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Tag: "marijuana"

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Against all odds: How marijuana was legalized in Denver
By Erich Vieth on January 23rd, 2010

Against all odds: How marijuana was legalized in Denver

If your quest were to convince the people of your city to legalize a highly demonized drug which was entirely safe, how would you run your campaign? At the recently concluded True Spin Conference in Denver, I had the opportunity to listen to an animated yet highly focused Mason Tyvert describing for the audience how he and his small and not-well-funded organization (“SAFER”) convinced the people of Denver to legalize marijuana in 2005, with 51% of the people voting in favor. He also spearheaded a 2006 campaign to legalize marijuana throughout Colorado. Although that latter measure failed, an astounding 41% of the people of Colorado voted in favor.

In case you’re thinking that I’m promoting the use of marijuana, I am not, but neither would I attempt to prohibit any other adult from using it. I’ve never used marijuana (even though I once worked as a musician and the opportunities were ubiquitous. Millions of gainfully employed and otherwise law abiding people do like to use marijuana, but they are paying dearly for their attempts to feel good and seek stress relief. I am for the legalization of marijuana because that our country arrests more than 750,000 people each year for possessing or using an extremely safe drug that successfully makes people feel good. This destructive and expensive waste of government law enforcement is absolutely shameful. The number of people arrested each year is more than the entire population of South Dakota. and these users include many people you know and respect.

There is rank hypocrisy in the air, given that marijuana inexpensively offers the harmless escape that most of us seek much of the time (in one way or another), without any serious side effects and without the expense of many other methods of escape. If there were no such thing as marijuana, when it was finally invented by a pharmaceutical company, we would hail it as a miracle drug (Big Pharma wouldn’t need to lie about its efficacy or safety, as it does for many other drugs). Governments would allow it to be sold at drugs stores and they would happily tax it.

Consider, too, that the U.S. “War on Drugs” (of which fear of marijuana is a huge component) costs almost enough U.S. tax money every year to hire almost one million teachers. These are some of the many reasons that marijuana should be legalized for all adults, not just those of us who are sick . . .

[more . . . ]

American Culture • Censorship • Communication • Drug laws • Politics • hypocrisy • ignorance
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By Erich Vieth on December 09th, 2009

Medical marijuana is coming to DC

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition is reporting that Congress is giving the OK to medical marijuana in Washington DC.

Who is LEAP?

A group of police and judges who want to legalize drugs pointed to new FBI numbers released today as evidence that the “war on drugs” is a failure that can never be won. The data, from the FBI’s “Crime in the United States” report, shows that in 2008 there were 1,702,537 arrests for drug law violations, or one drug arrest every 18 seconds.

“In our current economic climate, we simply cannot afford to keep arresting more than three people every minute in the failed ‘war on drugs,’” said Jack Cole, a retired undercover narcotics detective who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). “Plus, if we legalized and taxed drug sales, we could actually create new revenue in addition to the money we’d save from ending the cruel policy of arresting users.”

LEAP’s motto is that while drug use is bad, “The War on Drugs is Worse.”

Drug laws • law and order
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By Erich Vieth on November 23rd, 2009

Marijuana as an autism treatment

What rational person could possibly cast blame at these parents for treating their autistic son with marijuana? This result suggests the need for further research, it would seem.

 

Drug laws • Health
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By Erich Vieth on November 03rd, 2009

Gagging the experts when discussing the war on drugs

Jim Webb introduced a bill to “create a blue-ribbon commission to look at every aspect of our criminal justice system with an eye toward reshaping the process from top to bottom.”

How shall we proceed? A recent amendment to Webb’s bill by Republican Senator Charles Grassley would bar the commission from “considering” “legalization” of presently controlled substances. See also, this post by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

Rolling Stone reports in more detail:

Enter unreconstructed drug warrior Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has released the text of an amendment that would ensure the commission not reach any conclusions that threaten 40 years of failure. The commission would be prohibited, thanks to Grassley, from examining any “policies that favor decriminalization of violations of the Controlled Substances Act or the legalization of any controlled substances.”

Here’s the text of Grassley’s proposed gag rule:

SEC. ll. RESTRICTIONS ON AUTHORITY.
The Commission shall have no authority to make findings related to current Federal, State, and local criminal justice policies and practices or reform recommendations that involve, support, or otherwise discuss the decriminalization of any offense under the Controlled Substances Act or the legalization of any controlled substance listed under the Controlled Substances Act.

Therefore . . . let’s figure out how to revamp our criminal justice system but let’s not discuss the elephant in the room: the fact that the “war on drugs” that has ruined more lives than drugs ever could have ruined. It’s important to keep in mind that some conservatives see the light on the “drug war.”

Drug laws • Featured • Law • law and order
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By Erich Vieth on October 23rd, 2009

Phelps versus Armstrong

Phelps versus Armstrong; safe marijuana v. dangerous alcohol. As David Sirota explains, it’s all a tale of deep hypocrisy when Phelps is pilloried for smoking in private while Armstrong is AOK for hawking beer in public.

American Culture • Drug laws • Health
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By Erich Vieth on October 01st, 2009

Conservative judge once again advocates decriminalization

Retired Judge James Gray has impeccable conservative credentials. I’ve posted about him previously. In a recent article in the Daily Pilot, he most reasonably suggests that most Americans would share most of the following goals:

1. Reduce the exposure of drugs to and usage of drugs by children;

2. Stop or materially reduce the violence that accompanies the manufacture and distribution of drugs, especially to police officers and innocent by-standers;

3. Stop or materially reduce the corruption of public officials, individual people and companies, and especially children that accompanies the manufacture and distribution of drugs;

4. Stop or materially reduce crime both by people trying to get money to purchase drugs and by those under the influence of drugs;

5. Stop or materially reduce the flow of drugs into our country;

6. Reduce health risks to people who use drugs;

7. Maintain and reaffirm our civil liberties;

8. Reduce the number of people we must put into our jails and prisons;

9. Stop or materially reduce the flow of guns out of our country and into countries south of our border;

10. Increase respect for our laws and institutions.

What is a good way to simultaneously further all of these goals? All we need to do is to treat the manufacture and sale of drugs “just like we treat alcohol.” Consider #2 in more detail–attempting to curtail violence on the streets. Judge Gray offers a hypothetical:

Today if Budweiser has distribution problems with Coors, they don’t take guns to the streets to resolve them. Instead they file a complaint in court, and have it peacefully adjudicated by judges like me.

Consider also, common sense economics: if drugs were not punished with criminal sanctions, the price of drugs would fall and “drug addicted people would only need to steal half as much to get their drugs.”

The case for decriminialization is utterly compelling to anyone who takes the time to consider the sceop of the current problem. For instance, it’s time to stop throwing 700,000 people into jail every year just because they use marijuana. Many of these people are (other than the marijuana offenses) peace-loving tax-paying citizens with families. It’s time to stop the insanity.

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By Erich Vieth on September 29th, 2009

Burning American tax dollars to incarcerate Canadian seed sellers

We’re about to spend hundreds of thousands of American dollars incarcerating a Canadian who was busted for selling marijuana seeds. He never set foot in the United States, but he’s being extradited. Who did he hurt?

“There isn’t a single victim in my case, no one who can stand up and say, ‘I was hurt by Marc Emery.’ No one.”

Here’s the conclusion of an article by Ian Mulgrew of the Vancouver Sun:

Emery is facing more jail time than corporate criminals who defraud widows and orphans and longer incarceration than violent offenders who leave their victims dead or in wheelchairs. Whatever else you may think of him — and I know he rankles many — what is happening to him today mocks our independence and our ideal of justice.

Emery’s crime is so incredibly serious that he would have spent an entire month in a Canadian prison for his crime. But, apparently, we have nothing better to do with American tax dollars than incarcerating people who sell marijuana seeds to people who want to buy them.

Drug laws • Featured • law and order
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By Erich Vieth on August 17th, 2009

Police officers have epiphany: time to legalize and regulate street drugs

In the Washington Post, two police officers make the case that it’s time to legalize and regulate street drugs. Why? To quit squandering tax dollars, to quit filling prisons with people who don’t belong there and to protect neighborhoods and police officers.

Only after years of witnessing the ineffectiveness of drug policies — and the disproportionate impact the drug war has on young black men — have we and other police officers begun to question the system . . . Drug manufacturing and distribution is too dangerous to remain in the hands of unregulated criminals. Drug distribution needs to be the combined responsibility of doctors, the government, and a legal and regulated free market. This simple step would quickly eliminate the greatest threat of violence: street-corner drug dealing.

Here’s the “money” quote:

Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimates that ending the drug war would save $44 billion annually, with taxes bringing in an additional $33 billion.

Addictions • Health • law and order
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By Erich Vieth on July 20th, 2009

Our insane drug war, revisited

Mother Jones has hammered our drug war with undeniable facts . . . well, undeniable unless you are a government official in charge of the “drug war.” In fact, as authors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery advise us, the entire history of the U.S. “war on drugs” is actually a governmental war on truth.

[T]he drug war has never been about facts—about, dare we say, soberly weighing which policies might alleviate suffering, save taxpayers money, rob the cartels of revenue. Instead, we’ve been stuck in a cycle of prohibition, failure, and counterfactual claims of success. (To wit: Since 1998, the ONDCP has spent $1.4 billion on youth anti-pot ads. It also spent $43 million to study their effectiveness. When the study found that kids who’ve seen the ads are more likely to smoke pot, the ONDCP buried the evidence, choosing to spend hundreds of millions more on the counterproductive ads.) What would a fact-based drug policy look like? It would put considerably more money into treatment, the method proven to best reduce use. It would likely leave in place the prohibition on “hard” drugs, but make enforcement fair . . . And it would likely decriminalize but tightly regulate marijuana, which study after study shows is less dangerous or addictive than cigarettes or alcohol, has undeniable medicinal properties, and isn’t a gateway drug to anything harder than Doritos.

If you want to see a bunch of demoralized people wasting time, park yourself at your local drug court and watch a judge slapping faux sentences on marijuana users and small-time peddlers. Everyone involved knows that the system is a joke–a money sucking time-wasting absurd joke that ruins lives, because every so often someone gets ripped from his or her family, thrown into prison for years. The crime (just to remind you) is that these users wanted to feel pleasure. And sometimes its more absurd: the criminal wanted to escape stress or anxiety and he didn’t have a fancy health insurance policy that would allow a doctor to hand him legal pills that do the same thing. And maybe he didn’t want to legally rot out his liver with alcohol, which is the other way of getting a similar high.

As I’ve made clear many times, I am not promoting drug use of any kind. I just had serious surgery and I could have loaded up on narcotics that were made available to me, but I didn’t because I don’t want that or need that. I’m a lucky person in that regard. I am not interested in altering my mind through chemicals. I am trying to convince my daughters that they should strive for clean drug-free living. But I am aware that many people want or need relief from stressful lives (or from their own misfiring brains) or maybe they want the option to simply chill out. I certainly don’t want to stand in their way any more than I would tell a patient to not take those pills prescribed by her doctor.

It’s time to stop spending billions of tax dollars on a drug war that doesn’t stop drug use and only ramps up violence, destabilizes governments and steals critical services from taxpayers. The drug war is highly immoral, but we won’t be able to fix the situation until we have the courage to have an honest conversation.

Related posts:

The most harmful thing about marijuana is jail (reporting on the opinion of a conservative judge).

The Economist’s argument to stop the war on drugs. (includes the mind-scrambling statistic that the U.S. spend $40 B each year trying to stop the use of illegal drugs).

Johann Hari’s argument that It’s time to stop the drug war. (more shocking statistics)

It isn’t dangerous to use marijuana. (Really, no more dangerous than Doritos)

Addictions • American Culture • Politics • hypocrisy • law and order
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By Erich Vieth on June 29th, 2009

Hard work and drugs in America

Ryan Grim has just published This is Your Country on Drugs, and he has presented some of his main ideas at Huffpo.

[O]ur nation diverges sharply from the rest of the world in a few crucial ways. Americans work hard: 135 hours a year more than the average Briton, 240 hours more than the typical French worker, and 370 hours–that’s nine weeks–more than the average German. We also play hard. A global survey released in 2008 found that Americans are more than twice as likely to smoke pot as Europeans. Forty-two percent of Americans had puffed at one point; percentages for citizens of various European nations were all under 20. We’re also four times as likely to have done coke as Spaniards and roughly ten times more likely than the rest of Europe.

What is driving law enforcement regarding drug use. Grim’s answer focuses on our ambivalence toward pleasure:

When pleasure is suspected, American drug use gets tricky, particularly when that high might do some real good, as in the case of medical marijuana.

American Culture • law and order
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By Erich Vieth on June 22nd, 2009

Federal Bill introduced to decriminalize marijuana

Citing John Stuart Mill, Barney Frank has introduced a bill to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana and use of marijuana in public:

Frank has filed a bill that would eliminate federal penalties for personal possession of less than 100 grams of marijuana. It would also make the penalty for using marijuana in public just $100.

This bill would make sense for many reasons including these. Or listen to the reasons of this conservative judge. Or consider these reasons.

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Conservative Judge: the most harmful thing about marijuana is jail.
By Erich Vieth on April 05th, 2009

Conservative Judge: the most harmful thing about marijuana is jail.

Judge James P. Gray is a trial Judge in Orange County, California, a former attorney in the Navy JAG corps, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles; he has also been a civil litigation attorney for a private law firm. In these two videos, he talks about marijuana and our “failed and hopeless drug policy” in America.

According to Gray, it’s easier for kids to get marijuana than alcohol because alcohol is regulated by the government and marijuana is regulated by drug dealers on the street.

These are excellent videos, caused by a thoughtful judge who is in a position to know.

If we started treating marijuana as we do alcohol, we would see five immediate benefits:

California would save $1 Billion in state expenses currently used to prosecute marijuana offenses.

California would generate $1.3B in take revenue per year in California (marijuana is currently the number one cash crop in California, with grapes being #2).

We’d make marijuana less available than it is now, and the quality of marijuana would be better regulated than it is now.

The entire medical marijuana controversy would go away–the Federal government is currently acting like a “bully” harassing sick people.

The hemp industry is a viable industrial crop, more valuable than cotton. You can get more paper from an acre of hemp than an acre of trees, and it’s much more environmentally friendly. The diesel engine was originally designed to run on hemp. The sails of the ship “Old Ironsides,” The U.S. Constitution were made of hemp fibers. The original copy of the founding document, the U.S. Constitution was made of hemp. It is an extremely valuable crop that we fail to exploit.

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Why don’t we treat marijuana like alcohol, even though the majority of people are willing to do this? Why does the federal government care? Here’s Judge Gray’s belief: At least 75% of everyone in the U.S. who uses any illicit substance uses only marijuana. By legalizing and regulating marijuana, the federal government would no longer justify our “colossal prison-industrial complex.” Many government jobs depend on the “war on drugs.” Two Congressmen have admitted to Judge Gray that “the war on drugs is not winnable, but it’s imminently fund-able.” He concludes that the federal government is “addicted to the drug war funding.”

For more on the harmlessness of marijuana, see this earlier DI post.

These videos were produced by Lee Stranahan, a writer, photographer and independent filmmaker. He also blogs for The Huffington Post .

Addictions • Featured • War • law and order
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By Erich Vieth on March 28th, 2009

Maher, Rushdie, Hitchens and Mos Def have an honest conversation about marijuana

Maher and guests (Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens and Mos Def) had an honest conversation about marijuana, politics and prohibition. Compare this honesty to Obama’s recent concocted statement, which was carefully designed to keep him safe from Republican character attacks. This topic of the legalization of marijuana needs more honest discussion, or else we will continue tossing 800,000 victimless “criminals” into the justice system every year. I’m not promoting the use of marijuana or any other mind-altering drug; I would prefer that everyone stay sober and naturally high on life. The current system is insanity, however, and I don’t see any hope for the honest public conversations we need to have.

On a related note, Huffpo reports that the violent big-time sellers of illegal drugs are thrilled to hear that we are going to continue our violence-inducing and generally counter-productive “drug war”:

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, reported head of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, ranked 701st on Forbes’ yearly report of the wealthiest men alive, and worth an estimated $1 billion, today officially thanked United States politicians for making sure that drugs remain illegal. According to one of his closest confidants, he said, “I couldn’t have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama, none of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, Gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you.”

Addictions • Health • Medicine • Psychology Cognition • law and order
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