Wednesday, May 4, 2005

30,000 Britons are About to Maybe Die from Pot Annually! Nobody's Business' take-down of an incredibly stupid article is a delightful, funny, and smart read. According to this article in the Guardian, which quotes an editorial in the British Medical Journal, Thirty thousand Britons a year might eventually die from cannabis smoking, doctors claimed. In other news, the physicians insisted that the sky might eventually turn green with purple polka dots, and also that they'll soon achieve cold fusion using only an umbrella and a two-pound bratwurst. Read the whole piece. 11:17:35 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

More Lying with Statistics -- The Drug Czar's at it again Several people today have been sending me a variety of articles out there that have combined the story of how the government's war on drugs has turned into a war on marijuana (that I reported earlier) and a report from the Drug Czar's office that supposedly demonstrates a brand new link between marijuana and mental illness! Yahoo: Feds Sound New Warning About Marijuana Use Government officials say recent research makes a stronger case that smoking marijuana is itself a causal agent in psychiatric symptoms, particularly schizophrenia. "A growing body of evidence now demonstrates that smoking marijuana can increase the risk of serious mental health problems," said John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy. Administration officials pointed to a handful of studies to make their case. One, from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, found adult marijuana smokers who first began using the drug before age 12 were twice as likely to have suffered a serious mental illness in the past year as those who began smoking after 18. CNN: Research: Youths risk mental health with pot use. Lots of the same stuff (and note the funky generic "drug" picture for illustration), but CNN's Paul Courson at least gets a point for this paragraph: Walters did not directly address the possibility of confusing cause and effect -- that is, that people with mental problems might be more inclined to use drugs. The thing is, this is not a new study -- the release was timed to disrupt the other news today (the Sentencing Project report and the press conference about the States' Rights to Marijuana Act). This is merely another crunching of numbers in another way from the SAMHSA datasets (see my earlier report. Here is the entirety of the information that they have put together in this "report". 18.5 million Americans (over 8 percent) apparently have a Serious Mental Illness. Those who are now over 18, but first tried marijuana before the age of 12, were twice as likely to be classified as "having a serious mental illness" in the past year as those who didn't try marijuana until they were over 18. This was based solely on asking people questions in a survey. Yep. That's the startling "growing body of evidence now demonstrates that smoking marijuana can increase the risk of serious mental health problems" that Walters was talking about. I call Shenanigans (and a whole lot more). First, there is absolutely no evidence of causality here. Is it any surprise that kids who are in a family, peer, and community situation that allows or encourages the use of marijuana at age 10 or 11, might also, for reasons totally unrelated to marijuana use, have self-esteem issues later in life? But the Czar is just humping data trying to get something to fall out in another way that he can use (and naturally I had to go dig through that data again today when I had much better things to do). And of course, there was plenty he avoided, such as: Although SMI [Serious Mental Illness] is somewhat correlated at the individual level with past month use of an illicit drug, the correlation at the State level among persons aged 18 or older was fairly low (0.11). The correlation at the State level between SMI and past month use of cigarettes was slightly higher (0.27). This finding is consistent with literature that shows some correlation at the individual level between smoking cigarettes and SMI (Arday et al., 1995; Kessler et al., 2003; Romans, McNoe, Herbison, Walton, & Mullen, 1993; Woolf, Rothemich, Johnson, & Marsland, 1999). That's right. A higher correlation with smoking cigarettes than using drugs. Still a bunch of useless information when it comes to showing causality. But wait -- what's this business about 18.5 million people having a Serious Mental Illness? Wow! With those odds, that means a lot of my friends are seriously mentally ill. (By these odds, there's at least someone in the Drug Czar's office that's seriously mentally ill, but Duh!) So what is the definition of someone who is seriously mentally ill? Well, the reports that the Czar uses dances around it a lot with such language as: Serious mental illness, or SMI, is defined in this report according to the definition stipulated in Public Law (P.L.) 102[^]321, that is, having at some time during the past year a diagnosable mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder that met the criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV) (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 1994) and resulted in functional impairment that substantially interfered with or limited one or more major life activities. Then I discovered that "SMI was assessed... using the six-item K6 scale." Ah, and what is the K6 scale? A series of six questions that interviewers asked as part of this overall drug survey. And here they are: Most people have periods when they are not at their best emotionally. Think of one month in the past 12 months when you were the most depressed, anxious, or emotionally stressed. If there was no month like this, think of a typical month. During that month, how often did you feel nervous? (All of the time, Most of the time, Some of the time, A little of the time, None of the time) During that same month... how often did you feel hopeless? During that same month... how often did you feel restless or fidgety? During that same month... how often did you feel so sad or depressed that nothing could cheer you up? During that same month... how often did you feel that everything was an effort? During that same month... how often did you feel down on yourself, no good, or worthless? One of the things that absolutely makes my head explode is that these people have the audacity to claim that medical marijuana doesn't have sufficient scientific studies to validate its use, and then they try to feed us this junk pseudo science to justify their stupid, petty, taxpayer-funded rape of the American people. 6:49:40 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

Drug Warriors - they're afraid of us Jacob Sullum notes in Where Have All the Drug Warriors Gone? (at Hit and Run) an oddity about the drug war segment at CPAC in February. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, just sent me a link to the tape of his "debate" with journalist Richard Poe at last February's CPAC conference. It's only eight minutes long and is worth a listen because otherwise you might not believe me when I say there was no controversy whatsoever about the war on drugs, the ostensible topic of the exchange. The audience was confused. Given my own difficulties in finding people willing to debate me on the drug issue, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that no one wanted to go up against Nadelmann except a guy who agreed with him. Still, it's remarkable that the organizers of a major conservative conference apparently could not find a single person who was willing to publicly defend the war on drugs. Drug warriors can't handle a debate. They'll lose. The only way they can operate is through lies, incomplete information, and unsupported correlations. That doesn't mean that somebody like Walters isn't facile with words -- he can talk a good game and impress reporters who aren't informed. But in a decent match-up (with someone knowledgeable), he'll lose big time. And he's probably the best they've got. When a state representative challenged Andrea Barthwell to debate medical marijuana, she replied, "I have no need to engage in street theater." When a Chicago TV station was trying to develop a new debate-style TV show, the producer told me they were having a real hard time finding people on the prohibition side willing to do it. In September, 2003, John Walters called for a national debate about marijuana policy. "The real issue is should we legalize marijuana," Walters said. "Let's have a debate about that." Rob Kampia immediately offered to oblige him -- as did I. We're still waiting. 9:48:06 AM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

Marijuana Becomes Focus of Drug War In Today's Washington Post, an article by Dan Eggan, with some excellent information, a couple of lies, and some clueless comments. The focus of the drug war in the United States has shifted significantly over the past decade from hard drugs to marijuana, which now accounts for nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide, according to an analysis of federal crime statistics released yesterday. The study of FBI data by a Washington-based think tank, the Sentencing Project, found that the proportion of heroin and cocaine cases plummeted from 55 percent of all drug arrests in 1992 to less than 30 percent 10 years later. During the same period, marijuana arrests rose from 28 percent of the total to 45 percent. [...] "In reality, the war on drugs as pursued in the 1990s was to a large degree a war on marijuana," said Ryan S. King, the study's co-author and a research associate at the Sentencing Project. "Marijuana is the most widely used illegal substance, but that doesn't explain this level of growth over time. . . . The question is, is this really where we want to be spending all our money?" Of course, the White House Drug Czar's office was there to spread the usual lie. Bush administration officials attribute the rise in marijuana arrests to a variety of factors: increased use among teenagers during parts of the 1990s; efforts by local police departments to focus more on street-level offenses; and growing concerns over the danger posed by modern, more potent versions of marijuana. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy released a study yesterday showing that youth who use marijuana are more likely to develop serious mental health problems, including depression and schizophrenia. "This is not Cheech and Chong marijuana," said David Murray, a policy analyst for the anti-drug office. "It's a qualitatively different drug, and that's reflected in the numbers." [emphasis added] And did Dan Eggan do his job as a reporter and ask David Murray if he had any evidence regarding the claims that it's a different drug today? Did he ask if there is any evidence that marijuana today affects people in any different way than it did in the past? Did he ask why the drug czar's office won't put this claim in print where it would be subject to Data Quality Act review? Nope. Dan dropped the ball and just continued on. The study released yesterday by the Sentencing Project found that arrests for marijuana account for nearly all of the increase in drug arrests seen during the 1990s. The report also found that one in four people in state prisons for marijuana offenses can be classified as a "low-level offender," and it estimated that $4 billion a year is spent on arresting and prosecuting marijuana crimes. In addition, the study showed that although African Americans make up 14 percent of marijuana users generally, they account for nearly a third of all marijuana arrests. Among the most striking findings was the researchers' examination of arrest trends in New York City, which focused intently on "zero tolerance" policies during Rudolph W. Giuliani's mayoral administration. Marijuana arrests in the city increased tenfold from 1990 to 2002, from 5,100 to more than 50,000, the report said. Nine of 10 of arrests in 2002 were for possession rather than dealing. Winner of the Clueless award goes to Jonathan Caulkins, a criminology professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "There's been a major change in what's going on in drug enforcement, but it clearly isn't something that someone set out to do. It's not like anyone said, 'We don't care about cocaine and heroin anymore.'" Jonathan, let me introduce you to John Walters, and his campaign to meet superficial goals through the demonization of marijuana, and his spreading of lies to state and local law enforcement. [Hat tip to Andy] 12:50:07 AM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []