Tag: drug_war

Missouri Judges Take Prison Costs Into Account in Sentencing

Seth Anderson0 comment

This policy has all sorts of implications, both positive and negative. Will lesser sentences be meted out for deserving criminals because of their inherent costs? What about non-violent offenders?  Isn’t probation and counseling cheaper than incarceration?

Prairie Restoration in Progress

ST. LOUIS — When judges here sentence convicted criminals, a new and unusual variable is available for them to consider: what a given punishment will cost the State of Missouri. Enlarge This Image

If For someone convicted of endangering the welfare of a child, for instance, a judge might now learn that a three-year prison sentence would run more than $37,000 while probation would cost $6,770. A second-degree robber, a judge could be told, would carry a price tag of less than $9,000 for five years of intensive probation, but more than $50,000 for a comparable prison sentence and parole afterward. The bill for a murderer’s 30-year prison term: $504,690.

 

(click to continue reading Missouri Judges Take Prison Costs Into Account in Sentencing – NYTimes.com.)

Our nation’s jails are full beyond the point of exploding, yet we keep locking up folks as a first resort. Not mentioned in this article ((except in passing) is how many drug cases are adjudicated, and at what cost. How much do we spend locking up teenagers caught with a couple of grams of marijuana?

Reading between the lines in the article, seems as if many officials are uncomfortable with the implications of the policy, so instead of changing the system, they are just going to cease discussing costs. Ignore the big picture, instead maintain the status quo.

Still, money worries loom. This year, in an annual address, even the chief justice of Missouri’s Supreme Court, William Ray Price Jr., warned that the system would be threatened if budget cuts persisted.

“Perhaps the biggest waste of resources in all of state government is the over-incarceration of nonviolent offenders and our mishandling of drug and alcohol offenders,” he said.

Mr. McCulloch, the prosecutor, said the state’s prisons were filled with anything but harmless people. “You show me the college kid with a perfect record and a dime bag of weed who has been sent to prison, and I’ll get him out,” he said. “Find me him.”

When Missouri lawmakers meet next year, Mr. McCulloch says that he expects he and others may push to abolish the sentencing commission.

Banks Laundering Drug Money Without Consequence

Seth Anderson1 Comment

The cynic in me thinks the reason the United States has not assertively moved to legalize drugs1 is for this reason – large banks are making so much freaking money laundering drug money. The banks have many, many lobbyists in Congress, and have made it known they are opposed to changing the status quo. The politicians claim it is a moral issue, but we know they lie.

Nancy Reagan - Just Say Yo

We’ve all read damning accounts of the government saving banks from their risky subprime bets, but it turns out that the Wall Street privilege problem is far more deeply ingrained in the U.S. legal system than the simple bailouts witnessed in 2008. America’s largest banks can engage in flagrantly criminal activity on a massive scale and emerge almost completely unscathed. The latest sickening example comes from Wachovia Bank: Accused of laundering $380 billion in Mexican drug cartel money, the financial behemoth is expected to emerge with nothing more than a slap on the wrist thanks to an official government policy which protects megabanks from criminal charges.

Bloomberg’s Michael Smith has penned a devastating expose detailing Wachovia’s drug-money operations and the government’s twisted response. The bank was moving money behind literally tons of cocaine from violent drug cartels. It wasn’t an accident. Internal whistleblowers at Wachovia warned that the bank was laundering drug money, higher-ups at the bank actively looked the other way in order to score bigger profits, and the U.S. government is about to let everyone involved get off scott free. The bank will not be indicted, because it is official government policy not to prosecute megabanks. From Smith’s story:

No big U.S. bank . . . has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Instead, the Justice Department settles criminal charges by using deferred-prosecution agreements, in which a bank pays a fine and promises not to break the law again . . . . Large banks are protected from indictments by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory. Indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets.

Wachovia was acquired by Wells Fargo in late 2008. The bank’s penalty for laundering over $380 billion in drug money is going to be a promise not to ever do it again, and a $160 million fine. The fine is so small that Wachovia will almost certainly turn a profit on its drug financing business after legal costs and penalties are taken into account.

(click to continue reading Wall Street Is Laundering Drug Money and Getting Away with It | Economy | AlterNet.)

Even if banks are not actively laundering the cartel money, they are storing it – the drug economy is easily in the trillions of dollars, and upper level drug cartel executives are not keeping their cash under their beds. Just imagine, if one drug dealer in a medium size U.S. city like Baltimore can clear a few million dollars a month, and illegal drugs are being dealt everywhere humans live, well, you do the math.

From Michael Smith’s article, a hint of the huge sums of money we are talking about

Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion [PDF – Exhibit A Factual Statement] for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history — a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.

(click to continue reading Banks Financing Mexico Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal – Bloomberg.)

See, that’s over $125,000,000,000 a year in just one bank! From one area of the drug economy! Not including Columbians, Jamaicans, Americans, Taliban, Triads, yadda yadda. I don’t know for certain, but this Wachovia case seems to only be discussing cocaine dollars, in other words, not including profits from heroin, cannabis, methamphetamine, ecstasy, and whatever else people buy to get high. All in all that is a seriously large number of dollars, untaxed, unregulated, unaccounted for. And for what? So that bankers and drug lords can live high on the hog, and addicts can die from adulterated street drugs?

No, the drug war continues because the status quo is making certain groups an almost unfathomable amount of profit.

Footnotes:
  1. despite the will of the electorate [↩]

Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Not surprising really, the argument against this class of entheogens being made illegal was always fairly weak, and coupled with cultural nonsense, and not scientific reality. In fact, before the rise of Reagan and Nixon and similar finger-waggers, there was a lot of very interesting research being conducted with LSD, with mescaline, with psilocybin. We blogged about this new research in 2006 too.

Shiitake mushrooms from FreshPicks.com

Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs’ potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness.

After taking the hallucinogen, Dr. Martin put on an eye mask and headphones, and lay on a couch listening to classical music as he contemplated the universe.

“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” he recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.”

Today, more than a year later, Dr. Martin credits that six-hour experience with helping him overcome his depression and profoundly transforming his relationships with his daughter and friends. He ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life, which makes him a fairly typical member of a growing club of experimental subjects.

Researchers from around the world are gathering this week in San Jose, Calif., for the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the United States in four decades. They plan to discuss studies of psilocybin and other psychedelics for treating depression in cancer patients, obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs or alcohol.

[Click to continue reading Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again – NYTimes.com]

Johnny Depp and some psychoactive mushrooms

Let’s hope the research continues unabated, and uncoupled from the Drug War ridiculousness. If you want to read Dr. Griffiths study, it is available in PDF form at this website.

Since that study, which was published in 2008, Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues have gone on to give psilocybin to people dealing with cancer and depression, like Dr. Martin, the retired psychologist from Vancouver. Dr. Martin’s experience is fairly typical, Dr. Griffiths said: an improved outlook on life after an experience in which the boundaries between the self and others disappear.

In interviews, Dr. Martin and other subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished. They found themselves reviewing past relationships with lovers and relatives with a new sense of empathy.

“It was a whole personality shift for me,” Dr. Martin said. “I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.”

The subjects’ reports mirrored so closely the accounts of religious mystical experiences, Dr. Griffiths said, that it seems likely the human brain is wired to undergo these “unitive” experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage.

“This feeling that we’re all in it together may have benefited communities by encouraging reciprocal generosity,” Dr. Griffiths said. “On the other hand, universal love isn’t always adaptive, either.”

Green Taxes for Cannabis

Seth Anderson0 comment

Even if these numbers are optimistic (and nobody knows, really, until after the fact of legalization), the social costs cannot be ignored. Police resources, court resources, prison resources, all freed up.

Cat on a Hot Spring Lawn

faced with a $20 billion deficit, strained state services and regular legislative paralysis, voters in California are now set to consider a single-word solution to help ease some of the state’s money troubles: legalize.

On Wednesday, the California secretary of state certified a November vote on a ballot measure that would legalize, tax and regulate marijuana, a plan that advocates say could raise $1.4 billion and save precious law enforcement and prison resources.

Indeed, unlike previous efforts at legalization — including a failed 1972 measure in California — the 2010 campaign will not dwell on assertions of marijuana’s harmlessness or its social acceptance, but rather on cold cash.

“We need the tax money,” said Richard Lee, founder of Oaksterdam University, a trade school for marijuana growers, in Oakland, who backed the ballot measure’s successful petition drive. “Second, we need the tax savings on police and law enforcement, and have that law enforcement directed towards real crime.”

Supporters are hoping to raise $10 million to $20 million for the campaign, primarily on the Internet, with national groups planning to urge marijuana fans to contribute $4.20 at a time, a nod to 420, a popular shorthand for the drug.

The law would permit licensed retailers to sell up to one ounce at a time. Those sales would be a new source of sales tax revenue for the state.

[Click to continue reading Legal-Marijuana Advocates Focus on a New Green – NYTimes.com]

If a Republican wins the governorship, this bill will not be enforced1, so that’s another reason to vote against Meg Whitman and/or Steve Poizner. The will of the voter only is important when it benefits policy makers.

Nar Hookah

And I bet a lot of people have a similar response to this one, by Shelley Kutilek:

Still, the idea of legal marijuana does not seem too far-fetched to people like Shelley Kutilek, a San Francisco resident, loyal church employee and registered California voter, who said she would vote “yes” in November.

“It’s no worse than alcohol,” said Ms. Kutilek, 30, an administrator at Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco. “Drunk people get really belligerent. I don’t know anybody who gets belligerent on marijuana. They just get chill

That echoes my own experience – I’ve seen plenty of angry drunks stumbling down the street, yelling at cars and what not, and never seen that sort of behavior with someone who just is smoking their way to bliss.

Footnotes:
  1. that is, if it passes [↩]

Richard M. Nixon and Elvis Presley at the White House

swanksalot0 comment

From: Series: Master Print File, compiled 1969-1974 (Collection RN-WHPO)

Created by: President (1969-1974 : Nixon). White House Photo Office. (1969 – 1974)

Production Date: 12/21/1970

Persistent URL: http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ExternalIdSearch?id=1634221

Repository: National Archives at College Park – Archives II (College Park, MD)

Nixon high on whatever he was high on (lies and duplicity, and maybe a little Scotch whisky) and Elvis Presley high on various prescription drugs…

John P Walters – Drug Warrior to the Bitter End

Seth Anderson0 comment

John P Walters is either ignorant, willfully misleading, or both. Saturday’s WSJ contained a pro/con section discussing legalization of drugs. The pro-legalization side, written by Steven B. Duke, mostly dwells on the benefits of legalizing marijuana, with arguments you’ve probably heard before: tax revenue, reduce burden on our prison system, etc. John Walters, a two-term Bush-ite, bases his argument against marijuana legalization by ignoring marijuana, and pointing fingers at methamphetamine addicts, and the crack so-called epidemic of the 1980s.

Justified alarm over drug-related Mexican border violence has led to the predictable spate of drug legalization proposals. The most prominent was a call by three former Latin American presidents — from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico — to end what they claimed was the drug war. While there are many “end the drug war” plans, all of them, as even their advocates admit, result in more drug use and addiction. Their response? We should emasculate prevention and law enforcement and just spend more on treatment.

What would America look like with twice or three times as many drug users and addicts? To answer, consider what America was like in the recent past, during the frightening epidemic of methamphetamine, so similar to the crack outbreak of the 1980s. Each was a nightmare, fueled by ready drug availability.

Americans can’t forget the meth epidemic hitting the heartland earlier this decade. In 2004, 1.4 million people said they had used methamphetamine in the past year, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The powerful, long-lasting stimulant began growing rapidly as the make-it-yourself drug, using a precursor in over-the-counter cold medicine. It later was produced in large quantities by Mexican traffickers and smuggled into the U.S. Drugs weren’t just an urban problem anymore.

[From Drugs: To Legalize or Not – WSJ.com]

I have never actually ever met a marijuana addict in my life: do such creatures exist?

Walters continues his spiel:

The violence essential to drug trafficking is meant to be shocking — from the marijuana traffickers who brutally murdered DEA special agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in Mexico in 1985 to the viciousness of rolling heads across a dance floor — calculated to frighten decent citizens and government authorities into silence.

and so on

Legalizing drugs is the worst thing we could do for President Felipe Calderón and our Mexican allies. It would weaken the moral authority of his fight and the Mexicans would immediately realize that we have no intention of reducing consumption. Who do we think would take the profits from a legal drug trade? U.S. suppliers would certainly spring up, but that wouldn’t preclude Mexican supplies as well — or Mexican production for consumption in other countries. The Mexicans know that they too have a dangerous use and addiction problem. They have already learned that it is wrong and dangerous to make abuse and addiction worse.

We can make progress faster when more of us learn that drug use and addiction can not be an expression of individual liberty in a free society. Drug abuse is, by nature and the laws of organic chemistry that govern this disease, incompatible with freedom and civil society. Drug abuse makes human life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short (a special version of Hobbes’s hell in our own families). In the deepest sense, this is why failure is not an option.

What a buffoon

Reading Around on October 29th through October 30th

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A few interesting links collected October 29th through October 30th:

  • Chief drug adviser David Nutt sacked over cannabis stance | Politics | The Guardian – Alan Johnson, the home secretary, has sacked Professor David Nutt as senior drugs adviser after the scientist renewed his criticism of the government's decision to toughen the law on cannabis.

    Johnson wrote to Nutt saying he no longer had confidence in him as chairman of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) and asking him to consider his position.

    Nutt had accused ministers of "devaluing and distorting" the scientific evidence over illicit drugs by their decision last year to reclassify cannabis from class C to class B against the advice of the ACMD

  • Think Again: Obama’s Commie Past Exposed Yet Again – Robert Fox, the millionaire brother-in-law of a GOP congressman, tried to prove the connection. He offered $10,000 to Dr. Peter Millican, an Oxford professor who had developed a computer program to make comparisons between texts. Times of London reported this on November 2, 2008. Millican told Fox that the initial findings made it “highly implausible” that the books shared authors. He also said that if further research was done, then the findings would be made public whether or not Ayers was proven to be the author. Fox withdrew his offer.
  • Excerpts From The Book The NBA Doesn't Want You To Read – Tim Donaghy – Deadspin – I'm still fucking bitter about this game six travesty
    :"If we give the benefit of the calls to the team that's down in the series, nobody's going to complain. The series will be even at three apiece, and then the better team can win Game 7," Bavetta stated.

    As history shows, Sacramento lost Game 6 in a wild come-from-behind thriller that saw the Lakers repeatedly sent to the foul line by the referees. For other NBA referees watching the game on television, it was a shameful performance by Bavetta's crew, one of the most poorly officiated games of all time."

Psychedelic Tea Brewing In Santa Fe

Seth Anderson0 comment

Oh come on, I wonder how many opponents of this church’s sacrament know anything at all about hoasca? If their only information comes from the DEA, no wonder they are worried. They needn’t be.

A secretive religious group that fought a long legal battle for the right to drink hallucinogenic tea in pursuit of spiritual growth now plans to build a temple and greenhouse in a wealthy community here — to the dismay of local residents.

The church was founded in Brazil in 1961 and remains most popular there, but about 150 people in the U.S., including about 60 in Santa Fe, practice the faith, which goes by the Portuguese name Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal, or UDV. Members say the church is based on Christian theology but also borrows from other faiths and finds spirituality in nature.

Since the U.S. branch of the religion emerged in the late 1980s, practitioners have imported from Brazil their sacramental tea, known as hoasca, which is brewed from two Amazonian plants and contains the psychedelic compound dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. The U.S. government classifies DMT as a Schedule I controlled substance, the same designation given to heroin and marijuana. But in a unanimous ruling in 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the UDV had the right to use hoasca in its ceremonies.

Now, the Santa Fe branch has drawn up plans to build a greenhouse for growing their own sacred plants, a ceremonial kitchen for brewing the tea and a 7,100-square-foot temple, complete with a children’s nursery and foot-thick walls to ensure privacy.

[Click to continue reading Psychedelic Tea Brews Unease – WSJ.com]

Plants are not demons, treating farmers like they are the enemy of civilization is not a helpful attitude. Since eating the flesh and blood of your god is ok, why not a tea that opens up your consciousness?

[Aya-preparation, via Wikimedia Commons]

Hoasca, or as it is more frequently referred to, Ayahuasca is not a party drug, despite the morons in the DEA classifying it as a Schedule 1 controlled substance.

Ayahuasca (ayawaska pronounced [ajaˈwaska] in the Quechua language) is any of various psychoactive infusions or decoctions prepared from the Banisteriopsis spp. vine, usually mixed with the leaves of dimethyltryptamine-containing species of shrubs from the Psychotria genus. It was first described academically in the early 1950s by Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes who found it employed for divinatory and healing purposes by Amerindians of Amazonian Colombia.

Sections of B. cap vine are macerated and boiled alone or with leaves from any of a number of other plants, including Psychotria viridian (chacruna) or Diplopterys cabrerana (also known as chaliponga). The resulting brew contains the powerful hallucinogenic alkaloid N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and MAO inhibiting harmala alkaloids, which are necessary to make the DMT orally active. Though B. cap is a central ingredient in traditional ayahuasca brews, harmala-containing plants from other plant-medicine cultures, such as Syrian Rue, can be used instead of the vine to make an ayahuasca analogue, yet it isn’t considered ayahuasca, as Caapi vine is considered the main plant in the brew.

Brews can also be made with no DMT-containing plants; Psychotria viridian being substituted by plants such as Justicia pectorals, Brugmansia, or sacred tobacco, also known as Mapacho (Nicotiana rustic), or sometimes left out with no replacement. The potency of this brew varies radically from one batch to the next, both in strength[clarification needed] and psychoactive effect, based mainly on the skill of the shaman or brewer, as well as other admixtures sometimes added and the intent of the ceremony.[citation needed] Natural variations in plant alkaloid content and profiles also affect the final concentration of alkaloids in the brew, and the physical act of cooking may also serve to modify the alkaloid profile of harmala alkaloids

[Click to continue reading Ayahuasca – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Reading Around on August 25th through August 27th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected August 25th through August 27th:

  • Mac OS X Automation: Services Downloads – Download free services. Service collections are grouped by color. Some services will install required Automator actions and may require an adminstrator password to do so.”
  • One_Billion_Dollar_Daley_Chicago_Reader.jpg
  • Chicago vice – chicagotribune.com – Chicago Police Sgt. John F. Mangin displays a bushel of marijuana leaves and a jar of ground marijuana found Sept. 27, 1945, in a flat at 601 W. Madison St.. Six men were arrested in the narcotics bust, including a 60-year-old man that Mangin said was the first person he arrested when he joined the narcotics detail in 1931.

Reading Around on August 9th through August 10th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected August 9th through August 10th:

pig-o-cycle.jpg

  • The Washington Monthly – GLADNEY THE UNINSURED ACTIVIST – I know I should laugh at the misfortunes of others, but…bwha-ha-ha:

    “Wait, the conservative opponent of health care reform, fighting (literally) to defeat a plan that would bring coverage to those who lose their jobs, lost his coverage because he got laid off?

    I’m not in a position to say whether Gladney sustained genuine injuries or whether he’s exaggerating for 15 minutes of Fox News fame and a lucrative out-of-court settlement.

    Either way, the new right-wing cause celebre needs to take up a collection to pay for his medical bills because he doesn’t have health insurance. It’s a fascinating sign of the times.”

  • Newspapers: Shut up and charge already « King Kaufman – “I wish newspapers would quit talking about this stuff and just start charging. They’ll quickly “understand the value” of their content, which, with rare exceptions like the Wall Street Journal, is something very much like zero, and then get to the real business at hand, which isn’t figuring out how to get people to pay for newspaper Web content, it’s how news organizations can generate enough revenue to do the important work they need to do.”
  • anti propaganda hemp anslinger marijuana-girl-reefer-madness-poster.jpg
  • Drug WarRant – “If you’re reading this, you’re at the new location of Drug WarRant.com.

    Our home for the past 6 years was at blogs.salon.com using radio userland software. Radio hasn’t been upgraded in ages, and they’ve announced that the blog hosting will go away in December of this year. This is a big change (and a difficult transition).

    I have moved the blog to a server at DreamHost and adapted a WordPress theme to be close to the old look of Drug WarRant. All 3,500 radio posts were exported to MT and then imported into WordPress relatively intact (with some formatting errors). Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do with the old comments — they can’t be retrieved from the Salon server (except manually — over 20,000 of them).”

Why it’s time to end the war on drugs

Seth Anderson1 Comment

The Financial Times comes out strongly against the asinine and never ending War on Drugs:

Nancy Reagan - Just Say Yo
[Nancy Reagan – Just Say Yo]

For nearly 40 years, since the habits established in the 1960s took root in society, there has been a stand-off. Across the free world, and most of the unfree, anyone seriously interested in smoking, snorting, swallowing or injecting illegal substances can acquire the wherewithal with a little effort, and proceed without much fear of retribution, particularly if they are wealthy enough. Police and politicians say they are interested in punishing the suppliers and not the users. This is an intellectual nonsense, but it has suited everyone who matters. The drug users don’t care; governments have felt no pressure to attempt a politically dangerous reform; and above all it suits the international gangsters who control the drug business, which offers massive rewards and – for them – minimal risks.

But 2009 has seen a change: among the academics and professionals who study this issue, from Carlisle Racecourse to the think-tanks of Washington, there is growing sense that reform is possible and increasingly urgent. The argument is not that drug use is A Good Thing. It is that the collateral damage caused by the so-called war on drugs has now reached catastrophic proportions. And even some politicians have started to think this might be worth discussing. The biggest single reason (as with so much else this year) is the Obama Effect. In one way, this may be short-lived since the president’s reputation will eventually be tarnished by reality. But the chief barrier to reform has been that the international agreements barring the drugs trade have been enforced primarily by threats of retaliation from the White House.

Obama is the third successive president believed to have used illegal drugs: Bill Clinton famously did not inhale; in a conversation that was secretly taped when he was governor of Texas, George W. Bush didn’t deny that he had smoked marijuana or used cocaine; Obama has admitted using both dope and “a little blow”. Unlike the other two, he is also on record as favouring decriminalisation of cannabis and more generally addressing the problem. The president having other preoccupations, there is no sign of him proposing the Do What The Hell You Like Bill to Congress any time soon. There is every sign that the blanket ban on other people’s initiatives has been partially lifted.

[Click to continue reading FT.com / Reportage – Why it’s time to end the war on drugs]

and concludes with:

Of course drugs need to be controlled, just as alcohol, tobacco, firearms, prescription drugs, food additives and indeed UN bureaucrats with massive budgets need to be controlled. But the whole point is that illicit drugs are not controlled. The international pretence of prohibition sees to that. One of the major arguments advanced for continuing the ban on cannabis is that the currently available strains of the drug do not offer the gentle highs of the hippie years but are intensively cultivated and far more potent, with potentially serious ­psychological effects. The analysis is correct, according to my stoner friends. But the logic is 180 degrees wrong. Imagine a total ban on tobacco, which is no longer so unthinkable. Among the consequences would be an immediate return to the unfiltered full-strength gaspers of the 1950s, just as American alcohol prohibition produced moonshine. One benign consequence of drug legalisation would be that users would have a guarantee of quality and strength/mildness: an end to heroin flavoured with brick dust (many believe adulteration is the real killer), and the type of marijuana they actually want.

…

Decriminalisation or even legalising cannabis on its own would achieve little. Something more radical is required. The crucial issue concerns the supply chain: the way prohibition has enriched and empowered gangsters, corrupt officials and indeed wholly corrupt narco-states across the planet. It was a point made eloquently by the Russian economist Lev Timofeev, when interviewed by Misha Glenny for his book about global organised crime, McMafia. “Prohibiting a market does not mean destroying it,” Timofeev said. What it means is placing a “dynamically developing market under the total control of criminal corporations”. He called the present situation a threat to world civilisation, which international public opinion had failed to grasp.

Proper reform means legitimising production and supply, precisely so it can be controlled. Would it unleash a drug epidemic worse than the one we now have? Well, it would be an unusual child of the 1960s who did not mark the moment with a celebratory joint. But the novelty would soon wear off. And from then on, the places where it is easiest to obtain drugs would no longer be the inside of jails and inner-city school playgrounds.

Imagine a situation…where all drugs were sold in pharmacies licensed for the purpose. Taxation could be set at a level that brought in revenue but still made illegal dealing uncompetitive. For the more dangerous and addictive drugs there would be compulsory medical supervision. Identity checks and strict record-keeping would be required. There would be laws (which could actually be enforced) against advertising, adulteration, use in public, driving under the influence and supply to minors.

In what way would that be worse than the present situation?

Indeed.

Medical Marijuana in California Aspires to Go Commercial

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Seems like good problems to have

Introduced as a Friend

LAKE FOREST, Calif. — Sellers of marijuana as a medicine here don’t fret about raids any more. They’ve stopped stressing over where to hide their stash or how to move it unseen.

Now their concerns involve the state Board of Equalization, which collects sales tax and requires a retailer ID number. Or city planning offices, which insist that staircases comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Then there is marketing strategy, which can mean paying to be a “featured dispensary” on a Web site for pot smokers.

After years in the shadows, medical marijuana in California is aspiring to crack the commercial mainstream.

“I want to do everything I can to run this as a legitimate business,” says Jan Werner, 55 years old, who invested in a pot store in a shopping mall after 36 years as a car salesman.

…

Some now are using traditional business practices like political lobbying and supply-chain consolidation. Others are seeking capital or offering investment banking for pot purveyors. In Oakland, a school offers courses such as “Cannabusiness 102” and calls itself Oaksterdam University, after the pot-friendly Dutch city. As shops proliferate, there are even signs the nascent industry could be heading for another familiar business phenomenon: the bubble.

…

As the business matures, ancillary ventures are springing up. In Oakland, OD Media manages advertising and branding for about a dozen pot clients. An Oakland lawyer, James Anthony, and three partners have started a firm called Harborside Management Associates to give dealers business advice. A pot activist named Richard Cowan has opened what he envisions as an investment bank for pot-related businesses, called General Marijuana.

Mr. Cowan is also chief financial officer of Cannabis Science Inc., which is trying to market a pot lozenge for nonsmokers. It was founded by Steve Kubby, a longtime medical-marijuana advocate who a decade ago was acquitted of a pot-growing charge but briefly jailed for having illegal mushrooms in his home. Mr. Kubby says there is “no more alternative culture” at the company, which went public in March and has hired a former pharmaceutical-industry scientist to try to win Food and Drug Administration approval for the lozenge.

[Click to continue reading Medical Marijuana in California Aspires to Go Commercial – WSJ.com]

[non-WSJ subscribers use this link]

and wherever there’s a confluence of money and politics, lobbyists cannot be far behind:

Lobby Horse

To defend their interests, some pot proprietors are hiring lobbyists. Messrs. Shofner and Werner pay consulting fees to Ryan Michaels, a political organizer with an expertise in med-pot compliance issues.

There are signs medical pot’s increasing business legitimacy is crowding the market. A 20-mile stretch of Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley now has close to 100 places to buy. “So many dispensaries have come along, the prices are dropping,” says one operator, Calvin Frye. Two years ago, his least expensive pot was about $60 for an eighth of an ounce. Now it is $45.

Across the country, a med-pot bill is working its way through New York’s state legislature. If it makes it, entrepreneurs are getting ready.

Larry Lodi, a 49-year-old Little League umpire from Long Island, spent two days at Oaksterdam University in May, learning the fine points of cultivation and distribution. Mr. Lodi envisions a business that would link the growers and the sellers of medical marijuana. “I want to be the middleman,” he says.

Reading Around on July 18th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading July 18th from 20:56 to 23:29:

  • Falling Off the Turnip Truck… – ” four heads of cabbage? Some of us fled the shtetl and crossed the North Atlantic precisely to avoid having to eat four heads of cabbage n a single week…”
  • Drug WarRant – Prosecutors Scared of the Constitution – Of course prosecutors are scared by this ruling. It makes their job harder and it also means that more drug cases might go to trial in the hope that they could get a dismissal if the prosecutor can’t produce the analyst. The only way prosecutors manage the huge load of drug cases is to see to it that only 5% go to trial (through piling on charges to make the plea deal attractive in comparison to the alternative). If more drug cases go to trial, the whole system falls apart, particularly in a time when more money for courts is unlikely to be found.

    And the system is corrupt. This Supreme Court ruling merely states that the prosecutors and judges must do their job as specified in the Constitution. If they can’t handle it, then maybe we’ll finally take a look at why we’re prosecuting so many people.

  • heroin
  • From Israel to the N.B.A., Missing the Hummus – NYTimes.com – The first Israeli in the N.B.A., Omri Casspi, is busily trying to adapt to life in the United States.

    For starters, he needs a cellphone with a local number. He just received a $4,500 bill for about two weeks of calls, which is expensive even by N.B.A. standards. He needs new chargers for all his gadgets. But he is struggling most to find comfort food.

    “Hummus,” Casspi said, with a hard h and a long u, stressing the first syllable in a way that conveyed utter seriousness. “You don’t have that here, though.”

Supreme Court Ruling Requires Lab Analyst Testimony

Seth Anderson0 comment

Confronted by one’s accuser? What a novel concept. District Attorneys would rather not have to work so hard.

Neon - NH Ballin Drugs Prescriptions

nationwide, thousands of drug cases might have to be thrown out of court annually.

Legal experts and prosecutors are concerned about the results of last month’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that requires lab analysts to be in court to testify about their tests. Lab sheets that identify a substance as a narcotic or breath-test printouts describing a suspect’s blood-alcohol level are no longer sufficient evidence, the court ruled. A person must be in court to talk about the test results.

The opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, has prosecutors and judges shaking their heads in disgust and defense lawyers nodding with satisfaction at the notion that the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment guarantee that defendants “shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him” is not satisfied by a sheet of paper.

“This is the biggest case for the defense since Miranda,” said Fairfax defense lawyer Paul L. McGlone, referring to the Supreme Court ruling that required police to inform defendants of their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. He said judges “are no longer going to assume certain facts are true without requiring the prosecution to actually put on their evidence.”

[Click to continue reading Supreme Court Ruling Requiring Lab Analyst Testimony Worries Prosecutors – washingtonpost.com]

A large percentage of the drug offenses would be dismissed outright without the leverage of a lab analyst’s report. There aren’t enough lab analysts to appear in court for all the cases that are brought – the Drug War churns more victims in its thresher than the anti-drug bureaucracy can handle.

States and counties across the country handle evidence differently, so the problems caused by the ruling vary widely. But many jurisdictions have a similar issue: Crime labs that test drug and DNA samples face huge backlogs even when scientists and analysts do not have to testify. If the workers are taken out of the labs to appear in court, those backlogs will grow.

In drug cases, more than 1.5 million samples are analyzed by state and local labs each year, resulting in more than 350,000 felony convictions, national statistics show. “Even if only 5 percent of drug cases culminate in trials, the burden on the states is oppressive,” a group of state attorneys general wrote in a brief for the case.

The percentage of cases going to trial could well go up if defense lawyers think that bringing lab analysts to court will help their cases. Lawyers also could go to trial with the hope of a dismissal if the analyst cannot be there.

Perhaps reducing the amount of arrests of simple drug possession would be an answer to this overloading of the court system.

[via Pete Guither]

These are The Liars On Drugs

Seth Anderson0 comment

In a manner of speaking

Cut Rate Liquors and Real Drugs
[Rothschild’s Cut Rate Liquors and Real Drugs, on Chicago and Ashland, or nearby]

AMONG OUR LEADERS in Washington, who’s been the biggest liar? There are all too many contenders, yet one is so floridly surreal that he deserves special attention. Nope, it’s not Dick Cheney or Alberto Gonzales or John Yoo. It’s a trusted authority figure who’s lied for 11 years now, no matter which party held sway. (Nope, it’s not Alan Greenspan.) This liar didn’t end-run Congress, or bully it, or have its surreptitious blessing at the time only to face its indignation later. No, this liar was ordered by Congress to lie—as a prerequisite for holding the job.

Give up? It’s the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), a.k.a. the drug czar, who in 1998 was mandated by Congress to oppose legislation that would legalize, decriminalize, or medicalize marijuana, or redirect anti-trafficking funding into treatment. And the drug czar has also—here’s where the lying comes in—been prohibited from funding research that might give credence to any of the above. These provisions were crafted by Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Bob Barr (R-Ga.) and pushed for by then-czar Barry McCaffrey, best remembered for being somewhat comically obsessed with the evils of medical marijuana. A few Dems complained that the bill, which set “hard targets” of an 80 percent drop in the availability of drugs, a 60 percent decrease in street purity, and a 50 percent reduction in drug-related crime and ER visits, all by 2004—whoops!—was “simplistic” and “designed to achieve political advantage.” Though the vote count was not recorded for history, it got enough bipartisan support to be signed into law by Bill “Didn’t Inhale” Clinton.

If this tale strikes you as the kind of paranoid fantasy you’d expect from someone who’s taken one too many hits off the joint, consider that it isn’t the most bizarre, hypocritical, counterproductive moment in our nation’s history with drugs. Not by a long shot. Consider that Prohibition came about when progressives got into bed with the Ku Klux Klan, but was rolled back once they’d had enough of the Mob. Or that the precursor to today’s drug czar supplied morphine to Sen. Joe McCarthy because he worried about the national security consequences—not of the red-baiter’s habit, but of its potential exposure. Or that drug war progenitor Richard Nixon ordered a comprehensive study on the perils of marijuana, and then ignored the study once he learned it recommended decriminalization.

[Click to continue reading This Is Your War on Drugs | Mother Jones]

Any legislation that bears the imprint of the three stooges, Hastert, Barr and McCaffrey is bound to be ridiculous and objectionable. Drug policy in the United States is in serious need of reform, and that’s no joke. Will it happen in our lifetime? The jury is still loaded up in chambers…