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Drug WarRant
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Saturday, January 8, 2005 |
Odds and Ends
 At 8 pm (ET) tomorrow, Loretta Nall will be debating Western Carolina University Police Chief McAbee on the Free Speech Radio program at Western North Carolina University.
At Grits for Breakfast, Scott has a guest blogger who will be covering the Tom Colemen perjury trial.
This week's Drug War Chronicle is a fascinating read. The first two items point out the challenges involved in Afghanistan, where the war on terror and the war on drugs are incompatible and are coming to a collision.
11:10:06 AM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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My Question Gets Picked
So I guess I should feel honored. Drug Czar John Walters picked my question to answer in the White House chat yesterday. I tried to frame it in a way that would be critical, yet not too critical (so he wouldn't answer it). So here's what ended up:
Pete, from Bloomington, Illinois writes:
Isn't there a problem with giving kids misleading information regarding marijuana that overstates the actual dangers? I worry that when they find out we've been lying to them about marijuana that they'll stop believing us when it comes to more dangerous drugs. After all, when you call Canadian pot the "crack cocaine of marijuana," the message kids may hear is that crack must not be too bad.
John Walters
Actually Pete, you've got the question exactly backwards. Marijuana is a much bigger part of the American addiction problem than most people -- teens or adults -- realize. There are now more teens going into treatment for marijuana dependency than for all other drugs combined. And there are more teens now seeking treatment for marijuana than for alcohol. Today's marijuana is also twice as strong as it was in the mid 80's. One of the reasons we have such a serious problem with marijuana in our country is because of the misinformation that has been spread about it over the past 30 years -- that marijuana is "harmless" or a "soft drug" or a "rite of passage." These are all myths -- and for too many Americans they are costly myths. We need to educate Americans about the real harms of marijuana if we want to sustain the gains we've made over the past three years.
We've recently released a report entitled "Marijuana Myths & Facts: The Truth Behind 10 Popular Misperceptions" to help get the facts out about marijuana.
So I accuse Walters of downplaying the dangers of other drugs by hyping marijuana, and in his answer he does exactly that. He again overstates the dangers of marijuana (which leads to lack of confidence by teens that they're getting the truth). And he significanly downplays the dangers of alcohol.
Of course, he pulls the same stunt that his office has been doing ad nauseum -- the false implication regarding treatment. The truth is that treatment percentages connect to referrals, not addiction, so the reason that marijuana numbers are high has nothing to do with the danger of the drug (marijuana only has mild dependency capability), but rather that people go into treatment to avoid expulsion from school or as a condition for a positive drug test on the job, or to avoid jail.
As for the Drug Czar's "report" -- "Marijuana Myths & Facts is a joke. One of the commenters here is working on a detailed rebuttal to that publication -- I'll post a link to it when it's available.
Of course, this was not a good format for me. I ask a question and he gets to answer it any way he wants to without rebuttal. So, for the record, I'll state once again -- I'll debate the Drug Czar anywhere, any time. I'll even pay my own way. Just let me know and I'll be there.
10:50:29 AM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Excellent editorial
And editorial in The Oregonian titled Stop Blocking Marijuana Research
The bottleneck for legitimate researchers is that the agencies that are hostile to medicinal marijuana are the gatekeepers of its supply. Two suggestions:
Federal agencies such as the DEA should stop blocking legitimate research that is conducted with proper security.
Until the agencies stop erecting unreasonable barriers, the Supreme Court and federal appeals courts should recognize that FDA approval is not currently a viable option, so patients need to be afforded full protection of their states' laws.
10:36:27 AM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Lawmakers call on President to Stop Covert Propaganda
At BuzzFlash
Democratic leaders in Congress today called on President Bush to stop the alarming use of illegal covert propaganda to promote government policy after two new accounts of such activity surfaced today. In a letter to the President, they pointed out that the use of covert propaganda has been revealed through independent investigations by at least three separate federal agencies. ...
The letter was signed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, Rep. David Obey (D-WI), the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the outgoing Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Senior Democrat on the Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources Subcommittee.
The letter was in reaction to two reports today. USA Today disclosed that the Department of Education paid $240,000 to conservative political commentator Armstrong Williams to routinely promote the No Child Left Behind Act on his broadcast shows without revealing that he was being paid by the government to do so. Rep. Miller separately today requested that the Department's Inspector General investigate this contract with Williams.
And the Washington Post and New York Times reported today on a General Accounting Office report to Rep. Waxman and Rep. Obey that found the Office of Drug Control Policy violated the law when it used video news releases to promote an anti-marijuana message without revealing to television news viewers that the on-camera "reporter" was really an actor, not a journalist. In May, the GAO found that the Department of Health and Services also violated the law by producing and distributing similar video news releases regarding Medicare policy.
It seems to me that the drug czar's use of propaganda would normally have received less public awareness (it's almost the status quo). But since the report come out at the same time as the Armstrong Williams issue, there may be some attention paid.
I doubt that a lot will come of this, but the public statement by these Representatives will help long-term.
10:30:33 AM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Thursday, January 6, 2005 |
GAO says Drug Czar violated propaganda ban. Why not ask him about it?
Via Loretta at US Marijuana Party -- White House anti-drug videos violate propaganda ban, GAO says.
Not that this is news to us, of course -- the ONDCP is nothing but a propaganda mill that depends on misdirection, misleading, and outright lies.
Videotape footage of people using drugs and interviews with federal officials discouraging their use that was produced by the White House drug control policy office, violate a legal ban on official propaganda because they were presented to the public without any indication they were produced by the government, according to a decision released Thursday by the Government Accountability Office.
GAO, in response to a request from Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., examined a series of "video news releases" prepared by the Office of National Drug Control Policy from 2002 to 2004 to determine whether they violated a legal prohibition on "covert propaganda." The ban was included in the appropriations legislation that funded ONDCP's media campaign to lower drug use among American youth.
The videotapes were complete, prepackaged new stories, GAO found. They were sent to media outlets to be used "as news reports, without the need for any production effort," the agency wrote in its 17-page decision.
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ONDCP's estimates show that the video footage reached more than 22 million households, GAO noted, "without disclosing to any of those viewers - the real audience - that the products they were watching, which 'reported' on the activities of a government agency, were actually prepared by that government agency, not by a seemingly independent third party. This is the essence of the 'covert propaganda' violation."
Of course, the Drug Czar's office claims they've done nothing wrong -- most likely because they truly believe that they are entitled to use any tactic, including lying to the American people, in order to achieve their aims.
White House Drug Czar to Discuss Teenage Drug Use Tomorrow
White House: John Walters, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, will answer your questions about the 2004 Monitoring the Future study and the decline in teenage drug use Friday at 1:30pm (ET). Submit questions now.
Go ahead and submit a question -- of course they're all screened in advance, so he's not likely to answer any questions that seem like a criticism. Still, you could ask him what he thinks about lying to teens about drugs.
Update: I've asked my question. Now I just have to wait and see if it gets picked.
7:15:04 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Wednesday, January 5, 2005 |
Alcohol Prohibition and Drug Prohibition
One of the most incredible aspects of drug prohibition has been the almost total inability to learn from our mistakes in alcohol prohibition. Those in government and those supporting drug prohibition have been either blind to these truths, or have promoted willful ignorance.
I just finished reading one of the best pieces I have seen in this area. Alcohol Prohibition and Drug Prohibition: Lessons from Alcohol Policy for Drug Policy by Harry G. Levine and Craig Reinarman examines both prohibitions and analyzes the lessons from the earlier one that can be applied to the latter.
After a careful analysis of the history of both, the authors demonstrate a couple of important points:
First, the legalization of drug production and sales and the establishment of drug control along the lines of alcohol control is a reasonable and practical policy option. Supporters of alcohol prohibition always claimed that alcohol was a special substance that could never be regulated and sold like other commodities because it was so addicting and dangerous. However, as the last seventy plus years of alcohol control and the experiences of many other societies have shown, the prohibitionists were wrong. The experiences of drug policy in other nations, and the experiences of U.S. pharmaceutical and drugstore regulation, suggest that most if not all psychoactive substances could be similarly produced, regulated, sold, and used in a generally lawful and orderly fashion. Therefore, it would mark a significant advance if the current U.S. debate on drug policy could be moved beyond the question of whether such a system of legalized drug control is possible. It is. Instead, we think debate should focus on whether a nonmoralistic assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of such a system make it desirable, and what different regulatory options might look like.
Second, a workable system of at least partially legalized drug production and sales -- of drug control -- would have to be a flexible one, geared to local conditions. Edward Brecher recommended in his landmark study Licit and Illicit Drugs (1972), and the importance of local option was also stressed over a century ago by the Committee of Fifty (Levine, 1983). Because towns, cities, counties, states and countries vary enormously, alcohol and drug policies must be shaped according to local environments.
As with alcohol control, drug control could be implemented so as to reduce substantially if not eliminate the illegal drug business and most of the crime, violence, and corruption associated with it. Drug control with a public health orientation would also seek to encourage milder and weaker drugs and to make them available in safer forms accompanied by comprehensive education about risks, proper use, and less dangerous modes of ingestion. In other words, a public-health-oriented drug control regime would seek to reverse the tendencies that appear inherent under criminalization, where production, distribution, and consumption are pushed into deviant subcultures, where purity is uncontrolled and dosage is imprecise.
If a legalized, decentralized drug control system with local option is implemented, then the experience of alcohol regulation suggests that, in the long run, drug problems would probably not rise significantly above the levels now present under drug prohibition, and overall consumption might not rise either (see also Nadelmann, 1989a). Similarly, if such a public health model of drug control were coupled with increased social services and employment for impoverished inner-city populations, then the abuse of drugs like heroin and cocaine might well be expected to decrease (Reinarman and Levine, 1997; Brecher, 1972; Jonas, 1990).
The paper goes on to tackle the problems of global prohibition (which the authors consider to be a long-term reform challenge that will be tackled first by countries simply ignoring the treaty provisions).
The article is available at the Centre for Drug Research, University of Amsterdam.
8:11:20 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Interesting profiles
A couple of pieces of enjoyable, entertaining and enlightening reading focus on a couple of icons in the reform movement.
In Exhale, Stage Left, by Peter Carlson in the Washington Post, we get a colorful profile of NORML's Keith Stroup, who is retiring. It's a fascinating story of some of his wild experiences in developing the marijuana reform effort, as well as an indication of how far that movement has come.
While Boston's The Weekly Dig is not the Washington Post, take a moment to check out "These Laws are So Fucking Stupid" by Paul McMorrow (The Post probably wouldn't have allowed that headline). The article is a profile on Joe White and Change the Climate -- a Boston based organization that has been huge in fighting for the right to bring the discussion of marijuana public.
"I've been more of a non-activist over the years," White said. "I got involved with this issue partially as a business endeavor, but really in response to my teenager, who's now 23, asking me why adults lie to kids about marijuana. He's part of the DARE generation, the generation that's been bombarded by ads that make marijuana out to be the most dangerous substance on the planet. He told me that he didn't smoke, but his friends did, and if we weren't telling them the truth about marijuana, maybe we weren't telling them the truth about other drugs, more dangerous drugs.
"And once I started learning how much money is spent on arresting and prosecuting people for marijuana-how much money is spent disseminating inaccurate information about marijuana -- the more obsessed I became about telling people the truth and educating the public about what a huge fiasco this is. It costs us billions of dollars a year. Plus, it's easy for me -- I smoke pot. I'm fighting against stupid laws that go against my self-interest. Nobody ever died from smoking marijuana -- that's why these laws are so fucking stupid."
Good articles worth a read. (And thanks as always to Scott for all the tips.)
7:48:21 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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Monday, January 3, 2005 |
Happy New Year!
Well, my one week vacation stretched to almost two, with some wonderful time spent in Indianola (Iowa), Quincy (Illinois), and Chicago with family and friends. While I took a holiday vacation from Drug WarRant, the drug war continued to show up in discussion and on the news.
It was interesting over the holidays to talk with a variety of people from different backgrounds and political persuasions, including some violently opposed to drug use. Every single one I talked with, however, agreed that the drug war is not working.
I'm not saying there aren't regular people who still mistakenly support the government's war on drugs. It does appear, however, that their numbers are shrinking. The thin ice under the government's position is getting downright vaporous in places. Once enough people are willing to point out that the support is gone, the drug war will no longer be able to stand.
How about you? Did you talk with friends or family about the drug war over Christmas? What did they have to say?
8:59:40 PM | drug policy | Links | permalink |
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