May
May
San Francisco's Hemp Center Is the Latest Target in Federal Marijuana Crackdown
The Hemp Center…has been in business for nearly 14 years and has been in its current location for 11. Its landlords recently received a letter from U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag. The letter warned of property seizures and prison sentences if the dispensary was not shut down, according to dispensary operator Kathleen Capetti.Similar letters, which claim the clubs are too close to parks or schools, have been responsible for the closure of eight San Francisco dispensaries since Oct. 2011 — many of them longstanding, respected operations…
[…]
The letters are what the Obama Administration’s Justice Department has done to “crack down” on California’s burgeoning but federally illegal medical cannabis industry. In Oct. 2011, the four United States Attorneys for the state announced a coordinated effort that led to the closure of “hundreds” of dispensaries across the state, according to an estimate by Americans for Safe Access, a medical marijuana patients’ advocacy group.
“I would not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users. It’s not a good use of our resources.” — Barack Obama, August 21, 2007, in Nashua, New Hampshire
Apr
Man Dies in Police Raid on Wrong House
A 61-year-old man was shot to death by police while his wife was handcuffed in another room during a drug raid on the wrong house. Police admitted their mistake, saying faulty information from a drug informant contributed to the death of John Adams Wednesday night.Bad information from a drug informant? Why, that never happens!
“The death of John Adams…” It’s as if they’ve literally killed the principles behind our founding documents.
Apr
Congressional analysis upholds states' right to legalize marijuana
Today, Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) shared a new legal analysis, prepared by the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research agency supporting the United States Congress, which finds that the federal government cannot compel states to prohibit marijuana use within their borders.
More specifically, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) writes that:
“Although the federal government may use its power of the purse to encourage states to adopt certain criminal laws, the federal government is limited in its ability to directly influence state policy by the Tenth Amendment, which prevents the federal government from directing states to enact specific legislation, or requiring state officials to enforce federal law. As such, the fact that the federal government has criminalized conduct does not mean that the state, in turn, must also criminalize or prosecute that same conduct.”
Congressman Polis responded, stating, “I’ve long believed that Colorado, Washington and other states that have decriminalized or legalized marijuana for personal or medical use have acted within the legal bounds of the law. I am pleased to see that Congress’s research agency has interpreted the law the same way. With a majority of Americans now supporting marijuana legalization, and more states acknowledging every election cycle that the War on Drugs has failed, I hope that the Department of Justice will conduct and release a legal analysis that is as thorough as that done by CRS. If they do, they are sure to reach the same conclusion: it is perfectly legal for states to regulate marijuana as they see fit.”
Apr
Rep. Jared Polis questions DEA Administrator
I rather like the cut of this Polis fellow’s jib. He opposed the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, the NDAA, and SOPA. It is often said that Republicans would benefit from a more libertarian approach to civil liberties and foreign policy. So too would the Democrats, and Polis is perhaps a prime example of what a more liberty-loving Democratic Party could look like.
Apr
Marijuana legalization fits into almost any ideology you can think of. That’s why you see these odd bedfellows supporting it, you know, Barney Frank and Ron Paul. It’s not a wedge issue anymore.
Since November, when Washington and Colorado made it legal for people over 21 to use marijuana, we’ve seen an explosion. This year, there are 10 measures at the state level to legalize outright. In previous years, we would have been lucky to even have one. In two dozen states there are forty or so marijuana reform bills in play ranging from simple decriminalization, to medicalization and full-on legalization. Where we’re also seeing the movement is on the federal level where we haven’t previously. There are six to seven federal marijuana bills in Congress and they span the scope like we haven’t seen before including a call for a presidential commission to look at medical marijuana and Jared Polis’ legislation to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act, which would essentially end the federal government’s involvement in marijuana prohibition.
What you see on the marriage equality side is the power that comes when you get some influential people behind this. They’ve had the benefit of Barack Obama in the past year or so just using the bully pulpit on that issue. What we’re kind of waiting for here is that kind of moment to happen.
Apr
“The war on drugs, while well intentioned, has been a failure…we’re warehousing addicted people every day in state prisons…giving them no treatment, sending them back out on the street after their term of incarceration, and wondering why recidivism rates go up and why they don’t get better, why they commit crimes again, why they commit crimes to support their addiction. You can certainly make the argument that no one should try drugs in the first place. I certainly am in that camp. But tens of millions of people in our society do every year. And for some people they can try it and walk away from it, but for others, the first time they try it, they become an addict. They’re sick and they need treatment.”
- Chris Christie
Mar
Evaluating Drug Decriminalization in Portugal 12 Years Later
One gram of heroin, two grams of cocaine, 25 grams of marijuana leaves or five grams of hashish: These are the drug quantities one can legally purchase and possess in Portugal, carrying them through the streets of Lisbon in a pants pocket, say, without fear of repercussion. MDMA — the active ingredient in ecstasy — and amphetamines — including speed and meth — can also be possessed in amounts up to one gram. That’s roughly enough of each of these drugs to last 10 days.
These are the amounts listed in a table appended to Portugal’s Law 30/2000. Goulão participated in creating this law, which has put his country at the forefront of experimental approaches to drug control. Portugal paved a new path when it decided to decriminalize drugs of all kinds.
“We figured perhaps this way we would be better able get things under control,” Goulão explains. “Criminalization certainly wasn’t working all that well.”
As part of its war on drugs, Portugal has stopped prosecuting users. The substances listed in the Law 30/2000 table are still illegal in Portugal — “Otherwise we would have gotten into trouble with the UN,” Goulão explains — but using these drugs is nothing more than a misdemeanor, much the same as a parking violation.
[…]
“Drug users aren’t criminals, they’re sick,” Goulão says. …Goulão repeats that statement often, as do members of his staff within the anti-drug program, as well as doctors at state-run drug clinics. More surprising is that a Lisbon police commissioner, whose officers spend their days searching for drugs, says it too.
…”Humanistic and pragmatic” is how João Goulão describes the new program.
The data show, among other things, that the number of adults in Portugal who have at some point taken illegal drugs is rising. At the same time, though, the number of teenagers who have at some point taken illegal drugs is falling. The number of drug addicts who have undergone rehab has also increased dramatically, while the number of drug addicts who have become infected with HIV has fallen significantly.
Previous reports on Portugal’s decriminalization experiment, including one by Glenn Greenwald commissioned by the Cato Institute, have drawn similar, if not identical conclusions as the article highlighted above. It’s important to contextualize the increase in drug use amongst adults, which Greenwald does exceptionally well. This article doesn’t quite emphasize the point that recreational drug use, especially by adults who are presumably better educated on the effects of the drugs they’re consuming, should not be of particular concern to government and law enforcement. The concern, rather, is drug abuse and the havoc it can cause to families and communities. Under a decriminalization policy, less teens are using drugs and more addicts are receiving treatment.
Given this evidence, why should we continue to incarcerate so many drug abusers rather than rehabilitate them? The reform of our nation’s drug laws is inevitable, just, humanitarian, and can’t possibly occur too soon.
Mar
Mar
Elizabeth Warren, attacking Republican State Rep. Dan Winslow. Winslow’s stance on marijuana prohibition is nuanced and perfectly reasonable:
I disfavor decriminalization of marijuana because it increases demand from illicit sources. I think we need to legalize marijuana (likely starting with medicinal marijuana in view of the current federal prohibition) and then regulate it and tax it. Only be lawful production of marijuana will the cartels, crooks and drug dealers be put out of business in the US.
Lame, Elizabeth.
Mar
A Conservative Columnist’s Desperate Attempt to Justify Marijuana Prohibition
Legalizing marijuana is foolish because it leads to far more use of the drug and the availability of ever more potent forms. But the foolishness doesn’t end there. Equally foolish is that as a society we have made peace with marijuana while making war on tobacco. This has been a classic example of upside-down thinking; and we are reaping exactly what we have sown. We have produced a generation of young Americans who would never put a cigarette or cigar near their lips, but who increasingly get high on pot.
Yes, tobacco — specifically cigarettes — kills and marijuana doesn’t. But, if you’ll forgive the ultimate political incorrectness, young people would do much better in life if they smoked tobacco rather than weed.
First, tobacco doesn’t kill young people. When it kills, it generally kills much older adult people. Moreover, according to a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, if you stop smoking cigarettes by age 44, you will lose only one more year of life than a person who has never smoked.
Second, regular pot smokers increasingly tune out of life, becoming what are known as potheads, or, to put it bluntly, losers.
Third, as noted in the CBS4 report, “new studies that have been published say the risk of a car accident increases two-fold after someone consumes pot.” In other words, innocent human beings — sometimes whole families — are more likely to be maimed, paralyzed, and killed by pot smokers than by cigarette smokers.
…ponder these questions: Would you rather your airplane pilot smoke pot or tobacco while flying? How would Britain have fared in World War II if Winston Churchill had smoked pot instead of cigars?
Dennis Prager, the author of this National Review piece, seems to think that because marijuana and tobacco are both smoked, they are therefore comparable substances. In fact (and I can’t believe I am forced to write this), they are nothing at all alike. A better comparison would be marijuana and alcohol, and it is of course illegal to consume an abundance of alcohol before operating a motor vehicle. Marijuana legalization advocates, as should be evident to anyone who has conducted even a cursory examination of the pro-legalization argument, think it should be illegal to drive while high. So yes, Mr. Prager, I would prefer that pilots not smoke marijuana before takeoff, just as I would hope they are not guzzling vodka from a tiny bottle they swiped from a stewardess.
As for Prager’s claim that marijuana users are destined to become “losers,” I’ll let Time’s Maia Szalavitz respond:
The idea that “marijuana makes you dumb” has long been embodied in the stereotype of the slow, stupid stoner, seen in numerous Hollywood movies and TV comedies and going unquestioned by much of American culture. But a new study says no: the researchers followed nearly 2,000 young Australian adults for eight years and found that marijuana has little long-term effect on learning and memory— and any cognitive damage that does occur as a result of cannabis use is reversible.
Perhaps most notably, there is no mention anywhere in Prager’s diatribe of the inevitable consequences of marijuana prohibition, such as mass incarceration, the financial burden that prohibition places on taxpayers, the racial disparities that arise when prohibition is enforced, or the escalating crime rates that are a direct result of prohibition. As Conor Friedersdorf notes, ignoring these devastating consequences is “deeply irresponsible.” One wishes National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. was still around to rebut Prager’s claims. In 2004, Buckley wrote:
Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great. The laws aren’t exactly indefensible, because practically nothing is, and the thunderers who tell us to stay the course can always find one man or woman who, having taken marijuana, moved on to severe mental disorder. But that argument, to quote myself, is on the order of saying that every rapist began by masturbating. General rules based on individual victims are unwise. And although there is a perfectly respectable case against using marijuana, the penalties imposed on those who reject that case, or who give way to weakness of resolution, are very difficult to defend.
Mar
Mar
Mar
Inside the lucrative world of ecstasy smuggling
Though [Ragan] makes $40 an hour teaching SAT classes and tutoring kids in their math classes, most of her income comes from dealing ecstasy. It’s a year-round business, but summer is especially lucrative. “High season,” she calls it.
[…]
A drought in Canada had led to a shortage of safrole oil, the main ingredient needed to produce [MDMA]. ..the Vancouver labs ran dry and even California, a growing hub in the US, lacked the substance.
Police in Canada had been cracking down on all avenues of ecstasy production, and conservationists helped the cause by fighting against the harvesting of sassafras plants, whose root bark and fruit provide safrole oil.
The bottleneck led to a proliferation of adulterated [MDMA] that included synthetic drugs called “bath salts” — crystals that when crushed into a powder and mixed the right way can pass for ecstasy, especially to the untrained eye. They look like epsom salts but otherwise have nothing to do with actual bath salts; they cause people to become hyped up, as with cocaine.
This is a fascinating article that establishes a few important points:
1) Illegal drugs, in this instance MDMA, are smuggled in vast quantities across the Canadian border just as marijuana and other drugs are flooding through the Mexican border. It seems to matter little whether a given country possesses a corrupt government or a democratic one…in either case, if a demand for an illegal substance exists, that product will be sold and yield astonishing profits. As this article notes, two of the major producers of MDMA in Canada are offshoots of Chinese and Vietnamese gangs. Some unsavory characters are profiting from this enterprise and using their funds for god-knows-what.
2) Drug dealers, though often depicted as murderous sociopaths in the media, could very well be tutoring your child in math.
3) Synthetic drugs (or “bath salts”) exist only because the “real” drugs are illegal. This is an important point. Demand for a product does not magically disappear just because the product has.
4) The drug war cannot, in any real sense, ever be “won.” A white flag is our only option.
