Calling a Truce in the War on Drugs: Reason verus Barbarism

Don't you Feel Safer? Image by Flckr user OregonDOTThe juxtaposition of the Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy and Steven Levitt's introduction of "The Daughter Rule" provided insight into both what is wrong with international drug policy, and why it probably will not soon be improved upon.  The Global Commission includes such luminaries as Paul Volcker, Kofi Annan, the former presidents of Columbia, Mexico and Switzerland, and the current Prime Minister of Greece.  They do not mince words:

The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.

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Walking the Federal Pot Plank: Time for More Mutiny

Gwen Florio wrote in the Missoulian on December 19th:

A funny thing happened on the way to Missoula County District Court last week.  Jurors – well, potential jurors, staged a revolt.  They took the law into their own hands, as it were, and made it clear they weren’t about to convict anybody for having a couple of buds of marijuana...’

...The tiny amount of marijuana police found while searching Touray Cornell’s home on April 23 became a huge issue for some members of the jury panel.  No, they said, one after the other.  No way would they convict somebody for having a 16th of an ounce.  In fact, one juror wondered why the county was wasting time and money prosecuting the case at all...

...“I thought, ‘Geez, I don’t know if we can seat a jury,” said (District Judge Dusty) Deschamps.  The judge and former Missoula County attorney said he's "more or less" convinced that marijuana should be legalized in some form, despite being "much alarmed at what I consider to be rampant abuse of what I think was a well-intentioned initiative"...

...On Friday (December 17th), (Defendant Touray) Cornell entered an Alford plea, in which he didn’t admit guilt.  He briefly held his infant daughter in his manacled hands, and walked smiling out of the courtroom...“A mutiny,” said (Deputy Missoula County Attorney Andrew) Paul.  “Bizarre,”...defense attorney (Martin Elison) called it.  In his nearly 30 years as a prosecutor and judge, Deschamps said he’s never seen anything like it.

Death and Taxes Magazine's Andrew Belonsky reacted to the story as follows:

County Attorney Andrew Paul described the jury’s insistence as a “mutiny,” while defense attorney Martin Elison described it as bizarre. Deschamps, however, took a more expansive view, and called the impasse “a reflection of society as a whole on the issue.”

There’s every indication average Americans are mellowing to the idea of legalizing marijuana.  A Gallup survey from October, for example, found that 46% of Americans support legalizing the drug, a two-point increase from last year.  And though the AP-CNBC poll from April showed less favorable numbers for legalization — only 33% in favor, while 55% opposed — it showed an overwhelming support for medical marijuana: 60% of Americans think cannabis should be used as part of prescription plan.

Founding Father and President Thomas Jefferson said:

I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.

John Adams said of the juror:

It is not only his right, but his duty – to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.

So, the obvious question, ever-looming over our collective heads, why isn't pot legal?  I mean lots of other things are legal, and lots of people seem to want to make pot legal, and I myself can't seem to come up with much if any reasons not to make pot legal.  It’s a real head-scratcher.  Marijuana is essentially illegal across all of the United States (except for Breckenridge, Colorado, those rebels); but in many places the drug has been decriminalized to the point that getting caught with an ounce or less of pot is the same as getting a speeding ticket for doing ten miles over. 

You could almost call the war against marijuana the oxymoron of laws: proscriptions against the possession of pot aren’t really much more than symbolic at this point; enforcement of them serves to clog up the courts and costs money and time law enforcement officials could be putting to much more productive use. 

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It's, Like, From the Earth, Man

"Graduation" by Peter BlinmanThere is a pervasive yet erroneous idea circulating these days that things are "good" because they are "natural".  Advertisers for foods or beauty products often engage in label-slapping to that effect; moneyed hippies and bobos buy up "natural" products like nature is going out of style; obesity and cancer are explained away as cosmic justice for our civilization of plastic's forsaking of the earth goddess.

Nowhere can this idea be heard more stupidly (or more harmlessly) than in a circle of close friends and random acquaintances passin da righteous civil disobedience on the left-hand side whilst listening to music about that with which goats love to play and/or watching marijuana-related comedy:

“Why is marijuana against the law? It grows naturally upon our planet. Doesn't the idea of making nature against the law seem to you a bit . . . unnatural?”

Which one might naturally (no pun intended) counter with this pithy dialogue: 

Nick: Come on, what's the big deal? It's from the earth, it's natural. Why would it be there if we weren't supposed to smoke it?

Lindsey: Dog crap is here and we don't smoke that.

The clear and obvious truth is that marijuana is harmless enough without having to appeal to its being natural.  People high on marijuana don't commit crimes.  They don't die.  They mostly just sit around watching stuff on TV and figuring out how to order pizza.

But this post is not about marijuana.  It's about "natural" not entailing "good".  After all, arsenic is natural.  The black plague is natural.  Even rape is natural.  In fact, the entirety of human society - from our legal code to our hallowed institutions of medicine - exists as a Hobbesian bulwark against the evils of the natural world.

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The U.S. Healthcare System is Going to Hell

It's no secret to anybody that the U.S. healthcare system is bad, but it's important to point out from time to time just how bad it is.  I am an asthmatic and have had asthma since I was five or six years old.  Around age ten, I began taking regular medicine, which I have taken daily since then and will likely have to take for the rest of my life.

Part of my motivation in deciding to become a doctor is to work on seemingly "intractable" problems like asthma, because every time I really think about it, it pisses me off.  Despite the genetic reductionism gripping our society (in stark contrast to the scientific community), asthma is a disease having near entire environmental causality.  There was recently a study conducted in China where the rate of asthma decreased in predictable fashion the farther one was from an urban center.  People who lived near factories and cars had mathmatically modelable high rates of asthma correlated with ppm of various pollutants, while people who were farmers and lived in the countryside had near zero incidence of asthma.  The patterns produced matched the patterns produced by of infectious diseases, suggesting strong environmental correlation.  

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That E.D. Kain is So Hot Right Now

I've been reading E.D. Kain for quite some time now (aren't I such a great hipster?), and I've had the opportunity to witness his meteoric rise from twelve posts a day at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen to being profiled by Conor Friedersdorf for the Daily Dish during Andrew Sullivan's hibernation (Cause he's a bear, get it?).  I read Kain's posts on Capitalism, Anarchy & War today (I think that's the first time I've ever typed an ampersand.  Seriously, I had to look for it.) and was absolutely floored: it was as though Howard Beale had been crossed with Mikhail Bakunin, cloned by Norman Borlaug, and then grown by Dame Julie Andrews and John Valjean with Michel de Montaigne as a private tutor a la Aristotle.

Kain:

When our government wages a war overseas against terror or domestically against drugs (or overseas against drugs and domestically against terror) [extremely pithy, emphasis mine] or when they tell you that they’re trying only to stabilize Afghanistan or resolve the conflict in such a way as to make a graceful exit, etc. these are lies.

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July 2010 News Time Capsule

This is from the EconomistI decided to celebrate the birth of my second daughter with a rehashing of news stories from the last time I really kept a continuous link with civilization via the mass media: here is July 2010 as a time capsule of our civilization's most idiotic component.

In the Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses the famous fire hydrant experiment in which subjects were shown increasingly less blurry pictures of a fire hydrant until they were capable of identifying the object.  The experiment concluded that subjects were more likely to correctly identify the object sooner if they were shown fewer pictures.  Taleb interprets these counterintuitive results as proof that if we have discontinuous, intermittent exposure to something, we are more likely to understand that something.  He particularly discusses how intermittent exposure to news stories makes one more likely to know what's truly going on in the world than those who voraciously follow the news.

As an American living in Japan and returning to the U.S. twice a year on average, I sympathize with Taleb's premise (another post), but I think this particular overgeneralization is one of very few glaring faults in his book.  Either way, I'd like to present a news roundup of sorts.  I receive "the Slatest" everyday from Slate Magazine, which basically offers snapshots of news stories, and so I'd like to present some selected Slatest stories, and offer my visceral two cents.  Here it is:

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Drug Policy: Engaging with Reality

In Japan, there is a widespread benign ignorance about the effects of recreational drug use on the human body.  I know only one person here who has tried a hardcore drug (by which I mean it doesn't pass the lunchbreak test), and he happens to be an extremely unique, strongwilled, powerful, and privileged individual.  Drugs (besides of course alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, nitrous, and until recently, both marijuana and mushrooms) are not a part of Japanese culture, and so if Japanese people do not dispassionately understand the physiological effects of crystal meth, who cares?  

However in America, a country saturated with recreational drug use, we suffer from a malignant almost willful ignorance on the part of parents and authority figures.  Our drug laws and programs designed to combat youth drug use, personal experimentation, and addiction are universally poor and self-defeating.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the easily-debunkable urban legends and boogieman stories disseminated through networks of parents and school officials engaging in discussions of mutual ignorance.  Like priests and nuns lecturing Catholic school students about sex, bureaucrats, PTA officials, and politicians not named Hunter S. Thompson should not be formulating drug policy or setting curricula.  This job should be the proper province of neuroscientists who understand the physiology of addiction, and illegal drugs should be scientifically reviewed and assessed by the chemists and clinical researchers at the FDA.

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The Language of Politics: Nuance versus Moral Certainty

Along with a change in legislative direction, President Obama has ushered in a new era of political language.  In stark contrast to President Bush's use of moral language and dichotomies, Obama expresses inclusive nuance, even frequently including a mention of the sincerity of those who disagree with him.  While generally this is an improvement, there are important lessons Obama could learn from his Republican counterpart in framing an issue.

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BrewDog: Anarchy in the U.K.

BrewDog's grassroots financial campaign: Equity for PunksScottish nonconformist beermaker, BrewDog, just released the world's strongest beer: at 32% alcohol content, Tactical Nuclear Penguin is almost as strong as whiskey and will sell for 30 pounds (about 49 dollars as of press time) per bottle.  Founded in 2007 by 24-year-old friends James Watt and Martin Dickie, BrewDog has been in business for less than three years, but those three years have been loud, boisterous, and whirling: nearly everything BrewDog has done in its short rise to greatness has been very public and very controversial.  From the company's website: "BrewDog is about breaking rules, taking risks, upsetting trends, unsettling institutions but first and foremost, great tasting beers." 

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Obama's New Marijuana Policy: One Tiny Step for Mankind

After my recent post on legalization of marijuana through federalism, it is gratifying to see the Obama administration move away from federal prosecution of marijuana offenses that are within the guidelines of state laws.  This is the exact framework needed to allow the eventual legalization of marijuana on the state level - though it is disheartening to see on the very same day Obama's new Justice Department policy: the Los Angeles District Attorny's Office chose to crack down on dispensaries in the LA area.    California is the state with the most developed quasi-legal marijuana infrastructure, so a setback there is especially poignant.

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The Slow Creep towards Weed Legalization

 Irv Rosenfeld is one of four U.S. citizens who get their medical marijuana from the federal governmentFederalism is so powerful that it can even bring progress in the intractible feild of drug reform.  This cover-story in Fortune about how medical marijuana combined with Obama's distinterest in prosecuting violators federally has led to a de facto legalization of marijuana in many states, and especially in California, is fascinating.  My favorite part is when Roger Parloff, the even handed writer and senior editor, is seduced by the lure of that sweet ganja:

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Drug Danger Visually

I can't read the article that accompanies this graph, but the graph alone is pretty interesting.  Unfortunately, without the methodology from the article, you can't see why amphetamines (which I assume includes meth) are rated as less dangerous than cocaine.  A more serious criticism would be that dependence is a lot less important than physical harm.  For example, a huge chunk of the population is dependent on caffeine, but there is so little physical harm that it has a net positive affect on society.  I suppose the counter point would be that without habitual use physical harm is minimized.

The War on Drugs: Graft-Versus-Host Disease

Since it has been mentioned in the last two posts, a full post on prison and drug reform seems warranted.  Eventually, I’d like to discuss the social/economic impact of the current criminalization of drugs, but first I’d like to consider the moral and ethical questions surrounding the issue.

First, why is it illegal to consume certain substances?

It’s not.  Its illegal to possess drugs, but from what I understand consumption is not punished (at least not by itself: if you are on parole, applying for a job, or driving a car you can be punished for consumption).  Of course, it is impossible to consume without possessing, so this seems like a moot point.  Philosophically, however, this means that drugs are illegal apart from the question of whether adults should be allowed to do with their bodies as they see fit.*  Similarly, distribution is subject to greater punishment than mere possession, because that is the act of inciting illegality.  The real crime of drug possession is disobeying the express will of the paternal state.

So on what basis does the state declare drugs illegal?

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The Trouble With Representative Democracy

The criticism that politicians lack the testicular fortitude to back unpopular or broadly-impacting reforms because they must maintain relations with a local constituency is misdirected. Representative democracy is ill-equipped to deal with long-term issues - like climate change, healthcare, and social security - or acute problems that require a fundamental overhaul, like our financial regulatory system. But the reality of creating a majority coalition among 435 congressmen and 100 senators in a two-party system crippled by partisanship (see stimulus package) is that issues prone to negative-spin, like prison and drug reform, are consciously ignored.

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