Three takes on weed

First, USA Today did it's best to create the impression that there is still a raging debate about marijuana and the gateway theory:

Most users of more addictive drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, started with marijuana, scientists say, and the earlier they started, the greater their risk of becoming addicted.

Many studies have documented a link between smoking marijuana and the later use of "harder" drugs such as heroin and cocaine, but that doesn't necessarily mean marijuana causes addiction to harder drugs.

"Is marijuana a gateway drug? That question has been debated since the time I was in college in the 1960s and is still being debated today," says Harvard University psychiatrist Harrison Pope, director of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at Boston's McLean Hospital. "There's just no way scientifically to end that argument one way or the other."

That's because it's impossible to separate marijuana from the environment in which it is smoked, short of randomly assigning people to either smoke pot or abstain — a trial that would be grossly unethical to conduct.

"I would bet you that people who start smoking marijuana earlier are more likely to get into using other drugs," Pope says. Perhaps people who are predisposed to using a variety of drugs start smoking marijuana earlier than others do, he says.

Besides alcohol, often the first drug adolescents abuse, marijuana may simply be the most accessible and least scary choice for a novice susceptible to drug addiction, says Virginia Tech psychologist Bob Stephens.

No matter which side you take in the debate over whether marijuana is a "gateway" to other illicit drugs, you can't argue with "indisputable data" showing that smoking pot affects neuropsychological functioning, such as hand-eye coordination, reaction time and memory, says H. Westley Clark, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The article ends up hedging its bets and qualifies just about everything she says. I find it hard to argue with the facts presented, but the emphasis and the selective inclusion suggest that the writer might be guilty of hype.

Next, a Canadian publication advocates legalizing and regulating marijuana:

Because of crimes that are related to the drug trade—most notably the killing of the four police officers in Mayerthorpe two years ago—many have been pushing for increased punishment for drug-related crimes recently. While a tactic such as increased jail time would theoretically make criminals think twice before becoming involved in the trade, there’s no statistical evidence that supports this claim.

The fact remains that it’s just too profitable an industry to be deterred by harsher punishment. Instead we need to end this failed experiment called prohibition and regulate most, if not all, drugs.

...The regulated sale of drugs would mean that one of the biggest dangers of drug use, drugs that are laced with more dangerous substances, would be systematically eliminated. As well, it would allow people to find a more accurate description of what they are taking, what it does to them, recommended doses and possible negative side effects. A more honest approach on the effect of these drugs would work better than just saying that drugs kill.

If there’s a demand for illicit drugs, like any other product, why should criminal elements be the ones who profit from it? Marijuana, for example, is more profitable than any other crop in Canada. Instead of letting criminals sell it, using the profits for other nefarious purposes, why doesn’t the Canadian government make it and sell it, eliminating the criminal element in the process? People are still going to buy it either way, after all.

Variations of this proposal a published frequently. At least this version eliminates profit potential. Most versions of this proposal suggest legalizing and regulating private sale, which raises the specter of a marijuana industry with the promotional and lobbying power of the alcohol and tobacco industries. While all variations of legalization models have an uphill battle, one that puts the government in the role of manufacturer and sales seems DOA.

Finally, STATS was riled by the USA Today article. They make several strong rebuttals to the points in the USA Today - if there is a gateway drug it's alcohol; alcohol causes more harm; there's lots of evidence against the gateway theory; most marijuana users experience little or no harm, etc. However, she also inserts her bias and misrepresents the USA Today article:

So, where’s the evidence that marijuana is more harmful than other substances?

The USA Today article didn't argue that marijuana is more harmful, just that it's not harmless. There were enough problems with the article that the straw man tactics we're needed.

Drug Wars in the blogosphere

Matthew Yglesias offers an interesting deconstruction of an all or nothing agrument against the war on drugs:

I guess this is something liberals and libertarians are supposed to agree about, but I consistently find it bizarre that there are some people who seem to think it would be a good idea if you could just walk into your local convenience store and pick up some heroin or crack along with your Fritos and Diet Coke. At times, people taking this line seem to argue that drug prohibition couldn't possibly be having any beneficial effects because, after all, you can still find heroin. Naturally enough, you don't see anyone proposing that the "war on mugging" be ended simply because mugging-prohibition has failed to actually eliminate the proscribed activity. That said, like any reasonable person I think many aspects of current crime-control and drug-control policy in the United States don't make sense. So I have a hard time knowing what to make of things like this from Jerry Taylor:

While it should be obvious to any fair-minded observer that our increasingly brutal war on drugs is a losing proposition on all counts, few of us seem to be fair minded observers. So allow me to pose a question to those of you still clinging to this benighted enterprise: Exactly what would it take to convince you that the drug war was causing more harm than good? Is there any bit of data, any hypothetical fact, or anything at all that would cause you to give up the policy ghost? Because if there is not, then we are in the realm of religious belief — and that’s about all that I can find to support this cruel, costly, and counterproductive jihad.

I mean, I'm not even clear on what question's being asked here. Do I think the status quo is preferable to total deregulation of currently prohibited drugs? I would say so. But considering how heavily regulated the use of alcohol and tobacco is, one hardly imagines that a heroin free-for-all (ads after school cartoons, for sale out of ice cream trucks) is a likely alternative policy. So, I don't know. What is the "war on drugs" exactly? Does it do more harm than good compared to what?

Marijuana Policy

This morning's post on the evolving sentiment toward marijuana policy reminded me of this interview with Bill White from Bill Moyer's Close to Home PBS series. I always thought that medical marijuana advocacy was a joke was an ineffective way to promote policy change, but I now think that they're having success in changing who we associate with marijuana.

White: ...you would be hard-pressed to build the case why in certain cultures opiates are celebrated and in other cultures alcohol is celebrated. I would suggest that it has little to do with science or pharmacology in either culture. It has much more to do with the historical niche that a drug fills within that culture. Most importantly, drug policy depends on whom we associate with that drug [emphasis added]. We almost always confuse our feelings about drugs with our feelings about the people we believe to use those drugs.

...

Moyers: How, then, were our drug laws developed?

White: They grew out of racial and class struggles, particularly on the West Coast and in the South. The first state laws were based on this sort of "dope fiend" caricature -- showing somebody of a different race and a different culture. In California, it was Chinese railway workers smoking opium; in the South, it was black men using cocaine. The reality is that the vast majority of people addicted to narcotics in the late 19th century were white affluent women, who were primarily addicted through traditional medicine or over-the-counter "patent" medicines. The caricature which drove the prohibition campaigns in the late 19th century bore little resemblance to reality. And, to give you a modern version of that, in the mid-1980s, when cocaine was overwhelmingly a white phenomenon in America, the images which began to appear on television were overwhelmingly of African-Americans, particularly young African-Americans enjoying crack cocaine on a street corner. If you look at all the exposes of drug exposed infants, we see young African-American infants, trembling in neonatal intensive care units. But that image was not the reality of cocaine addiction in the United States in 1985.

Moyers: Why?

White: At that exact point in time, those who were addicted to this drug were overwhelmingly white and affluent. The best predictors of cocaine use at that point were education and income. As years of education went up and annual income went up, the probable use of cocaine went up. Yet the image was and still is that we have poor inner-city African-Americans involved in all of these criminal illegal markets. Much of the anti-coke rhetoric and the changing of laws it generated was based on that early image. But in 1985, it had little relationship with reality.

Weed, weed, weed.

The LA Times reports on the DEA's efforts to target California's large, higher profile "medical" marijuana businesses.

The conservative Washington Times runs a UPI story that these larger business are claiming that they are unfairly targeted.

The conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ran a scathing anti-drug war editorial and a letter to the editor on the recent NORML report about marijuana as the U.S.'s largest cash crop.

Finally, a DEA press release from earlier this year on some dealer's creative packaging of marijuana. Includes photos.

I've seen some year-end commentary on failures in efforts to change marijuana policy in 2006, but I think there's little doubt that it gained traction as a political issue. Growing numbers of conservative ideologues are joining libertarians and liberal ideologues in calling for radical reform in drug policy. The issue may be placed on the back burner as we approach a presidential election cycle, but I don't see it fading. What's interesting about this is that the conservatives involved see it as a conservative issue, liberals involved see it as a liberal issue, and libertarians see it as a libertarian issue. If these groups can form a functional coalition, they could be pretty effective in advocating greater latitude for states to experiment with drug policy and organizing support for state-level legislation and ballot initiatives.

Vendor's reefer sadness

The LA Times reports on municipalities wrestling with the growth of the medical marijuana trade and how this trade should be conducted:

Kevin Reed launched his medical marijuana business two years ago, armed with big dreams and an Excel spreadsheet.

Happy customers at his Green Cross cannabis club were greeted by "bud tenders" and glass jars brimming with high-quality weed at red-tag prices. They hailed the slender, gentle Southerner as a ganja good Samaritan. Though Reed set out to run it like a Walgreens, his tiny storefront shop ended up buzzing with jazzy joie de vivre. Turnover was Starbucks-style: On a good day, $30,000 in business would walk through the black, steel-gated front door.

Today, the 32-year-old cannabis capitalist is looking for a job, his business undone by its own success and unexpected opposition in one of America's most proudly tolerant places. Critics in nearby Victorian homes called Reed a neighborhood nuisance. Although four of five San Francisco voters support medical marijuana, the realities of dispensing the contentious medicine have proved far more controversial.

It has been 10 years since California approved Proposition 215 — the Compassionate Use Act — becoming the first state to define marijuana as a medicine. The 389-word act aimed to ensure seriously ill Californians the right to use marijuana. But it said nothing about how they might get the drug — and left ample regulatory ambiguity.

Today, about 200,000 Californians have a doctor's permission to use cannabis, which they can obtain through more than 250 dispensaries, delivery services and patient collectives — 120 of them in Los Angeles County alone. Medical marijuana, activists say, has become a $1-billion business.

Drugs: why we should medicalise, not criminalise

This sounds so rational. When you read the whole column, it's also wrapped in the language of social justice. However, her arguments are so flawed that it's difficult to know where to begin.

Of course we should try to get drug addicts off their drugs. It is good that waiting times are now shorter for rehabilitation. But treatment doesn’t work unless users really, really want to give up. And even then, they often relapse because the cravings are so strong. So it is not surprising that enforced treatment and rehabilitation is so unsuccessful. A National Audit Office report on the Government’s Drug Treatment and Testing Order, a court-administered mandatory programme for addicts, found that 80 per cent of offenders were reconvicted within two years.

It is much more sensible to prescribe a maintenance dose for addicts, which they must take under supervision so they cannot sell it on, until they are ready to try to give up. That way, they can attempt to lead a normal life, to refrain from crime, to stay off the streets, even to hold down a job, until they can wean themselves off the drugs.

Among the flawed assumptions are that:

• addicts don't want help;
  
• treatment is only helpful if they're in the "action" or "preparation" stage of change;
  
• the failure of their lousy treatment system means treatment doesn't work;
  
• legalization would be a panacea for consuming countries and producing countries;
  
• crime should be the measuring stick for the effectiveness of drug policy;
  
• abstinence focused treatment is ineffective;
  
• doing more would be too expensive;
• we have to choose between legalization and maintenance

I'm struggling to find the words, but I also find it troubling that among some HR advocates there is something resembling a fetishizing of heroin addiction or vicarious derivation of street credibility. While speaking to some harms, they fail to grasp the pain and demoralization that addicts experience when they call it an illness but treat it like a lifestyle choice. Why such half-measures when addiction is concerned? Why is the case for treatment on demand framed as a symptom of some kind of moral panic? I suppose I am guilty of moral alarm at the "suble bigotry of low expectations." (Now, now, principles before personalities.)