Easiest Bust In History

Thank goodness this menace to the nation is taken care of:

A U.S. Border Patrol spokesman says country singer Willie Nelson was charged with marijuana possession after 6 ounces was found aboard his tour bus in Texas.

Patrol spokesman Bill Brooks says the bus pulled into the Sierra Blanca, Texas, checkpoint about 9 a.m. Friday. Brooks says an officer smelled pot when a door was opened and a search turned up marijuana.

Brooks says the Hudspeth County sheriff was contacted and Nelson was among three people arrested.

Next thing you know, they’ll target Tommy Chong. Oh, nevermind.

Complete Idiocy From the WH

What happens when you add two legal substances together? They magically become deadly and illegal:

The White House on Wednesday threw its support behind a ban on beverages that infuse alcohol and caffeine.

Drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said he welcomed a ruling by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that would effectively ban drinks like Four Loko and Joost, which have come under scrutiny for their alleged role in several cases of alcohol intoxication on college campuses.

“These products are designed, branded, and promoted to encourage binge drinking, and I commend the FDA for acting promptly to curb their sale,” Kerlikowske said in a statement. “These drinks are especially unhealthy and dangerous because they combine alcohol and caffeine — and present a further concern when used by young people.”

Does this mean I can expect a no-knock raid this Sunday because I put a little Bailey’s and Bushmills in my coffee before a Steelers game?

Locally grown and operated

Arizona has legalized medical marijuana, joining fifteen other states across the country that allow marijuana use for health purposes. A system of cultivation and dispensaries will be operative by late summer 2011, with all plants grown in-state. 125 dispensaries are allowed in the new law, and dispensaries must be located at least 500 feet from schools. Only chronic conditions like cancer, HIV/AIDS, and glaucoma will be initially open for prescriptions, though this can change through public petition. Law enforcement in the state has been almost unanimously against the measure, which is no surprise, even if it is a badly misguided position.

The state health department worries how they will pay for the initial program set-up which could cost as much as $800,000. I suppose they will be able to recoup the costs through taxes and licensing fees and so-forth, but I wonder also where the money will come from initially. The state is strapped for cash. Nevertheless, I’m counting this as good news both in the war on drugs and for people who will benefit from a safe, legal way to obtain marijuana for medical purposes.

Parallels

What do you immediately think of when you read this:

A top leader of the Gulf drug cartel was killed during a two-hour gun battle with Mexican security forces in the border city of Matamoros, authorities said.

Antonio Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, known as “Tony Tormenta” or “Tony the Storm,” was killed in the shootout Friday, Mexican military officials said in a statement.

Something like this, maybe:

A recent drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal region killed one of al Qaeda’s top commanders, two Pakistani security officials told CNN Tuesday.

Sheikh Mohammad Fateh al Masri, described as the group’s senior operational commander, was killed in North Waziristan, one of the seven districts of the country’s volatile tribal region.

Only the names change, but the game goes on. Permanent war is permanent war.

“Yes, We Cannabis”

Al Giordano at The Field has a long, detailed, fascinating piece on generational demographics and its effect on American politics—“I Have Seen the Future of US Politics & Its Name is Prop 19“:

... SUSA titles its analysis, “Some Evidence That California’s Marijuana Tail is Wagging Barbara Boxer’s Dog; Voters Without Home Phones, Voters Focused on Decriminalization, May Tip Senate.” In sum, the pollsters have identified the key factor in Boxer’s contest vs. Republican Carly Fiorina, who leads narrowly with 46 percent over 44 percent for the incumbent. By looking separately at voters who only use cell phones, those who have both cell and home phones, and those only with home telephones, SUSA has found significant differences in the voting intentions of the cell phone-only citizens and the rest. It is no secret to young people (of all ages) who use cell phones exclusively that they are culturally distinct from land liners in ways that extend beyond hardware preferences.

Nomadic, and on the move, more reliant on the Internet than the television for their news intake, they’re the future of the United States. And they’re also a lot more multi-racial – and more actively defy societal apartheids – than the rest of the population. OMG! Wait… wait… see that little light bulb popping on over our heads? By Jove, I think we get it! Those are the 2008 first time Obama voters, duh! And getting them to vote in the midterm elections is the biggest headache that the White House and the Democratic party has right now leading up to November 2…

Interestingly enough, Boxer opposes Proposition 19. So does former and future Governor Jerry Brown… And when I see Attorney General Eric Holder and drug czar Gil Kerlikowske embarrass themselves with anti-Prop 19 posturing – given that the data shows that highly motivated Prop 19 supporters are the Democrats’ only ace left to save the California senate seat, and what that implies for the rest of the country in 2012 – I have to wonder aloud whether this is the usual fear-motivated political posturing on the part of these Democrats or a more calculated strategy to hope Prop 19 loses narrowly in order to have it on the ballot again two years from now and bring the new “swing voter” back to the ballot box again. If that is the hidden agenda, it is a risky one, not one that I would recommend, because if Prop 19 goes down this year there are going to be a lot of pissed off reform votes out there, some of whom remember when the words “tea party” had other connotations…

The best case scenario for Democrats, however, is not that Prop 19 loses and comes up again in California in 2012, but to the contrary: If the historic Proposition 19 passes, the pundits and talking heads that generate the misnamed “conventional wisdom” in the Washington DC beltway will be falling all over each other to note that Prop 19 won and it pulled Boxer out of the fire with it. If coming out of Election Night, Prop 19 emerges with the sheen of a newly-minted winner, Democratic strategists will have little choice but to adopt a “50 state strategy” (especially in the 26 states – Maine, Massachusetts, and virtually everything west of the Mississippi River – that have citizen generated statewide ballot initiative processes), and go “all in” on legalizing, regulating and taxing marijuana, even if their politicians continue to balk at saying it aloud. And if you’re a Democratic (or Republican) politician that doesn’t yet see the writing on the wall, remember how most of you were wrong (or late) in your predictions two and three years ago, and that “Yes, We Can” means “Yes, We Cannabis,” too.

Go read the whole thing before you start arguing about the details—there’s a lot of solid numbers and information that I can’t do justice in a teaser here. I don’t have the background to judge whether Giordano is right about the Democrats’ possible Sekrit Plan, but he’s got an excellent record when it comes to predicting specific contests, largely because he’s been good about parsing the numbers rather than finger-to-the-winding Conventional Wisdom.

Our Failed Wars

Great piece up by Glenn on something we’ve discussed hundreds of times- the failed war on drugs and how similar it is to the war on terror:

It’s the perfect deceit. These wars, in an endless loop, sustain and strengthen the very menaces which, in turn, justify their continuous escalation. These wars manufacture the very dangers they are ostensibly designed to combat. Meanwhile, the industries which fight them become richer and richer. The political officials those industries own become more and more powerful. Brutal drug cartels monopolize an unimaginably profitable, no-competition industry, while Terrorists are continuously supplied the perfect rationale for persauding huge numbers of otherwise unsympathetic people to join them or support them. Everyone wins—except for ordinary citizens, who become poorer and poorer, more and more imprisoned, meeker and meeker, and less and less free.

I was talking to Sadly No’s Bradrocket the other day, and one of the great things about Prop 19, along with it being great legislation, is that it is an issue that also resonates with Democratic voters. Especially young voters. Having this on the ballot is going to bring out a lot of votes that otherwise would have stayed at home, this being a non-Presidential election. Basically, Prop 19 is the saintly counterpart to all the gay bashing ballot initiatives Republicans use to get the bigots out to vote in off years, and this may save Boxer’s ass this election. Good on the people pushing Prop 19, and maybe we could learn from this and have more ballot initiatives that have worthy goals and engage and electrify the base in the future.

BTW- To help the FDL initiative to call people regarding Prop 19, call here.

Gold Weed

Sully has been tracking the price of good pot, and it’s clocking in between $250-500.

If pot is legalized and farmed (rather than “grown” as a cottage industry), I’d imagine that price will go down by a factor of as much as 1000. Once a bunch of Dakota farmers plant a few quarters (160 acres) of weed, the unit of measure will be the bale, not the bag. And I doubt that quality will go down much. Hydroponic vegetables just aren’t as good as those grown outdoors, and with a real market for pot, the fertilizer and seed companies will come up with strains and chemicals matched to growing conditions.

We could be the world’s reefer basket, instead we’re putting millions of people in jail.

The Police State Is Here To Defend Your Right To Suffer

At what point do we just give in and accept that we are a fascist state:

Sheriffs in North Carolina want access to state computer records identifying anyone with prescriptions for powerful painkillers and other controlled substances.

The state sheriff’s association pushed the idea Tuesday, saying the move would help them make drug arrests and curb a growing problem of prescription drug abuse. But patient advocates say opening up people’s medicine cabinets to law enforcement would deal a devastating blow to privacy rights.

Allowing sheriffs’ offices and other law enforcement officials to use the state’s computerized list would vastly widen the circle of people with access to information on prescriptions written for millions of people. As it stands now, doctors and pharmacists are the main users.

Gee. It probably would make it easier to make drug arrests if you had a list of people using prescription drugs. You could go to their house, knock in their door, and you are probably guaranteed to find drugs! And then you could seize any loose cash, the drugs, and any property you think might have been involved in the drug use, call their abode a “crack den” and seize that too. And then it is up to the person using a legally prescribe substance to prove they are innocent to get their property back.

At some point, people are going to realize that the war on drugs and the war on terrorism are actually declarations of war on the rights of the American citizen. Can anyone anywhere give me one good reason why some fascist cop in North Carolina needs to know what my doctor prescribed to me? Just one.

And it goes without saying the kind of negative effect this will have on pain management. This is just another attempt to intimidate doctors.

Why Johnny Can’t Conform

This post has a pretty chilling list of invasions of student privacy:

The increasing use of student surveillance and intrusion of school districts into students’ extra-curricular conduct should alarm us all.   Whether it is a district surveilling students in their bedrooms via webcam, conducting random drug or locker searches, strip-searching students, lowering the standard for searching students to “reasonable suspicion” from “probable cause,” disciplining students for conduct outside of school hours, searching their cellphones and text messages, or allegedly forcing them to undergo pregnancy testing, student privacy is under increasing threat.

Glenn Greenwald’s gloss on this is “children are being trained to give up all privacy, and to be good, dutiful Surveillance State citizens, through constant, pervasive surveillance in schools.”

While children are learning to tolerate more surveillance, I don’t think that our current society is set up for kids to be completely dutiful. The drinking age is now 21 everywhere, smoking pot is still more-or-less illegal, and the downloading of media (music or movies) can come with bigger fines than smoking a joint. Teenagers still engage in all of these activities, and in order to do so, they’re sneaking around. There may be more surveillance, but the need to evade it is as strong as ever, and I have faith that the desire to smoke a joint, drink a beer or download a pirated movie will trump whatever indoctrination occurs in the schools.

Just to be clear: I think the increasing criminalization of adolescence is outrageous – I’m just observing how things are, not how I wish they were.

New Treatment for Psychotic Depression?

The temptation is to make a joke about timeliness, but too many of us know how crippling (sometimes fatal) a disease depression can be. Or perhaps that knowledge is why we make such jokes. From ABC News, “Controversial RU-486 Studied For Treatment of Psychotic Depression”:

... The drug, a synthetic steroid compound known as mifepristone, is known as RU-486 in Europe, and marketed as Mifeprex in the United States. In combination with misoprostol, the drug was used in 161,000 medical abortions in the United States last year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

But in clinical trials over the last decade, researchers have been using the drug to treat psychotic depression, a terrifying form of depression that carries a high suicide risk, and for which there are few sure-fire cures. They say the drug acts on the brain’s receptors for cortisol, the so-called “stress hormone.”

The Food and Drug Administration will review an application for use as a treatment for psychotic depression at the end of the year.
[...]

“When people are stressed, we know that there is an increase in inflammation and cortisol,” said Kenneth Robbins, medical director of psychiatry at Stoughton Hospital and professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. “I think this hypothesis is really interesting, and has to do with inflammation and cortisol metabolism, and treating inflammation somehow improves mood.”
[...]

As for the potential for RU-486, which is so highly regulated that the distributor—Danco Laboratories—has offices in a secret location so they are not hounded by anti-abortion protesters, Robbins said, “I think we have to keep an open mind.”

What interests Robbins is how steroids, which are used to decrease an inflammatory reaction, play a role in depression. And RU-486 is known to decrease the body’s steroid system.

The raw scientific information here is literally half the story. I’ve left out the personal saga that actually headlined the article: “Woman Buys Abortion Drug Illegally to Stop Psychotic Depression”. Mifepristone is a Schedule 1 drug here in the United States, put in the most tightly controlled class because of what in another drug would be treated as “an unfortunate side effect”. The American profiled in this piece is “uninsurable except in an expensive high-risk pool” ; she travels overseas to spend an estimated $15,000 – $20,000 every year to buy the drugs illicitly which enable her to function well enough to afford her medication. Just another statistic in our neverending War on Some Drugs. But at least we’re getting an FDA review!

Open Thread: ‘Medical Miracle’ of the Week

Study touts horse tranquilizer Ketamine as ‘magic’ anti-depressant:

Ketamine, a general anesthetic usually administered to children and pets but perhaps best known as a horse tranquilizer, is also highly effective in low doses as an anti-depressant, according a study published Thursday.

Researchers at Yale University wrote in the August 20 issue of the journal Science that unlike most anti-depressants on the market which can take weeks to take full effect ketamine can begin to counter depression in hours.

“It’s like a magic drug—one dose can work rapidly and last for seven to 10 days,” said Ronald Duman, professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Yale and senior author of the study.

The researchers noted that ketamine was tested as a rapid treatment for people with suicidal thoughts. Traditional anti-depressants can take several weeks to take effect, they noted.

The researchers found that ketamine improves depression-like behavior in rats by restoring connections between brain cells damaged by chronic stress.

Whatever the cost benefits of giving depressed individuals a shot of “Special K” as an alternative to long-term therapy, I wanted to highlight the “chronic stress” issue. For all the attention paid to the delicate feelings of Wall Street banksters and other highly-paid criminals, being poor is one of the main causes of chronic stress, as well as contributing to many other sources (untreated medical conditions, bad nutrition, family dysfunction, dangerous living environments). And chronic stress will shorten your lifespan even when it doesn’t lead directly to suicide. But I can confidently predict that this study will lead to a spate of thumb-sucking (finger-wagging) articles about the “dangers” of allowing people who can’t afford six weeks at Hazelden to “self-medicate”. And a bunch of pharmaceutical funding diverted to coming up with a “boutique” (i.e., patentable) version of ketamine that can be marketed to Medicare users as a longterm mood improver…

(h/t General Stuck for the link)

The problem with marijuana cooperatives

Mark Kleiman, in the comments, objects to my framing of his argument against commercial sales of marijuana, and points to this passage in his original piece:

On the cannabis front, my plea is for a “grow-your-own” policy: consumers would be allowed to cultivate pot for their own use, to give it away, or to join small consumer-owned co-ops to produce the stuff for them. No commercial sales. [emphasis added]

There are several things wrong with this.

First, it creates at best a gray market. You can grow it, smoke it, and join a co-op to help produce it, but you can’t sell it to whoever you want or buy it from whoever you want. This is very fuzzy. Can you think of any other product like this? I can’t, and I don’t think Americans would take to the idea very well (what, I can’t buy bread at the store, I have to make it myself? What the hell is a co-op?) or that our regulatory apparatus would be up to enforcing it (not to mention the potential for regulatory capture at the local and state level). Furthermore, this strikes me as little more than Kleiman’s own preferred version of Capitalism Lite – a sort of throwback to distributism – Chestertonian in its romanticism, but not terribly practical.

Second, no matter how you spin this, consumers of marijuana under Kleiman’s rules would also have to be producers of marijuana – if not directly, then indirectly through a co-operative. Rather than casually purchasing pot whenever they wanted, they would have to make a commitment to either A) grow the stuff, or B) become involved with a group of people growing the stuff. If anything, this works against Kleiman’s paternalist instincts. Where Kleiman seeks to protect the consumer from the big marijuana corporations, he ends up making consumers more financially vested in the product, and thus more bound to its success, use, and so forth. Probably not the best idea when you’re attempting to keep use of the product to a minimum. This would be like forcing drinkers to have a financial stake in whatever alcohol they were consuming. And a lot of people just don’t want that. They want the freedom to choose to simply buy the stuff at a store or, if there’s no co-op nearby and nobody growing, then from a dealer.

Which brings us to point number three. I don’t think co-ops would actually spell the end of the illicit marijuana trade unless the co-ops were allowed to scale up to the point where basically they were operating as commercial businesses. So either you lose the idyllic co-operative-only market or you sustain the demand for the black market.

And last, there is simply nothing in this argument that makes it necessary. The problem with pot is that it’s illegal, not anything inherent with the drug – at least no more so than alcohol (and probably a lot less). If pot becomes legal I hope we don’t regulate out home growers or local co-operatives. That would be a disaster and a travesty. Imagine doing to the wine industry what was done to the beer industry for so long. Imagine the Budweiser of bud – and that all legal marijuana was so lifeless. But preventing commercial sale of anything that has a high consumer demand is just asking for trouble, even if you provide avenues for that demand to be met. Those avenues are simply unnecessary when an open market could exist instead. If we really want to curtail marijuana usage, legalize it and then tax the hell out of it. At least people will be able to buy it and consume it safely.

I love the idea of co-operatives and a more cooperative economy generally, but I don’t think this is the right way to go about it. Sure, Kleiman’s proposal is better than the status quo, but full commercial legalization makes much more sense and seems much more workable. It’s also a hell of a lot less paternalistic, and if the war on drugs has taught us anything, it’s that paternalism and pot don’t mix.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Update.

Some commenters are not reading me very closely. When I wrote:

I don’t think Americans would take to the idea very well (what, I can’t buy bread at the store, I have to make it myself? What the hell is a co-op?) or that our regulatory apparatus would be up to enforcing it (not to mention the potential for regulatory capture at the local and state level).

I did not mean that I didn’t know what a co-op is. If you read the whole post it’s fairly clear that I have a handle on the basic idea behind a co-op. My point is that many Americans don’t and wouldn’t understand why they were forced to either grow or join a co-op in order to have legal marijuana. My flippant example was if the same rule were applied to bread.

That being said, I think y’all are mostly right on target here. Cheers!

Just say no to prohibition

This doesn’t make any sense to me. Mark Kleiman argues that pot should be legal to grow and use and give away but not to sell commercially. His reasons? Because it’s bad for you, like beer is bad for you. And because the Marijuana lobby would be really, really bad. (Note, Kleiman does not propose to ban the sale of alcohol and return us to the days of stills and home breweries.)

Kleiman is wrong on many fronts, but mainly he’s wrong because most people who want to smoke pot don’t want to grow it. They want to buy it. And all these people spending money to grow their own aren’t going to give it away to everyone for free, which leaves us with a demand to fill but not nearly the level of supply needed to fill it. The only thing standing between that demand and the supply shortage would be the government. Which, naturally, leads to black markets, drug dealers, confiscation of property by police departments, drug raids, shooting deaths and so forth. Not too far a cry from where we’re at now.

So we have a choice: create a legal market or a new black market.

One of these two markets will exist no matter what we do, because people are going to smoke pot one way or another. The laws we have now don’t prevent this. Allowing home growing but not commercial sales won’t either. Nothing will. This is one vice that isn’t going anywhere and doesn’t really need “America’s marketing geniuses” in order to peddle.

Kleiman thinks all the companies selling marijuana will be like the Big Tobacco companies, with a fierce lobbying arm and a huge monopoly over the market, preying mercilessly on helpless consumers. But that’s not going to happen if we just legalize marijuana and don’t set up regulations which grant these big companies de facto monopolies to begin with. Small growers, like small brewers, will do just fine. And no, we won’t have a bunch of crazed cannabis users at the mercy of Marijuana Inc. Some people will smoke too much pot, but plenty of people already do and many of them quit before their lives are ruined.

A better idea would be to simply not regulate out home growers from the market – which is a legitimate concern. Setting up laws which prevent home growing will crowd out home growers and make big corporations much more powerful. Simply opening up the market to both will create a much more level playing field. I think it will actually be extremely difficult for big corporations to compete with local growers – economies of scale be damned, pot smokers enjoy the quality of their product too much – but at least that competition will exist.

Furthermore, I’m much more afraid of violent drug dealers, over-eager SWAT teams, and the whole awful black market cycle of violence than I am about the lobbying arms of a few big corporations which apparently fill Kleiman with fear. I’ll take lobbyists over drug cartels any day.

Blog del Narco

This is an interesting piece about a Mexican drug news blog run by an anonymous student.

“For the scanty details that they (mass media) put on television, they get grenades thrown at them and their reporters kidnapped,” the blogger said. “We publish everything. Imagine what they could do to us.”

Of course, since he posts information he gets directly from drug cartels, he gets a tsk-tsk from a journalist:

“Media outlets have social responsibilities and have to serve the public,” said Carlos Lauria, of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. “This is being produced by someone who is not doing it from a journalistic perspective. He is doing it without any ethical considerations.”

I’m sure Lauria’s committee is a good bunch of people who do good work, but I think we can all do without the journalism lectures from self-appointed gatekeepers.

I Almost Forgot

I’ve been so consumed by hippy-punching, I forgot to promote this worthy venture from the Jane Hamshers of the Left:

Just Say Now is a project of Firedoglake and Students for Sensible Drug Policy. Our campaign is working to support marijuana legalization efforts across the United States.

Go sign the petition!