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Drug WarRant
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Thursday, December 11, 2003 |
Catching up...
I've been (and still am) under the weather and having a hard time keeping up with posting, but here's a few things worth checking out:
 On the local front, it looks like Ed Rosenthal's visit to University of Illinois was a success (unfortunately I was busy here and we had our hempfest the next day). A good article on the student organizations in the Daily Illini.
The New York Times brings back Brandeis' views on states' rights in this interesting article. I have always been a fan of his statement on the value of states' rights:
...to stay experimentation in things social and economic is a grave responsibility. Denial of the right to experiment may be fraught with serious consequences to the nation. It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
While the Times article doesn't talk about the drug war, it is particularly in regard to the drug war that I think this viewpoint has relevance (Medical marijuana is a prime example, as is the development of industrial hemp).
Canada loosened some of the rules regarding use of medical marijuana as required by the courts, but patients are upset, claiming that the government is ignoring court orders. Some are planning lawsuits, and the decisions led one group to proclaim:
Ontario Consumers for Safe Access to Recreational Cannabis is happy to
inform consumers that, because of Health Canada's failure to implement
constitutional Medical Marijuana Access Regulations, wide-open marijuana
legalization is back in Ontario!
And Ottawa stays pot charges in 4,000 cases.
At the same time, we have the U.S. still threatening Canada's borders for being lax on marijuana. (Am I crazy for worrying that someone in the U.S. administration watched "Canadian Bacon" or the South Park movie and didn't realize they were fiction?)
Steve Kubby's application for asylum in Canada was unfortunately denied. An appeal will be coming. If he is sent to the United States, he will die. Help him out by writing a letter.
Also be sure to check out my Daily Reads on the left for other good news and perspectives.
1:20:11 AM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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Tommy Chong Updates
Chong Family Values in the LA Weekly:
The word most used by Paris and Precious Chong to describe their father's ordeal is "surreal." "They couldn’t have picked a kinder, more generous person to throw in jail than my father,” Paris says. Today the family remains afraid of what the Justice Department might yet do to their father, and it is plain from speaking to them that they fear being quoted as saying anything that might antagonize it. “I don’t want to say anything against the government because I don’t want anything to happen to my children,” says Shelby. In a strange twist of fate, the Chongs have become an example for every American family in this new age of conformity.
“Growing up, I’d always had this fear that our family wasn’t like everyone else,” says Precious Chong, “and that we’d be punished for it someday — and then this happened. My parents never locked their doors. They do now."
It's a great article that details the entire sorry episode. Read the whole thing.
Tommy Chong's Next Movie by Dean Kuipers
“The DEA agent that busted me said, ‘We don’t want your son or your wife, although we could indict them, too. But if you just give yourself up, don’t make it a political or a publicity thing, then nothing will happen to you,’” Chong adds. “And the last thing that he said to me was, ‘You don’t want to be a martyr.'"
Martyrdom, however, was nearly impossible to avoid considering the current political climate. On the day of the arrest, Ashcroft held a press conference in Washington, D.C. and applauded efforts to scrub the dirty Internet, saying, "The illegal drug paraphernalia industry has invaded the homes of families across the country without their knowledge.” John Walters, Drug Czar and head of the ONDCP, author of the deadly “shoot first" policy in Peru that killed a missionary flying a small plane in 2001, said, "We will act decisively to protect our young people from the harms of illegal drugs." John Brown, acting administrator of the DEA, summed it all up, noting, “People selling drug paraphernalia are in essence no different than drug dealers."
Yep, another great article.
Chongstock Concert
The bands Mule, Mike Stinson, Dale Peterson, Random Joe Citizen and Cody Lapow
are doing a show in support of the Free Tommy Chong movement. The event takes
place Saturday, December 13th at THE CINEMA BAR, 3967 SEPULVEDA BLVD, CULVER
CITY, CA, 310-390-1328. Be sure to bring a pen to sign petitions.
The Commies Nice to see all the comments on Tommy Chong on Comedy Central's new Award Show, including giving him the award for "Best Comedian Behind Bars" accepted by Cheech who started the celebrity audience chanting "Free Tommy Chong!"
12:34:19 AM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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Tuesday, December 9, 2003 |
Senator Paul Simon, R.I.P.
 The man with the bow tie died today. What a life!
Smart, honest, courageous - a delightfully geeky little man with enormous integrity and the ability to lead. I'm proud to say I had the opportunity to meet him and hear him speak.
We can still heed his words, like these remarks about sentencing in the drug war from an article he co-wrote with Dave Kopel in 1996 for the National law Journal:
Harsh laws and severe punishments, observed Confucius, are a sign that something is wrong with the state. But you don't need to be a brilliant philosopher to recognize that America's prisons are in a state of crisis.
Federal mandatory minimums have made a bad situation worse. In large part because the rigid minimums make no distinction among the circumstances of cases, today's sentences for non-violent crimes lack any semblance of balance. If a man helps unload a boat of hashish just once to pay for his wife's cancer treatments (an actual case), he is subject to the same minimum sentence as the mastermind of the whole scheme.
As a prime example of the irrationality of mandatory minimums, we should consider the sentencing disparity for users of different types of cocaine. Under the drug laws, five grams of crack cocaine draws the same mandatory minimum five-year sentence as 500 grams of powder cocaine. No scientific or crime-policy reason justifies the enormous 100-to-1 ratio. The gaping difference is particularly troubling because it has racially charged implications: Eighty-five percent of federal crack prisoners are African-American, while powder cocaine offenders are more likely to be white or Hispanic....
We suggest, however, that it might be more sensible to target the violence rather than the drug of use. As a result of present policy, more than 20 percent of federal prisoners are low-level, non-violent drug offenders. Various 1996 congressional bills proposing increases in the mandatory minimum penalties for powder cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs continue to undermine efforts of the Sentencing Commission to maintain rationality in the administration of justice. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has noted that mandatory minimums "frustrate the careful calibration of sentences from one end of the spectrum to the other that the guidelines were intended to accomplish."
Expensive as prison is, it can be a bargain when it keeps violent criminals from preying on the innocent. But loading our prisons with non-violent offenders, often for drug violations, means that there is less room for the more dangerous repeat criminals. The end result is that we have a higher percentage of people in prisons than any other nation on earth -- South Africa being a distant second. And yet, although we have passed the dubious milestone of having more than a million Americans in prison, we feel less safe today than we formerly did....
The reason that we have highly-paid, experienced federal judges is to judge.
No sensible judge would send a young person to prison for five years without parole for a first offense involving possession of a small quantity of drugs. Judges can make the distinction between a person who makes a solitary mistake, and a person who directs a major criminal enterprise.
Yet, because of the congressionally imposed mandatory minimums, judges are prevented from taking the facts of a case into account during sentencing. Long ago, Plato wrote, "We should exhibit to the judges . . . the outline and form of the punishment to be inflicted . . . But when a state has good courts, and the judges are well trained and scrupulously tested, the determination of the penalties or punishments which shall be inflicted on the guilty may fairly and with advantage be left to them." That wisdom still stands.
We'll miss you.
7:37:14 PM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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Sunday, December 7, 2003 |
Weak, dishonest science and media sensationalism
Smoking cannabis causes lung damage. This inept Reuters report discusses a study done in England (it's inept because of the extremely vague wording which I find often in Reuter's reports). The study is of individuals who heavy smokers of tobacco or heavy smokers of tobacco and cannabis, and the article includes:
"Smoking cannabis on a regular basis actually depletes your lung of protective antioxidant substances...and this may have chronic long-term implications for young individuals," said Dr Sarah Nuttall of the University of Birmingham in central England.
As correspondent Tim Meehan (who's been on top of this story) pointed out, this is just plain dishonest, and he wrote Sarah Nuttall to tell her so. Her response:
Next time I suggest you get off your high horse and establish the facts before
labelling anyone or any work "dishonest" - apart from your own thoughts that
is.
Despite Nuttall's desire to have us look at the facts, very little is provided by her. No online description of the study, the British Thoracic Society's website (where the report was given) appears to be offline, and the University of Birmingham where the study took place gives no information about the study on its website and merely lists Nuttall as a doctoral student.
So let's look at the facts as we've been able to discover them, partly from news reports and partly from Dr. Nuttall's email response:
- Dr. Sarah Nuttall and her team studied 20 people aged 19 to 30. This is an extremely small sample to draw any kind of conclusions.
- These 20 participants were broken into three groups: complete non-smokers, tobacco smokers, and tobacco plus cannabis smokers. There was not a group of cannabis only smokers.
- They took blood samples, measured lung function and tested for antioxidant markers.
- Tobacco smokers had impaired lung function compared to non-smokers (yeah, that's a surprise)
- Tobacco plus cannabis smokers had lower levels of antioxidant and nitric oxide than tobacco only smokers.
- There was no possible evidence in this study that cannabis smoking alone affected lung function in any way.
- No direct evidence that changes in antioxidant levels were caused by cannabis smoking (ie., as opposed to other factors such as differences in diet, etc.) or that they would happen without tobacco smoking.
- The head of the British Thoracic Society said that more research is needed.
So, Dr. Nuttall's broad statement that "Smoking cannabis on a regular basis actually depletes your lung of protective antioxidant substances...and this may have chronic long-term implications for young individuals," is not supported by any scientific evidence from her study, and is in fact, dishonest. I would be happy to change my evaluation if she would provide evidence from her study that actually scientifically proves her claim as stated, but the way her study was structured (as it's been described), that's not possible.
What she should have said, given the results of her study, if she was an honest or competent scientist: "Based on a small number of subjects, those who smoke tobacco and cannabis regularly have lower levels of protective antioxidant substances than those who just smoke tobacco. Further study is recommended to determine if there is a direct connection between antioxidant levels and cannabis smoking and whether these levels suggest a health risk."
But no, she made provocative inferences instead.
So you take a small study by an unknown researcher, distort the reporting of the result to appear more dramatic regarding the dangers of smoking pot, and then let the press sensationalize it even further.
And voilà! Within hours you have the New York Post reporting on Pot's 'High' Risk of Cancer
Smoking weed is not the harmless recreational activity it may seem because it can cause lung cancer, researchers in England said yesterday.
Disgraceful.
Of course, you got less reporting on studies of not 20 participants, but 45,000 subjects in Sweden and 65,000 subjects in the United states, that showed no connection between cannabis and mortality. (See my post from September.) But "Pot doesn't kill" apparently makes for poor headlines.
5:26:23 PM | drug policy | Related | permalink |
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