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Drug WarRant
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Saturday, February 7, 2004 |
What to do in the Primaries...
A lot of states with primaries fast approaching. Tough decisions to make. All sorts of reasons to look at different candidates on different issues.
Well, I'm here to make it easy for you.
- If you're voting in a Democratic Primary, vote for Dennis Kucinich
- If you're voting in a Republican Primary, write in Blake Ashby
Simple. Of the candidates in the two main parties, these have the absolute best positions on drug policy. No contest.
Now perhaps you think that Dennis Kucinich or Blake Ashby are unelectable, or there's some other area that you disagree with their policies, or just that they don't have a chance of getting the nomination. My response: well of course they don't have a chance of getting the nomination! At this point, the odds are pretty extreme. But, every vote they get means another chance of their views on the drug war being heard or considered. Then once the nominations sort themselves out, you can take a look at your final choice then (without worrying about "throwing your vote away" in the final election).
I'm serious. What will it hurt?
If, on the other hand, you're a Democrat who is convinced that the primaries are over and John Kerry is going to be the nominee, BigLeftOutside has started to give detailed analysis on Kerry's positions on the drug war, including:
The good:
- Kerry and Medical Marijuana
- Kerry and Marijuana
- Kerry, Mandatory Minimum Sentences, and "Crime Bills"
- Kerry and What He Already Knows About the Drug Economy
The bad:
- Kerry as Overzealous Prosecutor in anything defined as "War"
- Kerry as Social Moralist
- Kerry and the Drug Plane Shoot-downs
- Kerry and his Rand Beers Problem
- Kerry and Plan Colombia: The Bad
And the uncertain:
- Kerry and Plan Colombia: The Potential for Good
- Kerry's Environmental Passions and Drug Policy Dilemmas
- Kerry's Budget-Balancing Priorities and Drug Policy Dilemmas
It's a wonderful start to a Kerry analysis, and it's clear that Al Giordano has great knowledge and useful advice. It's also clear that he's got an ego the size of Texas -- something he'll need to learn to temper if he really wishes to be effective in his self-appointed role as "referee" for upcoming strategy debates within the drug reform community.
4:51:51 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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The Drug War Chronicle
This week's Drug War Chronicle is worth reading cover to cover. Some amazing articles including:
 Drug War Kills More Than a Cop a Month
Yes, that's at least one policeman every month. Give this to your law-and-order-I-support-the-drug-war friends:
"These police deaths are totally unnecessary," said Cole. "If we ended drug prohibition, none of these officers would have had to die. We're killing our police. All we have to do is legalize drugs and that would not be happening. Can't we learn from Alcohol Prohibition?" Cole asked. "We had the highest murder rate in our history and cops were dying right and left."
"These are casualties of war," said LEAP member Peter Christ, a retired police captain with 20 years of experience fighting the drug war. "It's a war we shouldn't be fighting," he told DRCNet. "Drug prohibition creates an environment where we put cops in a job where they can't win, and you have to expect these kinds of results. The answer is a no-brainer, at least for me: You have to legalize drugs."
Marijuana Rx for Methamphetamine? Hawaii May Give It a Try
This is fascinating and I'd like to see if it catches on in medical marijuana states.
Medical marijuana is "a multi-purpose therapeutic aid" that can do a better job of treating ice users than current programs, Adler said. ...
While there are no studies of the therapeutic effect of marijuana on methamphetamine users, studies of its use in treating crack users have returned promising results. In a Brazilian study, researchers followed crack users who turned to pot to break their addiction. After nine months, they reported, "most of the subjects ceased to use crack and reported that the use of cannabis had reduced their craving symptoms, and produced subjective and concrete changes in their behavior, helping them to overcome crack addiction." In another study from Jamaica, researchers followed 33 crack-smoking women for nine months and found that "cannabis cigarettes ("spliffs") constitute the cheapest, most effective, and readily available therapy for discontinuing crack consumption."
"It could work," said Dr. Ethan Russo, Senior Medical Advisor to British pharmaceutical company GW Pharmaceutical's Cannabinoid Research Institute. GW is the maker of Sativex, a sublingual cannabinoid medicine. "Cannabis is helpful for a variety of addictions, and the mechanisms of crack and meth are quite comparable."
HEA Struggle Enters New Year as Bush Budget Pushes Souder Reform
As you may be aware, a current heinous provision in the Higher Education Act denies financial aid to students who have had a drug conviction (not rape or assault or any other charges -- just drugs -- and it usually ends up damaging young people who got caught with pot at some point).
For years, we've been fighting this provision and it looks like there's finally a better chance of getting it repealed in Congress. So Bush's current budget has done an end run around the reform efforts and joined with drug warrior Mark Souder to propose a modification to the provision (still bad) rather than repeal. Go to RaiseYourVoice to see how you can get involved in this.
There's lots more good stuff in this issue of the Drug War Chronicle including a newsbrief about San Francisco giving an OK to possible city-supported medical marijuana co-ops. And you can also get fun stuff like Stop the Drug War strobe lights and ink stamps by donating.
10:43:09 AM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Around the web...
Did Bush drop out of the National Guard to avoid drug testing? Eric Boehlert in Salon idly speculated about the fact that the questioned time period in 1972 was the year that the military started implementing random drug tests.
Now, I'm opposed to drug testing for future Presidents. And since anybody can grow up to become President... well, you get the idea.
For something entirely different, and just for fun in this election season, check out the Guns and Dope Party. Entertaining and informative. Equal rights for ostriches!
(thanks to Tad)
You might find this article about The Living Things, a performance group from St. Louis, interesting...
"We aren't angry, we're frustrated." With what? "With our government," (Lillian says with a delighted laugh; "John Ashcroft came to the library in St. Louis and I shook hands with him -- I shook hands with the devil!). Prozac for teens --"It's refusal to deal with the issues of youth except by prescription. Prozac is just a gateway drug, " Lillian explains, "It will only lead to coke and other illegal substances because it trains people to treat their problems with chemicals." The education system: "The schools don't want you to talk, so kids come to our shows and they are so happy they can speak their fucking minds."
This week's DrugSense Weekly is out with an excellent re-cap of the week, including this great feature article by Leah B. Rorvig on drug testing: Students find dialogue more effective than drug testing.
You might think that we were the safest students in north Texas. But you'd be wrong. I knew classmates who drove drunk or high because they had no one to call who could pick them up in time to meet our strict curfew. Instead of opening up an honest dialogue, administrators enforced a strict no-tolerance policy, giving us the impression that we couldn't talk to them about alcohol or other drugs.
10:42:13 AM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Friday, February 6, 2004 |
Breaking news. Drug warriors lose.
This was not particularly a surprise to me, but is very welcome.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against the DEA regarding its "final rule." The DEA was attempting to prohibit the sale or consumption of hemp food products.
The Court had earlier granted a temporary injunction against the DEA from implementing the rule, and today they made it permanent.
From the ruling (available here in pdf form)
Appellants manufacture, distribute, or sell comestible items
containing oil or sterilized seeds from "hemp" -- a species of
plant within the genus Cannabis. They challenge two Drug
Enforcement Administration ("DEA") regulations that, taken
together, would ban the sale or possession of such items even
if they contain only non-psychoactive trace amounts of
tetrahydrocannabinols ("THC"). The DEA asserts that natural,
as well as synthetic, THC is included in Schedule I of the
Controlled Substances Act ("CSA"). We have previously held
that the definition of "THC" in Schedule I refers only to synthetic
THC, and that any THC occurring naturally within
Cannabis is banned only if it falls within the Schedule I definition
of "marijuana."1 We reiterate that ruling here: in accordance with Schedule I, the DEA's relevant rules and regulations
may be enforced only insofar as they ban the presence
of marijuana or synthetic THC.
To understand that section completely, it's important to know that the Controlled Substances Act specifically exempted hemp stalks, fiber, oil and cake made from hemp seed (and sterilized hemp seed) from the definition of marijuana.
Good news. And I repeat from an earlier post:
This means you can get your delicious and nutritious hemp food products, like those pictured from Ruth's Hemp Foods, where they have hemp bars, hemp oil, tortilla wraps/chips/pasta, hemp milk and more. Hemp cannot be legally grown in the U.S., but hemp foods can be imported from Candada, and at Ruth's it's easy to order online and have it shipped here.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Ruth's Hemp Foods, nor have I received any consideration for promoting their products. However, if Ruth's Hemp Foods appreciates this product placement, and wants to thank me... I particularly like the Cranberry Almond SoftHemp bars and the SoftHemp seeds (a case of each would be great!)
[Thanks to Richard Lake, as always!]
7:27:57 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Thursday, February 5, 2004 |
More Voting Guidance
Vote Hemp has just come out with their own voting guide, which shows:
| Dennis Kucinich | A+ |
| John Edwards | B- |
| Howard Dean | C- |
| Al Sharpton | D- |
| John Kerry | F |
| Wesley K. Clark | F |
| George W. Bush | F |
Balance that with Granite Staters' Medical Marijuana voting guide.
| Dennis Kucinich | A+ |
| John Kerry | A- |
| Wesley K. Clark | B+ |
| Al Sharpton | B |
| Howard Dean | D- |
| George W. Bush | F |
| John Edwards | F |
There's also NORML's Presidential Scorecard, which shows Kucinich as best and Edwards as worst of the Democratic candidates, and my summary of the candidates' responses to Vote-Smart.
8:24:56 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Around the web...
Walter in Denver has discovered two drug war victims from 1989 that I'll have to add to my Drug War Victims page.
Libby at LastOneSpeaks has been on a tear with tons of interesting material.
- She has the info on Rand Beers, John Kerry's 'national security advisor,' who was one of the architects of the notorious Plan Columbia. That particular relationship makes me a little more uneasy about Kerry, along with his unwillingness to answer some surveys.
- She has the story of the High School drug search in Narragansett, Rhode Island. The dogs didn't find any drugs, but they claimed a locker "smelled" like marijuana (even though no drugs were there) so they suspended the locker's owner. Outrageous. Is the lesson we give our young people that there is no such thing as due process?
- Libby also had a delightful little dust-up with Mark Kleiman regarding medical marijuana. For the record, she's right.
8:20:44 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Tuesday, February 3, 2004 |
Conservatives, Liberals, and Libertarians, Oh my!
My friend Desert Cat points me to Vox Day (the love child of William F. Buckley and Ayn Rand), who is also an ardent foe of the drug war. He is also not hesitant to tell conservatives that support the war why they're wrong, as he does here and here.
The upshot is that the Drug War is yet another example of short-sighted conservatives being snookered by statists. The centralizers burn to increase central power by any means necessary, and this has been one of their most successful tactics. Remember, back when the country actually was conservative, opium, cocaine and marijuana were all legal. There's nothing inherently conservative about the Drug War, and there's nothing inherently libertine about opposing it. I don't want drugs to be legal so that I can use them, I want them to be legal so government agents don't have an excuse to trample on the Constitution, steal private property and shoot people in the head. ...
Let me grant the most paranoid conservative fear and state that even if I knew that every school child in America would immediately begin smoking pot every single day that I would still support ending the drug war. Even if I knew that every single adult in America would be riding the electric high wire on cocaine every night, I would still support ending the drug war. Because neither of those things will kill America dead beyond any hope of recovery the way that increasing the power of the central state always kills a society in the end. This has been clear since the days of Rome; it is true now.
Powerful words. And this brings up a point I'd like to make again about the political spectrum of the drug war. Opposing the drug war is not a left-wing or right-wing notion, but rather it's a function of being smart.
Take a look at some of the opponents of the drug war. Both William F. Buckley, Jr. and Walter Cronkite have spoken out elequently against the war. Two of the most intelligent politicians against the excesses of the drug war are former Republican Governor Gary Johnson, and Democratic Senator Richard Durbin. And in the House, you actually have, as co-sponsors of anti-drug war bills, radical conservative Dana Rohrabacher and radical liberal Barney Frank.
My own politics draw inspiration from left libertarian, classic liberal, and progressive liberal approaches (among others). In this blog, I stick strictly to the drug war and leave other issues alone (except related issues like the Patriot Act). And I love the fact that the other bloggers I interact with favorably on drug policy reform wander far across the political spectrum.
With advance apologies (because I'm going to be oversimplifying and probably getting these wrong) and the caveat that these descriptions are just to make a point, here's a few examples of the range of bloggers who are smart about the drug war. Last One Speaks is probably liberal, and it's no secret that Talk Left: The Politics of Crime leans to the left. And BigLeftOutside is very liberal. Desert Cat would probably be considered an anti-statist conservative Christian and it's possible that Vox Day is as well. I'd classify Walter in Denver as a practical libertarian and RandomActOfKindness as a Libertarian. Conservative blogs Balloon Juice and Ipse Dixit both have been extremely supportive of Drug WarRant and the principles of drug policy reform, and I consider Eugene at The Volokh Conspiracy as a practical conservative who is open-minded about drug war issues.
Whether you are conservative, liberal, or libertarian, there are plenty of reasons to oppose the drug war. Here's a few.
9:32:51 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Sunday, February 1, 2004 |
Each election cycle, Project Vote-Smart provides in-depth coverage of candidates, including distributing a questionaire for them to fill out on a wide variety of issues.
On this page, I have combined the drug policy answers of a number of candidates for President in a single chart for comparison purposes.
4:39:18 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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ONDCP Superbowl Ad
Here's a sneak peek of "Rewind." (RealAudio streaming file)
[Backwards running scenes of girl passed out, throwing up in toilet, drinking, smoking pot, buying pot, starting the day]
Narrator (girl): "Life doesn't rewind. So if your child is drinking and smoking pot, stop them, while you still can."
[Mother holding baggie as daughter is ready to leave for the day]
Mother: "Jessica. We need to talk."
First Reaction: I'm actually surprised at the fact that this may be a somewhat reasoned approach to an ONDCP ad for the first time. This doesn't make it proper to spend tax money doing it on the Superbowl, in my mind. However, at least this ad is not one of those ridiculous "pot=terrorism" or "smoke pot and you'll kill your little brother" ads that have been typical of the ONDCP.
What I like about this ad is the inclusion of alcohol (BIG move there) and the results of the misadventure being the sort of yucky drank-too-much, smoked-too-much reality of partying that can all too often be part of teenagers' lives.
I need to watch it some more (and perhaps catch some detail that I'm missing on the postage-stamped RealVideo file that I found), but at this point it seems to me that the over-riding message of the ad is that parents should talk with their kids, that young kids shouldn't be using alcohol and drugs, and that people need to learn to use alcohol and drugs responsibly. Sounds OK to me.
Update: I think I just saw the other new one during Superbowl trophy ceremony. Perhaps someone can verify this? Caught the end of it, but it was a girl standing on a pier indecisively while her friend is splashing/drowning in the water and the voice over says something like "If you friend was in trouble you'd help them, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you?"
Disgusting. That's the same old ONDCP that we're used to seeing.
12:26:22 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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