Obama’s New Draconian Drug Control Report (no enlightenment here)

Obama’s New Drug Control Report Calls for More Workplace Drug Testing, Nationwide Zero Tolerance Laws, Prescription-Only Ephedrine Products, and the Return of the “Above the Influence” Campaign
Mike Riggs | April 17, 2012
The first thing you should know about President Barack Obama’s 2012 Drug Control Strategy report is that it begins and ends with the declaration that the war on drugs is working and will continue apace.

Obama administration policies have “yielded significant results,” according to the President’s introductory letter, which concludes by saying, “While difficult budget decisions must be made at all levels of government, we must ensure continued support for policies and programs that reduce drug use and its enormous costs to American society.”

The report ends with a familiar refrain: “Legalization of drugs will not be considered in this approach. Making drugs more available and more accessible will not reduce drug use and its adverse consequences for public health and safety. We will continue to educate young people and all Americans about the science on the harmful health effects of marijuana use.”

The pages in between those two statements contain a broad outline for increased drug enforcement, mandatory rehabilitation programs for people who don’t need or want them, and the return of melodramatic Reefer Madness-style agitprop aimed at teenagers.

The worst policy plans contained in the report are outlined after the jump.

The report implicitly blames the debate over drug reform—one Obama recently told Univision he’s more than willing to hear—for increased use of drugs by teens:

One possible influence on this observed trend in drug use and perception of risk is the decreased exposure of youth to prevention messages and the presence of messages and policies that downplay the consequences of drug use. While the Administration supports ongoing research into determining what components of the marijuana plant can be used as medicine, to date, neither the FDA nor the Institute of Medicine has found the marijuana plant itself to meet the modern standard for safe or effective medicine for any condition. The Administration also recognizes that legalizing marijuana would not provide the answer to any of the health, social, youth education, criminal justice, and community quality of life challenges associated with drug use.

The report encourages carte blanche workplace drug testing, on the grounds that it will curtail productivity losses associated with drug use and improve users’ lives. It also describes the Obama administration’s attempt to develop on oral test for workplace drug testing:

In addition to the youth programs mentioned previously, as our young people enter the workplace and others remain engaged in workforce, it is important to ensure a drug-free workplace. The consequences of illicit drug use in America’s workforce include job-related accidents and injuries, absenteeism, health care costs, and lost productivity. 

Workplace programs that provide clear policies regarding drug use; offer prevention and education opportunities for employers and supervisors; conduct drug testing to detect and deter use; and support referral and treatment for those who have substance use disorders can play a large role in reducing the demand for drugs throughout our Nation and in helping drug users get into treatment. 

These programs provide employees with the opportunity to self-identify and get help. Often, such programs give employees an opportunity to return to the same job, or a similar job in the same industry, thereby creating an incentive to succeed in their recovery and resume a fulfilling career. Consequently, drug-free workplace programs are beneficial for our labor force, employers, families, and communities in general. 

In 2011, the Administration committed to funding for the scientific determination for oral fluids testing as a complement to urine testing. HHS published a Federal Register notice requesting public comment on the scientific basis for oral fluid testing . HHS is moving forward to set standards for oral fluid testing that will be published in the future for public comment before they can be finalized in the Mandatory Guidelines for Drug Workplace Testing. These Guidelines will also be available for state and local jurisdictions to apply as appropriate for the prosecution of drugged driving violations, and to encourage the drug testing industry to develop accurate point-of-collection oral fluid testing devices.

The report contains a request to Congress for $20 million to Revamp and Reenergize the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, which was defunded by Congress last year because it doesn’t work:

Since 2005, there has been a significant public investment in developing the widely-recognized “Above the Influence” (ATI) brand, a campaign that has been found by independent scientific analyses to be effective, relevant to youth, and instrumental to drug prevention efforts in communities across the country. Unfortunately, despite evidence of its effectiveness, Congress appropriated no funding for the Media Campaign in Fiscal Year (FY) 2012, and the campaign is now operating on a minimal budget composed of its unobligated balances as the Youth Drug Prevention Media Program.

The report also calls for a nationwide zero tolerance policy for "drugged driving," which would mean all drivers would be subjected to laws that currently affect only commercial drivers:

The Administration encourages states to pursue enhanced legal responses, such as per se (or “zero tolerance”) laws. Seventeen states already have per se statutes, and additional states should consider adopting these standards. These same standards have been applied to 12 million commercial drivers in the United States for the past two decades. The Administration has developed educational packets for states, providing them with information on the dangers of drugged driving and why per se laws are beneficial.

The report also says that “Several options are being considered to further reduce methamphetamine production including prescription-only status for pseudoephedrine/ephedrine products.”

The Marijuana Policy Project’s Rob Kampia has called the report “appalling,” adding, “The drug czar is trying to resurrect those stupid TV ads, like the one where a teenager gets his fist stuck in his mouth. The budget intentionally undercounts the federal government's expenditures on incarcerating drug offenders, who comprise more than half of the federal prison population. And the budget dangerously proposes a massive escalation in using the military to fight drugs domestically. Congress should just ignore this budget and start from scratch. Specifically, Congress should not provide the Obama administration with any money to go after nonviolent marijuana users, growers, or distributors."

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition also attacked the report.

"President Obama keeps saying he is open to a discussion but he never seems willing to actually have that discussion,” said LEAP Director Neil Franklin said in a press release. “Polls show that three out of four U.S. voters think the 'war on drugs' is a failure and a majority now support marijuana legalization. The time for real change is now, but at the Summit of the Americas President Obama announced more than $130 million in aid to fund the continued effort to arrest drug traffickers in Latin America. This prohibition strategy hasn't worked in the past and it cannot work in the future. Latin American leaders know it, and President Obama must know it. Let's stop the charade and begin to bring drugs under control through legalization."

Former ONDCP senior advisor Kevin Sabet, meanwhile, is doing promotion for the report, which he refers to as “Wake Up and Grow Up.” In anticipating criticism of the report, Sabet writes, "The 2012 release is likely to be attacked by those who are waiting for the day the President will make a U-turn and support legalization—but attackers will unfortunately miss the nuance and striking clarity which characterizes this particular document and its connection with the first Strategy." Fun fact: Sabet wrote the first strategy!

More Reason on Obama's drug policies, including investments in police violence, the myth that the president's policies are "compassionate" and Jacob Sullum's must-read feature on how Obama turned out to be just another drug warrior.

"It is time for a new approach on marijuana policy," Drug Policy Coalition says to Obama

Six National Drug Policy Organizations Call on President Obama to End Unnecessary Assault on Medical Marijuana Providers
Wednesday, 04 April 2012

Contact: Allen St. Pierre, NORML Executive Director, (202) 483-5500
Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director, paul@norml.org

Washington, DC -- In the wake of recent attacks on medical marijuana providers and patients by multiple branches of the federal government, including Monday's raids on Oaksterdam University in Oakland, CA, a coalition of six national drug policy reform organizations is appealing to President Obama and his administration to follow its own previously stated policies respecting state medical marijuana laws. In the letter, posted in full below, the organizations call on the Obama administration to bring an end to the federal government's ongoing campaign to undermine state efforts to regulate safe and legal access to medical marijuana for those patients who rely on it.

The Obama Administration's National Drug Control Strategy Report 2012, reportedly being released in the coming days, is expected to cling to failed and outdated marijuana policies which further cement the control of the marijuana trade in the hands of drug cartels and illegal operators, endangering both patients in medical marijuana states and citizens everywhere. The members of this coalition stand together with members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, current and former Latin American leaders whose countries are being ravaged by drug cartels, state officials from five medical marijuana states, and tens of millions of Americans in their call for a more rational approach to marijuana policy.

###

THE LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA:

April 4, 2012 

President Barack ObamaThe White House
Washington D.C. 20500
Via Fax: 202-456-2461 

Dear Mr. President: 

Our coalition represents the views of tens of millions of Americans who believe the war on medical marijuana patients and providers you are fighting is misguided and counterproductive. As your administration prepares to release its annual National Drug Control Strategy, we want to speak with one voice and convey our deep sense of anger and disappointment in your lack of leadership on this issue. 

Voters and elected officials in sixteen states and the District of Columbia have determined that the medical use of marijuana should be legal. In many of these states, the laws also include means for providing medical marijuana patients safe access to this medicine. These laws allowing for the cultivation and distribution of medical marijuana actually shift control of marijuana sales from the criminal underground to state-licensed, taxed, and regulated producers and distributors. 

Instead of celebrating - or even tolerating - this state experimentation, which has benefited patients and taken profits away from drug cartels, you have turned your back as career law enforcement officials have run roughshod over some of the most professional and well-regulated medical marijuana providers. We simply cannot understand why you have reneged on your administration's earlier policy of respecting state medical marijuana laws. 

Our frustration and confusion over your administration's uncalled-for attacks on state-authorized medical marijuana providers was best summed up by John McCowen, the chair of the Mendocino County (CA) board of supervisors, who said, "It's almost as if there was a conscious effort to drive [medical marijuana cultivation and distribution] back underground. My opinion is that's going to further endanger public safety and the environment - the federal government doesn't seem to care about that." 

The National Drug Control Strategy you are about to release will no doubt call for a continuation of policies that have as a primary goal the ongoing and permanent control of the marijuana trade by drug cartels and organized crime. We cannot and do not endorse the continued embrace of this utterly failed policy. We stand instead with Latin American leaders, members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, and the vast majority of people who voted you into office in recognizing that it is time for a new approach on marijuana policy. 

With approximately 50,000 people dead in Mexico over the past five years as the result of drug war-related violence, we hope that you will immediately reconsider your drug control strategy and will work with, not against, states and organizations that are attempting to shift control of marijuana cultivation and sales, at least as it applies to medical marijuana, to a controlled and regulated market. 

Sincerely, 

Drug Policy Alliance (DPA)
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP)
Marijuana Policy Project (MPP)
National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA)
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)
Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) 

cc: Eric Holder, Attorney General, Department of Justice
James Cole, Deputy Attorney General, Department of Justice
Gil Kerlikowske, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy

Active duty cop: ‘The war on drugs is a war on people’

All prohibition does is cost millions of lives and pack the prisons with non-violent offenders who have a problem with their health, not their morality. Drug addiction is a serious and destructive problem--and their solution? Make it worse and even more destructive. It's bad enough people overdose (though, legally prescribed drugs are now the #1 cause of death in the US--alcohol and tobacco--both legal--cause more and worse health problems than all illegal drugs combined; and now, marijuana has been shown to prevent and cure CANCER and reduce and eliminate tumors); by outlawing drugs, they created a thriving and hungry black market that is pitted against law enforcement and results in multiple deaths daily. Drugs are a health issue, not a moral one. As soon as that reality is embraced, our nation's southern borders and our city streets will become safer---people can get the help they need without having to go through the prison system. Prohibition was a failure in the 1920s, and it has been a failure since 1937.--jef




By Stephen C. Webster - RAW Story
Friday, January 27, 2012

Speaking to Raw Story recently, an active duty police officer who asked not to be named threw down the gauntlet over the part of his job he hates most: the drug war.

“I did not get in law enforcement to destroy a person’s future because that person had marijuana or a pill in their pocket,” the officer explained. “Why would you want to destroy that person’s future and cause them great harm because of that? It’s not worth it.”


Like many Americans, the reality of the drug war was was nothing like what he’d been taught to believe in his youth. But statistics like a citizen being arrested for drugs every 19 seconds in 2010, and 1.6 million people incarcerated over drugs in 2009, were nothing compared to what he actually experienced in the front lines of the drug war on America’s users.

But for those officers who put their lives on the line every day to protect the public from dangerous, violent criminals, the drug war isn’t always just another part of the job. For this officer in particular, it’s much more than that: “The war on drugs is a war on people,” he claimed.


“I just didn’t see problems from illegal drug users that I’d been led to believe,” the officer explained. “Most of the calls that we get on drug use, as police, are alcohol related. Alcohol is a serious drug that can be abused, but I just didn’t see the calls on other drugs like I had been led to believe. I didn’t see these drug-crazed people out there doing crazy things… Even growing up before entering law enforcement, I was always led to believe that the drug war was meant to stop all these people from doing crazy things. But on the street, that’s not what you see. That’s a lie.”

In his view, the officer said that the American public would be much better off if the government would “regulate drugs and keep the control out of the hands of the black market criminals.”

“The cartels have been running a serious drug operation in America for decades, and I don’t think most Americans are really aware of it,” he said. “The money comes from the prohibition of drugs. These criminals are making their money because of the prohibition. If you legalize and regulate it, their profits go to zero.”


For more than two decades in law enforcement, he said that he’s carried an immense guilt: his first drug arrest.


“I was in training, on ‘the other side of the tracks,’ for lack of better words, and we pulled a vehicle over,” he explained. “The guy, I think he had a defective taillight or something. He was sober, polite, respectful, no problems, and my training officer said, ‘Oh yeah, he’s gonna have drugs.’ So, I asked if we could search his vehicle and he gave me permission. Within no time, I found a small amount of (hard) drugs, so he was facing a serious charge. The whole time I was thinking, ‘This is not right. This guy’s keeping to himself, not hurting nobody, he’s a peaceful person.’ I instinctively knew this was wrong.


I changed my perspective immediately. This was not the war on drugs that I thought it would be.”

Carrying this guilt for his participation in such a system, he got away from making narcotics arrests and received a transfer to another division. There he worked for years, until one day in 2006. Acting on a whim, he ran a Google search for the peculiar terms, “cops against the drug war,” and rather abruptly found a new calling: an activist group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). He’s followed their work ever since, and in 2012, the officer finally decided that he too must raise his voice against the drug war.


Today, he’s acquired a unique extra-curricular activity: an anonymous blog served up by LEAP, examining the innards of the drug war from a perspective rarely put on public display. If his superiors knew, he explained, “I would probably be terminated.”


And, he claims, it’s not just him that’s come to some stark, personal conclusions on the drug war: fellow officers are coming around as well — especially those who’ve been doing it for a while.


“I remember a case just here recently when an officer was trying to find marijuana on one guy, and another officer started looking around in this area where there’s actual crime, and he was kind of making fun of him for wasting time,” he said. “There’s plenty of officers that do want to get away from the petty, small drug arrests that distract them from fighting real crime, which is what a lot of them get into law enforcement for individually.”


To read more from the anonymous cop, visit the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition blog.

End the 'War on Drugs'

Thursday, June 16, 2011 by The Nation

by Peter Rothberg

Tomorrow's 40th anniversary of President Nixon's declaration of the War on Drugs comes amid growing recognition that the policy, and all that it wrought, is a complete disaster.

Shifting priorities toward a more sensible approach that offers treatment rather than punishment for addicts may seem like a daunting task but public opinion is increasingly opposed to the war on drugs, and many states facing tight budgets are de-emphasizing expensive criminalization in favor of strategies that decrease the penal population.

As Sasha Abramsky explained in an extensively reported and still-timely 2009 piece, "out of economic necessity and because of shifting mores, the country will likely get more selective, and smarter, about how it uses incarceration and whom it targets for long spells behind bars."

Last week, the Global Commission on Drug Policy issued a report declaring unreservedly: 

“The global war on drugs has failed.” 

This strong criticism of the status quo was endorsed by the three former Latin American presidents who organized the commission — Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia, and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico — along with 16 other prominent world leaders, including former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former head of NATO Javier Solana, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson.

Meanwhile, in the US, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of police officers, judges and related professionals, held a well-attended DC rally this past Tuesday, citing its own report criticizing the Obama Administration for doing precious little to reframe drug abuse as a matter of public health rather than one of criminal justice. The report calculates that the war on drugs has brought us 40 million arrests at a cost of one trillion dollars without making even a tiny dent in drug use.

The transpartisan coalition of people who want to end the drug war is one of the most diverse, broad-based alliances in America today, drawing from all regions and most spots on the political spectrum.

The War on Drugs is Lost (3 articles)

Saturday, June 4, 2011 by Reuters
Failed: The War on Drugs and a Milestone Critique
by Bernd Debusmann

The war on drugs is a waste of time, money and lives. It cannot be won. The world’s drug warriors are out of ideas.

The war on drugs President Richard Nixon launched 40 years ago has failed. Fresh thinking is of the essence. Governments should consider legalizing drugs to take profits out of the criminal trade.

Filling prisons with drug users does nothing to curb the billion-dollar illicit business, one of the world’s richest. Drug use is a public health problem, not a crime. Arresting small-time dealers does little but create a market opportunity for other small fry. Destroy drug crops in one region and cultivation moves to another. Cut a supply route in one place and another one opens up.

By one group or another, each of the above points has been made about long-running drug policies that bring to mind Albert Einstein’s famous definition of insanity — doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

But never before has such criticism come from an international panel of establishment figures with such high profiles as the Global Commission on Drug Policy which presented a devastating assessment of the drug war in New York on June 2. Its 19 members include former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, three former Latin American presidents (of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia), former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, Richard Branson, the flamboyant billionaire chairman of the Virgin group, and Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou.

Other commission members of impeccable mainstream respectability: George Shultz, U.S. Secretary of State during the Reagan administration; Louise Arbour, a former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and now president of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank; former Swiss president Ruth Dreifuss; Javier Solana, former European Union foreign affairs chief; Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel literature laureate, and Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes.

Whether their report will bring about change remains to be seen but it looks like a milestone on a long road toward reforms that some see as inevitable. “Today is the day when we start to end the war on drugs,” Branson said at the commission’s New York news conference.

The commission’s report does not mince words:

“The global war on drugs has failed. When the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs came into being 50 years ago and when President (Richard) Nixon launched the U.S. government’s war on drugs 40 years ago, policymakers believed that harsh law enforcement action against those involved in drug production, distribution and use would lead to an ever-diminishing market in … drugs such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis and the eventual achievement of a ‘drug-free world.’”

“In practice, the global scale of illegal drug markets – largely controlled by organized crime – has grown dramatically over this period.”

A KIND OF ARMS RACE

So has bloodshed and violence as government forces and drug trafficking organizations engage in what the report calls “a kind of arms race” – tougher crackdowns prompt criminal mafias to respond with greater force.

Exhibit A for this arms race is Mexico, where at least 36,000 people have died since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon declared war on his country’s drug cartels and unleashed the Mexican army to fight them. The death toll has mounted year by year, the army is not winning, and there is no end in sight.

“Poorly designed drug law enforcement practices can actually increase the level of violence, intimidation and corruption associated with drug markets,” notes the report. It echoes many of the points made in a 2009 by a commission that focused on Latin America but did not go as far as recommending that governments debate and seriously consider “models of legal regulation” of all drugs, not only marijuana.

The driving force in the Global Commission, a private initiative launched in Geneva in January, is former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who also led the 2009 Latin American group together with former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo and former president Cesar Gaviria of Colombia.

Latin America is the world’s largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana, largely to the insatiable U.S. market, and a major supplier of opium and heroin. Around the world, drug producing countries are vulnerable to what Moises Naim, a scholar at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Venezuelan trade minister calls “the politicization of criminals and the criminalization of politicians.” It’s a process that has given birth to “narco states,” a label that has been used for countries as far apart as Venezuela and Afghanistan.

There is reason to be skeptical about the prospect of change within years rather than decades and the commission alluded to it – “a built-in vested interest” in continuing with policies that focus on enforcement, interdiction and eradication. It is an entrenched anti-drug establishment that provides employment for thousands of people, from narcotics agents and intelligence analysts to prison wardens.

One of the essential elements required to change that system is spelt out in the first of the commission report’s 11 recommendations: “Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won.”

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Sunday, June 5, 2011 by the Guardian/UK
The War on Drugs War is Lost. Now It's Time for a Rational Response
Politicians are too scared to propose legalisation and controlled use, but without radical changes many more lives will be destroyed or ruined
by Ian Birrell

Four decades ago, Richard Nixon was casting around for a new enemy to shore up support for his unique brand of uncompassionate conservatism. Having risen to national prominence as an anti-communist campaigner, then turned his attention to crime, he found a new foe in the counterculture.

The media were full of stories of clean-cut young men returning from Vietnam as wrecked junkies, while intellectuals such as Timothy Leary were promoting the use of LSD. So Nixon, elected on a wafer-thin margin and desperate to turn back the tide of permissiveness, declared war on drugs. "America's public enemy number one is drug abuse," he thundered.

While the Vietnam conflict has faded into history, thousands are dying and millions of lives are still being destroyed in his insane struggle. Fittingly, since it was launched by a president who turned out to be a crook, the biggest beneficiaries have been the most murderous gangsters on the globe as they rip apart country after country. Yet our leaders limp on in this self-defeating, $100bn-a-year war. Last week saw the latest salvo in the struggle when a host of distinguished names gathered under the banner of the Global Commission on Drug Policy to urge a truce. Their thoughtful report pointed out a series of obvious truths underlying how the war backfired so terribly and called for policies based on treatment rather than prosecution.

Look at the rise in drug use. In 1998, the United Nations committed member states to achieve a "drug-free world", pledging to eliminate or "significantly reduce" use of opium, cannabis and cocaine by 2008. Instead, global opiate use rose by more than one-third over that time, with big rises also for cocaine and cannabis. It is estimated almost 5% of the world's adults take illegal drugs.

Worse is the damage done by gangs fighting over the huge profits created by the illegality of this trade. We have all heard tales of headless bodies littering the landscape of Mexico. But the world's most violent region away from active war zones is further south – Guatemala and Honduras, for instance, both have more murders than the 27 countries of the European Union combined. Now the cancer is working its way through west Africa.

The trade is so lucrative that in several countries – some signed up to those sanctimonious UN pledges – drug gangs have bought or fought their way to power. Kosovo has a prime minister linked to drug smuggling, as are the leaders of Afghanistan, Burma, Guinea, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Then there are cases such as South Africa, where the police chief turned out to be the head of a crime syndicate.

There are so many arguments against current policies it is hard to believe anyone who is not stoned still signs up to Nixon's war. The vast costs, the crime waves, the racial dimensions, the stigmatisation, the futility. Then there is the dreadful hypocrisy of politicians who use and tax the lethal drug of alcohol then jail others who enjoy less damaging relaxants such as marijuana and ecstasy.

The key question is why? After all, we live in a world in which grandparents took acid or smoked pot while listening to the Grateful Dead and many parents were the people who dropped ecstasy at outdoor raves. The current occupant of the White House has confessed to taking cocaine, while several of our cabinet ministers admitted smoking weed. Drug use is no longer that big a deal, while it is clear many of the problems and much of the misery are byproducts of banning.

The Global Commission is a valiant effort, but it is noticeable that signatories include 11 former presidents, politicians and diplomats, but just one in office – the Greek prime minister, who presumably needs any extra revenue he can find. This is the fundamental problem: serving politicians lack the bottle to take the obvious remedial actions.

As the report rightly states:

"Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem and the war on drugs cannot be won."

This failure of nerve is particularly acute in Britain. One cabinet minister who has admitted smoking cannabis in his youth said politicians were scared to act, despite knowing they should, since they would be slaughtered by rivals and the media for every drug-related death following liberalization. "You may think it is absurd regulation and it may cost more lives but deregulation is impossible in our political climate."

Sadly, he is right. Witness the infantile response – especially from local Labour parties, as the campaign group Transform will testify – to any politician standing for election who has dared suggest saner drug laws. They should listen to the admirable Bob Ainsworth, who had a Damascene conversion while a home office minister: "The public are in a far more progressive place on this issue than most politicians and sections of the press."

Recent polling proves he is correct. One survey last year found 70% of Britons favoured the regulated sale of cannabis, with smaller majorities supporting legally available heroin, ecstasy and cocaine. Curiously, the groups most in favour were Conservative voters, middle-aged women and readers of mid-market tabloids. And just think how tax proceeds would help the public spending crisis.

Politicians say they fear drug use would rise if prohibition is lifted. Evidence from abroad shows they are wrong. Look at Scandinavia, where the tough Swedes and more liberal Norwegians have similar addiction rates. Or Switzerland, where heroin demand and crime fell sharply following new policies based on public health rather than legality. Or Portugal, where heroin use fell by half after decriminalization.

These are places where there have been tentative steps forward. There are even signs the US, which remains the bastion of bigotry on this issue, is slightly shifting its stance under Barack Obama. It has, for example, permitted its blood-soaked neighbor Mexico to loosen cannabis laws.

Meanwhile, the tone of debate in Britain serves only to highlight the immaturity of our public discourse, with too many politicians lost in the fog of this foolhardy war. So here is a suggestion for our three main party leaders, who are all young enough to know better: why not hoist the white flag and work out a unified way to end a struggle that does so much more harm than good?

The alternative is to carry on fighting like generals in the First World War, ignoring the deaths, the devastation and the wastelands created around the world in a battle than can never be won.

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Drug Control Imperialism
Marijuana, Psychosis and the Failed War on Drugs
By PATRICK COCKBURN

In 2002 my elder son Henry was diagnosed with schizophrenia. His final breakdown came when he tried to swim Newhaven estuary in mid-winter fully clothed and was lucky to be rescued by some fishermen before he died of cold.  He spent the next eight years in and out of mental hospitals, though more recently has shown strong signs of recovery.

Henry later said that between the ages of 14 and 19 he had taken marijuana almost every day. He did so because it made him feel less shy with other people and his generation of teenagers all did so too. The music-scene, of which he wanted to be part, was drug orientated. “It would have been better if I hadn’t,” he says now, “but about half the people I knew in Canterbury [where he lived] were smoking dope.”

At the time I knew little about cannabis and nothing about mental illness. Henry was very intelligent, charming and passed all his exams.  I was at Oxford in the late 1960s and early 1970s when cannabis smoking was becoming popular, but I had probably puffed at a joint about twice in my life. I never knew about the dangers involved.

The risks are quite specific in the case of cannabis and tend to be masked by blanket disapproval or disapproval of the drug. Not everybody taking it is vulnerable to the same degree, but numerous scientific studies show that cannabis can be the precipitating factor for the sizeable minority of the population, perhaps 20 per cent, with a genetic pre-disposition to psychosis.

The evidence for this has been mounting for decades. A study of 1,900 people between the ages of 14-24 published in the British Medical Journal this year, who at the start of the survey had not taken cannabis, were reassessed at three and eight year periods. Those who took to smoking cannabis had a higher risk of developing psychosis. Sir Robin Murray, professor of psychiatric research at the Institute of Psychiatry, said “this study adds a further brick to the wall of evidence showing that use of traditional cannabis is a contributory cause of psychoses like schizophrenia.”

The conclusion mirrors my own experience. When Henry first showed symptoms of mental disorder I was amazed to discover how many friends, many of whom I had known well for years, had a close relative disabled by schizophrenia whom they had never told me of. Again and again the common feature in these tragedies was that the victim had taken cannabis in significant quantities at a young age.

It is this failure to take adequately on board the dangers of cannabis which is a serious failing of an otherwise impressive report by the Global Commission of Drug Policy published last week which is signed by luminaries such as the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker. All agree that the 40-year-old “war on drugs” has been a failure at every level and suggest other approaches such as decriminalization, education and treatment to replace incarceration.

The report was predictably rejected, despite its high level endorsement, by politicians across the world who learn from the cradle that a policy of “being tough on drugs” however counter-effective is invariably popular. But there is a second, less mindless reason why a well-researched report like this has less impact than it should. This has because supporters of decriminalization in the media and among the intelligentsia in general see cannabis as harmless and discount opposition to it as ill-informed prejudice. 

Even in a well-informed report like this there are repeated signs of an underestimation of the dangers of some drugs. For instance it blithely reproduces a chart published in Lancet drawn by “independent experts” claiming that cannabis carries a lower risk to the consumer than alcohol and cigarettes. They fail to make clear that for people genetically susceptible to psychosis the risks involved in taking cannabis may be lethally high. Cigarettes and alcohol, whatever harm they cause, do not, at a young age, send you mad. The report would carry more political punch if it underlined that its proposed “experiment in decriminalization” does not imply that cannabis is less harmful than was once believed. It may, indeed, be much more dangerous.

It is not as if there were only a small number of people at risk. An estimated 51 million people worldwide, including 2.2 million in the US and 250,000 in the UK, are estimated to suffer from schizophrenia, which may have been precipitated or hastened as to the time it manifests itself by cannabis, so the potential casualty list from ill-judged experimentation is large. 

The proponents of current drug policies, largely devised and propagated by the US, scarcely bother to justify them in rational terms. The present demagogic approach is usually attributed to President Nixon, though it was first used as a political weapon by his Republican rival the New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. As with “red-baiting” in the US in the 1940s and 1950s and “the war on terror” post 9/11, the “war on drugs” was always a means of manipulating and exaggerating public fears as a means of winning political power and as Nixon put it privately to his aide Haldeman, essentially aimed at America’s blacks.
   
The results, as the Global Security’s report cogently explains, have been devastating. Demand and profits will always be so high that arrests of dealers, punishment of consumers, crop eradication, highly publicized seizures of drug shipments, have no overall effect. Where an obstacle to the drug trade appears, the trade simply flows through different people and countries. States with weak security systems like Mexico and the Central American states or, increasingly, West Africa, do not have the strength to combat the hordes of gunmen which drug money can pay for.

Security agencies justify their bloated budgets as participants in the “war on drugs” despite its manifest failure. Cheaper and demonstrably more effective methods are under-funded or neglected. For instance, provision of clean syringes to heroin users in UK and Germany has kept HIV prevalence among people who inject drugs to below five per cent while in Russia and Thailand, where there is no such provision, it is over 35 per cent.

The war on drugs incorporates and exacerbates racial and social conflict. Of the 2.3 million people in jail in the US about a million are there for non-violent offences, mostly to do with drugs, and of these half are African-Americans and a quarter Latinos. Despite ruining the lives of so many non-criminal consumers, imprisonment has not reduced drug consumption or dented the profits to be made.

None of this is going to change while the US plays the predominant role in determining the drugs policies of the rest of the world. The “war on drugs” is too politically attractive in the US to be abandoned as futile. The report rather daringly denounces this as ‘drug control imperialism’ that lands the rest of the world with a failed American policy while more successful drug policies tested successfully in European countries are ignored.

Retired Cop Slams Arguments Against Legalizing Marijuana

by STEPHEN C. WEBSTER | Jul. 21 2010

This fall, California will consider repealing marijuana prohibition by way of a voter-sponsored ballot initiative called Proposition 19. If passed, it would stand as a direct affront to federal law, representing the most significant change in a state’s drug policy since cannabis was first outlawed in 1937.

Though marijuana legalization is largely a liberal and progressive cause célèbre, it may be fair to say that the state’s elected Democrats aren’t exactly cuckoo for these coco-puffs.

Prominent California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein has declared her opposition to Prop. 19, signing a ballot argument against legalization put forward by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Sen. Barbara Boxer and Democrat gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown were quick to adopt Feinstein’s position, and the state’s Democratic party, while apparently torn on the issue, officially elected to stay neutral fearing their support could damage state-wide candidates.

In spite of Democratic opposition, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a drug policy reform group made up of former cops, judges and federal agents, seems to stand perhaps the best chance of swaying the state’s drug policy establishment. They’ve put forward a ballot argument in favor of Prop. 19, and three of their most prominent members from California law enforcement have signed it.

In an exclusive interview, the former police chief of San Jose and the former deputy police chief of Los Angeles County — both members of LEAP — took to task those favoring continued prohibition, insisting that both Sen. Feinstein and MADD level an “emotional, unreasoned” argument for keeping pot illegal.

Sen. Feinstein’s press office was contacted multiple times in seeking a response to these officers. Both times a returned call or e-mail was promised, but none were received after several days.

“I know Dianne Feinestein quite well from when she was mayor of San Francisco,” said former San Jose Chief of Police Joseph McNamara. “I’m kind of stunned by her stance on this. It’s contrary to everything she talked about as a politician in San Francisco.”

By contrast, post-Feinestein San Francisco was host this year to the first-ever International Cannabis and Hemp Expo, and the Hemp Industry Association is planning to hold its 17th annual meeting there in November. Last month also saw San Francisco hosting the first ever Medical Cannabis Cup: a competition among growers, to see who produces the best pot.

It’s pretty clear that the city, by and large, has taken a position of favoring Prop. 19.

“[Feinestein's] position [as San Francisco's mayor] certainly wasn’t this law and order nonsense on stamping out marijuana,” McNamara said.

In a ballot argument against legalization (PDF link), Feinstein and MADD argue that Prop. 19 could cost California school districts $9.4 billion in federal funding, as they would no longer be able to meet federal drug-free standards. They also fret that colleges and universities in California will lose out on federal grants, which is a very real threat that LEAP did not address.

The main thrust of their argument is that due to the ballot initiative’s wording, officers or other public officials would not be able to take preemptive action against stoned drivers: they’d have to wait for accidents to happen. Much of the argument focuses on school bus drivers, and how they could be permitted to ingest marijuana and transport children, leaving the hands of authority bound until someone got hurt.

“Their argument is specious and I don’t think it’s based on any emperical evidence,” contended Steven Downing, the former Los Angeles County deputy police chief. “It’s kinda like, we make things up in order to pass laws. Well, come up with the facts.”

He and McNamara insist there is no evidence to support the assumption that officers or public officials could not enforce laws against driving while intoxicated. They argue that Prop. 19 has nothing to do with laws requiring sobriety while driving, and that it’s impossible to say, as MADD does, that legalization would turn California’s highways into a nightmare.

Similarly, though a recent study by the Rand Corporation predicted that usage is likely to go up because prices could plummet if cannabis is legalized, they too admit that estimating the number of stoned drivers is impossible.

“I think one of the strongest points to make is that there were no studies when these drugs were outlawed,” Downing said. “It was religious fervor and prejudice. Fear. We all know that’s how it all got started. That’s how alcohol prohibition got stated. It’s the same today for marijuana, which is kept illegal by emotional, unreasoned arguments.”

“Smoking may even decrease,” McNamara said. “Looking at the reaserch, 85% of high school students surveyed say it’s more difficult to get beer than marijuana. The reason for that is that beer is regulated. You need proof of identity and age to purchase it. That argument, that use will explode, is wrong. It may be exactly the opposite. It will be more difficult for people under-age to get cannabis.”

He adds that “marijuana is already in the mix,” as far as the sobriety of drivers is concerned. The former police chief, now a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, calls Feinstein and MADD’s argument on stoned drivers “speculation that doesn’t make any sense.”

Supporting McNamara’s position is the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, which reported in May that after a double-blind study of 85 drivers tested before and after smoking marijuana, “no differences [in motor control and response time] were found”.

“The laws today prohibit driving under the influence of drugs,” he said. “If they do that, they’re violating the law and can be punished under the present laws. By freeing law enforcement from making so many [marijuana] arrests, this would give them more resources to use against dangerous activities like driving under the influence.”

Downing’s argument was similar, and one of surprise at the lack of support from MADD. He said that fewer marijuana prisoners would mean more drunk drivers serving out their full sentence, thanks to reduced overcrowding in California’s jails.

“When you look at all of it, I think Prop. 19 offers an opportunity for rationality in an area that’s been so emotional,” McNamara said.

Prop. 19 will appear on California’s state-wide ballot this November. Should it pass, individual counties and municipalities would be able to opt in or out of the legalized system; those which opt in would be given additional tax and enforcement options, and residents would be allowed to transport up to one ounce and grow plants in a five-foot-by-five-foot area.

Even if the voters carry Prop. 19, it may not mean anything as it still conflicts with federal law. The Obama administration’s policy has been to not interfere with state-supported medical marijuana initiatives, but the president has said he is opposed to legalization. Whether or not the administration will take a hands-off approach to legalization in California is still an unanswered question.

A recent CBS poll found that while 42 percent of the state’s voters oppose legalization, 56 percent are in favor. Aligned with the majority is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which endorsed legalization because of prohibition’s inordinate impact on minority communities. The California Young Democrats also endorsed Prop. 19, along with former United States Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. The 200,000-member-strong United Food and Commercial Workers union, of the Western States Council, backs it as well.

LEAP’s full ballot argument in favor of Prop. 19 is available on their blog.