Sunday, July 3, 2005

Devastating Downing Street Memo No, not that one... This one: Secret report says war on hard drugs has failed: A secret Downing Street report on crack and heroin, suppressed by ministers, has discovered that the government's war on drugs has failed. The document, seen by The Observer, was one of several papers on key areas of government policy prepared by the strategy unit at the Cabinet Office and overseen by policy tsar Lord Birt. Researchers found that stamping down on hard drugs through the police and courts had little effect on production and found no evidence that attacking drug supply had any impact on the harm caused by heroin and crack users. The full report provides a powerful argument for legalising drugs so they are not controlled by criminals. [...] The full findings of the 105-page report contained such a devastating critique of the government's policy of prohibition they are unlikely ever to be published. The suppressed pages, seen by The Observer, show that Downing Street experts found that the international drug war, led by the US, simply displaced production from one country to another. More government cover-ups. More denial. More of the same broken prohibition policies. 10:44:53 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

Study: Smoking Pot Does NOT Cause Lung Cancer! Libby beat me to this one, too. I'd really like to see this in some other media sources, but this is very exciting news. In fact, it should be front page. From Fred Gardner at CounterPunch, comes this: Marijuana smoking -"even heavy longterm use"- does not cause cancer of the lung, upper airwaves, or esophagus, Donald Tashkin reported at this year's meeting of the International Cannabinoid Research Society. Coming from Tashkin, this conclusion had extra significance for the assembled drug-company and university-based scientists (most of whom get funding from the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse). Over the years, Tashkin's lab at UCLA has produced irrefutable evidence of the damage that marijuana smoke wreaks on bronchial tissue. With NIDA's support, Tashkin and colleagues have identified the potent carcinogens in marijuana smoke, biopsied and made photomicrographs of pre-malignant cells, and studied the molecular changes occurring within them. It is Tashkin's research that the Drug Czar's office cites in ads linking marijuana to lung cancer. Tashkin himself has long believed in a causal relationship, despite a study in which Stephen Sidney examined the files of 64,000 Kaiser patients and found that marijuana users didn't develop lung cancer at a higher rate or die earlier than non-users. Of five smaller studies on the question, only two -involving a total of about 300 patients- concluded that marijuana smoking causes lung cancer. Tashkin decided to settle the question by conducting a large, prospectively designed, population-based, case-controlled study. "Our major hypothesis," he told the ICRS, "was that heavy, longterm use of marijuana will increase the risk of lung and upper-airwaves cancers." So here was a study going in with the notion that they would find a causal relationship between marijuana smoking and lung cancer. What did they find? Absolutely no increase in odds of marijuana smokers getting cancer, regardless of amount of use. In fact, in all categories of pot smokers, the odds of getting lung cancer were actually less than in the control group! 10:35:47 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

Marijuana growers prefer to be law-abiding power consumers Libby at Last One Speaks nails it. This article in the Globe and Mail points out that the police in Canada are having a harder time busting grow-ops since a new privacy regulation prevents utility companies from ratting out paying customers based on their power consumption. Between the lines, though, you immediately see that the grow-ops, while previously using dangerous techniques to steal the power, causing millions of dollars of losses for the utilities, are now paying for it as good consumers. Everybody wins... except the prohibitionists. Jackl in comments also notes: I have been told by people managing in the billing and customer service areas of public utilties that they're also really nervous about people possibly coming to see the innocuous meter reader or lineman, who often has to enter customers' premises, trying to do his/her job, being a potential surveillance agent working for the police. 10:21:36 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

Supreme Analysis While much of the press is going to go nuts analyzing the future of three or four specific issues (probably not including the 4th, 9th, or 10th amendments -- my areas of concern), this article at Reason is one of the most interesting. Reason interviewed a wide range of legal experts (from the left to the right, but with libertarian leanings) to get their views of the past, present and future of the court. 10:06:49 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []