This is an open thread…

You know things are changing with respect to marijuana laws when the former police chief of a major American city writes the forward to a book about how marijuana is safer than alcohol. Here’s former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper in the introduction to a new book called Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink:

In all my years on the streets, it was an extremely rare occasion to have a night go by without an alcohol-related incident. More often than not, there were multiple alcohol-related calls during a shift. I became accustomed to the pattern (and the odor). If I was called to a part of town with a concentration of bars or to the local university, I could expect to be greeted by one or more drunks, flexing their “beer muscles,” either in the throes of a fight or looking to start one. Sadly, the same was often true when I received a domestic abuse call. More often than not, these conflicts–many having erupted into physical violence–were fueled by one or both participants having overindulged in alcohol.

In case you might be thinking my observations are unique, let me share the results of some informal research I have conducted on my own. Over the past four years, out of a general interest in this subject, I’ve been asking police officers throughout the U.S. (and Canada) two questions. First: “When’s the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana?” (And by this I mean marijuana only, not pot plus a six-pack or fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause; they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask, “When’s the last time you had to fight a drunk?” They look at their watches.

This past weekend, another Hempfest came and went. Several hundred thousand people flocked to Myrtle Edwards Park, most of whom got high, and the most serious altercation was Dominic Holden being removed from the VIP area.

As Stamper points out, anyone remotely familiar with people who drink and people who smoke pot know quite well which category is more likely to be violent. Yet we continue to regard alcohol as the safer drug. Politicians of both parties have continually told us that we can’t legalize marijuana because of the message it would send to our kids, yet alcohol advertisements are everywhere. For those of us who grew up with this nonsense, we got the message loud and clear. Our drug laws don’t make any sense.

All day Thursday is a book bomb for the aforementioned book from Mason Tvert, Steve Fox, and Paul Armentano. Drug law reform groups are hoping to get the book to #1 on Amazon. I have my own copy already but haven’t had a chance to read it yet. The book is largely an extension of the work that Tvert has done with SAFER, a Colorado-based organization that has made some waves in that state already. You can grab it from Amazon here.

With reports that the Obama Administration is considering backing down on the public option – a health care proposal that is supported by roughly 3/4 of the country – due to the way the debate is being portrayed in the media, I get the sense that we’ve witnessed what might be an even larger media failure than what happened in the run-up to the Iraq War. At least then, the public was in far more of a position to buy into the lies being put out by the special interest groups leading us into that mess. But what has happened over the past few weeks in the health care debate has transcended that. A narrow set of interests who profit very handsomely from our incredibly overpriced health care system have managed to derail a popular initiative put forth by a popular president. It’s another loud warning that the ability of Americans (and media personalities) to figure out when moneyed interests are lying to us is not keeping up with the myriad ways we’re all being lied to.

A big part of this distorted debate has focused on end-of-life issues. An innocuous provision in one of the health care bills was incorrectly characterized by former Alaska Governor and losing Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin as “death panels“. The issue itself was nothing more than a provision to allow for voluntary end-of-life counseling sessions to be covered. As I’ve pointed out previously, these end-of-life sessions have a well-known positive effect when people take advantage of them. In fact, those who discuss these issues openly and honestly with their doctors tend to outlive those who don’t. The idea that there’s anything to fear from something like this is so absurd that even Sarah Palin herself didn’t buy it back in 2008 when she endorsed end-of-life counseling as Governor of Alaska.

Instead, much of what happened after Palin dropped that turd into the health care debate punch bowl reminded me a lot of what happened last year during the I-1000 campaign, where opponents of the death with dignity initiative piled lies on top of bullshit on top of more lies in order to convince people that a law that was working very well just across the border in Oregon would somehow be a disaster here in Washington. One can easily see the parallel to the current health care debate, where we can look to countries like France – which has a world-class health care system that relies heavily on government involvement alongside private insurance – to see that moving towards more “socialized” medicine is not a slippery slope. And we rarely saw the media (either last year or right now) take a forceful approach to separating fact from fiction this way.

Fortunately, the I-1000 debate was only about a single contentious issue, and in the end, it didn’t really matter that Martin Sheen was telling whoppers in a commercial that aired every 10 seconds in October, or that the Seattle Times was giving editorial space to a crackpot conspiracy theorist who actually believes that Washington’s death with dignity law was specifically worded to allow people to kill their rich parents. It still passed with nearly 60 percent of the vote. I think that’s one thing to be optimistic about. I remember having a conversation with Will around this time last year (he was working on the I-1000 campaign) as he was freaking out about all the bullshit being shouted through media outlets who arguably should have had much better baloney detectors. I told him there’s no way it wasn’t going to pass, and I ended up being vindicated on that front.

The national health care debate right now is a complete buffet of every contentious issue that borders on health care. End-of-life care is just a small tibdit. Abortion, government regulation, illegal immigrants, and taxes are each separate elephants crammed trunk to tail into this room. And while the people whose paranoia far outweighs their ability to grasp complex issues continue to show up at town halls and scream their heads off, I still hold out some hope that enough Americans are taking the same thing away from the spectacle that I am, that we’re really not doing a good enough job in this country of treating the mentally ill – and that’s just another reason we need to improve our health care system. Sadly, we’ll still likely have to improve how we keep ourselves well-informed first.

Marc Emery is expected to be sentenced to a 5-year prison term right here in Seattle on Monday, September 21. Rallies are planned in his support in a number of U.S. and Canadian cities on Saturday, September 19th.

NPR has the story of how an Orange County retirement community set up their medical marijuana coop.

A Clallam County man who was a medical marijuana provider won a victory in the state Court of Appeals when they overturned his conviction and ordered a retrial.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy isn’t buying that the Mexican government is upholding human rights in their (our) war on drugs.

The Economix blog at the New York Times breaks down the rates of illicit drug use from state-to-state. Washington is in the top ten, but still lags behind Montana and Alaska.

I’m on my way down to Hempfest right now. I will update this post as the day goes on.

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This weekend is the annual Hempfest protestival. It’s an event that has something for everyone (well, except for the uptight tools in the comment threads who think they’re cool when they call me a stoner). I generally hang around the Hemposium tent, where political discussion is the order of the day. Here are some panels I’m looking forward to:

Saturday 2:20PM – Suits in Babylon

State Representative Roger Goodman, the Marijuana Policy Project’s Rob Kampia and others give an update from the front lines of getting government to deal with reality on our marijuana laws.

Sunday 11:00AM – Cannabis Coverage: Reefer sanity for the 21st Century

Phil Smith from the Drug War Chronicle, Mason Tvert from SAFER, Fred Gardner from CounterPunch, and David Nott from Reason discuss media coverage of marijuana.

Sunday 2:20PM – Yes We Cannabis: The hope of the DARE generation

Ian Barry, the Peninsula High School student arrested after smoking a joint as part of a school presentation, will be on this panel with Kampia and Tvert.

And if passing a bowl around and listening to some music is more your style, they’ve got that too.

Last week, Seattle and King County law enforcement officials tried something new, not arresting drug dealers:

More than a dozen black binders, each with at least two inches of criminal evidence, were atop tables on the stage. Names were in bold and underlined on the front.

In the first three rows of the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, the suspected drug dealers named in those binders filled the red seats next to family and friends in what felt like an intervention.

“If this was an ordinary day, I would be your prosecutor,” King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg told the men and women Thursday. Some could get 20 months in prison or even more, he said.

But Satterberg wanted them to walk away.

He announced an opportunity police and prosecutors in Seattle had never given in a community meeting: Stop dealing drugs and you won’t get prosecuted.

Interim Seattle Police Chief John Diaz, had written a letter last week to the dealers. He promised that if they showed at the Central District meeting they would not be arrested and repeated that promise again Thursday.

The idea is taken from a successful program in High Point, NC, where using interventions like this – rather than prison – to deal with drug dealing, worked to reduce crime in the community. The idea is an effective one because it targets one aspect of the drug war that tends to have some nasty downstream repercussions. In low-income communities where a lot of drug dealing occurs, young people who don’t see a lot of opportunities for themselves often choose to become drug dealers for either money or status. But as soon as they end up behind bars for that choice, it becomes significantly harder for them to put that choice behind them. Instead of reforming people in that situation, jail often does the opposite, and cements their lifelong participation in criminal activity.

This program works to break that cycle. By working to keep young people from making the choice to participate in drug markets, the demand for those drugs can be met elsewhere. In High Point, a medium sized town that sits inbetween the larger towns of Winston-Salem and Greensboro, any unmet demand likely just shifted to those larger communities. As a result, residents in High Point have seen former open air drug markets become safer places.

But will it happen here? At Saturday’s event in Shoreline, Diaz said that it wouldn’t be a city-wide effort, and as Philip Dawdy points out, this approach isn’t likely to work in the high-volume drug markets like Belltown anyway, where the dealers aren’t part of the community. In fact, this approach will likely make those groups (arguably the most dangerous) even wealthier.

Also, one of the dealers who was offered the deal had already been re-arrested by the weekend. He was a 39-year-old with a history of drug addiction problems. And he wasn’t arrested for dealing, but for using a crack pipe. This makes me wonder whether or not much thought was put into trying to separate people with actual drug problems from the people who enter the drug trade to make money. Treating both groups the same way doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

That’s not to say that this effort is pointless. It’s far better than sending as many young people to jail as possible, but what happened in High Point simply can’t be achieved here (or in any other large city) on a large scale. As has been pointed out ad nauseam for years, the only way to eliminate black market drug dealing is to treat addicts in a health care setting and to provide safe and legal outlets for recreational drugs that large numbers of adults use responsibly. Until that day, programs like these that divert some people from our prisons might improve a neighborhood (and that’s definitely a good thing), but will ultimately fail to do anything about the overall amount of illegal drug dealing in the city. To some extent, I have sympathy towards the officials who end up in this no-win situation, but that sympathy tends to wane when I hear so few of them willing to challenge the faulty underpinnings of the status quo.

UPDATE: For anyone heading to Netroots Nation this weekend, there will be a panel about the High Point drug diversion program.

With the events of this past week, it seems appropriate to link to this old post from five years ago that got my old blog Reload noticed by The Stranger. In the beginning of the post, I wrote:

I remember in high school, my good friend and I used to talk about going to a place like Kansas one day, setting up a fake church, and swindling small town folks out of their money. One of us has grown out of that idea, while the other one is voting for President Bush, for much the same reasons as starting up that church.

It’s worth noting that his father was an executive at Blue Cross. If there’s anything that better illustrates the dynamic at work in these town halls, where misinformed morons are shouting down the politicians trying to fix our very broken health care system, I haven’t seen it yet.

Before Saturday’s event with Rep. Jay Inslee and Drug Czar Kerlikowske, a local medical marijuana patient named Ric Smith showed up. Smith, who lives nearby in Shoreline, wanted to ask Kerlikowske a question about why he went from being sympathetic to the medical marijuana community as Seattle’s police chief to amplifying old propaganda as the Drug Czar. Unfortunately, the meeting was closed to regular citizens, so he wasn’t allowed into the rooms set aside for either the roundtable or the media Q&A.

What’s even worse, had Smith been able to ask his question, it’s not clear that Kerlikowske could legally have given him an honest answer. By law, the Drug Czar must oppose any efforts to legalize any Schedule I drug, even for medical use. As drug law reformers have pointed out, that puts Kerlikowske in a position where he’s mandated to distort the truth and deny science. In fact, several commenters from Saturday’s post got on my case for even expecting an honest answer from him.

As a medical marijuana patient, though, the stakes are clearly higher for Smith. For his privacy, I won’t go into details on his medical condition, but it’s possible that he could one day meet the same fate as Timothy Garon, the Seattle man who died last year after being denied a transplant over his medical marijuana use.

Unlike any of the gullible morons who’ve been disrupting town hall meetings this week for the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, Smith actually does have to worry about decisions being made by government officials that could effect whether he lives or dies. If there’s anyone in this country who had a good reason to disrupt a recent town hall and make a scene over the government inserting themselves between patients and doctors, it was him. Yet instead, as the local TV crews started bringing in their cameras, he shook my hand and quietly walked out the door.

You can go with complete idiocy:

AJC columnist Jay Bookman noticed that in the latest Investors Business Daily editorial about how the ‘death panel’ will condemn all handicapped or disabled people to death on some horrid wind-swept mountain, it notes that …

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Needless to say, Hawking, who is recognized as one of the great theoretical physicists of the 20th and 21st century, was born in the UK and has lived his entire life there.

Well said

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. That’s 3 out of the last 4 for wes, who’s become the man to beat recently. The correct location was Mosaic Stadium in Regina, Saskatchewan, home to the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the CFL.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

I was able to attend the media presser this morning following Jay Inslee’s meeting with Office of National Drug Control Policy head (and former Seattle police chief) Gil Kerlikowske. The meeting was about legislation being pushed by Inslee to promote the safe disposal of prescription drugs, an initiative that I support. During the Q&A, I was able to ask our “Drug Czar” about the situation in Mexico:

Lee: President Obama is going to Mexico this weekend to meet with Mexican officials – and they’re dealing with an enormous organized crime problem fueled in big part by American consumption for marijuana. I’m wondering why is the equation for dealing with the problem different than it was in the early 30s when dealing with alcohol? Why isn’t setting up a regulated market the right way to go?

GK: Well, because they’re criminals and they’re terrorists. And they are creating huge amounts of havoc.

Lee: What I’m saying is…

GK: Let me finish. [One part is that anyone looking] at prohibition doesn’t realize the crime suddenly ended or changed drastically before or after. The other part is, we see with these criminal narco-terrorists and the violence that they’ve done that suddenly they’re not going to change and say “you know what? I think I’ll get a job out in the field growing potatoes”. They’re going to continue to be criminals and terrorists.

Lee: But how are they going to, can I follow up to this? How are they still going to still make money if we’re not buying marijuana from them?

GK: Extortion. Kidnapping. Theft of auto parts. Etc.

I was relying on my MP3 recorder, so I missed a few words of Gil’s second answer, so the part in brackets is a paraphrase from memory, but there were a number of video cameras there, so I’ll try to update as soon as I can. The general point he’s making here is clear though. And he’s making an invalid assertion. Crime rates did change drastically as a result of alcohol prohibition. Homicide rates steadily increased throughout the 1920s to much higher levels than before, and then began decreasing again within a few years after prohibition was repealed in the early 1930s. What makes these statistics even more extraordinary is that you’d think that the Great Depression would have had the opposite effect on those numbers.

Kerlikowske is right that the criminal organizations in Mexico aren’t going to just give up. But neither did the other criminal organizations that once benefited from alcohol prohibition. During the 1920s, they used their position in charge of Chicago’s thousands of speakeasies to control city government:

Chicago was a “wide-open” town. Police and judicial corruption were so widespread that the Better Government Association petitioned the United States Congress to intervene in the internal affairs of the City, stating that its leaders were in league with gangsters and that the city was overrun with protected vice (Woody, 1974:136). The alliance between corrupt government and organized crime was made clear by Big Bill Thomspson’s return to City government. Promising that he “was as wet as the Atlantic Ocean”, Thompson was returned to the Mayor’s Office in 1927 with strong support from Chicago’s criminal element (Nelli 1970:232). In fact, a number of Capone gangsters reportedly worked in Thompson’s campaign headquarters (Wendt and Kogan, 1953:269). It is also said that Capone, himself, donated $260,000 to Thompson’s reelection fund (Hoffman, 1989:2). With the advent of Thompson, Capone returned to the Levee, setting up headquarters in the Metropole Hotel at 2300 S. Michigan and in 1928 one block north at the Lexington Hotel. Speakeasies and vice again flourished in the First Ward, but they were not under the control of Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin (Wendt and Kogan, 1974:351). Vice remained strictly in the hands of the Capone syndicate. In fact, the Aldermen were called into Capone’s office and told that their future would depend on their usefulness to the Capone organization (Nelli, 1976:191). To this Coughlin was said to have replied, “We’re lucky to get as good a break as we did.”

After alcohol prohibition ended, these groups didn’t just disappear either. But without the ability to control a commodity as popular as alcohol, they had to resort to prostitution, racketeering, and other narcotics, trying to maintain this level of influence they had during the prohibition era. I’ve never encountered anyone who believes that ending alcohol prohibition didn’t allow for law enforcement to have more success in fighting these groups and to weaken their grip on our government.

Well, maybe I just did. Kerlikowske seems to think that ending marijuana prohibition won’t help in our effort to defeat Mexico’s drug cartels. And he appears to justify it by saying that ending alcohol prohibition didn’t help in our efforts to fight organized crime syndicates. It certainly did, even if it took a number of years for the power of those groups to diminish. Mexico’s drug gangs make billions of dollars per year from American marijuana consumption. There’s simply no way they can recoup that level of income through extortion or stealing car parts. Setting up a regulated, legal market for marijuana will be a major blow to these groups, and it’s time that the Obama Administration start to seriously consider it.

The House Judiciary Committee passed a bill to get rid of the infamous crack-cocaine sentencing disparity.

Oregon becomes the latest state to allow hemp farming.

Russ Belville writes about the hypocrisy of television networks who happily air shows about marijuana that are entertaining, but censor content about marijuana when it’s about legalization.

Media Matters breaks down the recent lame attempt by the health care industry to scare old people away from reform. More here.

Bill O’Reilly is still terrible at math.

Publius at Obsidian Wings looks at the new Net Nuetrality bill.