Terrell on Drug Laws

Candy Meth

2007-05-11T22:36:00.000-07:00

The Dallas Morning News recently ran an article, "Danger in disguise: candy-flavor drugs", on candy flavored methamphetamine, which I read with a mixture of amusement and irritation: amusement to see politicians and police drag out the tired old myths they have been recycling for about 150 years, and irritation that they believe we still fall for them.
Police see candy-flavored amphetamines on the market and make the unwarranted assumption that the purpose is for marketing to kids, an assumption they make with no supporting evidence. However, drug dealers don't market to kids; if a kid with money comes along, a dealer will sell to him, but not as a major effort. First, kids don't have enough money to be interesting, and second, they come with dangerous baggage like parents, teachers, and police. Joe Camel can spend millions giving t-shirts and ball caps to kids, confident that RJR will be around in five or ten years to profit when those kids are old enough to smoke. Drug dealers don't invest in the long run. They know they will be either dead or in prison in five years, so their business is strictly cash today.
Strawberry meth is strictly utilitarian. The flavoring (and there are several other than strawberry on the market) is used to disguise the heavy chemical taste of amphetamine when it is sniffed, making the product more palatable to consumers.
It has the secondary effect of product differentiation: just like corn flakes or car dealers, meth dealers want market share. If their pink product has a reputation for potency or purity, it will sell well until others copy the trademark.
The same thing happens with other drugs. Around Houston Ecstasy buyers for years insisted on "blue dolphins" because they were the best. In the East Coast heroin market for years, heroin glassine envelopes with marked with logos and trade names. For a while in Baltimore, heroin dealers would circulate a neighborhood early in the day giving out small samples so the customers would know the quality of what he would be selling later that day. Whole specialty markets exist for premium marijuana plants.
Drugs are just like any other market; the same rules of economics and marketing apply, and trade names do appear.
As far as protecting children goes, amphetamines are a minor threat, ranking at most a distant fifth. If we want to protect children from the harms of drug misuse, we should concentrate our efforts on the big four, in terms of numbers of users and of harm resulting: alcohol, tobacco, antidepressants and anti-anxiety products, and prescription pain killers. Only after these major problems are under control, can we spare additional efforts for the minor ones.
Word count: 356

I'm Confused

2007-05-07T10:42:00.000-07:00

I'm confused.

I recently visited a new doctor for a minor problem, and she strongly scolded me for using ibuprofen for pai relief, telling me it could raise my blood pressure to a dangerous level. She gave me a prescription for Tylenol 3 (acetomenaphen plus codiene) to use instead.

Years ago i switched from aspirin to ibuprofen because of aspirin's causing gastric bleeding and problems with blood thinning. I has always avoided acetomenaphen because of the high rate of liver damage it causes. Codiene is an opiate the use of which can lead to addiction.

As I understand it, I can use aspirin, and risk stomach damage, ibuprofen, and risk high blood pressure or stroke, acetomenaphen, and risk liver damage, or codiene, and risk addiction.

What I cannot do is use marijuana, an effective pain-reliever with no serious side effects, because it is a dangerous drug.

Am I just confused, or is something seriously wrong with our drug laws?

Confession of Ignorance

2007-05-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

Confession of Ignorance

For more than the past decade, I have devoted the majority of my professional time and effort to the study of drug laws and drug use. Slowly I have come to realize that I know nothing about the subject. By "I", I mean all of us. I can discourse learnedly about how many people use methamphetamine and how the rates of marijuana use compare to those of 1975, but I have no basis to establish the significance of those data.
While "drug abuse" and "drug dependency" have medical definitions, "drug use" does not. What does it mean to say that many people in the United States use marijuana or that the Islamic world is largely free of alcohol use? We have no base-line idea of a "normal" society on which to anchor our statements. A drug-free world would be an impossibility, as would be a world of nothing but addicts, but where is our standard of comparison?
For instance, data indicate that 600,000 to 900,000 people, about 0.2 - 0.3% of a population of 300 million, use methamphetamine. But is that a large number about which we should be alarmed, or is it merely an outlier statistic about which we should be concerned, like a rare non-infectious disease that we would want to alleviate but which calls for no strong intervention? Frankly, we do not know.
Are there things that we do know: principles or generalities that would help determine a picture of human drug use norms? Some principles are available, although they are too general to do more than establish a vague outline.
Psychoactive drugs are as old as human culture. Some of the earliest known artifacts from the beginning of the agricultural age (8,000 - 10,000 years ago) are pottery shards containing evidence of the opium poppy. Beer is older than writing or baking (c. 6,000 years ago). Many of the hunter-gatherer societies that existed into modern times had at least some acquaintance with psychedelics. Note that this is a very weak claim. It does not distinguish between possible medicinal, religious, nutritional, or recreational uses; nor does it claim (except in the case of beer) wide-spread or majoritarian use within any society.
In many societies, including all current industrialized ones, the use of a predominant psychoactive drug is virtually universal. Between 80 and 90% of the residents of the current industrial world use caffeine daily (coffee in the Americas and Europe, tea in Asia). Before the development of modern water systems, beers, meads, and wine were universal beverages throughout the world. In the United States today around 2/3 of the population use alcohol somewhat regularly. In the Andean regions coca was widespread from pre-Columbian times to the present; and Northern and Eastern African and Arabian societies experienced widespread use of cannabis or khat. My own estimation is that until the middle of the nineteenth century -- until the development of safe drinking water and modern dentistry -- almost all English and Americans used opium on an almost daily basis.
Newly introduced drugs either establish a presence quickly or they fade from use. Coffee, tobacco, tea, and chocolate became major commodities in Europe within years of their introduction. Likewise, morphine, coca, and cocaine established themselves within a decade or less of their introduction in the mid to late nineteenth century; as did amphetamines and MDMA in the twentieth. On the other hand, drugs that are too toxic, have unreliable or unpleasant effects or bad side effects, like fly ageric mushrooms, morning glory seeds, or the various synthetic hallucinogens like STP, DPT, and others quickly fade, never finding a following.
The prevalence of any drug will vary over time. Alcohol consumption was probably highest in the U. S. at about the time of the Revolution and may be near an historic low at this time. Tobacco use increased after in introduction of cigarettes to majority use by about 1950 and has since declined to a level of about half as much. Cocaine use has had at least two major and one minor peak since its introduction in the 1880s.
Given a choice, users seem to prefer a "milder" drug. When available, coca was more common than cocaine. Khat users rarely move to amphetamines. Beer and wine continually outsell distilled spirits, which are usually consumed as mixed drinks, diluted to approximately the potency of beer or wine. Cannabis buyers seem to reject plants with a THC content of over about 8%.
Even the "milder" drugs can cause problems. Beer drinkers get drunk, get into fights, and even become alcoholics. Opium smokers can become addicts just as heroin injectors do.
Societies will accept astonishingly high levels of harm from socially accepted drugs. Tobacco is probably the leading cause of death in the United States today, with alcohol following close behind. Alcohol-related deaths, from car wrecks, to domestic violence, to assaults are unremarkable. The British public seems unable to recognize either tobacco or alcohol as harmful.
Social reactions to drugs seem to be more closely related to perceived group affiliations than to objective harm. The relationship of American drug laws to ethnic or cultural groups is well established.
Supply-oriented laws (prohibitory laws) have little or no effect on the level of consumption.
The statements are generalized observations, not firm data points, but I believe each of them is empirically testable and quantifiable. To the extent that this can be done, they can provide a theoretical structure of modern drug-using societies from which more rational policies can be developed.

Thinking about Legalization

2007-04-26T11:52:00.000-07:00

Thinking about Legalization
Either this Congress or the next -- within the next three and a half years -- may create an exception to the Controlled Substances Act, allowing for the medical use of marijuana, either nationwide or in those states with state statutes allowing it. Religious and even recreational legality are not totally out of the picture.
But unless planning and preparation are done now, the result could be as dysfunctional as the present situation.
First, if medical use is allowed only as an exception to the CSA, then marijuana -- even medical marijuana -- will still be subject to the (even more?) vindictive jurisdiction and regulation of the D.E.A. Non-medical marijuana will still be a controlled substance under D.E.A. enforcement; and I am sure that they will insist on stringent controls to "prevent leakage" from the medical situation to recreational use. Since the plants themselves are fungible and the use cannot be determined until the plant is in the hands of the ultimate consumer, I am sure the D.E.A. will impose strict cradle-to-grave (clone-to-exhalation?) registration and tracking on medicinal plants and probably create (with court approval) strong presumptions against medical use. In short, people will still get busted and have to spend thousands to defend themselves and producers will be buried in paperwork and inspectors.
Even if the enabling statute keeps the D.E.A. at arm's length, some kind of regulation is inevitable. Nothing ingestable today is sold in an unregulated market. The four choices seem to be 1) treat marijuana was a drug, 2) treat it as a dietary supplement; 3) treat it as a food stuff; or 4) consider it sui generis and create a market regulatory scheme just for marijuana.
Since we are considering medical use, treating marijuana as a drug would seem the most reasonable, but it is probably the most impractical solution. If it were a drug, it would have to be approved by the FDA for marketing (I think any idea of a strictly intrastate, non-FDA plan is unrealistic). Currently, New Drug Applications take between 5 and 10 years to process and cost in the neighborhood of $500 Million and up. I see no one on the horizon willing to undertake this effort, and the additional time is too long.
The dietary supplement category is where marijuana seems to fit best, but the law prevents classification of any drug as a supplement. Since either a medical exemption statute or the current claims and uses for marijuana clear make a drug for supplement classification purposes, this approach seems unlikely unless the enabling statute specifically so categorized it.
Classification as a food would provide health and safety regulation of the growing and processing, but would not provide any way to separate medicinal and non-medicinal products or to limit marketing to adults. This also seems unlikely.
The best, and politically most available, method would be for the enabling statute to classify marijuana as sui generis and not subject to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act. The enabling act should decide whether it would be marketing outside the FDA or whether the FDA's jurisdiction should be extended to include it. Either way would be acceptable.
Precedents for sui generis treatment exist in the marketing of both alcohol and tobacco, the other major personal intoxicants. Tobacco was marketed before the creation of the FDA and, according to the Supreme Court, was omitted from The FDCA scheme. The Repeal Amendment for alcohol let regulation to the states.
Among the choices to be made are issues of jurisdiction. Should regulation be left totally to the states, taken totally by the Federal government preemptively, or shared between the two, as controlled substances are now handled? Should remedies and sanctions be administrative or strictly judicial?

Other issues to be decided include:

-Authorized vendors
--Pharmacies only?
--Direct producer to consumer sales?
--All normal retail outlets?

-Authorization for purchase
--Prescription only?
--Doctor recommendation required?
--Behind-the-counter with signed register?
--Medical marijuana buyer's ID card?
--OTC with buyer at risk of proving medical need on arrest?

-Sales to minors
--Not allowed?
--On doctor's prescription or recommendation?
--Only on prescription with parental consent?
--Sales to parent or guardian only?

-Frequency or quantity limitations?

-Labeling
--THC content?
--Producer's identification?
--Strain or hybrid type identification?
---Mandatory or voluntary?
---Need for variety standards?
---Recommendations for specific medical uses?

-Use restrictions
--Consumption in public?
--Protections against employment discrimination?
--Driving and other use restrictions?

I'm sure that the rest of you can come up with several issues that have skipped my mind, and the time to bring them up is now. I can practically guarantee that the ones I have listed will rather quickly lead to litigation (criminal and civil) and political fights. The current situation in California, and to a lesser extent in Colorado and Oregon, shows what can happen if these issues are not decided early.
I have presented questions, not answers. Many alternatives, including sometimes the alternative of doing nothing, are viable. But all of us together can start building a reasonable framework. Let's share ideas and solutions. Perhaps one of the reform groups could set up a web site to host discussions of these issues.

Project Innocence: 200 Exhonorations

2007-04-24T10:35:00.000-07:00

Project Innocence has just celebrated (if that's the word to use for an exercise designed to work hard to restore people to where they once had been) the exhonoration of the 200th wrongfully convicted person through the use of DNA evidence. Since they have dealt mainly with those convicted of murder or rape, why is this important for those interested in drug reform?

The answer in two words: Mike Nifong.

Barry Scheck and Peter neufeld, co-directors of Project Innocence, co-authored the book Actual Innocence a few years ago that I think should be required reading for all U.S. citizens.
In that book they looked at the exhonorations they had obtained to that date and tried to determine what had led to the wringful conviction in the first place. The leading cause was eyewitness identification, which study after study has shown to be wrong at least half the time, but as contributing factors in over half the cases were prosecutorial misconduct and police malfeasance.

Prosecutors repeatedly suppressed exculpatory evidence, offered evidence they knew was false and abetted police and informer perjury. Polie coerced (or worse) defendants and witnesses, suppressed or planted evidence, wrote false reports, committed perjury, and conspired among themselves to commit perjury.

Crime labs routinely filed false or misleading reports, almost always in favor of the prosecutor's theory of the case.

One or more of these elements appeared in almost every case.

District Attorneys and police weild the most awesome discretion of any government agencies; and they are the most unchecked.

If it happens in the full publicity glare of murder cases, what do you suppose goes on in the everyday routine of drug cases?

Any kind of true reform must include more open operation of police and prosecutorial functions and more thorough civilian review and control of their operations.

Congratulations to Project Innocence: keep it up!

Hemp and Pot

2007-04-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

While I sympathize with the hemp growers attempts to distance themselves from the Stoners and Slackers who get wasted on that evil marijuana, I wonder if they are really helping themselves by promoting an untruth.

Hemp and marijuana are NOT different plants; they are merely cultivars of the same species, much like Great Danes and Yorkshire Terriers are still dogs.

Hemp plants have been selected for low THC content (accidently) and tall stalk growth. Marijuana plants have been selected for moderate THC content (intentionally) and bushy growth. Hemp cultivation incourages stalk growth and discourages flowering; marijuana cultivation incourages flowering and discourages stalk growth.

However, if either hemp or marijuana is allows to grow wild (like the ditch weed in the Midwest, most of which is escaped WWII era hemp), over a few generations both will regress toward the norm, and both will result in a relatively tall plant with a moderately low THC content -- enough to get high on, but not really that enjoyable. And for those of you with a do-it-yourself bent, save the residue from your Hash crop and weave a shirt out of it.

I realize that marijuana legalizers, medical marijuana users, and hemp growers are just fellow travelers and not true allies; but all three groups will be better served if their campaigns are founded on the truth.

Americans

2007-04-21T12:38:00.001-07:00

(Based on an excerpt from a speech I gave at the Houston NORML 420 Fest last night, advocating political action)
When I was growing up, my mother told me to always be nice and not to cause trouble. But when civil rights or liberties are threatened, I have to ignore Momma, and be aggressive, if not downright rude, and cause lots of trouble. Why? Because I am an American.
Americans once had a flag with the picture of a rattlesnake and the motto "Don't Tread on Me". They dressed up as Indians, illegally seized a legitimate merchant ship and destroyed its valuable cargo of tea by throwing it in the harbor. They stood on the Lexington Green and exchanged fire with government troops coming to take their arms.
Americans created a government of "We, The People", destroying kings and other rulers.
Henry David Thoreau was an American when he sat in the Concord jail for not paying a tax to support the Fugitive Slave Act and chided Ralph Waldo Emerson for being outside. His greatest disciple, the American Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote "A Letter from the Birmingham Jail".
American veterans in 1930 marched in the tens of thousands to Washington after the Great Depression destroyed their jobs. They lived in the parks and public spaces, demanding that Congress pay their promised pensions from the Great War and create jobs. They stayed, in spite of a cavalry charge by Douglas MacArthur and the U. S. Army, until Congress met their demands.
In the 1950s and 60s, Americans rode in the fronts of buses, sat in forbidden lunchcounters, crossed the bridge in Selma in the face of police with clubs, dogs and firehoses. In the 60s and 70s, Americans told LBJ: "Hell, no! We won't go!" and surrounded the Pentagon with flowers.
Walt Disney quoted an American (and Texan), Davy Crockett, as saying: "Be sure you're right, then go ahead."
We are sure we are right on marijuana, so, as Americans, we must move ahead. To quote another group of Americans, The Beasty Boys, we must "Fight for our right to party!"

VA Tech: Blame it on Prozac?

2007-04-19T12:13:00.000-07:00

The media are starting to pick up on the idea that the killings at VA Tech were the result of the so-called Prozac syndrome -- that some users of Prozac and other SSRIs are impelled to violent or suicidal acts.

Don't blame it on Prozac. Mass killers existed long before Prozac did and will continue to exist long after it is discontinued. In fact, it's probably best not to worry about the cause at all. Cognative science is a long way from being there yet; and we certainly don't want to lock someone up or limit his civil rights just because he "might" commit a crime some day.

By the way, the figures quoted this week calmed 40 deaths in K-12 school shootings over the past ten years. That's 4 deaths a year, probably below lightning strikes and certainly less than high-school football deaths (20-30/year) or bicycle riding (around 600 minors/year) or drowning (40/year).

Don't be like a Drug Warrior, and turn this into a killer weed with a deadly drug fiend behind every door.

Most of my life, I have been in favor of strong gun control (inspite of growing up in the West, hunting as a child and a teen, and still owning several guns myself); but yesterday I realized that strict gun control is just another form of prohibition law; and with the strong demand level in this country, woudl lead to the same kinds of prohibition defects like black markets and corrupt cops. When I started analyzing the differences between us and England or Cananda, it became obvious that the differences are in the level of demand. Depriving an Englishman of a gun (other than his shotgun) would be about like depriving me of a root-canal. Work in this country on gun control, like drug control, has to be on the demand side by education and by eliminating causual elements in the society (like lack of mental health facilities)

Talking or doing?

2007-04-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

Is it time for drug reformers to move from talking about drug reform to doing about drug reform?

The polls indicate that the battle for opinion about medical marijuana has been won and that a substantial number of people are now willing to remove penalties from possession and use of marijuana. So, what will it take to convert those attitudes into legal changes?

It's time to take to the streets. Political action often has to be political theater; a way to get people involved emotionally and a way to get the media involved visually. As I often heard when I was a child, "Actions speak louder than words."

The tradition of political action -- civil disobedience is an old and noble one. The first modern proponent was Henry David Thoreau, who developed a lot of the theory and protested the Fugitive Slave Act from inside the Concord jail. Ghandi brought down the British Empire and led India to freedom with Thoreau's methods; and the greatest proponent was Martin Luther King, Jr. in his leadership of the American Civil Rights movement.

One problem that we have is marijuana's image. For a very long time, the image of the marijuana user has been the Cheech-and-Chong stoner. Recently that has been extended to include the very ill. What has been missing is the image of ordinary people who use marijuana as part of their normal life. Politicians, voters, and newspeople need to see ordinary people in business suits lighting a joint. Smokers who are not stoners need to become visable.

Unfortunately, those are the same people who are uncomfortable making scenes. However, it would be worth their while if a hundred - or even 25 -- of them gathered outside the city hall or the state capital to smoke a joint. There's safety in numbers: if a hundred participate, probably no one gets arrested; there's power in numbers: if a hundred participate, the news cameras appear and interviews are made.

The retired people, who are not risking job or professional license, may be the most available -- and the most credible. If they have clean records, no jury or judge will send them to jail; and even if they are tried, the event in itself will be noteworthy.

Politicans in critical committee positions or who have publically taken pro-Drug War positions should have to run a gauntlet -- well-dressed, polite, but firm -- every time they enter or leave their offices or legislative spaces. They need to be shown that acts have consequences. Every one of their public appearances should have well-dressed questioners to ask the embarassing questions that we all can help write.

There are lots of public spaces that can be reserved so that respectable panels can conduct public discussions on "Why I use marijuana."

In short, it's time to quit being supplicants and start demanding recognition of our status. The only way to overcome the myths is to live and show the truth.

[By the way, I'm not knocking stoners. It's just that in this political fight, it's time for the moderate middle-American to stop hiding behind the stoners' image. ]

Come out of the closet, and show America who really smokes!

Shame on you, Rep. Dianne White Delisi

2007-04-04T09:31:00.000-07:00

(While this post is Texas Specific, the message behind it is not)

Representative Dianne White Delisi, Chair of the House Public Health Committee should be ashamed of herself for refusing to set hearings on HB1534, which would allow people using marijuana medically on their doctors' advice from raising a defense of medical necessity to charges of possession of marijuana.

Her refusal is a blatant example of substituting her uninformed prejudices for the will of the People.

Polls show that over 70% of the population favor allowing seriously ill people to use marijuana medically if their doctors so recommend.

The science behind medical marijuana is solid and uncontravertable. Not only has a recent referreed article established, in a double blind test, the effectiveness of marijuana in the treatment of neuropathic pain, clinical trials have also shown it effective in the treatment of MS. Its use as an antispasmodic and as ancillary therapy for cancer and HIV is uncontraverted. The National Institute of Medicine, in 1988 recognized its therapeutic effectiveness.

Its safety is also uncontravertable. There is no record, in over 150 years of medical and recreational use, of any death attributable to marijuana. At least three multi-thousand patient, long term studies show no health differences between marijuana users and non-users.

In short, the only opponents to the medical use of marijuana are police agencies, like the DEA, which have no competence to speak to medical issues.

The legislature as a whole may or may not approve HB1534, but it as an act of unbridled arrogance for one person, Chair of a committee or not, to substitute her personal biases for an honest and open discussion of the merits of the matter.

Bob Barr and "Bong Hits 4...": A Conservative Dilemma

2007-04-01T10:35:00.000-07:00

The Religious Right/Social Censervatives have been known for their adamant stand on absolute principles and refusal to compromise on any legislative or constitutional approaches to issues that they believe have moral bases. However, two situations have recently arisen that have presented them with a true dilemma: do they insist on an absolute anti-drug position or do they recognize the reciprocal nature of rights to individual freedoms.

In short, do they recognize the principle that the policeman in my enemy's living room casts a dark shadow over my own house?

The more ironic of the two situations is the announcement that ex-Congresscritter Bob Barr has been retained as a lobbist for a medical marijuana group. Barr, a far-right Republican, was a consistently hard line Drug Warrior. He is best known for sponsorship of the Barr Amendment that prevented the District of Columbia from even conducting a referendum on the issue of medical marijuana. He now states that the danger of governmental intrusion into personal lives is a greater threat to American life than is a less intrusive drug policy. A social conservative has now become a more libertarian small-government conservative.

The "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" Supreme Court case concerning the speech rights of an Alsakan high school student has created an even deeper rift in the Religious Right.

Kenneth Starr, darling of the Right, Special Prosecutor ( or is that Persecutor?) of Bill Clinton, who eased out of government service into the position of Dean of the Law School of Pepperdine University, a right-wing religiously base college in California, is representing the school principal and arguing the school's right to supress drug activity.

Filing amicus briefs in support of the student's right to display his banner are several organisations of religious fundamentalists. The recognize that suppression of this silly banner will jeopardize several of their cherished programs, including such humbugs as abstinence-only sex education, intelligent (sic!)-design biology courses, and the plastering of school walls with Ten Commandment plaques.

And, you know what, they're right! Either the Bill of Rights protects all of us or it protects no one. Unless they can become a veto-proof 70% majority, the American Taliban cannot establish their cherished theocracy; and unless they do, they run the risk of being suppressed.

The rule of a pluralistic society is that we all must, if not respect, rcognize the rights of each other; for, in the words of Ben Franklin, if we do not hang to gather, we shall all hang separately. For the more theologically inclined, I leave it as a research project to look at the strikingly parallel defences of their martyrdoms by St. Thomas More and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

What's Right with Drugs

2007-03-25T23:11:00.001-07:00

What's Right with Drugs

I've been studying drugs, drug laws, and drug use, mainly from a historical viewpoint, for many years now. As that time passed, a couple of things slowly dawned on me.
The first is that almost all of the people arguing for reform of the drug laws argue either that drugs aren't really as bad as they are portrayed or that they would have no worse effects if they were legal. Even the Libertarians tend to argue that if people want to destroy themselves, they should be allowed to do so. Almost no one argues that the use (other than medical use) of some drugs has some beneficial effect.
The use of psychoactive drugs seems to be coextensive with human society, and evidence from non-human populations like elephants and birds, which seek out and eat fermented fruits, suggests that the use extends throughout prehistory as well. I'm enough of a Darwinian to believe that any behavior that has been that universal must have some survival benefit, especially when we know that it comes with a relatively high price in terms of negative effects.
The second thing I noticed was that for 150 years, the length of time the drug as been available in the West, many creative people, especially poets and musicians, have strongly claimed that hashish or cannabis has enhanced their creativity. This claim is wide-spread, and often comes from those who have reached the top of their art; Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and Willie Nelson are among the musicians so claiming. In some branches of music -- jazz and rock in particular, those using seem to be a majority of the active performers.
Interestingly enough, no one seems to have tried to rebut these claims. A few critics have scoffed, saying that the performers were stoned and only thought they were playing better; but no one has ever offered any evidence opposing the claim. On the other hand, many musicians have bemoaned their use of opioids or stimulants and have ruined their careers or fought long and hard to break dependencies on those drugs.
My next change in thinking came when I starting studying LSD. Even those of us who work extensively have trouble overcoming the stereotypes drummed into us through a lifetime of propaganda. But I soon realized that the proponents of LSD in the 1950s and 60s were not drug fiends or junkies. Aldous Huxley was the third generation of one of Britain's leading scientific families and an accomplished writer and thinker himself. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were respected members of the Harvard faculty. Ken Kesey was an outstanding novelist and a fellow of the Stanford Creative Writing Project. Strong evidence suggests that President Kennedy tried LSD. When men of that stature and with those backgrounds report that LSD expands and deepens thinking and experience and encourage others to follow them, their reports are hard to ignore.
Amphetamines were first developed in the 1930s, and by WWII, all of the armies of the world were using them to keep troops alert and awake under adverse circumstances. The armies, including the U.S., are still using them today, with over 60% of the air missions in the Gulf War being flown by aircrews using amphetamines. For 80 years now, long distance truckers have used them to be more productive; and many college students, including medical students find the invaluable for those necessary all-nighters.
Over 80% of Americans use caffeine daily and find it makes them more alert and productive. They do this in spite of "coffee nerves" and upset stomachs.
Will any of these claims survive the cold light of the laboratory? I don't know. I do know that they present testable hypotheses; and that if confirmed, could lead to large social benefits.
Should we change the law if the benefits are established? I think so, but a social calculus weighing those benefits against any social cost would have to be made. In the 1970s, prescription amphetamines clearly provided weight-loss and energy benefits to many, but the problems of managing the resultant abuse was felt to outweigh those benefits.
What I do know is that we should put those claims to the test and see if they hold up. I don't know about you, but my life would be better with some more Willie Nelsons, Louis Armstrongs, and Ken Keseys.

Bong Hits 4 Jesus

2007-03-21T21:46:00.000-07:00

A fiend of mine complained that I hadn't said any thing about the Bong Hits for Jesus case. I guess there are two reasons. First, the mere mention of that sanctimonius Ken Starr makes me froth at the mouth and throw heavy things through windows. Second, I was so thoroughly wrapped in the free speech aspects, I overlooked that it was a drug case as well. It's time to correct my oversight.

A public highschool was dismissed so the students could attend the procession of an olympic torch through town. On student displayed a large banner at the parade: "Bong Hits 4 Jesus". He was expelled.

The Fourteenth amendment defines an American citizen as (among others) anyone born in the United States. It does not establish an age limit on citizenship or its rights. The Supreme Court (in Tucker) recognized that even school children have First Amendment rights and upheld the wearing of protest armbands in the classroom. Cases have been more restrictive about school control over out-of-school activities (like web pages). Students have the right of free speech, even in school, unless their behavior in so speaking is disruptive.

Outside the school, off the school grounds, our student has the right to wave any banner he wants, even one saying "Mission Accomplished" and even while wearing Mr. Cohen's "Fuck the Draft" jacket.

During argument, the CJ suggested that the School Board had a duty to impart a point of view and a duty to teach more than math. Kenny boy even claimed the banner wasn't speech, it was a drug act.

But education is not instilling propaganda; it is not forcing only one side of an issue into empty heads for memorized recitation. Education is the art of teaching students how to apply reasoned judgment to determined facts to reach sensible conclusions. I suspect that "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" (once the giggling stopped) would generate much more honest and productive discussion of drugs than does hundreds of hours of force-fed DARE propaganda.

In the early 1940s, the court upheld the forced recitation in school of the pledge of allegiance in an opinion by Frankfurter stating that the school's duty was to instill a sense of patriotism and community in the students.

Two years later -- in the middle of WWII when patriotism was at its highest -- the court reversed that decision; and in Barnette set aside the coerced saying of the pledge. Justice Jackson, writing for the Court, created the most perfect, most important statement of the major principle of American democracy:

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us."

In spite of what I said above, I suggest that the Chief Justice and Kenny boy memorize that passage (and you, too, boys and girls), recite it each day and ponder its meaning.

Cannabis as GRASE?

2007-03-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking outside the box here [WARNING: I'm way ouside my expertise here, maybe even outside my area of competence; FDA law is not for the beginner]. This may be of more interest to those on the West Coast who are more actively engaged in med mj litigation.

I have long thought that the FDA (at least until its recent politicazation), with its scientific basis and lack of law enforcement bias, would be a good way around the DEA to firmly establish the medical basis of marijuana in an unassailable way. But the FDA itself has biases, including some against botanicals and other than single-molecular drugs, and a New Drug Application costs, literally, hundreds of millions and takes years. without a patentable compound or process to entice a big Pharma to undertake it, there was no way to overcome this hurdle.

But in 2004, the FDA changed its regulations concerning the GRASE (Generally Recognized As Safe and Effective) process so that botanicals could be included in the established monographs (including the analgesics) with an abbreviated process using sales and use outside the US to prove safety and effectiveness.

The GRASE list contains those drugs that may be included in OTC drug preparations without an NDA: things like aspirin. These are drug components that have been used for so long and so widely that their safety and effectiveness is readily accepted.

Until 2004, US prohibition prevented cannabis from being considered from GRASE, since it was not marketed within the time limits allowed.

However, now that foreign proof is allowed for botanicals, the door may be opened. After all, cannabis has been marketed as a drug for about 150 years now, and its effectiveness is widely documented.

While a GRASE petition is still expensive and time-consuming, it is orders of magnitude less than an NDA, and might be within the reach of a grant-based academic or a deep-pocketed reform group.

With a GRASE listing, the DEA would completely loose the medical use and safety prongs of Schedule 1, and with an FDA finding, might be forced to reschedule as a matter of law -- no factual findings for DEA to "interprete". Even if the FDA refused to amend the GRASE monograph, the findings of their scientific panel should still prove conclusive on the DEA.

I have done only the sketchiest research so far, but it would pay to have an FDA expert look at the issue. If cannabis could be established as GRASE, the highest possible schedule would be 4, and 5 would be more likely. In addition, it would solve the problem of how to market it without approved FDA labeling after an NDA.

Drug Tests for Cops?

2007-03-14T22:29:00.001-07:00

Random drug-testing for police might be the start of a great idea.
While most drug testing is stupid and counter-productive, in some instances --like flight crews -- there is some justification.

In the case of police, we allow them to carry arms and not only drive, to to engage in hot pursuit while driving. It would seem that the public safety rationale is present.

In addition, as parties to drug arrests, police are exposed to very high levels of temptation, being around large quantities of unaccounted-for drugs and money. Unfortunately, the record shows that high numbers of them succumb to that temptation. So we also have a history of abuse, satisfying the Supreme Court.

We expect our police, as armed enforcers of the law with a very high level of discretion, to be paragons of legal behavior. It just ain't so. Major police corruption is always an result of prohibition laws.

Maybe instead of random testing, we should test all of them at least trwice each shift.and on days off as well.

The other major result of corruption is money. Is there a test for that as well? Any officer exceeding the lower test limit would be suspended and investigated.

Come to think about it, is there a test for testostrone...

Awired, crooked cop is a much greater danger to society than a high school quarterback who got stoned last week.

(I'm only about half sarcastic here)
----- Original Message -----
From: "MAPNews" <owner-mapnews@mapinc.org>
To: <mapnews@mapinc.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 4:45 PM
Subject: MN: US PA: Random Drug Testing For Cops A Cloudy Issue
> Newshawk: Herb> Pubdate: Sun, 11 Mar 2007> Source: Times-Tribune, The (Scranton PA)> Copyright: 2007 Townnews.com> Contact: Letters@TimesShamrock.com> Website: http://www.thetimes-tribune.com> Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4440> Author: Matthew Kemeny, Staff Writer> Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Test)> > RANDOM DRUG TESTING FOR COPS A CLOUDY ISSUE> > The recent arrest of a Scranton police officer for allegedly selling > drugs while on duty has sparked concerns about whether the city > should, or even can, randomly test its officers.> > Mark Conway, 36, of 1012 Maple St., was arrested March 1 after > Lackawanna County detectives allegedly found five OxyContin pills and > 33 methadone tablets in his patrol car. A confidential informant > tipped authorities that Officer Conway was allegedly addicted to > heroin for more than a year. The informant also said he had bought > heroin from Officer Conway about 10 times, according to an affidavit.> > Shortly after the officer's arrest, Scranton Public Safety Director > Ray Hayes was quoted as saying he'd like to see random drug testing > for police officers as part of the next labor contract. The current > police contract was signed in May 1999 and expired in 2002. The city > and police cannot negotiate a new contract until all outstanding > police arbitrations are settled.> > While the current contract states Scranton police officers can only > be tested for drugs based on "reasonable suspicion," some say the > contract language is ambiguous and already allows for random drug > testing. The contract does require mandatory drug testing on officers > in the drug enforcement unit.> > "I think it's pretty clear... the contract allows for random drug > testing," said Ann Marie Stulgis, police union president. She recalls > a committee being set up shortly after the contract was approved to > solicit bids from lab companies to perform the testing.> > "But it was never implemented," she said. "I don't know why."> > Former Police Officer John O'Shea was union president when the last > labor contract was approved. He retired in 2002.> > "It's in our contract," he said bluntly, after being asked if the > city has the ability to randomly drug test its officers. "It came > from the (officers). They wanted it."> > However he couldn't say why it was never implemented.> > "That's an administrative deal," he said. "It costs money."> > However, Mr. Hayes, Scranton Mayor Chris Doherty and Scranton Human > Resources Director Lisa Moran insist random drug testing is not > included in the current contract.> > "We recognize that we really need a comprehensive drug policy," Mr. > Hayes, who started as public safety director in 2002, said. "And > although this policy here that we have in place is a first step -- > they had nothing before that -- you really need a total comprehensive > drug policy that includes random testing as well as testing for cause."> > Officer Conway's arrest underscores the need for a random drug > testing policy, he added.> > Since May 1999, the department has sent just one officer for testing, > based on "reasonable suspicion," Mr. Hayes said. That suspicion > turned out to be false, he said. Despite the differences in semantics > of the contract, Mr. Hayes, Mr. Doherty, Mrs. Moran and Ms. Stulgis > support random drug testing for Scranton police.> > Mr. Hayes even went as far as to invite Ms. Stulgis to sit down with > him on Monday and hash out a plan.> > "The city would like to make that modification, if the union is in > agreement, so that we could initiate random drug testing immediately," he said.> > Throughout the state, policies vary on random drug testing on police officers.> > The Jessup Police Department, for instance, does not have random drug > testing and only does pre-employment drug testing for officers. > Police Chief Patrick Kane said the borough is considering random drug > testing, especially after one of its off-duty police officers was > arrested for allegedly stealing a rifle, marijuana and hypodermic > needles from their evidence room.> > Last February, Officer Robert Santarelli was charged with burglary, > theft, receiving stolen property and possession of marijuana and drug > paraphernalia. Officer Santarelli, who has been suspended from the > department since February 2006, was arrested again in January for > allegedly impersonating a state trooper to obtain a prescription drug > from Berwick Hospital.> > "Random drug testing should be in everyone's policy the way things > are going," Chief Kane said.> > Police departments in Roaring Brook and South Abington Township have > been doing random drug testing for at least 15 years.> > "It keeps the police officers honest," Roaring Brook Police Chief > Kipp Adcock said. "If they know they're subject to drug testing, then > hopefully that will be a deterrent."> > South Abington Township Police Chief Robert Gerrity echoed Chief > Adcock's opinion.> > "Anyone operating police equipment should be subject to random > testing," he said. "Just to show that there's nothing illegal going > on with that police department."> > Dickson City can require an officer to take a drug test if Police > Chief William Stadnitski suspects the officer is under the influence > of drugs or alcohol. However, in the six years that stipulation has > been in the borough's police contract, it has never been used.> > "If an officer comes in and looks half-bombed out of his skull, then > the borough can request that officer be drug tested," he said. "The > results are only to be used for administrative purposes and not > criminal purposes."> > The Allentown Police Department had performed random drug testing for > more than 10 years, Police Chief Roger MacLean said. Allentown also > tests its officers in the vice unit, all potential hires and even > officers who get promoted within the department.> > "We've run many random drug tests and only ever came up with two > officers testing positive," Chief MacLean said. "I thought in today's > day and age, everyone would have it. I think it's a good thing to have."> > Archbald, Covington Township and Taylor police departments do not > have random drug testing. Neither do Wilkes-Barre or Erie, cities > that are similar in size to Scranton.> > Taylor Police Chief Steve Derenick supports random drug testing for officers.> > "I think in law enforcement, it should be required," he said. > "They're the ones enforcing the penal code."> > Liz Portelli, director of development and communication for Drug Free > Pennsylvania, insisted random drug testing should be mandatory for > police officers -- no exceptions.> > "Police officers should be role models for kids. You don't want your > police officers to be on drugs when they're on the job."> > ------------------------------> > Scranton Police Department drug testing policy:>

The Story of a Stimulant: A Tale of Policy and Hypocracy

2007-03-12T23:12:00.000-07:00

In the 1930s, a class of synthetic stimulants, the amphetamines, was developed. The three primary drugs in this class were Benzadrine, Dexadrine (dextroamphetamine), and methamphetamine.

Benzadrine quickly developed a wide-spread use as a nasal inhalant for nasal congestion, and many people found they could break open the plastic inhalers, squeeze out the drug, and inject it for a big high.

Dexadrine found other users. The military were among the first: soldiers could stay awake and alert longer and under more adverse conditions if they used Dexadrine (long distance truck drivers discovered the same thing). Military use has continued. Friends of mine who served in Viet Nam told of constant use of dexxies. One man told me that they were kept in a large bowl in the Company area of his unit and the men "ate them like M&Ms". According to the Air Force Surgeon-General, over 60% of the combat missions flown during the Gulf War were flown by air crews using amphetamines. Some pilots reported command influence on them to use the drugs. I have seen no evidence that military doctrine has changed since then.

After WWII, Dex became one of the most often prescribed drugs. It was an effective wieght-loss drug, and gave depressed, stressed, housewives a feeling of energy. However, by the late 60s, it was falling out of favor because of problems associated with its use: extreme weight loss, paranoia and psychotic behavior; dependencies -- they same ones we hear of today.

During the 1950s and 60s laws regulating drugs underwent drastic changes. Drugs were divided into prescription and OTC drugs; drugs were required to be proven safe and effective before they could be marketed, and the FDA spent about a decade developing a list of GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe), later GRASE (Generally Recognized as Safe and Effective) components that could be included in OTC drugs without additional testing. These developments focused on medicinal uses (the Supreme Court later said that Congress did not even intend to include tobacco or alcohol) and were kept separate from the regulation of the food supply.

In 1970 the Controlled Substances Act tried to reconcile illegal drug regulation with medical drug regulation by establishing scheduling based on 1) potential for abuse, 2) recognized medical use, and 3) safet when used under medical supervision.

Amphetamines fell into Schedule 2, the second most tightly controlled category, and medical use virtually stopped.

Also, during the 1950s, the market for vitamins and "dietary supplements" developed, evolving from the old snake oil salesmen and folk cures. For some reason, this market was viewed as part of the food chain and was not regulated as drugs were.

When Dexadrine became unavailable, two other stimulants popped up to take its place.

Methamphetamine is chemically similar to Dexadrine (virtually undistinguishable by the user), but it can be manufactured in small batches without elaborate equipment or extreme temperatures or pressures. As a Schedule 1 drug, it became an illegal replacement for Dex.

All of the amphetamines are derived from norepinephrine, one of the ephedrine compounds derived from the ephedra plant. Ephedra, as a herb, or the ephedrine purified from it, has roughly the same effect on the body as does amphetamine.

Those who could no longer get legal Dexadrine and who were unwilling to use illegal meth, soon started taking ephedra as a "dietary supplement". Supplements became a multi-billion dollar business.

As reports of deaths and serious side effects from ephedra started rolling in, the FDA began the process of regulating it. The shit hit the fan. One of the largest letter-writing campaigns in history flooded Congress, which passed two statutes virtually banning the FDA from regulating supplements. The agency may sue to remove one from the market after they can prove it to be dangerous, but the seller has to do no testing before marketing it and may make almost any marketing claims it wants to.

So Dexadrine is legal, manufactured under controlled conditions, but almost totally unavailable; methamphetamine is illegal, manufactured under dangerous conditions causing grave enviromental risk and impure products, but readily available; ephedra has been voluntarily withdrawn from the market after almost a decade of futile FDA litigation -- and they all do the same thing.

Ironically, if marijuana had not been outlawed by the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 and had continued as a rarely used medicine, it would probably have qualified for the FDA's GRASE list and would be available OTC today.

FBI: Business as usual

2007-03-10T19:59:00.001-08:00

It's a pity Congress didn't talk to any drug reformers before they stampeded themselves into passing the (un)Patriot Destruction of Civil Liberties Act.

Then, perhaps, they wouldn't be so shocked and appalled by the Fibbie's arrant (and probably illegal) misuse of National Security Letters. They have snooped and gathered personal information about hundreds of thousands of citizens without reasonable suspicion or any oversight whatsoever.

I'm sorry, but there is nothing shocking about this affair. It is only another dark chapter in a long, dismal history. Remeber Cointel Pro of the 60s and 70s with dossiers of thousands of honest citizens? How about the "black bag jobs" of the 50s through 80s -- or the cooperation with HUAC, McCarfthy, and the red-hating blacklisters of the 1940s or 50s? And don't forget the sexual files on Martin L. King, Jr., members of Congress, and even presidents.

But as observers and warriors in the War on Drugs, we can tell them all about the police. Police, in general, have way too much descretion and too little oversight. With no civilian oversight and no supervision by any independent agency, police work always degenerates into forced confessions, planted evidence, professional informers, no-knock raids and illegal searches. Wearing suits does not make the FBI any different from other police organs. Remember Lord Acton's warning that all power corrupts.

There has been a lot of talk about trransparency in government lately, but no branch of government needs it more than the police. In this situation, the FBI didn't even need to get a judge's signature -- a very weak check on abusive searches.

No police action should be screened from the public. Everyone should be entitled to know what every police officer is doing every minute (I might concede a week's delay in releasing the information to protect tactical information). Some elected body, not connected to the police, the prosecutors, the courts, or the legislature, should have oversight of the police (including FBI, DEA, ICE, and the rest of the federal alphabet soup) with subpoena power and the power to prosecute.

Anything less just means more of the same.

The Sin of Incarceration: Texas Youth Council

2007-03-07T11:40:00.000-08:00

About one and a half centuries ago, Lord Acton said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In our society no power is more absolute than the power of the state over the incarcerated.

It should come as no surprise, then, when stories of corruption, like those now surfacing in the Texas Youth Council, abound in corrections systems.

The Texas Youth Council superivises the State "schools" in which youthful offenders (teenagers mainly) are locked up for education and rehabilitation -- the stated goals of the system.

However, I don't think the Lege intended that program to include the kinds of sex and drug education that those youthful offenders seem to be getting.

At one institution for boys, well-substantiated allegations claim that, over an extended period of time, staff members were having sexual relations with their charges. Although several staff members were fired or allowed to resign and at least one case was referred to the local District Attorney, no one has been charged or prosecuted.

At one of the State schools for girls, staff members were allegedly not only having sex with some of the girls, they were paying the girls with pills --"uppers and downers" according to the news reports. The irony of this report springs from the fact that a very large percentage of the crimes juveniles are charged with, and supposedly being rehabilitated from, are drug offenses.

The stench from these incidents has gotten so strong that it has reached the State capital, and all over Austin people are pointing fingers at each other, all claiming ignorance and all claiming that they did, too, tell the proper authorities about it. So far the governor has placed the TYC in receivership and several special investigations have started.

But let's remember Lord Acton. let us also remember the California situation in which guards were staging "gladiator" fights among inmates and organizing gambling pools on the outcome. Let us remember Abu Graib and Gitmo; And Sing Sing before its major riots; and the Texas prisons with their "trustees" wielding axe handles beforee the Federal courts took over. (And Colorado is thinking about reinstituting chain gangs, renting out convicts to do stoop labor on farms to replace migrant workers now barred by Homeland Insecurity.)

How does this corruption florish? Like many evil things, it grows in the dark. The best cure is light and air. These agencies must be made transparent. The media, and to the greatest erxtent possible, the public, should have complete and open access to the events in these places and to their records (yes, we can pixilate faces and black out names to protect the inmates). We all must know what happens behind those razor wire fences. Otherwise we are just like the "good Germans" who knew nothing about the death camps in their midst.

States and the Federal government also need public watchdogs over them. I would suggest an independently elected omsbudman agency with free access to all governmental actions with subpoena power and the ability to prosecute without reliance on local prosecutors.

It's our government, but how can we be responsible if we don't know what's going on?

Sending a Message

2007-03-04T22:16:00.000-08:00

As the legislative battle over medical marijuana spreads across the country, the arguments are heating up. They are, however, different this year. Very few seem to be debating the acknowledged therapeutic utility of marijuana, but two arguments remain.

One is the argument of futility considering the overarching reach of Federal law. This one is hard to counter except by saying that reform has to begin somewhere, and a little is better than nothing at all.

The other argument against medical marijuana makes my blood boil: "We can't legalize medical use because it would send a wring message to the kids." An old sayings holds that patriotism is the last refuse of scondrels. After years of working with the First Amendment and sexually explicit materials and with drug laws, I would propose a variant of that saying: "Sending a message to the kids is the last refuse of the hypocrit."

What message would legalizing marijuana for medical use send to the kids anyway? "Come on, smoke grandma's cancer medicine; it will make you cool"? "We are going to deny people their medications, leaving them in pain or dying, just so we can maintain the propaganda that marijuana is bad"? "You're so dumb you can't see obvious truth if we just tell you a weak fairy tale"?

Kids are smarter than that. They use their eyes and ask questions, and see what is going on around them. They have pretty good bullshit detectors, triggered, perhaps, by Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

They know something is wrong when we tell them not to use stimulants, but we force millions of their comrads to take Ritalin or amphetamine for ADHD.

Kids can handle the truth; sometimes they need a little more explanation or a little guidance in applying it, but they can handle truth. Isn't that what we hope education helps them with in the first place.

Maybe we should worry about whether we have been sending the same kinds of propagandistic messages to ourselves. Having we been telling ourselves the truth about drugs, or has our government been 'sending us a message' because we are too immature to handle the truth?

Let's try telling the kids the truth this time. They can handle it. Or is it that we are afraid we can't handle the truth ourselves?

Drug Seizures and Body Counts

2007-03-03T10:39:00.000-08:00

Three or four news stories this week have trumpeted large drug seizures by police across the country. Usually they will announce the capture by a police agency (or combination of several agencies from differenct jurisdictions) of marijuana -- usually over 1000 pounds, cocaine -- 50 Kilos or more, heroin -- a few ounces to a pound or so, and now a few pounds of methamphetamine as well. Usually they will also include $10,000 - 100,000 or more -- and often guns as well. The implication is that the police are winning the War on Drugs.

But to those of use old enough to remember the 1960s and 70s, they sound very much like the Pentagon's Viet Nam war body counts. Each week the Pentagon would release the number of Viet Cong or North Vietnamese soldiers killed, implying that the enemy was being steadily reduced to ineffectiveness. Then, in january, 1968, the North Vietnamese unleased their Tet Offensive, staging over 100 simultaneous attacks. These attacks led, ultimately, to the disillusionment of Walter Cronkite and the decision of Lyndon Johnson not to run for reelction.

For, you see, reporting the number killed said nothing about the number of new recruits or the remaining strength of the enemy. In fact, the reports possibly served as a recruiting tool for those eager to replace the losses. What they did accomplish was to establish a culture of dishonesty in the American Army as field commanders, eager to please their superiors and gain promotions, exaggerated or even fabricated their kills or planned operations, not for their strategic value, but to maximize body counts.

The Drug War works the same way. Police departments plan operations to grab headlines, not to lower the demand for drugs. Even worse, they plan them to maximize money seized because that money goes into their operational budgets without governmental oversite or budgetary discipline.

The worst part is that seizures don't work. From the time Nixon first originated the War on Drugs, the idea was to suppress sources and interdict shipments so that the street drugs would become so rare and so expensive that users couldn't buy them. It didn't work. The Customs Service (now ICE) has always admitted that, at best, they could intercept 5 - 10% of the incoming drugs. In effect, higher seizures are only a measure that shows a greater amount of imports, just like greater body counts were only a measure of the greater size of the Vietnamese forces (come to think about it, this sounds a lot like the reports of the number of insurgents killed or captured in Iraq today).

They certainly don't affect the amount or quality of drugs on the streets. The price and availability of drugs will be the same the day after the seizure as they were the day before. I still remember one time when Customs announced the seizure of ten tons of cocaine in the Port of Houston. The local head of the Customs Office, however, was quick to point out that no one should expect to see any results on the streets.

The seizures get people killed; they spend a lot of tax dollars in carrying them out; they just don't do anything about the availability of price of drugs on the street.

Follow the Money: Drugs and Dollars

2007-03-01T11:35:00.000-08:00

There is no doubt that most of the social ills related to drugs are not caused by the drugs, their use, or their users; but are instead caused by the black markets created by the drug laws. These include official corruption, violence among and between drug dealers and police, environemental harm, harm from impure drugs, and collateral damage to non-users.

The Black markets, in turn, are created by the extremely high prices caused by attempts to suppress supply while not stemming demand. The prohibition laws create high entry barriers to the market because most normal people will not risk long prison terms, death, or killing as part of the cost of doing business. Only the promise of extraordinarily high rewards will lure the unscrupluous outlaw into the market. Walgreens is chased out and Pablo Escobar is drawn in.

How much money are we talking about? Some figures from my earlier researches might give some ideas.

Marijuana is a plant product roughly comparable to tea or tobacco in its cost of growing, harvesting, and preparation (it is probably the cheapest of the three). Tea may be purchased in the form of tea bags for about $1 per ounce. A package of twenty cigarettes, weighing almost an ounce, sells for $4 - 5 (which is more than half taxes). Current street prices for marijuana range upward from $80 an ounce. The multiplier of the prohibition is between 50 and 100 times.

When Bayer was selling heroin legally (about 1900 - 1914 in the US, 1900 - 35 in the rest of the world), it sold heroin and aspirin at the same price. Today, aspirin retails for about $30 per kilogram (one hundred 300-mg tablets for $0.99), while heroin in the US wholesales for over $100,000 per kilogram.

MDMA (Ecstacy) can be manufactured in small batches for less than 10 cents a tablet, while it retails for $15 -25 a tablet. We don't know what it could be manufactured for in bulk because no pharm has ever had a chance to try.

Amphetaimes, as legal prescription drugs are manufactured for less than $10 per 1000 tablets; illegal methamphetamine is now selling for up to $100 an ounce.

Let's trace a kilogram of cocaine and watch the money.

Coca leaves contain about 1% cocaine, so a little over 200 kilograms of leaves are necessary for one kilogram of cocaine HCL. The farmer will receive about $1 per kilogram or less. The processor will add a few cents worth of gasoline and acid and a few dollars worth of labor for a kilogram of cocaine that he can sell at the production plant for about $2000. He's increased his investment by a factor of 10.

A distributor in Colombia will sell that Kilo to a transporter for about $5000 for transportation to the US. Originally Mexican cartels moved the coke for a percentage of the value, but about 30 years ago, they started buying it and moving it as their own venture.

The transporter, who risks shrinkage from customs siezures, etc (usually less than 10%), payoffs to Mexican and US police and customs, and defense against other smugglers, is able to sell the Kilo in Houston, for example, for about $10,000. The total flow of heroin from the Andes to the US adds over $30 Billion to the Mexican economy each year.

A Houston wholesaler will buy the Kilo for about $10,000 and divide it into about 35 ounce packages, which he sells for around $500 each, or around $17,000 per Kilo; and he can easily move 10 Kilos or more a week.

The ounceman, the lowest level in the scheme who is really a professional drug dealer, will divide his ounce into 8 "eightballs" of a little over 3 grams each. If the coke is cut, or diluted at this point, the ounce may yield 10 -12 eightballs, which will sell for about $150 each, or $1,200 or more per ounce. An ounce dealer can easily move five to ten or more ounces a week; and he will have assistants to do the actual delivery collection, and protection activities. They may actually be paid with product instead of cash.

The purchaser of the eightball is usually a user. He divides the 3-plus grams into 1/4 gram packages -- 12 to 15 of them, depending on how generous he is -- and sells about 10 of them for $20 each. He then has about 2 packages for his own use and about $50 to cover living expenses. These guys are not permanent, but drift in and out of the game. However, there are always new volunteers to take their place.

Multiply these numbers by several 100 tonnes (1000 Kilos) per year, and you can see how much money is involved. The analysis for heroin is about the same.

Ask yourself what would happen to this market if the heroin addict could get his supply from CVS for less than $5 a day or if marijuana cost the same as tobacco.

The bad guys would lose interest immediately.

Branded for Life: Convict registries

2007-02-27T22:16:00.001-08:00

Pubdate: Tue, 27 Feb 2007
Source: Janesville Gazette (WI)Copyright: 2007 Bliss Communications, Inc
Contact: http://www.gazetteextra.com/contactus/lettertoeditor.asp
Website: http://www.gazetteextra.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1356
Author: Todd Richmond, Associated Press

STATES CREATE MORE REGISTRIES TO TRACK, DETER CRIMINALS
MADISON, Wis. - Police found 29-year-old Leah Gustafson in a pool of blood in her apartment last year. Next to her was her collector sword. She'd been stabbed through the heart.
A blood trail led police in Superior, Wis., to an apartment across the street, where her killer, Jason Borelli, had just gotten out of the shower. Borelli got life in prison.
"This is something nobody else should go through," said 32-year-old Kelly Ziebell of Superior, Gustafson's friend since high school. "It feels like an empty hole without her."
Motivated by the murder, Ziebell and others who knew Gustafson have spent the past year pushing lawmakers in Wisconsin and Minnesota to join a growing a number of states that have created a variety of databases to let the public know the whereabouts of criminals.
Modeled after the ubiquitous sex offender registries, the new online databases tell users whether the person mowing the lawn next door ever cooked methamphetamine, kidnapped a child or killed somebody.
Supporters say people deserve to know whether they might be in danger."That would make people more cautious about who their neighbors are," Ziebell said.
...

*****

Years ago in Law School I took a course in Chinese Law during the Rule of the Gang of Four (that lets you know a little bit about how old I am!). The professor, trying to demonstrate the cultural differences, told us of the Chinese idiom: "to cap someone as a criminal", and pointed out that in some Chinese institutions, those serving sentences actually wore caps like dunce caps. He contrasted that to the English/American idiom of "branding someone as a felon". That idiom, about three hundred years ago, was no idiom but a literal truth: convicts were branded (or had their ears cut off) as a permanent mark of their conviction.

Branding someone eliminates all possibility of change or reform; the brand remains. It's a life sentence with no possibility of parole.

Contrast that to our concept of measured sentences: incarceration is punishment, and the amount of punishment should be proportionate to the crime committed. Once the sentence is complete, then the obligations of the convict to the state are over and he is free to resume his life.

A lifetime branding, or registry, continues that obligation long past the time set by the convicting jury. The convict has to continue paying long after his debt has been discharged.

Have no doubt about it: a registration is a continuing punishment: it limits the places one can live. Landlords will refuse to rent (In my townhouse complex just this year someone posted the picture and registration information of a new tenant -- I guess that was so we would all gather with our torches, tar, and feathers to escort him from the premises). Employers will refuse to hire. Some businesses will refuse service. That is punishment.

And for what reason? So that people will be afraid of him and try to prevent him from committing another crime. If the recidivism rate was 100%, this kind of activity might be justified, but for the normal rates of criminal recidivism, this is merely punishing someone because we think he might commit a crime in the future. Does this meet the standards of due process?

Arguments are made that child sexual assaulters are sick, cannot control themselves, and cannot be cured. This statement like all universals, is overbroad. But even it were generally true, wouldn't a better approach be to use a civil committment process and require the state to prove that this individual (not this class of people in general) presents a real and current danger to others?

Please note how this hysteria contrasts to another, quieter, movement that has been going on across this country for several decades now. Historically, felony convicts forfeited their civil rights, including the right to vote. Almost all states have now returned at least some of those rights to them.

As for registering drug dealers? Maybe it would make them easier for would-be customers to find. It might be good advertising.

Social Costs of Prohibition

2007-02-26T21:37:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Mon, 26 Feb 2007
Source: Guardian, The (U of CA, San Diego, CA Edu)Copyright: 2007 UCSD Guardian.
Contact: editor@ucsdguardian.orgWebsite: http://www.ucsdguardian.org/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2776Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n186/a02.htmlAuthor: Robert Sharpe

FEDERAL DRUG POLICY HARDLY INCONSEQUENTIAL
Dear Editor,
Regarding your Feb. 15 editorial ("Strife Over FAFSA Aid Provision Remains Symbolic"), the actual number of students stripped of financial aid due to drug offenses is 189,065. To obtain state-by-state numbers, Students for Sensible Drug Policy teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union and sued the U.S. Department of Education, after their Freedom of Information Act request was denied. I encourage you to check out their Web site. The number of students impacted is hardly symbolic.
Instead of empowering at-risk students with a college degree, drug provisions in the Higher Education Act limit career opportunities and increase the likelihood that those affected will resort to crime.
Speaking of crime, convicted rapists and murderers are still eligible for federal student loans. Most students outgrow their youthful indiscretions involving illicit drugs. An arrest and criminal record, on the other hand, can be life-shattering.
After admitting to smoking pot (but not inhaling), former President Bill Clinton opened himself up to "soft on drugs" criticism -- thousands of Americans have paid the price in the form of shattered lives.
More Americans went to prison or jail during the Clinton administration than during any past administration. As an admitted former drinker and alleged illicit drug user, President George W. Bush is also politically vulnerable when it comes to drugs.
While youthful indiscretions didn't stop Clinton or Bush from assuming leadership positions, an arrest surely would have. The short-term effects of marijuana are inconsequential compared to the long-term effects of criminal records.
Students who want to help end the cultural war otherwise known as the war on some drugs should contact Students for Sensible Drug Policy at http://www.SchoolsNotPrisons.com.---Robert Sharpe, MPA

*****

While I was serving on my law school's admissions committee, we would regularly get applications from those who had been convicted of DUI, public intoxication, and some theft crimes. One even applied while in prison, serving time for a serious assault. Many of these we admitted, cautioning that they might have problems being allowed to take the bar exam. Many of them are now reasonably successful lawyers. All of them were eligible for fanancial aid while in school.

Only drug convictions, including simple possession charges deny federal student aid to college students. This short-sighted policy is only one form of the collateral damage caused by prohibition laws.

Have any of you, in your lifetime, heard of anyone blinded or killed by improperly distilled or blended liquor? It was common during alcohol prohibition, when anything with a kick could be sold without inspections, labels, or liability. Today, we have deaths from fentanyl- or rat poison-laced heroin; and almost half of the tested Ecstacy pills at one time were counterfeit, with sometimes disasterous results.

Do Merck or Pfiser contaminate their surroundings with waste from their factories? No, because we regulate and police them. But almost all bootleg meth labs (those that don't explode, maiming or killing those in the neighborhood, become hazardous waste dumps.

Did we correct that mess by licensing, policing, inspecting their plants? No, we instead made it extremely difficult -- it not impossible -- for the average citizen to buy simple, useful cold remedies and chased the meth plants and their problems to Mexico. The meth is still available to its users, but you can no longer buy Sudafed. (perhaps someone will smuggle it to us from Mexico).

It shouldn't have surprised us. The Andean countries have suffered for at least four decades from gasoline, kerosene, and strong acids dumped into their rivers.

Prohibition laws have several predictable results; unfortunately, those results do not include reduced availability or consumption.

Should Government be forced to tell the truth?

2007-02-24T21:55:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Thu, 22 Feb 2007
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)Section: Pg B-2
Webpage: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/22/BAGFMO8RE61.DTL
Copyright: 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact: letters@sfchronicle.comWebsite: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

MEDICAL MARIJUANA ACTIVISTS CITE LITTLE-KNOWN LAW IN SUIT
Medical marijuana advocates tried a new approach Wednesday in their tug-of-war with the federal government, filing suit under a law that requires the government to correct its own misstatements -- including, the advocates say, the assertion that marijuana has no medical value."Citizens have a right to expect the government to use the best available information for policy decisions," said Alan Morrison, a Stanford Law School lecturer and an attorney in the lawsuit by Americans for Safe Access.
The suit was filed in federal court in San Francisco under the Data Quality Act, a little-known statute signed by President Bush in 2001. It directs federal agencies to allow members of the public to "seek and obtain correction" of false or misleading government information that affects them.
Morrison said the law was originally pushed by businesses that objected to government statements taking dim views of products or entire industries, notably Clinton administration reports that listed industrial activities among the causes of global warming. He said he knew of only two lawsuits filed under the statute, neither of them successful.
...

*****

Should the government be forced to tell the truth?

Bush, Cheney, and their cronies in the energy industry were frustrated early on by the scientific evidence supporting global warning. Bush was also mad about information put out by gevernment health-related agencies embarassing to him about stem cell research and morning-after contraception.

In order to shut down these sources of embarassing information, he pushed through a law that would have the effect of placing the political appointees at the heads of agencies responsible for all information released. this staatute was called the "Data Quality Act"; and in true Orwellean double speak, the operative language called for agencies to, in effect, verify the truthfullness of any information they released of published.

Well, global warming is now virtually uncontravertible, we have next-day contraception, and stem cell research continues in spite of the White House.

But these aren't the only things the government has been less than truthful about. (We'll leave out the mess in Iraq, because enough other people are talking about it). The government has been concealing its own publications about illegal drugs since at least 1930.

In 1930, the Surgeon General of the Army published a report about the use of marijuana by soldiers in Panama, and even did research involving givinh marijuana to some soldiers. The Army's conclusion was that marijuana presented no risk and no laws or regulations against it were needed.

In 1972, The Shaffer Commission, appointed by Nixon at the direction of Congress, reported that marijuana was therapeutic and presented no socials dangers and should be criminalized.

In 1975, The National Institute on Drug Abuse conducted a three-day conference on the pharmacology of Cannabis and published the proceedings in 1976 as a 2-volume NIDA Monograph: The Pharmacology of Cannabis.

You can look long and hard at government publications and web sites and will find no references to any of these three basic reports or to their results; nor can you find reference to the 1942 Department of Defense film Victory through Hemp, encouraging farmers to grow hemp (cannabis) in support of the war effort.

Nor can you find either of the two white papers on drugs, pointing out the problems of prohibition, prepared for President Kennedy.

You may still be able to find references to the 1998 NIH report on needle exchange programs, finding that they promote public health and do not encourage IV drug use, or the 1999 IOM report on medical marijuana finding that it has real therapeutic value and other probable values that need testing and that it should be made available, even in smoking form, to patients in the last stages of certain diseases. You may find quotes out of context and msiquotes from the latter on several government web sites better known for propaganda than for fact.

What would the White House and Congress do if they were forced to face the facts that their own agencies had determined?

What if Congress required that any government report or publication, or any report or publication sponsored or financed by the government had to be immediately released on the Internet?

Perhaps our drug laws would, for the first time in over 90 years, become a little bit rational.

Medical Marijuana: Legislation this year

2007-02-23T13:48:00.000-08:00

Several states, including Connecticutt, New Mexico, Texas, and Wisconsin, have medical marijuana statutes pending in their state legislatures this year. If any of these are enacted, the enacting states will be added to the twelve already having state medical marijuana laws.

I'm quoting the proposed Texas bill for two reasons: first, it's my state and I'm more familar with it; and second, it takes an affirmative defense approach that is different from the other states that have simply excluded marijuana for medical use from the coverage of their criminal statutes.

80R7115 MSE-D
By: Naishtat H.B. No. 1534

A BILL TO BE ENTITLED
AN ACT
relating to the medical use of marihuana.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF TEXAS:
SECTION 1. Section 481.121, Health and Safety Code, is amended by adding Subsections (c) and (d) to read as follows:
(c) It is an affirmative defense to prosecution under Subsection (a) for the possession of marihuana that the person possessed the marihuana as a patient of a physician licensed to practice medicine in this state pursuant to the recommendation of that physician for the amelioration of the symptoms or effects of a bona fide medical condition.
(d) An agency, including a law enforcement agency, of this state or a political subdivision of this state may not initiate an administrative, civil, or criminal investigation into a physician licensed to practice medicine in this state on the ground that the physician discussed marihuana as a treatment option with a patient of the physician or made a written or oral statement that, in the physician's opinion, the potential benefits of marihuana would likely outweigh the health risks for a particular patient.
SECTION 2. Subchapter B, Chapter 164, Occupations Code, is amended by adding Section 164.0525 to read as follows:
Sec. 164.0525. MEDICAL USE OF MARIHUANA. A physician may not be denied any right or privilege or be subject to any disciplinary action solely for making a written or oral statement that, in the physician's professional opinion, the potential benefits of marihuana would likely outweigh the health risks for a particular patient.
SECTION 3. The change in law made by this Act applies only to an offense committed on or after the effective date of this Act. An offense committed before the effective date of this Act is covered by the law in effect when the offense was committed, and the former law is continued in effect for that purpose. For purposes of this section, an offense was committed before the effective date of this Act if any element of the offense was committed before that date.
SECTION 4. This Act takes effect September 1, 2007.

I foresee one major difference between the proposed Texas law and those the other states have passed. California, Colorado, and Oregon, which legalized medical marijuana, have all had trouble with law enforcement officers confiscating marijuana from legitimate patients and refusing to return it to them. The courts of all three states have ultimately ordered the marijuana returned to the patients.

The Texas statute, by merely excusing the act of possession, not the status of marijuana as a medicine, will still leave medical marijuana as contraband, subject to seizure by the police. This difference could lead to continuing harassment of bona fide patients.

Dennis Kocenich (sp?), D-Ohio is now chairman of the House committe with oversight of the subject and has promissed to introduce federal legislation creating an exemption from the Controlled Substances Act for medical marijuana in states that have enacted medical marijuana laws. Since he has replaced Mark Souder, a fanatical drug warrior, in that position, the bill, when introduced, will probably clear the committee. However, its fate in the House as a whole, in the Senate, and in front of the president's (this one doesn't deserve a capital letter) veto pen is still problematic.

The medical uses of marijuana are no longer in doubt; and its safety was never seriously questioned by anyone who looked at the subject with even a half-opened eye. It's time for this country's legislators to catch up with everyone else.

2007-02-21T14:50:00.000-08:00

Today, rather than commenting on a news story, I'm posting a bullet-poin statement of the conclusions I have reached concerning drugs. I welcome any thoughts you may have.

My Drug Manifesto

HUMANS INNATELY LIKE TO GET HIGH
About 90% of the American population regularly uses the stimulant caffeine
Human children routinely play games (spinning around, "the choking game", holding their breath) that make them dizzy
Many drugs are used by a majority of the adult population in many societies (US and Europe: Alcohol about 2/3, Khat in East Africa and Yemen, tobacco in pre-1955 US and Europe and in modern China and Japan, coca by indigenes of the Andes)
No society outside the impoverished polar regions has been without mind affecting drugs
Even elephants and robins have been known to seek out fermented crops and get intoxicated
DRUGS ARE UBIQITIOUS
Over 150 different plants with psychoactive effects have been identified through human use
Over 250 synthetic chemicals with psychoactive effects have been created and identified
Psychoactive plants may be grown in all areas of the earth except for the polar regions
DRUGS ARE MORALLY NEUTRAL
As inanimate objects, drugs are neither good nor bad, although almost all of them may be put to use with either harmful or beneficial results
Heroin is a very good pain-reliever, faster acting than morphine and tolerated by many who are allergic to morphine
Amphetamines are used to treat ADHD (ADD) in children and narcolepsy; the military uses them so that aircrews and soldiers may stay awake and alert for long periods
Overdoses of water can kill
Non-steroid pain killers cause more deaths each year than all illegal drugs combined
DRUG USE, DRUG ABUSE, AND DRUG DEPENDENCY ARE SEPARATE BAHAVIORAL ISSUES, AND MUST BE TREATED SEPARATELY
Use is any human consumption of a drug; it be medical or otherwise
Non-medical use of drugs can be benign or neutral: coffee to stay awake and alert during the day, a drink or two to relax for a social occasion, marijuana at a rock concert or MDMA at a dance party
Religious use of drugs include wine in Christian eucharists, peyote at Native American Church meetings, marijuana as a Rastafarian ritual
Abuse is the use of a drug under conditions that may lead to adverse consequences, like drinking and then driving.
Alcohol is the only drug regularly associated with abusive behavior like drunk driving and domestic abuse. Amphetamine users sometimes stay awake so long that they may experience hallucinations and paranoia, leading to automobile wrecks and violent confrontations.
Drug dependency is the situation in which an individual persists in using a drug even through the use has adverse personal consequences.
Drug dependency may be associated with physical withdrawal symptoms, like those with opioids, alcohol, caffeine, or Xanax; or with no physical withdrawal symptoms, like those with cocaine, amphetamines, or marijuana.
Psychedelics like LSD, peyote, or MDMA produce no dependencies.
ABUSE AND DEPENDENCIES MAY ARISE IN CONNECTION WITH NON-DRUG SUBSTANCES AS WELL.
Food is the best example of this
DRUG USE, DRUG ABUSE, AND DRUG DEPENDENCIES, AS DIFFERENT BEHAVIORAL MODES, CALL FOR DIFFERENT SOCIAL RESPONSES
Drug use, as individual behavior calls for little social response other than labeling drugs as to purity, potency, and possible effects.
Education may be useful in minimizing use and harmful effects.
Marketing limitations should limit children's access to drugs.
Drug abuse, with direct socially harmful outcomes may require intervention in the forms of education, amelioration, criminal sanctions, and therapies.
Drunk-driving laws and dramshop laws are examples of reasonably effective criminal sanctions on drug abuse; some domestic violence laws serve the same purpose.
Designated driver programs and free tows on holidays are examples of effective amelioration.
Many abusers are also dependent or may have other social or mental malfunctions so that therapeutic regimes can be useful in decreasing abuse.
Drug dependencies do need medical intervention, but they may also call for social- and job-skills training, education, stable living environments and other programs as well
Therapies are often unsuccessful and may need to be repeated several times for good results.
ATTEMPTS TO DECREASE OR MODIFY DRUG-USING BEHAVIOR MUST BE MADE ON THE DEMAND SIDE OF THE MARKET
Tobacco use in the US decreased from over 50% of the population to under 25% from about 1958 to 1990, largely through an educational effort.
Prohibition laws do not limit supplies; they merely increase costs and add all the black market social costs to the externalities of the drug market.
PROHIBITION LAWS DO NOT DECREASE SUPPLIES, BUT THEY ALWAYS HAVE MAJOR NEGATIVE SOCIAL EFFECTS
The history of Western societies has seen four major attempts at prohibition laws: the British Gin Acts of the 1720s - 30s, the US ban on internationally traded slaves from about 1815 - 1860, US prohibition of alcohol from 1920 - 1933, and US prohibition of "dangerous drugs" from 1914 until the present; all four examples have shown the same outcomes.
Supplies of the banned substances are not substantially reduced and use continues at approximately the same rate
Law enforcement is corrupted: London was plagued with profit-seeking false informers; over 1/3 of alcohol prohibition agents were convicted, fired, or allowed to resign because of corruption and ultimately the Prohibition Bureau itself was dissolved because of corruption involving even the Director; about 1/3 of the agents of the Bureau of narcotics were fired and the agency dissolved because of corruption in the 1950s; in 1999, the US Police Chiefs were told that corruption was the major problem facing law enforcement
Black markets are captured by organized criminal gangs, with radically increased corruption and violence. These gangs can continue long after the prohibition that builds them is ended.
Prohibition laws are notoriously expensive to enforce: over $100 Billion per year today.
Illicit manufacturing of drugs harms the environment: cocaine labs in the Andes and meth cookers in the US
Drug quality goes down, further harming users
Innocent people also suffer: those injured in mistaken no-knock raids and searches, those shot as bystanders, people who cannot buy cold medicines, those not allowed to transfer funds because of money-laundering laws, students subjected to drug tests and dog searches.
INSANITY IS REPEATING THE SAME EXPERIMENT AND EXPECTING A DIFFERENT RESULT (Einstein)
THOSE WHO DO NOT KNOW HISTORY ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT (Santayana)

Drug testing in schools

2007-02-20T18:17:00.001-08:00

Pubdate: Sun, 18 Feb 2007
Source: Today's Sunbeam (NJ)Copyright: 2007 Today's Sunbeam
Contact: bgallow@sjnewsco.comWebsite: http://www.nj.com/sunbeam/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4423

DISTRICTS WEIGH DRUG TESTING
It's no mystery high school students experiment with drugs andalcohol. But Salem County School Boards Association President JohnSmith says high schools can take a more active stance to deterstudents from experimenting by instituting random drug and alcoholtests for students involved in extra curricular activities.
Smith hosted a program attended by representatives from each schooldistrict, detailing a new drug and alcohol testing policy that wouldrandomly select students involved in extra curricular activities fortesting.
The computer generated program would randomly pick 10 to 20 percent ofstudents involved in extra curricular activities a year for a urineanalysis test. If a foreign substance is found in the completed test,the sample would be sent to a lab for further testing to find theillegal substance.
"It's an educational tool. We are the surrogate parents in the worldof education," he said. "We have to be responsible for the growth ofour students while they're in our educational system."
The tests, he said, would be mainly for educational purposes and wouldserve as a tool to alert parents of their children's activities.
"This program would not be a punishment program. We're not violatingany student's rights," he said. "There could be counseling and mentorprograms established if we find we have a problem in the schooldistrict's. We need to stress the importance of being drug free to ourstudents. It's a way to ensure that we nip this problem in the budbefore it becomes an issue."
Currently, school districts in Salem County only have one drug testfor their students mandated by the State of New Jersey. If a schoolathletic team reaches the state championship in any sport, the teammust submit to a urine analysis to test for steroid abuse.
...

*****

Why test school kids for drugs?

It seems to be another case of "If we're scared about the kids, we have to do SOMETHING, even if it's the wrong thing."

Random testing of school kids involved in extracurricular activities is wrong in so many ways that it's hard to count them.

First, it's not needed. Most school testing programs turn up less than 1% positive results. That level would suggest much less of a problem that the school boards claim ( and incidently belies the justification that the Supreme Court relied on when upholding a similar program: that the high level of student drug use justified extreme measures that might not otherwise survive Constitutional muster).

Second, it's expensive. The typical test costs about $40; at a one percent positive rate, that's $4,000 for each incident of drug use dedected.

Third, it tests the wrong kids and the wrong drugs. Kids on teams, in bands and clubs, and making the grades necessary to do so are not the kids in danger of drug abuse or dependency.

Since the tests don't cover alcohol or tobacco -- the real problem drugs-- and since stimulants and opioids will clear out of the body within less than 48 hours (less than the time from a Friday night party until a Monday drug test), the tests are really marijuana tests. And there they can detect use up until a month previously, not just recent use.

Fourth, the justification is specious. Testers claim tests give to students an excuse to avoid peer pressure and "just say no", but that's not the way peers interact. Saying "I'm afraid of the test" would probably cause a kid more problems than just refuisng thedrugs.

Fifth, they don't work. Study after study shows the same level of drug use in both testing and non-testing schools.

Most importantly, the tests "send the wrong message", to use the Drug Warriors' favorite phrase. They tell the kids that they belong to the state, that its OK for the government to invade their privacy and bodies, and that Constitutional protections don't mean a damn' thing.

That's not a message I want to send!

DARE

2007-02-18T21:50:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Sat, 17 Feb 2007
Source: Janesville Gazette (WI)Copyright: 2007 Bliss Communications, Inc
Contact: http://www.gazetteextra.com/contactus/lettertoeditor.asp
Website: http://www.gazetteextra.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1356
Author: Mike Heine, Gazette Staff

DRUG EDUCATION PROGRAM CUT FROM COUNTY BUDGET
The handwriting is a little sketchy, but the message from elementary students is clear-bring back the DARE program.
Facing budget pressure from Walworth County supervisors and a need to put more deputies on the road, the Walworth County Sheriff's Department eliminated the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program from its 2007 budget, Sheriff David Graves said."It's not a decision I wanted to make, but one I feel I had to," he said.
An external study of the sheriff's department recommends at least nine more patrol deputies.
The last round of graduates earned their DARE diplomas in December.
But more students want that opportunity, and parents, teachers and students are clamoring for it.Pell Lake's Star Center Elementary School fifth-grade teacher Thomas Jooss had DARE graduates write county board supervisors expressing their feelings about the elimination of the drug, alcohol, gang and violence education program.
"I think you should keep DARE going so our younger grades should get educated with this great knowledge," wrote Gabriel Katzenberg. "I have learned so much, like there are over 200 known poisons in cigarette smoke.When I heard you were canceling DARE, I was amazed you were going to cancel a program that kept kids away from drugs."
...

*****

And another DARE program bites the dust.

DARE is an elementary school drug awareness program designed over 20 years ago by LA Police Chief Gates (the same one who testified to Congress that all drug users should be taken out and shot) to create a police presence in schools by having active police officers conduct "drug awareness" sessions in schools to fifth graders.

When the federal government decided to expand its "War on Drugs", it made federal grant money available to local governments to fund programs like DARE. As a result, DARE quickly spread through large and small cities across the country.

It also attracted the attention of scholars and researchers. Study after study was published showing that DARE was totally ineffective in influencing the dru-use behavior of high school and older children. In fact, several of the studies showed that DARE-indoctrinated students were MORE likely to use drugs in high school.

As long as federal funding was available, school boards and police forces were able to avoid the hard choices and could get operating a feel-good, although ineffective program in the schools. Police particularly liked DARE because it enabled them to establish a "police are your friends" relationship with young children.

When federal funding disappeared, more and more school boards found that they could not afford a useless program, and police chiefs needed to keep more of their officers on the streets. DARE has all but disappeared from large city schools, and now small towns are feeling the same pressure.

Why haven't all schools given up on DARE? We are all so focused on saving children from drugs that the attitude is "we have to do something, even if it's wrong."

Yes, children need drug education, but not fever-based sloganeering like DARE. Drug education for children, like sex education, needs to be fact-based, outcome oriented, and based on the ideas of fact-based behaviorial choices.

Salvia: another new(?) psychodelic

2007-02-17T12:24:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Sat, 17 Feb 2007
Source: Toronto Sun (CN ON)Copyright: 2007, Canoe Limited Partnership.
Contact: editor@tor.sunpub.comWebsite: http://torontosun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/457
Author: David Hutton, Special To Sun Media

ON A MAGIC MINT RIDE
Users Say Potent -- And Legal -- Herb Is Safe, But Police OfficialWarns Of 'All Sorts Of Bad Trips'
Reality shatters in front of your eyes. Your ego dissolves. And youcan find God on your lunch break.
These are just a few of the accounts from hemp store employees whohave taken a psychedelic ride using an increasingly popular -- andperfectly legal -- herb that packs a powerful punch.
The herb is Salvia divinorum, more commonly known as Salvia, magicmint or the diviner's sage.It has come under scrutiny in several U.S. states, with one Delawaremother saying the herb was a major contributor to her son's suicide.
Some in the Ottawa police are concerned about its use in the city,especially among youth, but users defend the powerful herbalpsychedelic as a mind-altering but safe trip they only sell to thoseof age.

*****

Salvia first attracted attention four or five years ago as a "new" and legal psychodelic drug.

Since then its use has grown, but it still is not widespread.

But is there anything "new" about it? One anthropologist claims that over 150 different plants have been used throughout human history and pre-history for their psychodelic effects (this doesn't include soporants like opiates, stimulants like cocaine, or mood effectors like cannabis), and that all human cultures except for the polar eskimos in their sparse environment have used one or more of them. Salvia is just another drug in that long chain, with its own long history of use; but it is just now becoming somewhat popular because the US and other Western nations have not yet outlawed it.

Ghat, or Kat, is another example of a widely used drug that has recently caught Western attention. It is a plant, native to East Africa, whose leaves, when chewed released a mild amphetamine. It has been widely used as a social drug for a very long time in Ethopia, Somalia, Yemen and other Horn of Africa, Red Sea locales. As the US started accepted refugees from these areas, they brough Ghat with them.

When I was young and LSD was the rage, many people went on an enthusiastic search for other magical doses. In addition to the effective ones like peyote and mushrooms, other things were tried as well: smoked banana peels (no effect), morning glory seeds (psychodelic, but the dose was too large to manage), nutmeg [yes, the household spice](psychodelic, but the effective dose was too close to the potentially effective lethal dose).

Alexander Shulgin, the great chemist, detailed over 250 synthetic compounds whose psychodelic effects he examined. They included, among many others, MDMA (ecstacy).

There is no shortage of chemicals, natural, processed, or man-made, that can be used for their effect on the brain. Those who hope to change behavior that seems to be an inborn part of human nature by placing some of these substances in quarantine, are not only fighting a hopeless battle, they are depriving us of spice for our pumpkin pies.

Source Suppression as an anti-drug strategy

2007-02-15T21:16:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Thu, 15 Feb 2007
Source: Province, The (CN BC)
Copyright: 2007 The Province
Contact: provletters@png.canwest.com
Website: http://www.canada.com/theprovince/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/476

ANTI-DRUG POLICIES NEED OVERHAULING
LONDON -- Counter-narcotics policies in Afghanistan need to beurgently overhauled before they push the people of southernAfghanistan into the arms of the Taliban insurgency, a security thinktank said yesterday.
A poppy-eradication program that began last month has already sparkeda new wave of violence, said Norine MacDonald, president of the SenlisCouncil, a European security think tank. She said the program wascosting NATO the popular support it needed to counter a loomingTaliban offensive

*****

Suppression of drug sources has been a fool's errand everytime it has been tried.

When WWII cut the US off from its traditional opium sources in Turkey, Mexico quickly stepped in to make up the slack. After the war, Turkey resumed production and reminants of the Nationalist Chinese Army turned Southeast Asia into the Golden Triangle of opium production.

When the US adopted source suppression as a strategy and forced Turkish farmers out of the business, Afghanistan quickly stepped in.

Even if Southeast Asia, Afghansitan, Turkey (now back in business), Mexico, and Colombia, which wanted and took its share of the opium trade, were eliminated from the opium market; legal supplies for morphine, etc. in Australia, India, Spain, France, and Eastern Europe would be swiftly diverted. The US (both sides) even grew its own opium during the Civil War, and the opium poppy is the state flower of California.

Today, only about hald of the crop land planted in opium in 1900 is used for opium production today.

Even if opium production totally ceased, completely synthetic opioids like methadone and fentanyl are available to take its place.

The US has been unable to stop, or even limit, cocaine growth in the Andean regions; and if it did manage to do so, cocaine as historically been grown commercially in Indonesia, Malasia, and Hawaii.

Source suppression doesn't work. Any modification of drug-using behavior has to come on the demand side.

Is it drugs or people?

2007-02-14T21:53:00.000-08:00

John Walters, the Federal Drug Czar, released his annual report today. He claims that teen-age use of illegal drugs is down substantially, but that teen-age use of prescription drugs has gone 'way up so that now prescription drugs are now second only to marijuana (I have to ask: what about the really dangerous ones -- tobacco and alcohol?).

He is making a false distinction, here; and that distinction has been drummed into kids until they believe it.

The body makes no distinction between illegal and legal drugs. An opioid affects a person the same way whether it is illegal heroin or prescribable morphine, Oxycotin, methadone, Vicodin, fentanyl, or codeine. There is very little difference, as far as the body is concerned between Ritalin, Adderal (dexadrine), the dextroamphetaine given out as go-fast pills to military pilots and soldiers, and the methamphetamine cooked up in a motel room. The body uses them all in the same way. In fact, cocaine and these amphetamines are also interchangable with some differences in effect.

The kids may know heroin is evil, and they are probably scared of injections, smoking, or snorting; but they feel safe with the little white Vicodin pill they swiped from mother's medicine cabinet.

The law is wrong in two respects. First, it tries to separate illegal drugs from legal ones when there is no difference; and second, it makes no distinction between use, abuse, and addiction.

Those of use who have one or two drinks to "loosen up" for a party are using alcohol, as humans have done for at least 6000 years. Those who have five or six drinks (or fewer in many cases), and get behind the wheel of their cars are abusing alcohol; and they can hurt the rest of us. Those who can't do without their alcohol, even when drinking hurts them, are addicted, and probably need medical assistance to break the habituation.

Only one of those three conditions calls for legal intervention -- abuse like drunk driving or spousal abuse; but the law lumps all three together.

Almost all humans like to get high. Watch pre-schoolers spin around until they are dizzy and then laugh as they stagger about. Many kids endanger themselves by playing the "choking game" for the same effect. Many carnival rides are designed to make the riders dizzy. Chemical highs spring from the same impulse.

But most users don't become abusers or addicts. Most will experiment with a drug a few times and then quit. Many will continue to use in moderation in proper circumstances. A very few will continue into patterns of abuse or addiction.

The trick would be to find out who those very few are before they start using. We have some ideas, but nothing yet that amounts to real predictability.

Kids should be taught the truth about use, abuse, and addiction; they should learn the effects, contraindications, side effects, and overdose risks of the major drugs; they should have someone non-judgmental to talk to if they have problems.
What they do not need is scary preaching based on "evil drugs" and old wives tales.

And we need to divert a small percentage of what we spend on trying to arrest and shoot our way out of a "drug problem" to more and better research on problem users, abuse, addiction, and their prevention and cure.

Undercover cops

2007-02-13T10:54:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Sat, 03 Feb 2007
Source: Florida Times-Union (FL)Copyright: 2007 The Florida Times-Union
Contact: http://www.jacksonville.com/aboutus/letters_to_editor.shtml
Website: http://www.times-union.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/155
Author: Charles Patton

GROUP ASKS SHERIFF TO SHELVE UNDERCOVER STINGS
A local citizens group called on Jacksonville Sheriff John Rutherfordon Friday to immediately suspend all undercover sting operationspending a review of policies and procedures by an independent board.
That request was included in a letter to Rutherford that the groupdistributed to reporters during a news conference at the PoliceMemorial Building.
The group, led by a mayoral candidate and two City Council hopefuls,calls itself the Coalition of Concerned Citizens.The letter requested a meeting with the sheriff to "discuss the recentmurders by the Jacksonville Sheriff Office."
That was a reference to two recent incidents in which Jacksonvilleundercover police posing as drug dealers shot and killed 18-year-oldDouglas Woods on Jan 20 and 80-year-old Isaac Singletary on Jan. 27.Authorities said Woods pointed a gun at an officer and fired at leastthree times in a robbery attempt. Singletary was shot after heconfused the officers for drug dealers.
...

*****

Drug sales, prostitution, gambling, and bribery are often called "victimless crimes" because all of the parties to the transaction are willing participants and, unlike rapes, assaults, or robberies, there is no injured party to complain to the police.

As a consequence, police provide their own "victims" by posing as would-be participants: an undercover cop, for instance, may pose as someone trying to buy a substantial amount of drugs.

How can anything that starts with a sham -- is based on a lie -- turn out other than badly?

The quoted story involves a shoot-out between drug dealers and undercover police; an occurrance that happens many times a year in Houston where I live; sometimes with the criminals injured or killed, but often with the police or innocent bystanders victims of the flying bullets. Don't we know ahead of time that even the most routine illegal drug transaction has a high potential for violence? Why invent artificial bombs on purpose and then set them off in public?

The police also become confused about legitimate lying and illegal abuse of process. A few years ago in Tulia, Texas, we had a stiuation in which an undercover cop not only lied about who he was, he also lied about his drug purchases. As a result, about forty people were wrongfully convicted of felonies, most of them AFTER the sheriff, employer of the undercover rogue, and the District Attorney knew of the untruthful bases of his arrests. It took the entire Texas judicial system, the state legislature, and the governor to undo these wrongful convictions.

The sad part of the story is that the State would have left these people in prison had it not been for the determination of a handful of citizens, and the media which they got involved, to see justice done.

Because of the affairs in Tulia, and others just as bad with Drug Task forces in Hearne, San Antonio, and Liberty County, Texas finally quit funding drug task forces.

Look around: the high social costs of enforcing crimes through inherently corrupting undercover police work is so high that we would probably be better off if the activities those untruthful activites are directed against were made legal and subject to above-the-board regulation instead.

There are no Bad Drugs

2007-02-12T09:01:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Sun, 11 Feb 2007
Source: Independent on Sunday (UK)Copyright: Independent Newspapers (UK) Ltd.
Contact: letters@independent.co.ukWebsite: http://www.independent.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/208
Author: Sophie Goodchild, Chief Reporter

SPECIAL K: KETAMINE BREAKTHROUGH IN TREATING DEPRESSION
Ketamine is the fastest growing drug on the dance scene, the chemical of choice for tens of thousands of clubbers.
But the class C drug, which is abused for its hallucinogenic effects, is now being hailed by scientists as a breakthrough treatment for severe depressives.
New research has found that patients who have failed to respond to more conventional drugs can be cured of depression within as little as two hours with an injection of ketamine. A study by the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland found that in a third of cases the mood-lifting effects of the horse tranquilliser, known as Special K on the street, lasted at least a week.
This compares with prescription antidepressants that can take up to eight weeks to have any positive impact on patients who are hard to treat. Experts say that it could pave the way for a new class of faster and longer-acting medications.
Researchers believe that ketamine reduces depression-like symptoms in treatment of resistant people by blocking the protein or receptor in the brain that regulates mood, unlike antidepressants currently prescribed by doctors.
Ketamine is one of several banned drugs that have been found to have therapeutic benefits. Ecstasy has proved effective for traumatised servicemen who have fought in Iraq, and trials are also taking place involving rape victims who are given the drug to help them to recount their ordeals without triggering anxiety. Scientists have used LSD to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety.

*****

More and more, my mantra on issues of public policy is to repeat FDR's great admonition: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Ketamine is only the most recent of the "bad drugs" -- those with no socially redeeming virtues -- to undergo rehabilitation. When Ketamine, or Special K, became popular with club kids, it was quickly rescheduled because it was "so dangerous." Granted, someone "in the K hole" may be scary for his friends to watch, its usage seems to carry with it few, if any long term detriments. As usual, its rescheduling did not limit its street availability. The main result was an on-going stream of burglaries and robberies of vet's offices and clinics to replace the earlier open supplies.

Earlier examples flesh out the story.

Marijuana was a respected, if little used, medicine when it was outlawed. A forty-year fight has not brought it back to respectability in spite of now overwhelming evidence of its safety and efficiacy in many severe medical situations. Like Ketamine and MDMA, it has also been shown efective in the treatment of PTSD, being used by the Israeli army.

LSD was widely used in psychotherapy when Congress outlawed it at the request of the CIA and army in 1968. At that time, over 5000 refereed medical journals reported on its use in tens of thousands of patients, with hundreds of thousands of doses administered. One of its most successful uses, ironically, was in the treatment of alcoholics.

MDMA (Ecstacy), now being tested for use in PTSD cases, was widely used in psychotherapy from about 1975 until its "emergency rescheduling" in 1986. In that case, over 275 psychologists and psychiatrists filed testimony about its importance in their practices and its safety. No medical testimony was presented against these uses. The only safety evidence presented by the DEA concerned the related drug, MDA, since the agency had no data about MDMA to use. In short, a useful and safe drug, commonly used in therapy, with no evidence that it was unsafe, was totally banned from use because some people (OK, a lot of people) were using it (also safely) recreationally. The result was that the retail price of a drug that was manufactured for less than ten cents a tablet jumped to a street price of twenty dollars a tablet; and soon over half the tabs on the market were counterfiets containing drugs that could be truly dangerous.

In almost any way you can think, banning a drug through fear causes much more harm than letting people have reasonable access to it.

Are Drug Dealers Murders?

2007-02-10T14:04:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Thu, 08 Feb 2007
Source: Burlington Free Press (VT)
Webpage: http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070208/NEWS/70207026
Copyright: 2007 Burlington Free Press
Contact: http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/letters.shtml
Website: http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/632

BURLINGTON MAN PLEADS NOT GUILTY TO MANSLAUGHTER CHARGE IN MAY 2006 DRUG OVERDOSE
A Burlington man pleaded not guilty Thursday to two charges, including manslaughter, in connection with a May 2006 drug-overdose death of an acquaintance.Jesse J. Davis, 35, was ordered jailed on $35,000 bail during his arraignment at Vermont District Court in Burlington.

He faces up to 18 years in prison if convicted on charges of manslaughter and delivery of a narcotic drug.
Police say Davis provided a fentanyl patch to Michael Delphia, who later overdosed and died. Delphia ingested part of the patch containing a painkiller and became ill. Davis then drove Delphia home and left him on a couch, where Delphia later was found dead, police said in court papers.

*****

How far should the criminal liability of a drug dealer go? Under the doctrine of felony murder, if a person is killed during the commission of a crime, then the perpetrator of the crime can be convicted of murder, even though he did not directly cause the killing. As an example, a robber is engaged in a shootout with the police at the scene of an attempted robbery and one of the police bullets kills a bystander. The robber could be convicted of murder, even though he did not shoot the victim.

But does the same reasoning apply in the quoted story? The dealer delivered a fentanyl patch to a purchaser. The patch carries on it a label stating the contents. It is designed to be applied to the skin, through which the drug will be absorbed over several hours.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, several times more powerful than heroin. The purchaser was probably aware of this and was experienced enough to know how to open the patch to get at the total contents all at once. Wasn't it his responsibility to measure the size of the dose he was taking and to know of the consequences of overdose? Hadn't the dealer's involvement ended when he delivered the intact patch?

This case is different from one in which a dealer, facing a shortage of heroin, mixes some fentanyl in with a little heoin and some inert ingredient, and sells it as straight heroin. In this case, the dealer would be knowingly selling a deceptive product that he should know would be dangerous to a typical user; and he should be responsible for the consequences.

The other part of this story is that the death was preventable. Opioid overdoses rarely, if ever, should result in death. As in this case, death is not immediate and can take up to several hours. All emergency rooms and many EMTs are equipped to administer opiate antagonists, which immediately counter the effects of the overdose. However, fear of arrest means that few overdosers or their friends are willing to seek medical attention. If the dealer in this case had driven the customer to an emergency room instead of home to a couch, the death would have been prevented.

Accountability for this death should rest with the legislators and police, who have prevented reasonable medical care.

Polydrug Use: Robb's Story

2007-02-09T13:41:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Thu, 08 Feb 2007
Source: North Coast Journal (CA)Copyright: 2007, North Coast Journal
Contact: ncjour@northcoast.comWebsite: http://www.northcoastjournal.com/Welcome.html
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2833
Author: Monica Topping

FIGHTING DEMONS: ROBB'S STORY

My name is Nancy Courtemanche. I'm the mother of Robb Rierdan. Robb's not here to talk for himself, [he] died from an overdose of heroin. This is his story.
When I think back of Robb as a little boy, when he turned about 9, he went from being a happy boy to a sad boy. I wondered about that a lot, and it continued to just kind of hang around him. Then, at about age 13 we moved up here to Ferndale, and I think it was about that time that Robb began to experiment with marijuana and maybe some other drugs.
Move forward a couple of years and his behavior had changed quite a bit. He was very talented musically, very talented artistically. He was hanging in what he called the alternative crowd, and was very caught up in that world. There seemed to be a lot of alcohol and drugs in that world and it was very hard for me to watch.
He left home and was living in his friends' apartments, crashing on their couches wherever they would let him. I think at that point, around 18 or so, is when he got really involved with crank. He went from a normal weight down to 108 pounds. He looked like something out of a concentration camp, and I did not know what was happening. I didn't know the symptoms of crank use, I just saw my son dissolving in front of my eyes.
He told me later that he took himself off of crank, which was probably more difficult than I can even realize as I look back. I'm pretty sure after that he never used crank again, [but] I think it permanently damaged him.
After [that] he was clean for probably six or eight months, and then he discovered alcohol. He would drink himself into blackouts where he didn't know what had happened for even a whole day nor two sometimes. I think at that point the bipolar disorder kicked in. It came to dominate his life as [the] years passed.
One of the things I'm realizing now is that there is a vicious circle [for] people who have mental illness using drugs ... Robb may have had a predisposition to depression, and the drug use made it worse.His art was still amazing and his guitar skills were amazing, but the drugs at certain points [would] affect his ability to play, and there were a couple of bands that told him that if he didn't straighten up that they would not allow him to play with them any more. And that was pretty devastating to him.
When he was 23 he was living in Eureka, and I know that many of his friends were using heroin. He called what he did "recreational heroin," where you smoke it or you shoot it once in a while but you somehow don't manage to get hooked onto it. It's just something that you play with.
I remember in 2003, he came to me and asked me to take him to the doctor so [he] could get medicine. And I said "Why?" He said, "Because I'm hooked on heroin." I was devastated. I had no clue. But I went to the doctor, and he got the medicine, and he got himself off of heroin without going into rehab. He did it by himself. It was awful. He was sick, he was sick, he was sick, and then he got over it. And he promised me he would never use heroin again.
For the next couple of years, his depression got worse. He was taking a lot of meds -- for the bipolar, for everything that he had. He had a lot of pain. One of the things that happens with depression is people withdraw. They lose their appetite, they don't feel like going anyplace [or] doing anything, they don't have any energy. Decisions are overwhelming. The creative juices that they may have had at one time slowly begin to dwindle away.
I talked to Robb about choices, about good choices and bad choices. Toward the end, in the last year of his life, the consequences of [his choices] caught up with him. He got a DUI and lost his driver's license. He had lost his transportation, so it was hard to get around with his band equipment. He had steep fines he couldn't pay.His friends would get upset with him because he would drink so much when he went out to bars that he would get in fights, or he'd get so obnoxious they would ask him to leave. And then he would feel really bad and he would withdraw even further.
It was very sad for me to see. Very sad.I didn't know what I could do. I was helpless. He always appreciated when I would help him, and I encouraged him to do everything that he wanted to do. I would help him with transportation. I would help him buy art supplies. And it got to the point where that didn't even help. He just kept withdrawing more and more. I felt at some point that he was in this box where the sides got so high that he couldn't get out.
The last few months of his life were very sad. One thing that he did want to do was to go up to Seattle to visit his friends. He was really excited about that. So he went up there, and he was gone for a week. And when he came back, he wasn't right. I was suspicious and very afraid that he was doing something -- I was telling myself it wasn't heroin.
He got back on Thursday night. We went out on Friday and had a really wonderful afternoon together, and when I left that day, I thought maybe things were going to get better. And the next day, at 4:30, I got a call from his roommate, and he told me Robb was dead.
That's when a parent goes into denial. You don't believe it's true until you drive up and you see the coroner's car is there and the police are inside and you go in and you see the body of somebody that you have loved for 29 years. And you see this shell.
The word went around the community very fast that he was dead. Some people thought that he had committed suicide. I talked with the coroner, who was absolutely wonderful, and he said that no, it was an accident, that the lethal dose is 1 cc, but Robb died from 1.04 -- that's four one-hundredths. I don't know what that looks like, but I imagine to myself that maybe that's a half a drop, so my son died from a half a drop more than what it took to be within that line of where you could shoot heroin and survive.
It devastated his friends. There was so much hurt, so much sorrow, so much guilt, and so much anger. And so many of his friends reached out to me, came to his service and talked with me. A lot of [them] have stayed in touch -- I've known quite a few of them since they were 15 or 16, and now it's 15 years later and we've gone through a lot together. And some of these friends have gone through the drug scene and have gotten clean now and are really, really tired of seeing so much drugs in the scene, like, "Couldn't we do this without the drugs?"
The interview with Nancy Courtemanche was conducted by Monica Topping of KSLG radio as part of a series she produced with Mike Dronkers about drug use on the local music scene. "Lifestyle: Addiction in Humboldt's Rock Scene" begins airing Saturday, Feb. 10, at 1 p.m. on KSLG 94.1-FM

*****

Robb's story is, in a sense, so routine that it is boring. Kid begins experimenting with drugs ("marijuana and other drugs") at abou age thirteen, over the years progresses through a whole series of drugs -- amphetamines, alcohol, heroin, back to heroin, finds himself trapped in a world of mental illness, and dies.

On the other hand, many features of this story bear emphasizing. First, his drug use started at an early age (many even begin earlier than Robb) and it involved many drugs from the beginning.

I'm not sure his mother knew the whole story -- most of us parents don't know our childrens' histories as well as we think we do. First drugs are usually alcohol or tobacco, not marijuana. A dear friend of mine used to tell how, when she was in the seventh grade, she would buy a box of No-Doz (caffeine tablets for those of you who never pulled an all-niter), sell them to the grade school kids for fifty cents a pill, and use the profits to buy Ritalin for her own use from the older kids.

The second thing to note is the ease (relatively) with which Robb moved back and forth between drugs; he was not hooked on just one thing.

This often repeated story shows that it is not the drugs that cause addiction. Drugs are just neutral things that can be used wisely (morphine after surgery) or unwisely (morphine from a shared dirty needle in a shooting gallery). Some people -- a minority of drug users if we look at the government statistics -- find themselves unable to control, limit, or regulate their own drug use.

Many of those users suffer from mental illness of one kind or another. In effect their drug use is an attempt to self-medicate, often with the wrong drug for their condition, and with disasterous results. Robb's mother said he was suffering from bipolar disorder and depression; the symptoms continued, by her account, for sixteen years. I think she confused cause and effect, for she seemed to blame the Crank (a dear, old-fashioned term I haven't heard in years) for the depression, rather than realizing that the symptoms were probably there well beforee the drug use. But in her story there is no mention of any attempt to find appropriate therapy for Robb's condition.

Robb's death may go into the record book as a drug overdose and an example of abuse of illegal drugs; but doesn't most of the blame rest with parents, teachers, and doctors who, for sixteen years, could not recognize and find treatment for a rather common mental illness.

Remember it's not the drugs that are the problem; it is why and how and by whom they are used.

Drugs and Official Corruption

2007-02-08T10:43:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Tue, 06 Feb 2007
Source: Buffalo News (NY)Copyright: 2007 The Buffalo News
Contact: http://www.buffalo.com/contact-us/submit-editorial.asp
Website: http://www.buffalonews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/61

PRISON GUARD ADMITS TO HEROIN SMUGGLING
SARANAC LAKE - A guard has pleaded guilty to trying to smuggle heroin into the prison where he worked.The plea resulted from an investigation into contraband that has led to the firings or resignation of several other guards.
Michael D. Bradish, 34, of Plattsburgh, pleaded guilty Friday in Franklin County Court to attempted promoting prison contraband and attempted drug possession as well as misdemeanor official misconduct.
Prosecutors said Bradish was part of a network that delivered heroin mailed from New York City to Bare Hill, a medium-security facility for men.Authorities also charged two other state corrections officers.

*****

There is no surprise here: official corruption is always a companion of prohibition laws. By 1930, over 1/3 of the Federal Prohibition Bureau had been convicted, fired, or forced to resign because of official corruption. At that time, because of the Director's involvement in the criminal activities of Nicky Arnstein, the entire Bureau was dissolved and reorganized.

In the late 1950s, the Bureau of Narcotics in the Treasury was disbanded and replaced by the Bureau of Dangerous and Narcotic Drugs in the Justice Department because of wide-spread corruption among its agents.

In 1999, the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the National Association of Police Chiefs said that police corruption was the major law enforcement problem in the nation. We have recently seen two New York detectives convicted for acting as Mafia hitmen while they were on the police force.

Studies show that drug use in prisons occurs at the same frequeny it does outside prisons except for maximum security units -- there the usage is twice that of the outside world. This level of drug use in prison cannot occur without the knowledge, and even actual complicity, of the prison staff.

Money is the cause, the corruptor. When Texas prisons became non-smoking, prison guards starting being caught smuggling tobacco into the prisons in large numbers. At that time, generic cigarettes could be bought outside for about $3 for a pack of 20 cigarettes. Inside, a third of a cigarette could be sold for $5. A guard, earning about $20,000 per year could easily turn a $3 investment into $300 --tqx free. This is a job that attracts the undereducated and unskilled, living in rural areas without many other job opportunities. Were many of them tempted?

The other corrupter is futility. Police working drugs see that they are not accomplishing anything. As soon as they arrest a dealer, anew one takes his place. Only about 5% of the drugs coming across the borders are found and seized. Since they are not doing any good, why not take the money?

We have prohibition laws; they have not reduced drug use, but the have corrupted our justice system.

Hemp as a Crop

2007-02-07T11:04:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Wed, 07 Feb 2007
Source: New Mexican, The (Santa Fe, NM)Copyright: 2007 The Santa Fe New Mexican
Contact: http://www.freenewmexican.com/emailforms/letters.php
Website: http://www.freenewmexican.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/695
Author: Blake Nicholson, Associated Press

N.D. ISSUES NATION'S FIRST HEMP PERMITS
North Dakota issued the nation's first licenses to grow industrial hemp Tuesday to two farmers who still must meet federal requirements before they can plant the crop.The farmers must get approval from the Drug Enforcement Administration, which treats hemp much the way it does marijuana and has not allowed commercial hemp production but has said it would consider applications to grow it.
Hemp is a cousin of marijuana that contains trace amounts of the chemical that causes a marijuana high, though hemp does not produce the same effects. The sturdy, fibrous plant is used to make an assortment of products including paper, rope, clothing and cosmetics.
Industrial hemp cultivation is legal in Canada and other countries but is banned in the United States. Law enforcement officials worry that industrial hemp can shield the growing of marijuana, although hemp supporters say that fear is unfounded.
The North Dakota Agriculture Department approved rules late last year for hemp production with the DEA's concerns in mind, State Agriculture Commissioner Roger Johnson has said.The state issued permits Tuesday to Wayne Hauge and Dave Monson, who is also a legislator. The state Agriculture Department is processing 16 other hemp applications, Johnson said."It's taken us a lot longer than (expected) to get here, and I'm thinking we still have a ways to go," said Monson, the House assistant Republican majority leader.
Joseph Rannazzisi, an administrator with the DEA, said federal law does not allow the agency to delegate its ability to regulate hemp to state officials. Although the DEA may waive registration requirements, it has done so only for law enforcement officers and other officials, he said.
Johnson asked the DEA in December to waive its $2,293 registration fee, but federal officials rejected that request. Johnson said he will hand-deliver Hauge's and Monson's applications when he meets with DEA officials in Washington early next week to try again to persuade them to relax the annual fee requirement.
North Dakota is one of seven states that have authorized industrial hemp farming. The others are Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Montana and West Virginia, according to Vote Hemp, an industrial hemp advocacy organization based in Bedford, Mass.

*****

In spite of hemp's long history (actually going back into prehistory) as a valuable fiber and oil crop, when the federal government passed the Marihuana Tax Act in 1937, they outlawed the entire cannabis plant, although they did allow for the import of sterile seeds for inclusion in birdseed to keep canaries singing.

Hemp has a long history as the source of ropes and sails for the old sailing navies ("canvas" is just the Dutch word for cannabis). It is used to make durable fabrics and paper. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were both written on hemp paper, and US paper money was printed on hemp paper until the 20th century. Today, hemp oil is also included in many health foods and cosmetic preparations. Just go to any health store and read the labels.

All of the hemp used in this country is imported from Canada, Europe, and some Asian countries because, to the Feds, live hemp plants are still marijuana.

What's the difference between them? Hemp and marijuana are simply different cultivars of the same plant. Hemp plants have been selected to have a THC content of under 1%, while the mj cultivars have from 3% to over 10%. Some one once said that to get high on hemp, you would have to smoke a joint the size of a telephone pole, and you would get sick before you got high.

Cultivatiion methods are totally different. Hemp is planted close together, almost like grass, so that it grows very tall. It is usually havested before it blossoms if grown for fiber, but if grown for oil, the seeds are allowed to ripen.

MJ is normaly grown using asexual cloning methods to produce a seedless variety, and the buds are the goal of the harvest. Plants are spaced far apart and pruned low, to encourage branching and more buds. Male plants, if any, are eliminated as soon as sex can be determined so that no seeds will be produced.

The quickest way to ruin a mj crop is to grow hemp nearby, so that it fertilizes the mj, making seeds and lowering the THC in succeding crops. No smart mj farmer would ever try to hide is crop in a hemp field.

MJ is estimated to be the fourth largest cash crop in the US. In a strange case of "wag the dog", the DEA suppresses a smaller, but realistic, safe, and profitable crop so that it was not confuse them when it comes to the larger, illegal, beheomuth. There's something wrong with this picture.

Overcrowded Prisons

2007-02-06T10:04:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Sun, 04 Feb 2007
Source: Spartanburg Herald Journal (SC)
Contact: opinion@shj.comCopyright: 2007 The Spartanburg Herald-Journal
Website: http://www.goupstate.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/977
Author: Monica Mercer

LAW ENFORCEMENT DEALS WITH CROWDED JAIL
Spartanburg County Detention Facility Director Larry Powers Says He Wishes the Movie "Field of Dreams" Had Never Been Made.For him, the phrase, "If you build it, they will come," just hit a bit too close to home, since he figured at the time it had more to do with jails than baseball fields."When they built this jail, they all came," Powers said with a sardonic grin.
The county's current facility on California Avenue was constructed in 1994 to remedy chronic overcrowding. Yet within a month, every bed had been filled, and within four years the county was back to square one with the jail population again exceeding space. Today, there is an average of 800 inmates at any given time with room for only 586 at the main facility and its two small annexes.
As County Council prepares to review administration's recommendation to address overcrowding by essentially doing the same thing as in the past -- expanding the jail to the tune of $33.5 million -- county law enforcement officials continue to grapple with ways to curb the local jail population while admitting that the need for more space is unavoidable.Powers said the state Department of Corrections has for years pressured local jails to alleviate overcrowding, but because the jails in counties with larger populations such as Charleston have always been much worse, the state is just now honing in onSpartanburg.
Yet overcrowding at local jails -- which is a national problem according to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Labor Statistics -- doesn't necessarily coincide with more people committing more crimes, Powers said. According to the most recent crime statistics, all reported crimes in the city of Spartanburg decreased by 7 percent in 2006 compared with 2005.
A better explanation for jail overcrowding might be in the more mundane details -- for instance, Powers said, when Spartanburg County municipalities over the years "decided they didn't want to be in the prisoner business anymore" and gradually turned things over to the county jail. Add to that the nonviolent offenders who often sit in jail longer than necessary because they can't make bail -- currently there are about 100 such local cases -- and court systems unable to adjudicate cases fast enough."All these things affect the jail population, not necessarily that there are more prisoners," Powers said.
In 2005, County Council requested a jail overcrowding committee be formed to study such issues, and 7th Circuit Solicitor Trey Gowdy, who also leads the committee, said the group has made headway in streamlining the process of moving inmates through the jail.Gowdy said the county's three circuit judges have been generous in hearing criminal cases even when criminal court is not in session, often giving up vacation time to do so. He also advocated for Gordon Cooper, a Master-in-Equity who normally hears only those cases referred by circuit judges, to be designated a "special" circuit judge. Cooper now hears probation cases, which frees up circuit judges for trials and guilty pleas.Such measures over the past year, said Powers, have helped inmates get through the system in weeks rather than months.
The home detention program -- which allows offenders to be monitored at home rather than sit in jail -- also has modestly lightened the burden. Of the 360 people who have gone through the program, only 102 have been sent back to jail for violations. Six participants have escaped and have yet to be caught.But overcrowding persists.The committee made additional "very specific suggestions" for remedies in its 2005 report to Council. Most have not been implemented yet, Gowdy said.There was the idea to create a county fund where money could be posted on bonds under $10,000 so "inmates can be released and are not held unnecessarily at county expense."
And at the top of the list was expansion of the jail, which Gowdy called "essential.""It's not that (Council) disagreed with our findings, it's just a multi-million-dollar decision to make more bed space and expand a jail," Gowdy said. "We're doing everything we know how to do, and we still have an overcrowding problem."
In a recent interview, Council Chairman Jeff Horton agreed."We've purged that entity there as best we can," Horton said. "The fact is, as the community grows, the population of the jail will grow, too."

*****

I've chosen a story about a local jail to illustrate the problem with overcrowded prisons since the problem exists from the very top of the system down to the bottom. California is now trying to transfer about 5000 inmates to private out of states prisons to avoid a federal court lawsuit that would probably take over the state prison system. Texas, with the highest rate of incarceration in the nation, and which had its prisons under Court supervision for years until it embarked on the world's largest prison-building spree, now claims that it is 4,000 beds short of meeting its demand for prisons. What is going on?

In 1980, when Reagan decided to be tough on crime rather than being smart about crime, the total prison polulation in the US was about 400,000 people. Now it is over 2 Million, and almost 0.5 Million of those (more than the entire prison population in 1980) are in jail for drug offenses, most of them non-violent. Each year there are about 750,000 arrests (not citations) for marijuan offenses, over 80% of which are for mere possession. Overall crime rates have gone done significantly during the same period; but it seems that the fewer criminals there are, the more there are that get imprisoned.

It costs at least $30,000 a year to keep a prisoner in prison; Texas's prison budget four years ago was over $2 Billion a year. Multiply this out, add in the lack of school funding and health care and is if its worth the cost.

Why are drug users and sellers in jail instead of in rehab or community service? Drug Courts have spread nationwide quite successfully, but the total number is still woefully small. California's diversion program is working, but not covering enough people. The Federal prisons (where over 60% of the prisoners are there for drug offenses) has a highly effective rehab and halfway house program, but few (if any) states have followed its lead.

Even if you are not willing to legalize or decriminalize drug possession or use, ask yourself in expensive prisons (where HIV and Hepatitis C infection rates approach 40% and an inmate has over a 20% chance of being raped during his first week's confinement) are the right answer to the drug problem. Why not drug courts or therapeutic probation (instead od punative)? Why not house arrest or community service for possession offenses.

The next time you pay high taxes to support prisons, ask why your states doesn't have enough money for schools or health care.

Medical Marijuana

2007-02-05T10:55:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Thu, 01 Feb 2007
Source: Reason Magazine (US)Copyright: 2007 The Reason Foundation
Contact: letters@reason.comWebsite: http://www.reason.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/359
Author: Greg BeatoNote: Greg Beato is a writer based in San Francisco.

[I'm quoting this article in full, even

tho it's rather long because it does a good job on

the history of medical marijuana]

POT CLUBS IN PERIL

Are San Francisco Zoning Boards a Bigger Threat to Medical Marijuana Than the DEA?

On a sunny Saturday morning last summer, the air inside the Church Street Compassion Center was thick with the scent of sweet, skunky medicine.The place felt like a neighborhood rec center.A couple of regulars were sitting on the soft, worn couches in the corner, watching a World Cup soccer match on a big-screen TV while taking an occasional puff on a joint. A friendly dog named "Danger" roamed the premises.Hardwood floors and wainscoting gave the place a touch of shabby elegance; its high ceiling, painted a vivid shade of yellow, provided a blast of hippy-dippy optimism.Every 10 minutes or so, a customer would enter and drift toward the glass display case where the center keeps its wares.Inside the case were a half-dozen apothecary jars filled with different strains of marijuana, along with some ganja-fortified baked goods.A whiteboard on the wall listed prices.As the customers made their purchases, they exchanged pleasantries with the volunteer cashier-small talk about the weather and their plans for the Fourth of July.The Center is one of the approximately two dozen outlets in San Francisco that cater to medical marijuana patients.The building that houses it is on the corner of a busy street on the outskirts of the Castro District. For more than a decade-longer than medicinal cannabis has actually been legal-the location has been a home to one dispensary or another; longtime pot activist Dennis Peron set up the state's first one here in 1993.

Ten years after California voters approved Proposition 215 by a 56 to 44 margin, it is almost as safe and easy to obtain an ounce of Purple Haze in the city as it is to fill a prescription for Lipitor. All you need is a doctor's referral, a state ID card issued through the local health department, and $400. Patients are not required by law to obtain the ID cards, but the state issues them on a voluntary basis through county health departments. The system helps dispensaries and law enforcement officials identify registered medical marijuana patients and caregivers. Twenty-one out of the state's 58 counties currently issue ID cards.

In the June 2005 decision Gonzales v. Raich, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states' rights pose no obstacle to the federal government's power to prosecute anyone who cultivates, distributes, or possesses marijuana, medical or otherwise.Patients and caregivers feared that the brief era of widespread, worry-free access to medical marijuana was about to end. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) kicked into higher gear, conducting more than three dozen raids in California over the next year. Its efforts, however, did little to slow the growth in new dispensaries. As recently as 2002, there were fewer than 20 such businesses in California, most of them concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area. By the summer of 2006, more than 200 of them were operating throughout the state.Was the threat posed by Gonzales v. Raich less dire than originally imagined? Amidst the business-as-usual atmosphere at the Church Street Compassion Center, it was easy to answer "yes." But as an old saying often misattributed to the noted hemp farmer Thomas Jefferson goes, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.And outside the comfortable oases of the state's dispensaries, prohibitionists were going about business as usual too.

Four hundred miles south of San Francisco, the city of El Monte had just extended its ban on such facilities for another year. Twenty other California cities enforce similar bans; approximately 50 others allow dispensaries but have stopped permitting new ones to open.In San Diego, DEA agents were choreographing a raid of 13 dispensaries that would take place a few days later, producing closures, asset seizures, and 15 arrests.And even in San Francisco, merchants and residents in the Fisherman's Wharf neighborhood were honing the arguments they would use in their effort to block a dispensary from opening in their neighborhood.

Public opinion surveys, not to mention ballot box measures, show strong public support for medical marijuana in California and nationwide. Ten states have followed California's lead during the last decade; it was not until 2006, when a South Dakota initiative to legalize medical marijuana lost by a 52 to 48 margin, that voters rejected medical marijuana in a statewide ballot.But as vague voting-booth gestures of compassion have evolved into a real-world distribution system, complete with retail storefronts and an expanding client base, idealism often gives way to other forces.

In San Francisco, things have gotten particularly surreal.In November 2006, the city's Board of Supervisors voted to make crimes involving the private cultivation, possession, and sale of marijuana amongst recreational adult users the "lowest law enforcement priority" for the city's police department, thus formalizing a policy that has essentially been in effect for some time now. At the same time, it has passed laws that make it nearly impossible to open new medical marijuana dispensaries, and many of the ones that are currently operating may soon be regulated out of existence.And if San Francisco can't quite resolve itself to fully embrace medical marijuana, what chance is there that Fresno, California, will? Or Fort Collins, Colorado?

Today, thanks to the dispensaries, medical marijuana is not only legal in California; for many patients, it's genuinely accessible. Soon that may no longer be the case.Invasion of the Pot PeopleIn general, the California public seems to favor an approach to medical marijuana that combines Communism with imminent death: If tiny groups of very ill patients are out there tilling the soil in cancer-stricken solidarity, then medical marijuana is acceptable. The dispensaries, alas, consumerize cannabis.They offer ease and reliability, and compassion isn't always their only motivation. Some are set up as for-profit businesses and generate major revenues.The ones that adopt the tactics of, say, Wal-Mart or Pfizer-accepting credit card payments, running ads in newspapers, expanding their product ranges, and generally aiming to please their customers-are naturally the ones that attract the most suspicion.Of all the links in the medical marijuana supply chain, the dispensaries offer law enforcement officials the most attractive target.

Proposition 215 allowed doctors to recommend marijuana to their patients; it also gave patients and their caregivers the right to cultivate and possess it. But neither Proposition 215 nor a follow-up bill-SB 420, enacted in 2003-mentions dispensaries.The latter does acknowledge that patients and primary caregivers can "collectively or cooperatively" cultivate marijuana for medical purposes. It also states that primary caregivers can receive "reasonable compensation" for "actual expenses" and "services provided." While such language acknowledges a commercial component to the caregiver-patient relationship, neither Proposition 215 nor SB 420 suggest that a single person or entity might serve as the "primary caregiver" for hundreds or even thousands of patients, or that their relationship might consist solely of occasional, unscheduled cannabis purchases.Instead, Proposition 215 defines a primary caregiver as an "individual" who "consistently assume[s] responsibility for the housing, health, or safety" of another person.To shore up their status as collectives or co-ops, some dispensaries require clients to pay annual membership fees. Others set themselves up as non-profit businesses.

But providers that offer retail sales to members-as opposed to collectives where patients cultivate communal gardens-do not enjoy any protection under the primary caregiver provision.Instead, they operate at the whims and mercies of local law enforcement agencies and the DEA.Dispensaries may not be explicitly mandated, but they are practical. Patients have the right to cultivate their own pot plants, but in a world where even making a salad from scratch has become a lost art, how many people are likely to choose that option?We don't, after all, expect people to cultivate their own aspirin.Nor do we allow nature's growing cycles to dictate patients' treatment. "It takes three months to harvest marijuana," says Steph Sherer, executive director of the medical cannabis advocacy group Americans for Safe Access. "Let's say you're diagnosed with cancer. Do we tell patients they need to wait three months before they start their chemotherapy treatments?"

Proposition 215 encouraged "the federal and state governments to implement a plan to provide for the safe and affordable distribution of marijuana to all," but no such plan has materialized. Instead, California has outsourced the risk of providing safe and affordable distribution of marijuana to the private sector.Some of those private dispensers are making a lot of money, and that, in turn, raises suspicions. In 2005 the manager of New Remedies, a California-wide chain of dispensaries, told On the Record that his operation's weekly payroll was $170,000, with after-tax profit margins hovering between 5 percent and 15 percent.A DEA investigation later showed the chain had made 60 cash deposits totaling approximately $2.3 million to a single bank during one eight-month period last year.

The suspicions about the retail nature of dispensaries are amplified by the debate over the proper scope of medical cannabis. "We have no problem whatsoever with people that need it for glaucoma, people that need it for AIDS, the ability to eat," says Capt. Tim Hettrich, chief of San Francisco's narcotics unit. "The problem is with the law. It's too broad.I was talking with a woman one night, and she says, 'I got medical marijuana for my menstrual cramps.' A doctor prescribed that for her. So I said, 'Well, what do you use it, three or four days a month?' And she said, 'Oh, no, I use it every day.' That's the problem."The language of Proposition 215 is indeed expansive.It states that medical marijuana is appropriate for "the treatment of cancer, anorexia, AIDS, chronic pain, spasticity, glaucoma, arthritis, migraine, or any other illness for which marijuana provides relief." County health departments keep no records on what reasons patients give for seeking medical marijuana ID cards, but in December 2005, the DEA confiscated patient records during a raid in San Diego. According to The San Diego Union-Tribune, the records showed that only "2 percent of patients reported having AIDS, glaucoma, or cancer." The rest were seeking treatment for "muscle spasms, insomnia, back and neck pain, headaches and other less-serious ailments."Medi-Cann, a statewide network of nine medical clinics that offer evaluations for individuals hoping to obtain a doctor's referral for medical marijuana, sees around 500 patients a week. "Overwhelmingly, they're seeking relief from pain," says Medi-Cann's founder, Dr. Jean Talleyrand. "Pain for many different reasons.People who've had multiple fractures. People with arthritis."Dr. Talleyrand says his desire to practice medicine in a more holistic manner inspired him to create Medi-Cann. "I did my training in San Francisco, so I kind of have a little bit more progressive, alternative look at health," he explains. "As I developed what I wanted to do, a lot of it was alternative healing-acupuncture, botanical medicine.Marijuana is botanical medicine, and when you start thinking of it that way, you redefine what it's good for. A lot of plants and herbs are good for a lot of different things.And because they tend to be more benign than pharmaceuticals, they tend to have less side effects too.""

I take medical marijuana for severe chronic pain from a neck injury," says Sherer. Before founding Americans for Safe Access, the 30-year-old Sherer worked as an activist and organizer on campaigns involving globalization, social justice, and various other progressive causes.Then she suffered a neck injury that left her in chronic pain and her career path shifted. "About a year and a half into my injury, my kidneys started failing because of side effects from my pain medications and Ibuprofen. It's not an uncommon thing-about 1 in 200 people's kidneys shut down when they have to take 3200 milligrams of Ibuprofen a day. I was not a marijuana user-I thought that medical marijuana was for people who were dying. Luckily I lived in California and had a doctor who said that maybe I should try it."No doubt there are people who exploit Proposition 215's expansive language, seeking out medical marijuana simply for relief from a boring job or a dull Saturday night. "So what?" says Wayne Justmann, a 61-year-old medical marijuana advocate who volunteers at the Church Street Compassion Center. Justmann has been HIV positive for 18 years and has also been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; he was the first person in San Francisco to obtain a medical marijuana ID card. In his case, he says, cannabis has proven more effective than drugs like Klonopin or Percocet, and he doesn't believe other people's behavior should inhibit his access to it. "People will abuse any type of system," he says. "It's human nature. Do we close down the Internet because some people abuse it?"

Dispensary Panic

Maybe we would if the Web made it harder to find a parking space.In March 2005, thanks to a brief article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the rapid proliferation of dispensaries changed instantly from a barely noticed phenomenon to a citywide crisis.Until that point, the city had done nothing to regulate dispensaries. Many had opened without even bothering to apply for a standard business license.Their impact was so glaring that city officials appeared to be blinded by them: They had no idea so many existed.The Chronicle broke the news that there were 37 of them. One was being run by an ex-con and former crack addict. Another attracted "a stream of young and streetwise-looking customers showing up to buy or sample the goods." Follow-up articles included complaints about parking and traffic, excessive noise, patients who didn't look visibly ill, and customers selling and sharing purchases outside the dispensaries.A day after the first article appeared, Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's 39-year-old Democratic mayor, called for a moratorium on new clubs and substantial regulation for the existing ones. "I believe in the core of my cores that medicinal marijuana is appropriate and right," the moderate Democrat with strong ties to the local business community told the Chronicle, voicing a refrain that has played like a chorus during the last two years. "That being said, I also think there needs to be some common sense and grounding as it relates to the proliferation of these clubs in San Francisco."For more than a decade, the story of medical marijuana in San Francisco had been a positive one, a classic tale of only-in-San-Francisco rebellion, with empowered sick people taking on an indifferent, unenlightened federal government. But then the dispensaries became the public face of medical marijuana. And the dispensaries-an "underworld that sells pot with few rules," according to one Chronicle editorial-were trouble.

Very quickly, a litany of their sins became commonplace. They offered gang members an easy source of marijuana to resell on the streets.They made it harder for police to make ordinary pot-related arrests.They were irresistible targets for robbery because of all the cash they kept on hand. They were a gateway drug to loitering, double parking, and playing loud music.They smelled. And of course, they were "a real magnet to kids."

What are some of the actual numbers behind such generalizations? According to the San Francisco Police Department, four dispensaries were robbed in 2005; during the first half of 2006, two such robberies were committed.The police department doesn't release statistics about how many marijuana-related arrests it makes each year, so it's impossible to determine how much impact ID cards have had on its ability to make such arrests. But in California as a whole, the number of state prison inmates serving time for marijuana-related charges rose 11 percent in 2005. The state's annual Campaign Against Marijuana Planting achieved record results in 2005: More than 1.1 million plants found in national forests, in parks, and on private land were confiscated and destroyed.The 2003 2004 California Student Survey, a biennial "snapshot of students' risky and health-related behaviors," shows that among ninth-graders, marijuana use has dropped almost 50 percent since Proposition 215 was passed in 1996. Monitoring The Future, an annual survey funded by the federal government, asks eighth-graders, 10th-graders, and 12th-graders how available marijuana is. "They've been doing this survey since 1975," says Bruce Mirken, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project. "When you ask high school seniors if marijuana is easy to get, about 85 percent say yes. And that number has not changed-it's varied between 82.5 percent to 91 percent." (The 91 percent mark was recorded in 1997. Ever since then, the number has been dropping.)Crime rates have been dropping in San Francisco during the last 10 years, not rising.Street sales of marijuana have not moved to neighborhoods where they never existed before.The parking, traffic, and noise issues that have arisen at some dispensary locations are hardly unique to the distribution of medical marijuana.

Nonetheless, the DEA has capitalized on the new wariness that dispensaries provoke. In March 2006, more than 70 agents raided the facilities of an Oakland-based company called Beyond Bomb. Beyond Bomb was manufacturing marijuana candies, sodas, and baked goods with packaging that parodied that of popular snack food brands.Its product line included Pot-Tarts, Toka-Cola, and KeefKats; it distributed these and other treats to dispensaries throughout the state."Even though there may be claims that these weren't meant for kids, the packaging may suggest otherwise," DEA agent Casey McEnry told the San Francisco Chronicle. In fact, the packaging includes information about the THC content of each product.According to Steph Sherer, the DEA removed stickers that read "For Medical Use Only" from the products it seized before photographing them for publicity purposes.The DEA has not claimed these products were being sold anywhere except dispensaries that only qualified patients could enter.When I asked McEnry if there were any cases where a child did in fact mistake a Beyond Bomb knockoff for the genuine article, she replied, "The DEA doesn't keep user statistics."Apparently, none of this mitigates what could happen some day, maybe, thanks to these infernal treats that sort of look like popular snack foods. "What so many people don't realize," DEA agent Javier Pena exclaimed in a press release issued after the raid, "is that innocent children may somehow get their hands on these products and think they are just normal candy or soft drinks-thus, making this action not only illegal, but potentially tragic."Kenneth Affolter, the leader of the Beyond Bomb operation, was indicted by a grand jury in March 2006 on manufacturing, distribution, and conspiracy charges. Facing a possible sentence of life imprisonment and a $4 million fine, Affolter eventually reached an agreement with prosecutors and pled guilty to a single count of conspiring to manufacture and distribute marijuana. His sentence was five years in federal prison.He may be the only man in America serving time largely for making bad stoner puns.

Saving Joseph Conrad Square

Nine months after the Chronicle's initial report on the clubs prompted promises of regulation from Mayor Newsom, the city's Board of Supervisors delivered. On December 30, 2005, San Francisco introduced the Medical Cannabis Act, an 84-page set of mandatory guidelines for medical cannabis dispensaries. Under the new rules, patients could buy no more than one ounce of marijuana per visit. (The old limit was eight ounces.) New dispensaries could not be located within 1,000 feet of any school or recreation center, nor could they set up shop in residential districts, industrial districts, or the city's South of Market neighborhood. All dispensaries, new and old, would have to obtain a permit to operate, and the approval process would include a discretionary review open to the public.In July 2006, Kevin Reed, who had previously operated a dispensary in the city's Noe Valley neighborhood, became the first person to try to obtain a permit for a dispensary under the new rules.Reed's dispensary, the Green Cross, had been shut down in June 2005 after city officials, at the behest of a group of well-connected area residents, suspended Reed's change-of-use permit on the grounds that his establishment was "hazardous, noxious, or offensive." (Ironically, Reed had been one of the few dispensary operators to seek out a general business permit before the city created its regulations for dispensary-specific permits.)The 32-year-old Reed had once managed a Hollywood Video store; when he opened the Green Cross, he wanted to create a dispensary that was as stylish and customer-friendly as any retail environment. A neon green cross hung over the original location's front door. The interior featured deep-red walls and plasma TV screens.Young, attractive women known as "budtenders" served the customers.Located next to an Irish pub, the venue opened without much notice in the fall of 2004. Eventually, its wide selection and competitive prices made it increasingly popular, and at its peak it was serving as many as 300 people a day.Neighbors in the affluent, largely residential neighborhood began complaining about parking problems and marijuana odors.When a rash of burglaries occurred during the spring of 2005, residents blamed them on the Green Cross's clientele, many of whom were, in the words of one angry email sent to Reed, "male, under 30, non-white" and characterized by a "skater punk/home boy/gang-banger aesthetic."Police never actually tied the burglaries to the Green Cross, and at a community meeting in June 2005 the local police captain reported that crime rates in the neighborhood had actually declined since the enterprise opened. In addition, Reed had made repeated attempts to placate his critics. He banned smoking in the dispensary and invested $50,000 in a security camera system and other building upgrades.He hired security guards to make sure his customers weren't double parking or loitering in the neighborhood.

Some neighborhood residents continued to press city officials to take action against his business, however, and in September 2005 the San Francisco Board of Appeals offered Reed a compromise of sorts.It wouldn't revoke his permit, but he would have to find a new location for his dispensary within six months.Unfortunately, the new restrictions imposed by San Francisco's Medical Cannabis Act made that virtually impossible-there are so many new conditions regarding potential locations that the great majority of the city has become off-limits to dispensaries. And even in those rare areas where they are permitted, you still have to find a willing landlord.The six months Reed had to find a new location for his business came and went, and in March 2006, the Green Cross shut its doors.A few months later, however, a landlord with a family member who used medical marijuana contacted Reed and offered to rent him space in a building on the outskirts of San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf neighborhood.Fisherman's Wharf is the city's major tourist area, home to cable cars, seafood restaurants, and gift shops.Much of the neighborhood is so schlocky that the addition of a Hooters was considered a classy upgrade. The landlord was offering Reed the ground-floor space in a three-story building that also housed a bed-and-breakfast inn. The street on which it is located is several blocks away from the heart of the wharf; it's across the street from a Holiday Inn and a tiny triangular park known as Joseph Conrad Square. Reed wasn't crazy about the location, but since he believed it met all the requirements of San Francisco's new regulations regarding cannabis dispensaries, he signed a lease and began the process of obtaining a permit.In May 2006, in an effort to introduce himself to the neighborhood, Reed put together a six-page pamphlet about his plans for the Green Cross and mailed it to local residents and merchants.Unfortunately, his talk of "zero-tolerance for illegal parking" and a "state-of-the-art security and surveillance system that includes more than a dozen infrared, high-definition cameras...that are recording activity around the dispensary 24 hours a day" only incited alarm.As part of the permit process, a public hearing about the Green Cross was scheduled to take place in the Planning Commission's chambers in July 2006. On the day of the hearing, dozens of neighborhood merchants and residents showed up at City Hall, all decorated with red stickers on their chests that featured slogans like "Character counts" and "Daddy, what's that smell?"Chris Martin is the unofficial leader of the opposition effort.Forty years ago, his father transformed a large brick building that had once housed the world's largest fruit-canning factory into a complex of shops, restaurants, and office space known as the Cannery. Martin is now the Cannery's managing partner, and the complex is on the side of Joseph Conrad Square opposite the Green Cross's proposed location.When I asked him why the dispensary would not make a suitable neighbor, he replied, "It's kind of a dysfunctional block already.The two cafes on it are having fistfights trying to take customers from each other."For the last two years, Martin has been trying to make the Cannery and its surrounding neighborhood more appealing to local residents rather than just tourists. "We're trying to make Fisherman's Wharf more authentic and reflective of its commercial fishing roots," he said. "That block should be pedestrian-friendly and compatible with the residents of this community. It's not a moral issue. It's a land use issue."When the Planning Commission was finally ready to consider the matter, however, Aaron Starr, a caseworker for the city's Planning Department, told the six commissioners that the proposed location met all planning code requirements and that the department believed it should receive a permit. Another Planning Department employee, Zoning Administrator Lawrence Badiner, assessed the general situation facing the city's dispensaries. The majority of them had planning code violations of one sort or another, he explained, and by August 2007 all of them would either have to comply with city code or face closure. "They're all going to have to go through review processes like this one, and they're probably all going to be controversial," he explained. "A good number of them may just close down."In other words, this wasn't just a matter of one more dispensary opening in the city. It was a test case. Under the new rules of San Francisco's Medical Cannabis Act, was it actually possible for new clubs to open? Were some, perhaps most, of the established clubs in danger of being shut down as well?When those who opposed the dispensary got their chance to speak, they each used the two minutes they were allotted to describe how a pot club would destroy life in the neighborhood as they had known it for decades.Parking on that block was already a huge problem, they explained.How could children laugh and play in Joseph Conrad Square when people were purchasing marijuana behind closed doors a couple hundred feet away? Why would any community-friendly business require so many surveillance cameras and security measures?And what about the numerous institutions within 1,000 feet of the Green Cross's proposed location that qualified as "recreation centers"? The well-being and safety of the patrons of the Crab Openers Association Hall and the Norwegian Seamen's Church, among others, they insisted, would be jeopardized by the intermittent presence of sickly potheads.And perhaps most important, what would the tourists think?A medical cannabis dispensary might fit into a city like, say, Omaha, with its long tradition of hippies, beatniks, and countercultural rebellion.But San Francisco? When tourists think of Baghdad by the Bay, they think of the things Fisherman's Wharf embodies-tacky T-shirts, overpriced crab served in dingy outdoor restaurants-not marijuana.Ultimately, the Planning Commission agreed, denying Reed's bid for a permit by a 4-2 vote. The next morning, the block where he was hoping to set up shop was already looking better.Parking was plentiful around the neighborhood. In Joseph Conrad Square, things were so quiet and peaceful that four figures slept on the tiny park's benches.They were either drug-free children or homeless men; it was hard to tell, because they were swaddled in grimy blankets.The tourists, meanwhile, had a chance to enjoy the authentic San Francisco character of a bar called the Dirty Martini without the distraction of a nondescript cannabis dispensary. The neighborhood's Norwegian seamen felt a little bit safer.Two and half months later, in September 2006, San Francisco's Board of Appeals gave the Green Cross one more chance to make its case, but came to the same decision as the Planning Commission. A few days later, the DEA raided eight Bay Area sites associated with the New Remedies chain, arresting 15 people.There are approximately two dozen dispensaries operating in the city, down from an estimated high of 43 in April 2005. Of those currently in business, only one, HopeNet, has received a permit from the Planning Commission that will allow it to continue to operate beyond July 2007. The rest must obtain a permit by then or face closure.The Real ThreatDuring my visit to the Church Street Compassion Center, I spoke with Mykey Barbitta, a longtime volunteer there.Barbitta has blonde hair, colorfully tattooed forearms, and a wraith-like gauntness.He looks as if he's witnessed more than a little pain and suffering over the years, but his demeanor is serene.A one-time bike messenger, he used to deliver cannabis to bed-ridden patients at an AIDS hospice. "They were dying," he recalled. "They were so weak they couldn't eat, couldn't even sit up in bed. But they'd reach out and grab the pot. It was the only thing that kept them going."Barbitta also described the center's status in the neighborhood. "We've been here forever," he explained, "so our neighbors are used to us." The center is part of a local merchants association. It runs ads in the neighborhood PennySaver. "The burrito place [next door], they love us," Barbitta continued. "We send them a lot of business."Then he showed me a framed letter from Rep. Nancy Pelosi, her response to his invitation to visit the center.The visit never materialized-Pelosi wrote that her busy schedule would not permit it-but Barbitta is proud of the letter just the same. "Here's the line that I really like," he said, pointing to a sentence where Pelosi thanks him for the work he's doing at the center.If the DEA ever raids the place, Barbitta joked, he's got a letter from a member of Congress on his side. "If that's not a defense in court, I don't know what is."In the end, though, the feds might not be the real threat.Because of its long-standing place in the neighborhood, the Church Street Compassion Center stands a decent chance of making it through the Planning Commission review process.But for many if not most of the dispensaries, the local zoning board has become more dangerous than the DEA.

*****

Under Federal law, a drug may be classified as a Schedule I drug (possession or sale illegal under all circumstances except for a very narrow research exception). In 1970 Congress initially placed marijuana in Schedule I, but recognized that classification was probably in error, appointed a Commission to study the issue, and instructed the DEA to reclassify based on that Commission's report (the Shaffer Commission recommended decriminalization).

To be a schedule I drug, a drug must (1) have a high potential for abuse, (2) have no significant medical use in the US, and (3) cannot be safely used under medical supervision.

(1) The DEA has never satisfactorily defined "abuse", a word not define in the statute. As far as mj is concerned, it is not addictive, only about 3% of users have problematic habituation, and drivers under the influence are at least as safe as sober drivers.

(2) MJ has been used medically in the US for over 150 years. At the time the Feds outlawed it, it could be purchased in any drug store. Its medical value is now established beyond question. Through the 1970s and 80s, its use as an anti-nausea, anti-spasmodic, and painkiller became well established as part of therapy for cancer, HIV/AIDS, and MS patients. The Israeli Army uses it for PTS treatment. Its older uses as relief for PMS, menstraul cramps, and migraine have been rediscovered. Eleven states have passed medical mj laws.

(3) A DEA Administrative Law Judge, in formal findings of fact, found it the "safest therapeutic agent known." No deaths are attributed to mj overdose.

So what is going on here? One new House of Representatives committee chair has announced that he will introduce an amendment to the drug laws to allow medical use of mj in states with state statutes allowing it.

That would be a start, but isn't it time for the feds to follow their own requirements and recognize the medical benefits and overall beneign nature of mj?

Meth and the Environment

2007-02-04T10:03:00.000-08:00

Pubdate: Fri, 02 Feb 2007
Source: Langley Advance (CN BC)
Copyright: 2007 Lower Mainland Publishing Group Inc.Contact: editorial@langleyadvance.comWebsite: http://www.langleyadvance.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1248
Author: Roxanne Hooper

METH MAKERS LEAVE COSTLY MESS
Langley taxpayers are paying a high price as the Township becomes known as the Lower Mainland's meth waste dump.Without even taking detox, lab dismantling and preventive education costs into account, Langley taxpayers are forking out more than$120,000 a year just to dispose of meth lab waste.
While Lower Mainland residents are increasingly aware of how prolific crystal methamphetamine use has become in today's society, and howhighly addictive and horrifyingly toxic the drug is, its producers continued to make and sell the hallucinogenic drug in mass quantities. But it seems the disposal of large quantities of waste created duringproduction of this drug is what is putting Langley on the map for manymeth producers.

...

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The hazardous nature of illegal meth labs and their environmental cost has been drummed into us for some years now. Before that, we were entertained by stories of the destruction caused by the dumping of gasoline and other solvents into Andean streams by Colombian cocaine factories.

What these stories don't tell us is that cocaine has been produced since the 1880s and amphetamines since the 1930s by responsible, legal manufacturers without environmental damage. Legal manufacturers, subject to governmental oversight and inspection, can be -- and are-- required to properly dispose of their industrial waste. (I know the Greens will object that regulations still allow manufacturers to pollute way too much, but we do hold the manufacturer of Ritalin to a higher standard that that observed by the typical country cooker of meth).

The number of meth abusers in this country is small now, but it is probably larger than it was in the 1950s and 60s, when all truckers used stay-awake pills, every suburban housewife tooke amphetamine to lose weight, and benzedrine inhalers could be purchased OTC.

Luckily (?), since the states have decided to make it practically impossible for us to buy cold medicine, trying to cut off the supply of pseudepinepherine (sp?) to meth cookers, most meth in this country is now imported from Mexico across our well-protected border, leaving the Mexicans to deal with the environmental damage.

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Responses to comments

1. Most doctors don't know how to treat pain. From the 1920s til the 1980s, most medical schools only taught "don't use opioids"; but then research started; and many new doctors know better. As a result, many undertreated patients have been left on their own and have turned to the street with unfortunate results.

2. George Washington as a toker is probably an urban myth springing from one entry in his diary about sexing hemp plants. It's true he raised hemp -- the British and colonial governments even required it as a necessary naval supply -- but most hemp has a THC content so low that one cannot get high smoking it. There is no evidence of recreational cannabis use in America before about 1860 and no evideence of smokin it until almost 1900.

Welcome

2007-02-03T14:23:00.000-08:00

This is a new Blog on which I intend to comment each day on a current news story about drugs or drug laws (mainly selected from mapinc.org). I hope these musings and opinions generate some good discussions, arguments, and even (I hope!) thoughts.

Pubdate: Fri, 02 Feb 2007
Source: Daily Midway Driller (CA)Copyright: 2007 Taft Midway Driller
Contact: editor@bak.rr.comWebsite: http://www.taftmidwaydriller.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3392
Author: Doug Keeler, Midway Driller Editor

HEROIN MAKES A COMEBACK
OxyContin Addicts Using Drug To Avoid Withdrawal Pain
People addicted to a powerful pain medicine are turning to an older substitute when they run out of their drug of choice. That's why local law enforcement officers are seeing an upswing in heroin use in the Taft area. Heroin is used to prevent the painful withdrawal from OxyContin the commonly used brand-name for the drug oxycodone, said Kern County Sheriff's Sgt. Martin Downs, commander of the Taft substation.
The increasing prevalence of heroin in the area was underscored in early January when deputies seized nearly an ounce of tar heroin when they conducted a probation search at a Taft home. OxyContin is a synthetic opiate used as a painkiller for the most severe pain and is often prescribed to a cancer patient.
Downs estimated there about 50 addicts in the Taft area, are using up to three tablets a day.

...

*****

One problem with the drug laws is that they try to classify drugs as either "good" or "bad". The problem is that drugs have no moral dimension; they merely are. Heroin is just another opioid, like morphine or Vicodin (hydrocodone). It can be used as a pinkiller or as a downer; and some (but far from all) of those who use it personally become addicted. However, when it was used legally, heroin was a great painkiller for those allergic to morphine. All of the opioids are virtually interchangeable.

Even nicotine, the drug to which I'm addicted, is not all evil. It is commonly used in gardens as a pesticide.

Drug regulation can never be successful if it focuses on the drugs themselves and not on the users.