Sunday, October 15, 2006

Hooray for the Boulder Weekly What a great editorial! After spending several paragraphs detailing the arguments of those opposed to Amendment 44 (legalizing marijuana), they respond with this: BW position: Opponents are full of bull, and a large percentage of Boulder County readers knows it. Why? Because they smoke pot and lead healthy, functional lives. The war on pot is a waste of money and a waste of lives. Prohibition has never worked and never will. If alcohol and cigarettes, which are demonstrably more costly and harmful to human beings and to society, are legal, then ganja should be legal, too. End the hypocrisy. Vote YES on Amendment 44. Now that's refreshing. 8:17:14 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

But people would never lie on an anonymous survey, would they? Depending on data from surveys is always an iffy proposition. Even more so when it involves asking people about illegal activities. Anonymity may help people feel like they can be honest, but it also means there's nothing preventing them from lying. And a school setting actually encourages "pranking" such surveys (when I was in school, a lot of students pranked the tests that determined whether the school was doing a good job of teaching, often purposely selecting incorrect answers and driving down the entire school average). That leads to this astute observation by a student: Most people are quick to attribute the drop in cigarette, alcohol and drug use among Southwest Allen County Schools students to the random drug-testing program that has been placed in the school system's two middle schools and one high school. However, common sense from a student taking those very drug surveys that led to drug testing can prove otherwise. In middle and high school, the anonymous drug surveys given to students are seen as a joke. Not only do kids say they have done drugs that they have not heard of, they fill in the corresponding bubble saying they used cocaine more than 50 times a week as a sixth-grader. Until now, these drug surveys have shown ridiculous numbers of drug users in the district resulting from the anonymity of the test. After the random drug testing was implemented, however, everything changed. Middle and high school students began to see that these surveys, while still anonymous, were finally being used for something: numbers to verify the need for drug testing. Drug testing is not the Holy Grail to preventing drug use. It has actually done very little to stop drug use in the district ( only 1.9 percent of tested students tested positive ). The huge decline in drug and alcohol use in these surveys can be attributed to the clever students seeing that if they are honest, federal grants will not continue to be poured into the district for drug testing and the program will not be renewed by the school board at the end of the 2008-09 school year. Drug and alcohol use should not be as widespread as it is in schools, but administrators and employees should quit letting students fool them with a survey and look for something that actually works, and spend some money on education. After all, that is what school is for. 3:34:08 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

A Supreme Court that still believes in protecting the individual from potentially abusive government intrusion Canada Judges cannot issue probation orders requiring people to provide blood or urine samples to check if they are obeying conditions to abstain from drugs or alcohol, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Friday. In dismissing a Crown appeal of a B.C. Court of Appeal decision, the country's top court ruled that probation orders compelling people to provide bodily samples were contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.[...] "Compelling blood tests, absent a statutory framework governing such tests, is not consistent with the charter and random drug testing at a probation officer's discretion could become highly arbitrary," the court said. I used to think that the U.S. Supreme Court believed in such concepts as well. 2:55:04 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

War on a plant You may have already seen this one by now, but I couldn't resist... Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy -- almost impenetrable forests of marijuana plants 10 feet tall. General Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defense staff, said Thursday that Taliban fighters were using the forests as cover. In response, the crew of at least one armored car had camouflaged their vehicle with marijuana. "The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It's very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices. ... And as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don't dodge in and out of those marijuana forests," he said in a speech in Ottawa, Canada. "We tried burning them with white phosphorous -- it didn't work. We tried burning them with diesel -- it didn't work. The plants are so full of water right now ... that we simply couldn't burn them," he said. Even successful incineration had its drawbacks. "A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those [forests] did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action," Hiller said dryly. One soldier told him later: "Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I'd say 'That damn marijuana'." Update: [Photo added] As Hope notes in comments, we're really talking about a hemp field here. 11:56:00 AM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []