There are some high profile diplomatic meetings coming up regarding Afghanistan, but in Vienna over the past two weeks, a conference took place that could have far more of an effect on success or failure there. The United Nations’ Commission on Narcotic Drugs has convened for the last two weeks. Reuters reported on the first week of the conference:

U.N. members are expected to sign a declaration this week extending for another 10 years a “war on drugs” policy critics say is flawed and only feeds organised crime, helps spread HIV and undermines governments.

The U.N. drug strategy declaration, due to be signed in Vienna on Wednesday or Thursday, marks the culmination of a year of divisive talks among member states to try to agree a unified counter-narcotics policy for the next decade.

At the last convention in 1998, the slogan “A drug free world — we can do it” launched a campaign to eradicate all narcotics, from cannabis to heroin, by using law enforcement to tackle producers, traffickers and end users globally.

Needless to say, this effort fell far short of its goals. Hundreds of millions of people across the globe still use and sell illegal narcotics. As the Reuters article points out, the real consequences of this international circus act have been disastrous:

Drug policy campaigners, social scientists and health experts argue that strategy has failed, with statistics showing that drug production, trafficking and use have all soared during the decade, while the cost of law enforcement, both financially and socially, has rocketed, with vast numbers imprisoned.

In the United States, where illegal drug use is highest, the government spends around $70 billion a year to combat drugs. But illegal drug use has risen steadily over the past decade and a fifth of the prison population is there for drug offences.

Of course, that’s only a small part of the disaster. It has turned Mexico and our inner cities into war zones. It has created an atmosphere of fear and hostility between law abiding citizens and the police. And on the world stage, it threatens to undermine NATO’s efforts in Afghanistan.

One of the promises of the Obama Administration was to restore a commitment to science-based policy over ideological posturing. When it comes to drug policy, they’re moving in the right direction, but still have a way to go before truly fulfilling that promise.

Within international drug policy, the sticky point is the term “harm reduction.” Ideas like needle exchanges, safe sites, decriminalization for users and addicts, and the legal markets for cannabis are the main examples of harm reduction. In areas where these harm reduction methods have been tried, the negative overall effects of drug abuse – from overdoses to petty crime to street violence – have been reduced. It’s virtually impossible to find public health experts who’ve studied this subject who will say that these tactics don’t work. While the Obama Administration has been willing to endorse needle exchanges, they’ve been balking at endorsing other proven strategies:

In a statement explaining the White House opposition to harm reduction, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, deputy chief of the U.S. mission to the U.N. in Vienna, emphasized the administration’s support for needle exchange programs and “other evidence-based approaches to reduce the negative health and social consequences of drug abuse, including access to medication-assisted treatment for narcotic addiction.”

“However,” Pyatt continued, “the United States continues to believe that the term ‘harm reduction’ is ambiguous. It is interpreted by some to include practices that the United States does not wish to endorse.”

Such practices, according to State Department spokeswoman Laura Tischler, include drug legalization, drug consumption rooms, heroin prescription initiatives and programs to provide drug paraphernalia that has no tangible health benefit to the user.

By claiming that heroin prescription initiatives, drug consumption rooms, and legalization have no benefits, Tischler is very blatantly putting ideology ahead of science. Vancouver’s IN-SITE program, which allows for drug addicts to have a safe medical setting to feed their addictions, has been such a success in helping people get clean (and to reduce the collateral damage that generally comes with addiction) that an official from the Harper Government last year publicly rebuked the government’s attempts to close it. Everyone from Vancouver city officials to the police to health experts have been fighting to keep the program running. In Switzerland, their heroin prescription program has been so successful that voters there overwhelmingly voted to continue it. In Zurich, the number of new heroin addicts has plummeted by nearly 90% since they launched their program in the mid-90s.

Glenn Greenwald traveled to Portugal last year for the Cato Institute to study the effects of drug decriminalization in that nation. The Portuguese didn’t just decriminalize marijuana either, they decriminalized all personal drug use, including cocaine and heroin. Here’s what he found:

Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense.

Yet in Vienna this past week, the United States sided with Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran in preventing the declaration from containing anything about harm reduction. In the eyes of the world’s most authoritarian regimes, “harm reduction” is seen as an encouragement to do drugs, even though the reality has long been that harm reduction methods have not led to greater amounts of drug use. This decision was made under the direction of the outgoing interim Drug Czar, Ed Jurith, and not the recently appointed Gil Kerlikowske.

The proper analogy here, as this Students for Sensible Drug Policy post on the conference points out, is that harm reduction is to drug use as birth control is to sex. The pursuit of both sex and drugs is a part of human nature. The idea that institutions can establish effective barriers against these human impulses has repeatedly been shown to be folly. The role that institutions should play is to ensure that these impulses have the least negative impact on others. That’s the point of harm reduction, and by every measure, it works far better than trying to use law enforcement to stamp out the behavior altogether.

This failure in American policy isn’t just resulting in more crime and more wasted taxpayer dollars. It’s also undermining our efforts in Afghanistan. As we continue to strong-arm our European allies to take a more hard-line (and ineffective) approach to reducing drug use, the Taliban increasingly profit from the inflated prices. They profit both by protecting traffickers (and farmers) from the law and by participating in the trade directly. Afghanistan still produces around 90% of the world’s heroin, which accounts for somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the entire nation’s GDP. Much of this profit goes towards weapons used to kill coalition troops.

Much of the exported heroin from Afghanistan heads west through Iran or northwest through Russia on its way west. As a result, Russia and Iran now have two of the largest heroin addiction problems in the world. Those two notoriously authoritarian regimes both make attempts to downplay the problem while also demanding the most authoritarian response. In fact, Iran’s drug war solutions tend to look a lot like ours:

According to the figures released by Iran’s Drug Control Headquarters, Tehran spent over 600 million dollars in the two years leading to October 2008, to dig canals, build barriers and install barbed wire to seal off the country’s borders.

The result is that while the troops who fight alongside us in Afghanistan are Canadian, Dutch, French, and British, our approach to dealing with the illegal opium trade is more in line with what Russia and Iran advocate. As a result, the number of coalition troops who’ve lost their lives there has steadily risen over the past five years, and our relationship with NATO allies has been strained. When it comes to how to deal with the opium, we’re agreeing with nations we tend to consider enemies, while our strongest allies are seeing their brave young men and women being killed every day as a result.

The Taliban of today is not the Taliban of 2001, which used both religious sentiments against drugs and western aid to massively reduce the amount of opium produced there. The Taliban today is much more driven by nationalism and much more willing to profit from this trade. As a result, they’re once again threatening to overtake the regime in Kabul. They also have strong ties to anti-western radicals within Pakistan, which has the potential to turn the problem in Afghanistan into something worse altogether.

It’s been encouraging to see more and more media outlets correctly illustrate the dynamics of what’s currently happening in Mexico. There seems to be a growing understanding that the alarming amount of violence there is driven by American demand for illegal drugs and cannot be defeated with a military response. What we can’t afford to have right now is the same dynamic playing out in the lawless areas of Pakistan, where a populace largely sympathetic to radicalism has been put in a position to profit handsomely from the opium trafficking that we’re trying to push out of Afghanistan.

Up until now, the residents of the border area of Pakistan have been able to keep themselves isolated from Islamabad’s reach, but they don’t currently threaten the government itself. That could change if control of the opium trade ends up in their hands. And that’s exactly what our strategy in Afghanistan appears likely to do.

Just as the drug crackdown in the United States – the one that has filled our prisons to record numbers – has done nothing more than create a war south of the border, our ongoing belief that victory in Afghanistan comes from defeating the opium traffickers rather than building up stable Afghan institutions will only result in the same thing over there – a war south of that border as well.

Limiting the amount of money being made through the opium trade can only be done one way – by limiting the demand. A number of nations, including some of our closest allies, are figuring out how to do this effectively. Unfortunately, America’s anti-drug officials are still fighting them on purely ideological grounds. They’re ignoring evidence and avoiding debate. It’s time that we have an administration that allows for a fully open discussion on these issues that values empirical evidence over fear mongering. If not, Afghanistan will most certainly be to Obama what Iraq was to Bush.

I hope everyone finds a way to enjoy breaking the law over the next three weekends.

– Be careful when driving with soap, peppermint, oregano, or any number of other substances that test positive as illegal drugs in widely used field tests.

– Some Oregon lawmakers (2 Republicans and 2 Democrats) are trying to overhaul their medical marijuana law. They want the state to control production and ban private growing. Then, they want to tax medical marijuana patients at $98-per-ounce. That’s twice as much as what was proposed in a California bill for recreational users.

I guess in a time of economic distress like the present, our nation’s cancer and MS patients need to step up and pay their share for once.

– On a similar subject, Josh Farley reports on the Bruce Olson trial in the Kitsap Sun.

– As the marijuana decriminalization bill dies in the House, two University of Washington researchers, Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert, explain why they made a mistake:

[Read more…]

The trial against medical marijuana patient Bruce Olson in Kitsap County has gotten underway this week. The Cannabis Defense Coalition (a group that I work with) has been posting daily roundups from the courtroom. Olson and his wife Pam were arrested after members of the WestNET drug task force raided their home in 2007 and found 48 marijuana plants. Both Bruce and Pam are authorized by a physician to be medical marijuana patients.

Some interesting items from those dispatches:

– The prosecutors have been threatening defense witnesses with prosecution in order to keep them from testifying, including Bruce’s wife Pam, who was already tried and convicted last year of the very same crime (manufacturing marijuana with the intent to deliver).

– Earlier today (Wednesday), the jury pool was sent home because the prosecutor convinced the judge that the potential jurors were “tainted” after seeing a protester outside the courtroom holding a “Stop Arresting Medical Marijuana Patients” sign. This delayed the trial for a day.

I also heard that some local reporters have been on hand, so hopefully we’ll get some more complete news coverage from this gigantic mess. As always, if you’re free to attend and show your support for Bruce, you can find the court schedule at the bottom of this post.

Last week’s contest was won by 2cents. The location was Mississauga, ON. Here’s this week’s, good luck…

I just want to thank everyone who supported the successful passage of the Death with Dignity law this past year. It reminded me why this corner of the country is truly a special place.

UPDATE (Goldy):
Compassion and Choices has a page up explaining Washington’s Death With Dignity Act, and providing many useful links for patients and their families.

The news of Mexico’s drug war violence is finally starting to get the attention it deserves – primarily because it’s starting to affect American (and even Canadian) cities. Much of the response has even been positive, with a number of insightful editorials, and some initial attempts by politicians in border states to begin discussing the connection between drug prohibition and the violence. But not everyone gets it just yet.

At a website called investors.com comes the most confused editorial I’ve seen on the Mexican violence so far this year.

Now that Phoenix has become a kidnap capital, it’s official: Mexico’s drug war is spilling over into the U.S. The administration vows a strong response, but so far seems to be putting special interests first.

Trouble from Mexico is cropping up in the usual place: the border, a nexus of illegal immigration, human smuggling and drug trafficking, all of it interlinked. It’s all about illegal routes into the states. As they grow scarcer, traffickers’ war on the Mexican state intensifies.

The intensification of this war has had nothing to do with border routes. The intensification was a result of a massive effort by Mexican President Felipe Calderon to go after the cartel leaders. The resulting violence was an entirely predictable response to Calderon’s push, based upon the numerous times in the past that Mexico has tried to eliminate the cartel and seen violence skyrocket. The smuggling routes aren’t becoming scarcer, they’re being fought over.

The U.S. seems to recognize the gravity of the problem — or is at least paying it lip service. A recent Pentagon report cited a risk of a sudden collapse in Mexico if cartels win. A Homeland Security report vows to ready a response if Mexico’s war spreads here. Last Friday, the State Department’s global counternarcotics report called the cartels “a significant threat.”

But for a threat this grave, the Obama administration places it below other priorities. Yes, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano calls the violence “a top priority.” But how does that jibe with her response to the Texas governor’s request for more border troops? “We do not want to militarize the border,” she said.

The Obama Administration has been far from perfect in how they’ve discussed what’s happening in Mexico, but this is a foolish criticism. Considering that Mexico doesn’t allow American military personnel on Mexican soil, there’s not much that an increased military presence on the border would do, other than to lead to actual warfare in cities like El Paso.

This editorial is still premised on the archaic belief that the only way to defeat cartels is by killing off the “bad guys.” We know now that this doesn’t work. The only way to defeat the cartels is to cut off their profits. Collectively, the Mexican cartels earn roughly $1 billion per week. Once you kill a “bad guy”, there will be a dozen people fighting each other to be the next “bad guy” and get a piece of that pie.

Human trafficking is a real and serious problem, but it’s one that we’ll never be successful at fighting as long as we continue to maintain a drug policy that helps these criminal organizations remain untouchable.

The editorial goes on to criticize Obama’s attempts at resurrecting gun control legislation, criticisms that I generally agree with, but then it goes off the deep end:

Other Obama officials also send mixed messages. The new drug czar, former Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske, stresses “harm reduction” instead of tough action. Sounds humane, but it essentially expands cartel market bases by enabling users and expanding the buyer base for the cartels.

“Harm reduction” distributes new needles, legalizes medical marijuana and puts pot at the bottom of enforcement priorities. Legalization lobbies are happy. But cartels have one more reason to smuggle.

What? And this website gives investment advice?

First of all, if medical marijuana were fully legal, the cartels would easily be pushed out of the market by legal American growers. If marijuana were fully legalized for recreational use, you could massively reduce the amount of money being used to wage this war against Calderon’s government. And you could free up the resources to shut down human trafficking networks, which don’t have the same enormous level of demand that drugs do.

Second, this editorial is assuming that harm reduction techniques for dealing with hard drug addiction increases demand. That hasn’t been true anywhere in the world where it’s been tried. Not in Switzerland. Not in Australia. Not in Canada. Not in Holland. The idea that needle exchanges give cartels “one more reason to smuggle” is an idea so outdated that it would have been laughable a decade ago.

The choice of Gil Kerlikowski to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy has generally been positive among drug law reformers, but he will certainly find that various members of the media and the political elite will see no distinction between his moderate support of a public health approach to drug problems and the views of more outspoken legalization advocates. We’ve long been used to Drug Czars who never let anyone take a more authoritarian posture than them. Now that the country at our southern border is in real danger of succumbing to the downstream effects of that legacy, Kerlikowske should find it easier to advocate for a new direction.

The General reviews Joe the Plumber’s new book.

Scott Morgan writes about the dangers of getting hooked on anti-drug propaganda.

Our nation’s dumbest citizens are “threatening” to remove themselves from the nation’s workforce. More here. And some tangential silliness here.

Finally, it’s a sad day as WhackyNation is no more.

J.D. Tuccille writes about the very disturbing video of a King County officer assaulting a 15-year-old girl in her holding cell. If you haven’t seen the video yet, you can see it in this KOMO News report below:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl67FmVRjYs[/youtube]

Last week’s contest was won by YLB, who found that ginormous Costco in Murray, Utah.

This week’s contest is also retail themed, good luck!

– I was chatting with Dan Robinson last night at DL, and he was telling me about an encounter he had during his latest call-in for jury duty. An older gentleman, when asked if he thought the accused had done something wrong, responded by saying “well, he must have done something wrong, or he wouldn’t be here.” The examples of why it’s a bad idea to believe that are far too numerous to mention, but another huge one surfaced last week.

Over at Reason, Radley Balko breaks another story involving corruption in Mississippi. In this case, an old video surfaced showing Michael West, a forensics expert working on a case from Monroe, Louisiana, intentionally putting bitemarks on a toddler who’d drowned in a bathtub. The defendant who was eventually convicted in the case, Jimmie Duncan, has been sitting on death row for 10 years.

Balko has long covered the case of Mississippi’s main medical examiner and West’s colleague, Steven Hayne (more posts here). Hayne has been doing autopsies in Mississippi for 20 years (and doing far more than other forensics experts say is even possible) and has testified in thousands of trials. There have already been a number of people who’ve been exonerated by DNA or other evidence after being sent to long prison terms, or even death row, by Hayne’s testimony.

– Josh Marshall writes about Sir Allen Stanford, the nation of Antigua, and how the latter owes the former $100 million.

Now, I have an affinity for the place because I’ve been there three times. Not that I’m some big Caribbean island hopper or world traveller. It’s the only place that I’ve ever been in the Caribbean. But I’ve been there three times. So I know the place a bit. And Stanford’s flameout has completely upended the whole place because he had made himself such a player there. As a funny illustration, a few days ago I went to the website of the local newspaper, the Antigua Sun, to try to find out the latest on what was happening down there. And I couldn’t find anything about it, which struck me as weird. And then I dug a little deeper to discover that … well, the Antigua Sun is owned by Sir Allen. So maybe that explains it.

The country has been hit by a major banking panic, not surprisingly. And the entire population has been in a panic over what’s going to happen to the country. Today the government announced that it is confiscating the land that Sir Allen owns in the island “to protect the national economy.” And that makes me wonder if more of that might be afoot because a few days ago the Prime Minister revealed that the government of Antigua owes Stanford “more than $100 million.”

And in good news for rich Americans looking to do business in the Caribbean, we might be able to play in Cuba again soon.

– Legendary drug warrior Calvina Fay speaks out against the California bill to regulate marijuana:

“If we think the drug cartels are going to tuck their tails between their legs and go home, I think we’re badly mistaken,” Fay said.

“They’re going to heavily target our children.”

Calvina, they already heavily target our children. Not just as customers, but as employees too. If you legalize marijuana, you’ll no longer have 16 year old kids standing on the street selling it. You’ll have old hippies in a head shop or maybe a state liquor store doing that. And the unscrupulous people who still try to sell drugs to young people? Well, we’ll finally have the police resources to catch them when we’re not wasting our time trying to arrest Michael Phelps.

– Finally, with Jenny Durkan looking to become the U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, what will happen with the case against Marc Emery, the Canadian marijuana seed-seller who’s long been fighting extradition by the previous two U.S. Attorneys here?

Yesterday, Mark Kleiman, a California-based professor who occasionally discusses drug policy, wrote about the shifting tides on marijuana:

Obviously, this isn’t something the Obama Administration is going to jump on, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a big move late in a second Obama term or sometime in the term of his successor (assuming the Democrats keep winning elections). If I had to quote odds, I’d say about even money on legalization within fifteen years. As with the repeal of alcohol prohibition and the creeping legalization of gambling, I’d expect it to be presented at least in part as a revenue-raising measure.

And today, a member of the California State Assembly, Tom Ammiano, introduced a bill to do just that. His bill would regulate sales of marijuana the same as alcohol, with a 21 year old age limit and fairly substantial ($50 per ounce) taxes on both growers and sellers.

While I’m not optimistic that this particular bill will pass, I think that legalization is bound to happen on the west coast well within fifteen years. As Kleiman predicted, though, it’s being presented in part as a revenue-raising measure:

It also has the backing of Betty Yee, who chairs the state Board of Equalization, which collects taxes in California. An analysis by the agency concluded the state would collect $1.3 billion a year in tax revenue and a $50-an-ounce levy on retail sales if marijuana were legal.

But the next part in that article is the subject of more heated debate:

The analysis also concluded that legalizing marijuana would drop its street value by 50 percent and increase consumption of the substance by 40 percent.

Kleiman tends to agree with the latter part of that assessment:

Substantively, I’m not a big fan of legalization on the alcohol model; a legal pot industry, like the legal booze and gambling industries, would depend for the bulk of its sales on excessive use, which would provide a strong incentive for the marketing effort to aim at creating and maintaining addiction. (Cannabis abuse is somewhat less common, and tends to be somewhat less long-lasting, than alcohol abuse, and the physiological and behavioral effects tend to be less dramatic, but about 11% of those who smoke a fifth lifetime joint go on to a period of heavy daily use measured in months.) So I’d expect outright legalization to lead to a substantial increase in the prevalence of cannabis-related drug abuse disorder: I’d regard an increase of only 50% as a pleasant surprise, and if I had to guess I’d guess at something like a doubling.

Bruce Mirken from the Marijuana Policy Project disagrees:

A spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, which advocates for reform in marijuana laws and is backing Ammiano’s proposal, said any expected increase in consumption is a “false notion.”

“They are making an intuitive assumption that a lot of people make that really does not have that much evidence behind it,” said Bruce Mirken, the group’s spokesman

Mirken is absolutely correct here. Anyone who confidently says that marijuana abuse (or even marijuana use) will go up substantially in an environment where sales are legal is far more certain than they should be.

The first problematic assumption that leads to that unwarranted certainty is a belief there are large numbers of people in California who would start using marijuana if only it were sold legally. I’ve certainly met people (generally older people) who’ve used marijuana in the past, but have found it difficult to obtain due to its illegality, and who would probably buy it if it were legal. So in that respect, I could see an increase in use. However, this is a subset of the population who has already proven to be extremely unlikely to develop problems with marijuana abuse.

Young people, on the other hand, don’t have problems finding marijuana. The idea that marijuana prohibition is actually working as a firewall to keep young people from obtaining it is utterly ridiculous. Establishing a legal market with an age restriction of 21 will actually make it harder for young people to obtain it than it is now (although it likely still won’t be that hard). Because abuse problems are most profound in people who begin using it early, there’s a logical basis to expect abuse problems to decline in a post-Prohibition environment. One could also look towards Holland, where sales of marijuana to adults have been allowed for over 30 years, yet the use of marijuana among teens there is far lower than it is here.

Again, there are a lot of factors at play here, but my own guess is that in whatever state legalizes marijuana first, use will go up by less than 10%, and the prevalence of abuse will stay about the same or go down. Marijuana abuse, as a societal problem, will still remain miniscule when compared to harder drugs like meth, or even alcohol.

The biggest question for me is how the legal market will develop, and how we’ll deal with things like advertising and taxation. The tax being proposed in the California bill is pretty big. An ounce generally doesn’t cost more than $300 on the black market, so a $50 tax on that is not chump change, especially if legalization cuts the black market prices in half. Would that drive people back to the black market? Or would the growers (who have a history of begging to be taxed) be happy to yield a big chunk of their potential profit in exchange for legal status? I have no idea.

Kleiman, on the other hand, wants to take a different approach:

So I continue to favor a “grow your own” policy, under which it would be legal to grow, possess, and use cannabis and to give it away, but illegal to sell it. Of course there would be sales, and law enforcement agencies would properly mostly ignore those sales. But there wouldn’t be billboards.

There are a couple of very big problems with this proposal. Scott Morgan discusses some of the problems here. Another major reason why this approach won’t work is because it’s not trivial to grow high quality marijuana. It’s much more than just throwing some seeds in dirt and putting it under a light. It’s arguably far harder and more time consuming than homebrewing beer. And if you’re just growing for yourself, you’d end up spending a lot of money just to produce a single plant. People would naturally gravitate towards larger scale growers and distributors who know how to produce a higher quality product. It’s an unrealistic proposal, and it’s not at all clear why Kleiman thinks we can’t allow sales but just ban certain types of advertising.

At the end of Kleiman’s post, though, there’s something that he and I agree on:

I just hope the sellers are required to measure the cannabinoid profiles of their products and put those measurements on the label.

Ending prohibition doesn’t have to be synonymous with unfettered free markets. It should be about smart regulations for an activity that millions of Americans are going to partake in whether it’s legal or not. I hope that as we move closer to the post-Prohibition world, we begin to think about (and study) the real effects of setting up newly legal markets in various ways.