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Open Thread

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Here are some recent news items:

– Remember the big push a few years back after the Terri Schiavo mess to encourage people to have a living will for such situations? If you were one of the people who did that, make sure you avoid Catholic health care institutions as they’ve been ordered by the United States Council of Catholic Bishops to ignore people’s wishes and keep patients alive regardless of the circumstance.

– Laura Onstot in the Seattle Weekly points out that if the marijuana decriminalization bill passes in the state legislature, it would somewhat undermine incoming City Attorney Pete Holmes’ decision to no longer prosecute people for marijuana possession in Seattle. I’m not so convinced that it will make much of a difference. The police have generally abided by I-75, which made marijuana possession the lowest priority for law enforcement, and with a mayor and city attorney about to take office who seem to understand this better than their predecessors, I’m not terribly worried about people all over Seattle getting slapped with $100 fines. Then again, I could be underestimating the amount of enforcement that will still be done in Seattle’s minority communities.

– The first marijuana cafe in modern United States history has opened in Portland. It’s only for Oregon NORML members who have state-issued medical marijuana cards. When the state-wide smoking ban passed here in Washington a few years back, this was an aspect of the law that was unclear to me. If such a club opened in Seattle, would the law apply to marijuana smoke or just tobacco smoke? Would vaporized marijuana be considered smoke? I imagine that these questions will be settled in the most irrational way possible as we get closer and closer to simply allowing all adults to use marijuana legally.

– The Maryland Sheriff who was behind the horrifying mistaken raid of Berwyn Heights mayor Cheye Calvo is running for County Executive of Prince George’s County. Sheriff Michael Jackson still contends that his officers did nothing wrong when they invaded Calvo’s home, shot his two dogs, and held his family members captive for several hours, despite having absolutely zero evidence that they were involved in drug dealing. Now the county is trying to block the discovery process in Calvo’s lawsuit until after the election. Jackson is running as a Democrat against several other Democrats in a crowded primary and is actually being audacious enough to claim that he’s the law-and-order candidate.

– Finally, Tim Lincecum won the NL Cy Young Award today – for the second year in a row – as further evidence that pot smoking will derail your career.

Forum in Edmonds

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I was hoping to attend tonight’s forum in Edmonds with travel show host Rick Steves, State Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles, State Rep. Mary Helen Roberts, former U.S. Attorney John McKay, and former White House advisor Bud Krogh. It starts in about an hour, but I’m stuck at home with parental duties. I was hoping to ask Mr. McKay the following question:

If Marc Emery is successful in his efforts to avoid extradition to Seattle for drug charges (McKay was the U.S. Attorney who initially went after him) and becomes a free man again, what can Americans do to stay safe?

If anyone is in attendance, let me how it went.

UPDATE: Wow, it looks like McKay has done a 180:

“Federal law makes the possession of any amount of marijuana a crime,” McKay said. “So, even if you’ve got a certificate from your doctor, a federal officer could arrest you. … That’s just bad policy.”

McKay faulted Congress for failing to take initiative on the issue. It is not the place of federal prosecutors or law officers to make policy, he said, nor should the White House go it alone.

In the end, he argued, marijuana should not be lumped in with cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin as part of the war on drugs. Marijuana law, McKay said, “should look a lot more like alcohol (regulations) and a lot less like cocaine and methamphetamine (laws).”

Unfortunately, Marc Emery is still sitting in a Canadian jail cell awaiting extradition. Maybe McKay can meet with new U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan and reverse more than just his stance on this subject.

Another Domino Falls

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The American Medical Association this week adopted a report from the Council on Science and Public Health that encourages the Federal government to reclassify marijuana away from a Schedule I drug. Schedule I drugs, by definition, have no medical value, and now even the more conservative AMA is recognizing that marijuana does not belong in that category. The full report is here.

The AMA also concluded that more research should be done and that the current body of evidence doesn’t meet the standard for FDA approval (Bruce Mirken discusses that in more detail here), but they also rejected an amendment that would have added that doctors shouldn’t recommend smoked marijuana. The topic of smoked marijuana is largely an irrelevant distraction, considering that alternative forms of ingesting the drug, such as vaporizing, are readily available to anyone who’s concerned about the side effects of smoking it.

Kudos to local medical marijuana expert Dr. Sunil Aggarwal, who played a role in reviewing the CSAPH paper and has long been pushing the AMA to recognize the research being done on cannabinoids and the endocannabinoid system. It’s important to remember that when marijuana was first made illegal in 1937, it was an AMA representative who argued against it because doctors even then were concerned that a plant that was safe and had potential as medicine should not be restricted by the Federal government.

The Great Mystery of Afghanistan in 2005-2006

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Via Attackerman, I see that John Hannah, a former aide to Dick Cheney, is still scratching his head about what went wrong in Afghanistan:

Ever since last year’s presidential campaign, there’s been an unfortunate tendency to assess America’s Afghan campaign as one long, steady downward spiral to disaster. “Eight years of drift,” according to Obama administration officials seeking to explain their lengthy deliberations over strategy and troop numbers. But, as Stephens suggests, the reality is a good deal more complex. The fact is that, after a period of genuine progress following the Taliban’s removal in late 2001, the situation in Afghanistan only began to deteriorate markedly between 2005 and 2006. Suicide attacks quintupled that year. Remotely detonated bombs more than doubled. Insurgent attacks nearly tripled. And the trends have steadily worsened every year since. The question is why? What changed in that time period that might help account for the sharp decline in America’s war fortunes?

Hannah provides a couple of guesses, but doesn’t stumble upon the answer. But what happened there during that time wasn’t much of a mystery. In fact it was fairly obvious that it would produce the outcome that it did. Let’s take a look back at what happened:

[Read more…]

Pulling Back the Curtain on Rob McKenna’s War on the Sick

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In the wake of the Obama Administration’s declaration that the federal government would respect state medical marijuana laws, Kirk Johnson in the New York Times reported the following:

For years, since the first medical marijuana laws were passed in the mid-1990s, many local and state governments could be confident, if not complacent, knowing that marijuana would be kept in check because it remained illegal under federal law, and that hard-nosed federal prosecutors were not about to forget it.

But with the Justice Department’s announcement last week that it would not prosecute people who use marijuana for medical purposes in states where it is legal, local and state officials say they will now have to take on the job themselves.

Why? If it’s legal, then what job is there to take on? The article appears to be implying that it’s the job of state and local officials to enforce the federal law over the state one. That’s just not true. Here in Washington, our state law enforcement officials should be following the voter initiative passed in 1998 (and the follow-up legislation from 2007), not the Federal law. Unfortunately, our Attorney General doesn’t seem to agree. Rob McKenna’s office has been trying to undermine Washington State’s medical marijuana law, and thanks to a Public Disclosure Request, we’re finally able to shine some light on what they’ve been doing.

After the PDR was filed, nearly 800 pages of emails and other documents from the Department of Corrections were recently released to the Cannabis Defense Coalition. They’re broken up into eight 100-page PDF files. The documents are not in any order, so I created a chronological index for easy searching of specific events.

The reason that so much attention is focused on the DOC is because a number of qualified medical marijuana patients have been raided by police and arrested (the medical marijuana law does not provide an affirmative defense from arrest), pressured into accepting plea deals that would keep them out of a jail cell but still on probation, and then put under the supervision of the Department of Corrections. The Department of Corrections would then claim the authority to deny those individuals the ability to use medical marijuana through internal rules that they’d made up after consulting with the AG’s office. They would then easily enforce those rules by administering drug tests. In the end, you had individuals who’d been authorized by their doctors to use medical marijuana having law enforcement interfere with that decision and either force them to stop using that medicine or to use a less effective alternative like Marinol.

This end-around of the voter-approved medical marijuana law worked on a number of medical marijuana patients. Pamela Olson was one victim before her husband Bruce fought his own case in Kitsap County court and won (sadly, they lost their home in the process). It’s not clear, even with the released documents, exactly how many people were affected by this (names are redacted throughout), but lawyers who defend authorized patients have been dealing with cases across the state for several years now and are still hoping to bring some kind of legal action against the Attorney General, the DOC, or both.

What we do know from the documents just released is that there was clearly some nervousness within the DOC about how the Attorney General’s office was advising them to deal with those under their supervision who were authorized by a doctor to use medical marijuana. The actual advice from the AG’s office is also redacted throughout the documents (using the same attorney-client privilege argument that the Bush Administration used to initially keep the infamous torture memos under wraps), but emails like this one from a DOC employee make it clear that the Attorney General was advising them to do things that were morally questionable at best and against state law at worst [emphasis in original]:

Karen, Lori, Eldon let me offer a few off the top of my head thoughts and comments. How DOC handles the medicinal use of MJ depends on whether this is the hill we want to die on? The advice from the AGO may* (see below) be correct, as far as it goes, i.e. [<—————-redacted—————–>] But the real question is not whether DOC can violate an offender who proves the prerequisites for the medicinal use of MJ, but can/should DOC recognize it as a defense? From a small “p” political standpoint does DOC want to violate an offender for activity that the state legislature recognizes as lawful? Something they made lawful in recognition of the medical necessities occasioned by the offender’s illness.

Consider if you will the purpose and intent of the enabling statue: “The people of Washington state find that some patients with terminal or debilitating illnesses, under their physician’s care, may benefit from the medical use of marijuana. Some of the illnesses for which marijuana appears to be beneficial include chemotherapy related nausea and vomiting in cancer patients; AIDS wasting syndrome; severe muscle spasms associated with multiple sclerosis and other spasticity disorders; epilepsy; acute or chronic glaucoma; and some forms of intractable pain. The people find that humanitarian compassion necessitates that the decision to authorize the medical use of marijuana by patients with terminal or debilitating illnesses is a personal, individual decision, based upon their physician’s professional medical judgment and discretion.” So how would this look? Offender XY is HIV positive and has full blown AIDS.

They are in considerable pain and a licensed doctor has agreed that MJ will relieve this offenders suffering. If all of the statutory requirements are met, this person’s possession and use is not against state law. Should DOC still violate this offender for actions that our state legislature recognized was necessary for, “humanitarian compassion”. Do we really want to die on this hill?

That memo was from April 2008. A month later, as a number of the indexed items show, the DOC was forced to apologize to a medical marijuana patient who was improperly arrested and held for six days until her blood pressure shot up to dangerous levels. At around the same time, the DOC finally formalized their policy on dealing with medical marijuana, which was little more than a smokescreen that made it appear as if they were accommodating the law, but in reality was simply denying everyone who had their doctor fill out the DOC’s verification form. On several occasions, they were informed that they were violating state law, but those warnings don’t appear to have made any difference in their policy.

The larger question for the attorneys, doctors, and patients who’ve been fighting the DOC over this policy continues to be focused on what Attorney General Rob McKenna’s office was doing and why. All of the deliberations and discussions at the beginning of this timeline happened during the Bush Administration, when it was still the Federal Government’s policy to expend resources to override state medical marijuana law (which the Obama Administration just reversed). But Rob McKenna doesn’t work for the Federal Government. He’s our state’s top law enforcement officer. There’s no reason for him to be trying to enforce Federal laws over our state laws, especially a state law that was passed by a wide margin in a voter initiative and maintains widespread support. It’s clear from reading through these documents that the AG’s office was giving advice that led to a policy that undermined the law, but until there are enough resources to take them to court over their claims of attorney-client privilege, their communications to the DOC will stay hidden.

For anyone who hasn’t followed the fight over medical marijuana in states where it’s been legalized, Kirk Johnson’s description of the attitude of local law enforcers may seem surreal. At a time when we have prisons that are bursting at the seams and budgets that are running low, you’d think that people who collect a salary on the taxpayer dime would have more sense than to remain so concerned about stopping people with serious ailments from using a medicinal plant. Throw in the fact that the voters of this state have demanded that this be legal, and it’s beyond comprehension that police are still actively trying to stop people from using it. Whatever the rationale is for Rob McKenna to continue to undermine the state’s medical marijuana law, the least we should be able to get from him is more transparency into what his office has been doing.

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The Cannabis Defense Coalition, who put in the PDR request, is expecting to get two more document dumps from the DOC. The requests are not free, so if you feel inclined to pitch in, they have a Paypal donation page here.

UPDATE: A Public Disclosure Request was filed, not a FOIA. The post has been updated.

Chart of the Week

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Stephen Gutwillig gets to the real heart of the matter:

How can the notion that marijuana is “here to stay” coexist with these rates of marijuana arrests? Apparently because the people caught in the crossfire aren’t considered part of the mainstream. In California, African-Americans are three times as likely as whites to be arrested for a pot crime, according to the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice. If you’re young and nonwhite, you are especially targeted.

The increase in marijuana possession arrests of California teenagers of color since 1990 is quadruple that group’s population growth.

In New York City, blacks and Latinos — who represent about half the city’s population — accounted for 86 percent of everyone charged with pot possession in 2008. The NYCLU report says federal studies show young whites use marijuana at higher rates than blacks and Latinos.

Supporters of marijuana prohibition often argue that few possession busts lead to incarceration. First, that argument ignores the countless parolees and probationers sent back to jail and prison nationwide for failing drug tests or being caught with a joint. And it seriously diminishes the lifelong stigma any criminal conviction has for many young people of color, whose educational and professional opportunities are severely curtailed as a result of racist enforcement.

[via Pete Guither]

Nuttsackgate and Charles Grassley’s Lack of Nutsack

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There’ve been two news items this week that have shown us one of the uglier aspects of the drug war – attempts to censor science and expert opinion in order to maintain the status quo.

In the UK, a chief drugs advisor named David Nutt was fired by Home Secretary Alan Johnson after Nutt publicly stated something that’s rather obvious: marijuana and ecstasy are safer drugs than alcohol. Nutt was a member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), and two other members of the council quit after the firing.

Here in the US, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is going even farther than that. In response to a bill introduced by Senator Jim Webb of Virginia to establish a blue-ribbon commission to study how to fix our criminal justice system, Grassley tacked on an amendment that would prohibit the commission members from considering drug decriminalization as an option. This is like having a commission to study how to deal with global warming but not allowing the commission to suggest reducing carbon emissions.

Is there any other political subject where we so willingly accept the idea that science and reason are a threat that we have to legislate against? When Nutt made his proclamation, he was able to point to a recent study in The Lancet on the relative harms of various substances. As is mostly common knowledge now, you can’t overdose from marijuana and it’s less addictive than nearly all other recreational drugs. Ecstasy is also non-addictive and kills far, far fewer people than alcohol does every year, while also having potential medical uses. But simply pointing this out is apparently grounds for termination within the British Government.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has previously ignored the advice of the ACMD when his government stiffened penalties on marijuana, had this to say in defense of the move:

On climate change, or health, for example, we take the best scientific advise possible, but in an area like drugs we have to look at it in the round. We have got to look not just at what medics and scientists are saying to us – and we take that very seriously – but also what impact differ­ent decisions can have on young, vul­nerable people.

For some reason, this passes as an acceptable excuse. Drug policy is somehow a grand exception to the general rule that if you employ science and make rational decisions, you’ll end up with better outcomes. Brown seems convinced that if adults don’t act like paranoid simpletons, their kids will all become drug addicts. This is moronic. Of course, any time a drug warrior is backed into a corner of their own irrationality, they always end up claiming that what they’re doing will be better off for children – and never with any evidence to back them up. The UK continues to have much higher drug use rates among teens than nearly every other country in Europe, despite having some of the strictest drug laws too.

Back here in the United States, a reporter asked Senator Grassley about his amendment. Here was his response:

Well, my intent on that amendment isn’t any different than any other amendments that are coming up. The Congress is setting up a commission to study certain things. And the commission is a — is an arm of Congress, because Congress doesn’t have time to review some of these laws.

And — and — and the point is, for them to do what we tell them to do. And one of the things that I was anticipating telling them not to do is to — to recommend or study the legalization of drugs.

So Grassley is proudly admitting – out loud, to a reporter – that he thinks it’s a good idea to set up a commission to study a complex issue, but then also tell the commission what they can and can’t recommend. That’s surreal. It’s not like he and the rest of the dinosaurs in the Senate can’t do what they do in the UK and just ignore the experts and then fire them when they speak louder. Grassley posted this amendment because he’s too scared to even hear people suggest it. God forbid drug policy experts suggest that Iowa shouldn’t continue to arrest startlingly high percentages of its relatively few black residents for drug crimes. In the end, the reluctance to confront the broken status quo of our criminal justice system is not so much about the worry of children grappling with an adult issue so much as it is the worry that adults will have to stop dealing with this issue like children.

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