DrugReporter

For the past 15 years, lawmakers have pursued tough-on-drugs policies in an effort to create a "drug free America," plowing billions of dollars into prosecuting and imprisoning drug offenders. Is it working? Not according to many drug policy observers o

Why Are All the L.A. Times Columnists Using Medical Marijuana?
Posted by Sara Libby, True/Slant on October 29, 2009 at 4:00 AM.

L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez, one of the paper’s premier writers (Robert Downey Jr. played him in this year’s movie “The Soloist”) is the latest writer there to devote a column to obtaining medical marijuana. He describes the panic process he went through before he met with a doctor in Glendale to obtain pot to treat his back pain.

“My back problem wasn’t as obvious. Should I limp when it was my turn? … I was in a panic. I’d had a headache or two. Why hadn’t I gone with migraines, and was it too late to switch?”

Unsurprisingly, Lopez’s doctor (who turned out to be a gynecologist who admitted he knew nothing about back problems) was given a recommendation for marijuana use.

Sound familiar?

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Bong Water Counts as an Illegal Drug?
Posted by Jan Frel, AlterNet on October 26, 2009 at 5:52 PM.

From the AP:

In Minnesota, bong water can count as an illegal drug.

That decision from Minnesota's Supreme Court on Thursday raises the threat of longer sentences for drug smokers in that state who fail to dump the water out of bong — a type of water pipe often used to smoke drugs

The court said a person can be prosecuted for a first-degree drug crime for 25 grams or more of bong water that tests positive for a controlled substance.

Lower courts had held that bong water is drug paraphernalia. Possession of that is a misdemeanor crime.

The case involved a woman whose bong had about 2 1/2 tablespoons of liquid that tested positive for methamphetamine. A narcotics officer had testified that drug users sometimes keep bong water to drink or inject later.

The war on fun continues, despite some recent progress.

Dept of Justice Eases Off Medical Pot
Posted by John Nichols, TheNation.com on October 19, 2009 at 3:30 PM.

During the 2008 campaign, one of candidate Barack Obama's best applause lines was a promise to restore respect for science when it came to federal policy making.

On Monday, President Obama kept a piece of that promise when his Department of Justice issued a directive ordering agency lawyers not to prosecute individuals who use or prescribe medical marijuana in states that have legalized the drug for that purpose.

"It will not be a priority to use federal resources to prosecute patients with serious illnesses or their caregivers who are complying with state laws on medical marijuana, but we will not tolerate drug traffickers who hide behind claims of compliance with state law to mask activities that are clearly illegal," explained Attorney General Eric Holder. "This balanced policy formalizes a sensible approach that the Department has been following since January: effectively focus our resources on serious drug traffickers while taking into account state and local laws."

In the overall scheme of the drug-policy debate, this is a relatively small -- and cautious -- step.

But for medical-marijuana advocates, the administration's formal embrace of a more responsible approach represents a major breakthrough.

"This is a huge victory for medical-marijuana patients," says Steph Sherer, executive director of Americans for Safe Access, a medical-marijuana advocacy group. "This indicates that President Obama intends to keep his promise … and represents a significant departure from the policies of the Bush administration."

The jury is in on medical marijuana and the evidence argues for removing barriers -- federal, state and local -- to its use by patients seeking relief from pain and nausea associated with cancer, AIDS and multiple sclerosis and other debilitating illnesses and conditions.

The Obama administration's move respects that evidence. As such, it represents a clearer embrace of science with regard to drugs and drug policy by a White House than we have seen since the days when Jimmy Carter explored enlightened approaches.

As New York Congressman Maurice Hinchey said Monday, "Today, common sense won out over ideological stubbornness as our nation's law enforcement agency formally adopted a new and well-balanced policy on medical marijuana use. Across the country, individual states have enacted laws that allow individuals who are sick and suffering to use medical marijuana with a doctor's prescription only to have DOJ officials arrest and prosecute them anyway. This was a policy that was misguided and wrong from the start and I'm very pleased that the Obama administration's Justice Department, under the leadership of Attorney General Holder, has put an end to it."

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Great Moments in Drug Enforcement
Posted by BoRev, BoRev on September 17, 2009 at 9:41 AM.

Oh look: a high ranking U.S. drug official in Mexico also "served as a secret ally of traffickers while he was posted in Guadalajara." Specifically, Richard Padilla Cramer used his post to report DEA informants to big drug cartels, for cash! The druglords would use this information to kill said informants in gross and painful ways. This, of course, comes as a "Complete Shock" for anyone who hasn't noticed that every DEA agent in Latin America has done the same thing, for the same reason, forever.

Meanwhile this week State Department listed Venezuela and Bolivia among the top three worst drug offending countries in the world for not cooperating better with this same top-secret DEA drug-running thrill kill cartel, the end.

Religious Right University Chaplain Busted for Painkiller Robbery ... for the 2nd Time
Posted by PZ Myers, Pharyngula on September 11, 2009 at 9:57 AM.

It looks like one of the staff at Liberty University has been caught.

A Liberty University chaplain is facing drug and burglary charges. Last week, a homeowner caught Scott Ray on surveillance video breaking into a home to steal painkillers. Ray, who is the chaplain for the men's basketball team and the Director of Convocation, is also suspected in other Campbell County break-ins. In 2005 he was arrested and charged with the same thing. Ray has been suspended by the school and it's believed he's checked into a rehab program. Investigators also say Ray has not yet been arrested but additional indictments are pending.

Now if only the rest of the staff could be charged with the greater crime of sowing ignorance…

More People Over 50 Are Smoking Pot Than Ever Before
Posted by Jan Frel, AlterNet on September 11, 2009 at 9:41 AM.

From Daniel Engber at Slate:

 ...[A] statistical trace of what I've taken to calling the "puff daddy" movement emerged a few years ago, when researchers at the National Institutes of Health compared national drug surveys conducted over two-year periods beginning in 1991 and 2001. Their analysis, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that the percentage of people who say they smoked marijuana in the past year had remained fairly stable over the 10-year stretch. (That is to say, it ended where it started.) But they found a very different pattern among those between the ages of 45 and 64: As my parents' generation matured, the number of smokers in that group had nearly tripled.

The baby boomer drug uptick turns up again in the recent data. According to the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, almost 6 percent of all adults between the ages of 50 and 59 reported smoking marijuana in the past year. That's up from about 3 percent five years earlier. Meanwhile, the number of recent users over the age of 50 has climbed to 2.65 million people nationwide (and we can assume the real prevalence is somewhat higher, since these figures are based on self-reported drug use). Here's something to think about: There are about as many boomers using cannabis today as there are high-school students doing the same.

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Failure Squared: War on Drugs Meets the War on Terror
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, Majikthise on July 31, 2009 at 8:52 AM.

U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke is congratulating himself for ending the Bush administration's expensive and ineffective opium poppy eradication program. Trouble is, he's decided to replace eradication with interdiction.

He's only switching to the same failed strategy that the rest of the drug war is based on. Interdiction doesn't stop the billion dollar drug trade right here in the U.S., where the government actually controls all the territory. What makes Holbrooke think that interdiction will work in Afghanistan when the coalition doesn't even have a presence in, let alone control of, most of the territory.

Here's how Holbrooke described a successful interdiction at a press briefing yesterday:

On this trip, we saw the first indications that it might work. And those indications came from the British and American forces in Helmand, where they targeted interdiction and made interdiction their goal and they went after drug dealers. And using modern technologies, they located what they called drug bazaars, marketplaces which sold drug paraphernalia, precursor chemicals, laboratory equipment, poppy seeds and there were vast amounts of opium, nice fluffy poppy, to buy and sell, and they destroyed them. [The Cable]

He says they used "modern technology" to find drug bazaars. Does he really mean drone strikes on drug markets? If so, that's going to work until the narcos give up on their farmer's markets and go underground like normal traffickers. Of course, that will be an impetus for defense contractors and private security firms to sell the U.S. another costly round of "modern technology" to detect slightly better-hidden dope.

And how long before a drone or an satellite image analyst mistakes a real farmer's market for a drug market?

California: Oakland Voters Approve Nation’s First Marijuana Business Tax
Posted by Paul Armentano, NORML on July 24, 2009 at 1:46 PM.

From this week's NORML <a href="http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=3442">weekly media advisory</a>:

Oakland voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved the nation’s first ever business tax on retail marijuana sales.

According to preliminary election results, approximately 80 percent of Oakland voters approved the new tax (which appeared on the ballot as Measure F), which imposes an additional tax for “cannabis businesses” of $18 for every $1,000 of gross receipts beginning January 1, 2010.

Presently, Oakland’s medical cannabis dispensaries are taxed at the same rate as other retail sales businesses ($60 per year for the $50,000 of gross receipts, plus $1.20 for each additional $100,000).

Four dispensaries are licensed by the Oakland City Council to sell and dispense medical marijuana.

According to a financial analysis by the Oakland City Auditor, Oakland’s new cannabis business tax will generate an estimated $300,000 in additional annual tax revenue.

Representatives from the Oakland City Council, the California Nurses Association, and the dispensary community publicly advocated for the new tax, which had no formal opposition.

“The passage of this first-in-the-nation tax further legitimizes cannabis-based enterprises in Oakland and elsewhere,” NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre said. “These outlets are contributing to the health and welfare of their local communities, both socially and now economically. At a time when many municipalities  are strapped for tax revenues and cutting public services it is likely that public officials in other cities will begin considering similar proposals.”

White House Czar Calls for End to 'War on Drugs'
Posted by , AlterNet on May 14, 2009 at 7:00 AM.

The Wall Street Journal reports: 

"The Obama administration's new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting 'a war on drugs,' a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use."

In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation's drug issues.

"Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We're not at war with people in this country."

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Journalism, the Drug War and Democracy: Bill Moyers' Must-See Interview with 'The Wire' Creator David Simon
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on April 20, 2009 at 8:57 AM.

Over the last few weeks, I've written columns about the drug war and the demise of journalism, and I cited David Simon, the Baltimore Sun reporter turned creator of HBO's "The Wire." This week, Bill Moyers had Simon on his PBS show to expand on this topic, and it was one of those rare must-watch interviews that you see on television. You can watch it here, and I highly recommend you do.

Simon is firing on all cylinders throughout the interview, but I found this statement on the politics of the drug war particularly poignant:

Listen, if you could be Draconian and reduce drug use by locking people up, you might have an argument. But we are the jailing-est country on the planet right now. Two million people in prison. When I started as a police reporter, 33, 34 percent of the federal inmate population was violent offenders. Now it's like, seven to eight percent. So, we're locking up less violent people. More of them. The drugs are purer. They've not-- they haven't closed down a single drug corner that I know of in Baltimore for any length of time. It's not working. And by the way this is not a Republican/Democrat thing. Because a lot of the most Draconian stuff came out of the Clinton Administration. This guy trying to maneuver to the center, in order not to be perceived as Leftist by a Republican Congress.

Simon is absolutely right - the dynamics of Washington politics have long required Democrats to try to look more "tough on crime" than Republicans, for fear that they will be successfully tarred and feathered as "weak" via derivatives of Willie Horton ads. But I think things might be changing, if ever so slowly.

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Happy 4/20! The True Story Behind Stoners' Favorite Number
Posted by Ryan Grim, Huffington Post on April 20, 2009 at 8:32 AM.

Warren Haynes, the Allman Brothers Band guitarist, routinely plays with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, now touring as The Dead. He's just finished a Dead show in Washington, D.C. and gets a pop quiz from the Huffington Post.

Where does 420 come from?

He pauses and thinks, hands on his side. "I don't know the real origin. I know myths and rumors," he says. "I'm really confused about the first time I heard it. It was like a police code for smoking in progress or something. What's the real story?"

Depending on who you ask, or their state of inebriation, there are as many varieties of answers as strains of medical bud in California. It's the number of active chemicals in marijuana. It's teatime in Holland. It has something to do with Hitler's birthday. It's those numbers in that Bob Dylan song multiplied.

The origin of the term 420, celebrated around the world by pot smokers every April 20th, has long been obscured by the clouded memories of the folks who made it a phenomenon.

The Huffington Post chased the term back to its roots and was able to find it in a lost patch of cannabis in a Point Reyes, California forest. Just as interesting as its origin, it turns out, is how it spread.

It starts with the Dead.

It was Christmas week in Oakland, 1990. Steven Bloom was wandering through The Lot - that timeless gathering of hippies that springs up in the parking lot before every Grateful Dead concert - when a Deadhead handed him a yellow flyer.

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Medical Marijuana Raid Raises Questions About Obama's Pot Policy
Posted by Staff, Marijuana Policy Project on March 27, 2009 at 1:40 PM.

The DEA raided a San Francisco medical marijuana collective March 24 -- just one week after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the Department of Justice's more hands-off policy regarding state medical marijuana laws. Watch MPP's Troy Dayton question the DEA's apparent transgression on San Francisco's local CBS news. Click here to tell the White House medical marijuana patients deserve an explanation.

Obama Won't Legalize Pot, Wonders If Online Community Is a Bunch of Stoners
Posted by Lisa Derrick, La Figa on March 27, 2009 at 4:36 AM.

In his first ever interactive townhall meeting, President Obama addressed questions and issues raised online from the change.gov site.  One of the most popular ideas floated online there and on the pre-inuagural citizen's policy book was the legalization and taxation of marijuana, which could provide additional taxes and jobs, as well as lowering crimnal justice costs. His response:

 There was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation, and I don’t know what this says about the online audience.

Yes, it got some laughs. Then he added that he wanted to make sure the question got answered.

The answer is no, I don’t think that was a good strategy.

And it's probably not a good strategy to mock your constituents, either. Not everyone who supports legalization of marijuana smokes it recreationally, or even at all.

Pot Saved My Life, Mr. President
Posted by Jim Gilliam, WhiteHouse2.org on March 26, 2009 at 12:43 PM.

Today, in the historic first online town hall, President Obama fielded questions from nearly a hundred thousand people online. One of the most popular questions, and indeed, one of the most popular questions in any forum that lets people vote on what matters to them, was about whether legalizing marijuana would help improve the economy and job creation.

Chuckling, the President said: "I don't know what this says about the online audience, but [laughing] this was a fairly popular question, we want to make sure it was answered. The answer is no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy."

I've never smoked pot in my life, indeed I've never smoked anything at all. Despite that, a couple years ago, I needed a double lung transplant. My lungs were scarred beyond repair due to side effects from radiation treatments I'd had nearly a decade earlier in my two battles with cancer.

I lost a lot of weight in this process, to the point where it was life-threatening. My lung doctor suggested "marinol," the synthetic (and legal) version of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. I laughed at him, and asked "Was this going to make me stupid? I don't want to be a pothead!" He said one of his patients put on 40 pounds with it. I didn't have any other option.

It worked. Marinol allowed me to put on enough weight to get me out of the danger zone until we figured out the underlying problem was a bleeding ulcer in my stomach, a reaction to one of the anti-rejection drugs I was taking for the transplant.

Pot saved my life. It's a miracle drug, even the crappy non-organic kind made in a lab.

The President will be asked this question again, and maybe next time he won't laugh at us.

Obama Takes Pot Legalization Question During Online Townhall
Posted by Sam Stein, Huffington Post on March 26, 2009 at 10:02 AM.

The White House's innovative Open for Questions forum has produced plenty of substantive questions on wonky issues. But roughly midway through, the president preemptively took one of the more popular and provocative questions of the bunch.

The query, which received more than three million votes, was: "With over 1 out of 30 Americans controlled by the penal system, why not legalize, control, and tax marijuana to change the failed war on drugs into a money making, money saving boost to the economy? Do we really need that many victimless criminals?"

Obama actually interrupted the M.C of the event -- Jared Bernstein, chief economist to the Vice President -- in order to tackle the topic. He kept his answer brief.

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