing is not the same as legalizing. As long as people who use drugs need to go to the black market for them, they can never be sure of the dose or purity of what they are buying or if it is the drug they think they are buying. I also argued that it is inappropriate to judge Measure 110 so soon after the law went into effect. For example, in its first year, the country was amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and public health measures made it even more challenging than usual for Oregonians to access harm reduction and treatment programs.
However, writing in the New York Times this week, addiction and neuroscience journalist Maia Szalavitz contends that, while people may be quick to assume that the rise in overdoses during Measure 110’s implementation suggests cause and effect, it is essential to remember that correlation is not causation. Szalavitz provides crucial information placing Oregon’s overdose problem in proper context.
Szalavitz points to numerous studies showing that illicit fentanyl flooded the drug market in waves, beginning in the eastern US and working its way west. Szalavitz cites work by Brandon del Pozo of Brown University Medical School, showing nearly identical surges in overdose rates in every region of the country as fentanyl began dominating the drug market. Szalavitz cites research showing that almost 90 percent of overdose deaths involving fentanyl and its analogs occurred in 28 states east of the Mississippi River. Additional research published in 2023 showed a similar wave making its way across the country, finally dominating western states, including Oregon, around 2021.
Investigators at Brown University Medical School and the Research Triangle Institute (RTI International) used Centers for Disease Control and Prevention overdose mortality data from 2008–2022 and a synthetic control group consisting of 48 states and the District of Columbia to study the association between overdose fatality rates and Measure 110. They used a changepoint analysis to determine “when each state experienced a rapid escalation in fentanyl.” The researchers concluded:
After adjusting for the rapid escalation in of fentanyl, analysis found no association between M110 and fatal drug overdose rates.
Future evaluations of the health effects of drug policies should account for changes in the composition of unregulated drug markets.
The researchers also found:
Recriminalization in Washington State saw an increase in the fatal overdose rate.
Before lawmakers return to tactics that have proven to be a dismal failure for more than 50 years and risk exacerbating Oregon’s drug overdose problem, they should listen to drug policy researchers who point out that Oregon’s surge in overdose deaths corresponds to the late arrival of fentanyl in the state relative to other parts of the US.
If lawmakers want to know where to place the blame for Oregon’s overdose crisis, the answer should be obvious: prohibition.
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I wonder if data would be different with edibles.
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Even 1 Joint per Week Enough to Boost Heart Disease Risk: Study
New large-scale research presents some of the most damning evidence yet about marijuana’s impact on cardiovascular health.
Even 1 Joint per Week Enough to Boost Heart Disease Risk: Study
(Vuk Stajic/Shutterstock)
By George Citroner
3/21/2024
Lighting up a joint once or more a week? That puff of marijuana could be seriously hurting your heart.
A new study finds that even relatively infrequent cannabis use is linked to higher risks of having a heart attack or stroke—and the more you smoke, the more danger you’re in.
The large-scale research presents some of the most damning evidence yet about marijuana’s impact on cardiovascular health.
Marijuana Smoking as Risky as Tobacco for Heart Health
Using cannabis is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular diseases, even among nontobacco smokers, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Previous research had linked marijuana use to heart disease risk, but those findings were often dismissed because many participants also smoked tobacco, which has long been linked to various cardiovascular issues.
In the new study, researchers analyzed data from over 434,000 patients aged 18 to 74, collected between 2016 and 2020 from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey.
About 75 percent of the study participants said smoking was the most common way they consumed marijuana, but they also reported using edibles and vaping. However, the researchers did not specifically compare the risks of smoking marijuana versus consuming edibles.
25 Percent Higher Heart Attack Risk, 42 Percent Greater Stroke Risk
The study found that compared to those who never used marijuana, daily cannabis smokers had a 25 percent increased likelihood of heart attack and a 42 percent greater risk of experiencing strokes.
Among adults at risk for premature cardiovascular disease (defined as men under 55 and women under 65), cannabis use was significantly associated with nearly 40 percent higher combined odds of coronary heart disease, heart attack, and stroke, regardless of whether they used traditional tobacco products or not.
The researchers conducted a separate analysis of a smaller subgroup of adults who never smoked tobacco or used nicotine e-cigarettes and still found a significant association between cannabis use and an increased combined risk of developing coronary heart disease, including heart attack and stroke.
“Cannabis smoke is not all that different from tobacco smoke, except for the psychoactive drug: THC vs. nicotine,” Abra Jeffers, a data analyst at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and lead study author, said in a press statement.
The study shows smoking cannabis has significant cardiovascular risks, just like smoking tobacco, she noted. “This is particularly important because cannabis use is increasing, and conventional tobacco use is decreasing.”
Notably, participants who reported using marijuana only once per week still showed about a 3 percent increased likelihood of having a heart attack or stroke during the study period. However, the study was not designed to establish whether marijuana use directly caused this increase in risk.
Legal Weed Fueling Rise in Cannabis Use Across US, Data Reveal
While marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, 24 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized recreational cannabis possession and use so far.
A 2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) found more than 48 million people aged 12 or older reported using cannabis at least once, compared to only 25.8 million people in that age range in 2002—an increase from 11 percent to 17 percent. There is also evidence that this trend toward legalization has led to growing numbers of people living with addiction.
Recent data show a significant increase in cannabis usage. In 2007, approximately 10 percent of people used cannabis, but by 2022, that figure had more than doubled to 22 percent, according to SAMHSA.
The rise in cannabis consumption has also prompted concerns about the potential for marijuana use disorder. One study estimates that about one in three cannabis users may develop this disorder. Another study found that the risk is even greater for those who start using marijuana during their youth or adolescence and for those who use it more frequently.
Regardless of whether more states legalize cannabis, there is a need for more regulation of the forms, content, and marketing of cannabis products to consumers, Ms. Jeffers told The Epoch Times.
“Like tobacco, it should be legal but discouraged,” she said. “Furthermore, more guidance to physicians on screening and counseling for cannabis use is necessary.”
Marijuana Legalization Is Putting People at Risk: Doctor
The research contributes to the growing evidence linking cannabis use with increased cardiovascular-related deaths and highlights the inherent dangers of legalizing it, Dr. Christopher Varughese, an Interventional and General Cardiology physician at Staten Island University Hospital, not associated with the study, told The Epoch Times.
“They found an increased risk of coronary heart disease, myocardial infarction (heart attack), and stroke,” he said. “Legalization of cannabis may place the public at greater risk for future cardiovascular events.”
While the observational study couldn’t prove marijuana caused the increased cardiovascular disease risk, the findings suggest cannabis use should be held to the same standards as tobacco regarding health risks, Dr. Varughese noted, emphasizing the need for strong public awareness efforts on the potential future cardiovascular risks.
As more data emerge, there is a clear association between cannabis use and future cardiovascular events, Dr. Varughese said. The risk increases with more frequent use, independent of tobacco.
“Most importantly, the increased risk was also observed in younger individuals, highlighting the potential concerns for this population segment,” he said.
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"I wonder if data would be different with edibles."
I don't know the answer to this and I haven't seen that it has been studied well. But THC elevates blood pressure and heart rate, so edibles definitely have some effect without inhaling smoke. Also very easy to ingest more than the intended amount with edibles.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6461323/#:~:text=THC%20causes%20an%20acute%2C%20dose,and%20heart%20rate%20(HR).&text=Due%20to%20a%20quickly%20developing,usage%20frequency%20are%20commonly%20observed.
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"Even 1 Joint per Week Enough to Boost Heart Disease Risk"
What a strange metric, even one joint a week. According to the internet, one joint can equal 35 or more hits, where two or three small puffs ought to be enough for a casual user get the effect. At least that's what I hear the other kids say.
https://leafnation.com/cannabis/how-much-thc-is-in-a-joint/#How_Many_Hits_Do_You_Get_In_a_Joint
A casual user would not sit down once a week and have 20 times the needed dosage, IMHO, at least not intentionally.
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This mirrors my experience while contending with cancer and lesser boo boos:
The War on Drugs Is Also a War on Pain Patients
Cato @ Liberty / by Jeffrey A. Singer / Apr 1, 2024 at 10:37 AM
Jeffrey A. Singer
Doctor's Exam with Prescription
In a March 22 opinion column in the New York Times entitled “The DEA Needs to Stay Out of Medicine,” Vanderbilt University Medical Center associate professor of anesthesiology and pain management Shravani Durbhakula, MD, documents powerfully how patients suffering from severe pain—many of them terminal cancer patients—have become collateral casualties in the government’s war on drugs.
Decrying the Drug Enforcement Administration’s progressive tightening of opioid manufacturing quotas, Dr. Durbhakula writes:
In theory, fewer opioids sold means fewer inappropriate scripts filled, which should curb the diversion of prescription opioids for illicit purposes and decrease overdose deaths — right?
I can tell you from the front lines that that’s not quite right. Prescription opioids once drove the opioid crisis. But in recent years opioid prescriptions have significantly fallen, while overdose deaths have been at a record high. America’s new wave of fatalities is largely a result of the illicit market, specifically illicit fentanyl. And as production cuts contribute to the reduction of the already strained supply of legal, regulated prescription opioids, drug shortages stand to affect the more than 50 million people suffering from chronic pain in more ways than at the pharmacy counter.
Dr. Durbhakula provides stories of patients having to travel long distances to see their doctors in person due to DEA requirements about opioid prescriptions. However, despite their efforts, they find that many of the pharmacies do not have the opioids they require because of quotas. She writes:
Health care professionals and pharmacies in this country are chained by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Our patients’ stress is the result not of an orchestrated set of practice guidelines or a comprehensive clinical policy but rather of one government agency’s crude, broad‐stroke technique to mitigate a public health crisis through manufacturing limits — the gradual and repeated rationing of how much opioids can be produced by legitimate entities.
In the essay, Dr.Durbhakula does not question or challenge the false narrative that the overdose crisis originated with doctors “overprescribing” opioids to their pain patients.
Unfortunately, Dr. Durbhakula’s proposed policy recommendations would do little to advance patient and physician autonomy. She would merely transfer control over doctors treating pain from the cops to federal health bureaucracies and let those agencies set opioid production quotas. For instance, she claims, “It’s incumbent on us [doctors] to hand the reins of authority over to public health institutions better suited to the task.”
No. The “reins of authority” belong in the hands of patients and doctors.
Dr. Durbhakula suggests that “instead of defining medical aptness, the DEA should pass the baton to our nation’s public health agencies” and proposes that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration “collaborate” to “place controls on individual prescribing and respond to inappropriate prescribing.” She elides the fact that these public health agencies will “respond” to doctors or patients who don’t comply with their regulations by calling the cops.
To be sure, Dr. Durbhakula has good intentions. But replacing actual cops—the DEA—with federal health agencies that can order those cops to arrest non‐compliant doctors and patients is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. True, her proposed new pain management overlords would have greater medical expertise, but they would still reign over doctors and patients and assault their autonomy. And, as we learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, they will not be immune to political pressures and groupthink.
While her policy prescriptions may be flawed, Dr. Durbhakula deserves praise for having the courage to point out that the war on drugs is also a war on pain patients. Alas, courageous doctors are in short supply these days. Most doctors keep their heads down and follow the cops’ instructions.
After I read her essay, I wrote the following (unpublished) letter to the editor of the New York Times:
Dear Editor—
Kudos to Dr. Durhakula for speaking out against the Drug Enforcement Administration’s intruding on doctors’ pain treatment (“The DEA Needs to Stay Out of Medicine,” March 22, 2024). As my colleague and I explained in our 2022 Cato Institute white paper, “Cops Practicing Medicine,” for more than 100 years, law enforcement has been increasingly surveilling and regulating pain management.
The DEA maintains a schedule of substances it controls, and it categorizes them based on what the agency determines to be their safety and addictive potential. The DEA even presumes to know how many and what kind of controlled substances—from stimulants like Adderall to narcotics like oxycodone—the entire US population will need in future years, setting quotas on how many each pharmaceutical manufacturer may annually produce.
The DEA restricts pain management based on the flawed assumption that what they consider to be “overtreatment” caused the overdose crisis. However, as my colleagues and I showed, there is no correlation between the opioid prescription rate and the rate of non‐medical opioid use or opioid addiction. And, of course, as fear of DEA reprisal has caused the prescription rate to drop precipitously in the last dozen years, overdose deaths have soared as the black market provided non‐medical users of “diverted” prescription pain pills first with more dangerous heroin and later with fentanyl.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health found that overdose fatalities have been rising exponentially since at least the late 1970s, with different drugs predominating during various periods. Complex sociocultural, psychosocial, and socioeconomic forces are at the root of the overdose crisis, requiring serious investigation. Yet policymakers have chosen the lazy answer by blaming the overdose crisis on doctors treating pain.
When cops practice medicine, overdoses increase, drug cartels get richer, and patients suffer.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey A. Singer, MD, FACS
Senior Fellow, Cato Institute
When cops practice medicine, overdoses increase, drug cartels get richer, and patients suffer.
https://www.cato.org/blog/war-drugs-also-war-pain-patients