By the narrowest of margins, the Aloha State's Big Island Hawaii County Council has rejected a state and federally funded marijuana eradication program known as "Green Harvest." The action came dur

Faced with rising drug overdose deaths and high rates of opiate addiction, Massachusetts lawmakers this week began discussing a $5 million plan to fund two "secure treatment centers" for arrested d

A state-sanctioned needle exchange program envisioned for Bexar County (greater San Antonio) under legislation passed last year will not happen -- at least not this year.

Officials of the Iranian government announced last week that they are embarking on a pilot program to provide syringes and condoms to drug users in an effort to prevent the spread of AIDS and hepat

Oddly, the Drug Czar has created a new webpage that offers great tips for any teen looking to catch a buzz. The page claims to be a warning guide for parents, but the potentially deadly secrets contained within it are available for anyone to see. I was able to access all of the site's content without even being asked to verify that I'm over 18.

I've learned to steal drugs from the elderly because they don't monitor their pill count or throw away leftovers because they're super old and confused. Also, there's like a billion websites that don't even check prescriptions and will send me anything. I'm gonna go cure my boreditis now. Thanks, Office of National Drug Control Policy!

Editor's Note: Shane G. Trejo is an intern at StoptheDrugWar.org. His bio is in our "staff" section.

It turns out that prohibition has found an effective way to make marijuana truly toxic. As seen in Germany where marijuana has been tainted with lead in order to increase its weight and increase profits an estimated $682 per pound:

One bag bought from a dealer even contained lead particles big enough to see, which meant the lead must have been added deliberately, rather than being absorbed into the plant from contaminated soil. … The authorities do not know where the tainted marijuana came from or why the lead was added, but the German police suspect that it was done to make money. The samples tested contained 10 percent lead by weight, which translates into an increased profit of about $682 per pound of marijuana.

Maybe Fox News was onto something when they reported about the killer weed. Of course, legalization and regulation would solve any tainted supply problems of not just marijuana but any drug. If policy makers had any concept of history, they would realize this. Look at what happened during alcohol prohibition in the 1920s:

Highly toxic wood alcohols found their way into much of the available bootleg liquor. When denatured industrial alcohol was not sufficiently diluted, or was consumed in large quantities, the result was paralysis, blindness and death. In 1927, almost twelve thousand deaths were attributed to alcohol poisonings, many of these among the urban poor who could not afford imported liquors. In 1930, U.S. public health officials estimated that fifteen thousand persons were afflicted with "jake foot," a debilitating paralysis of the hands and feet brought on by drinking denatured alcohol flavored with ginger root.

When was the last time you saw an American alcohol consumer come down with a case of jake foot? That’s right, never. Because when a person goes to the store to buy liquor or beer, they know exactly what they are getting. I can’t for the life of me remember any deception-related scandals or recalls related to alcohol suppliers. Elected officials choose to ignore the lessons that history has taught us. And as a result, over 100 people have been poisoned in Germany after having to buy marijuana from an unregulated, criminal market. Society suffers while the perpetrators can continue to sell the lead-laced pot with no accountability or consequences.

David Borden, Executive Director

The Drug Czar is warning everyone about an epidemic of meth-laced ecstasy tablets coming into the country from Canada:

Alarmingly, more than 55 percent of the Ecstasy samples seized in the United States last year contained methamphetamine. Cutting their product with less-expensive methamphetamine boosts profits for Canadian Ecstasy producers, likely increases the addictive potential of their product, and effectively gives a dangerous “face lift” to a designer drug that had fallen out of fashion with young American drug users. [Pushing Back]

I'll tell you whose fault this isn't: mine. See, I don't think ecstasy should even be illegal. I don't want it to be manufactured by drug gangs in Canada, or anyone else who might lace it with methamphetamine or other noxious crap. I think it should be manufactured by licensed professionals and sold to adults through regulated outlets. Many people have been saying this for a long time to no avail and now look what's happened.

So if meth-laced ecstasy isn’t my fault, whose fault is it? Ironically, but rather obviously, it is the fault of the exact people who now complain about all the bad ecstasy rolling across our northern border.

The Drug Czar's blog has been very concerned about harm reduction lately. They've taken the counterintuitive position of opposing efforts to save the lives of drug users, which seems like a strange choice. Now I understand why: they think harm reduction is the opposite of what it actually is.

These so-called "harm reduction" strategies are poor public policy because their underlying philosophy involves giving up on those who can successfully recover from drug addiction. [PushingBack.com]

This is wrong for a very simple reason: you cannot recover from addiction if you're dead. Harm reduction programs are not an alternative to treatment, rather they go hand in hand. Harm reduction keeps people healthy and alive, thereby creating opportunities for them to subsequently recover from addiction.

We could do nothing. That would be "giving up." We could ask drug addicts to either quit or die. That would be "giving up." Instead, harm reduction activists have taken to the streets and attacked this problem directly. They've studied the leading causes of death among drug users and created programs to reduce those casualties. That's the opposite of giving up.

Just pretend for a moment that you're cruel and you want drug users to die in large numbers. How would you go about it? Well, you would begin by eliminating regulated distribution so that users are forced to obtain unsafe products from criminals on the street. You would reduce access to clean needles in order to spread AIDS. You would enforce criminal sanctions against users so that they're afraid to seek help. And you would lobby aggressively against anyone who's studied the problem and proposed programs to reduce AIDS and overdoses.

Now I'm not saying the Drug Czar wants to kill people. I'm just saying he presides over a policy that is perfectly tailored to achieve that outcome. And he dares to suggest that the people out there working with addicts and saving lives are the ones who've given up.

The needle exchange program bill passed nearly a year ago by the New Jersey state legislature has borne its first fruit.

Explaining the failure of marijuana prohibition is easy. Sociology, economics, history, and psychology can all help to explain why a safe and popular drug cannot be removed from the market by force. Still, there is another important reason why marijuana is here to stay: it evolves at an incredibly rapid pace, becoming stronger and more profitable every day.

The vigorous growth and adaptability of the marijuana plant has long frustrated efforts by law-enforcement to thwart its production. Specific strains are easily cross-bred, producing offspring that emphasize certain qualities, thus growers in Oregon can develop a strain that grows well in Oregon's climate with minimal effort. Hybridization not only improves potency, but can also shorten flowering time and increase yield, thereby enabling growers to produce more in less time.

We're witnessing a situation in which the biological vigor of the plant itself has far outpaced law-enforcement efforts that were never effective to begin with. Indoor-grown strains can advance through 3-4 generations in a year's time, with the best specimens from each batch selected for cloning or crossbreeding. Each successive generation carries on the best traits of the former, which explains why growers can now accomplish in a basement what used to require an acre or more in the woods.

The great irony of all this is that drug warriors still think increased marijuana potency is an argument for their side. In reality, nothing could better illustrate the failure of their efforts to reduce the drug's production. Harsh marijuana laws have incentivized growers to produce a stronger product, which carries the same penalties by weight, while commanding higher prices on the street.

As the bitter debate over marijuana legalization rages on, the plants will grow ever faster, bigger, and stronger. Marijuana is one of nature's most remarkable creations, and it is unbelievable that so many people still haven't figured out that this plant is here to help us. From healthy foods to a promising cancer cure, we should be grateful that cannabis sativa grows and evolves as vigorously as it does.

With every forward step in marijuana's evolution, the war against this resilient plant becomes less and less effective.

Note: Thanks to court-qualified cannabis expert Chris Conrad for answering growing questions, and to pot-paparazzi Steve Bloom for turning me on to the government's awesome 2008 cultivation assessment, which got me thinking about this.

Please join us for a screening of AMERICAN DRUG WAR. This will be a very special event! We will be dedicating the screening to Claudia Jensen - activist, pediatrician, and warrior against the powerful elite that fight so hard to keep marijuana illegal. ADW participant, friend and associate, Dr. Claudia Jensen lost her life to breast cancer on September 15, 2007, may she rest in peace. Special guest speakers include Judge Gray, T. Rodgers, Kevin Booth, and Joe Peitri.

An amendment to the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill that would have barred the dispersal of federal funds from those departments to any city that opened a safe injection site for drug users

You can urine test them. You can take away their financial aid for college. But you can't stop the kids from getting high. Some people will try anything, and I don't think arresting them is going to help:

Information Bulletin
New Drug – JENKEM

On 09/19/07 Cpl. Disarro received and email from a concerned parent regarding a new drug called “Jenkem”. The parent advised their child learned about this drug through various conversations with several students at Palmetto Ridge High.

Jenkem originated in Africa and other third world countries by fermenting raw sewage to create a gas which is inhaled to achieve a high. Jenkem is now a popular drug in American Schools. Jenkem is a homemade substance which consists of fecal matter and urine. The fecal matter and urine are placed in a bottle or jar and covered most commonly with a balloon. The container is then placed in a sunny area for several hours or days until fermented. The contents of the container will separate and release a gas, which is captured in the balloon. Inhaling the gas is said to have a euphoric high similar to ingesting cocaine but with strong hallucinations of times past. [Snopes]

This doesn't sound like a good idea. But what shall we do about it? You can't pop people for poop possession, or piss-test people for piss sniffing. Should we launch a massive public education campaign warning kids that fermenting their excrement and breathing in the resulting fumes will get them wasted? That could backfire.

So I don't know what the solution is. For starters, we should wait to see if this is a real problem or just another hysterical response to a couple gross, though isolated, incidents. If there really is a rising trend of Florida youths sniffing fermented feces, maybe it's just an overreaction to the Miami DEA Chief's recent claim that marijuana will kill you.

Repressive law enforcement responses to injection drug users in Southeast Asia are undermining the effort to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS in the region,

• read full post
• 2 comments

San Francisco city officials last Thursday took a tentative first step toward opening the nation's first safe injection site for drug users.

The Jersey City, New Jersey, City Council Wednesday unanimously passed an ordinance allowing for the creation of a needle exchange program in the city.

Scott was being silly last Friday night when he published his "D.C. Needle Exchange Ban Lifted: Let's Do Heroin!" blog post. In fact, Scott was being silly in multiple ways.

First, the DC needle exchange ban is only a ban on the District using its own tax dollars to fund the program. The PreventionWorks needle exchange program has been operating now for almost nine years, legally, and before that its predecessor program at the Whitman-Walker AIDS Clinic operated the exchange. It has been making do with private funding. Lifting of this ban means that PreventionWorks will be able to expand its operations, and that more needle exchange programs will be able to open, all of them together reaching more of the people who need the help. But it's not a matter of whether Scott personally could have gotten clean needles.

Second, the PreventionWorks office is only a 15 minute walk from our office, so if Scott had really wanted to use heroin all this time, he wouldn't even have had to travel far to get clean needles. (It's a pretty walk, too, and there's a nice coffee shop in the neighborhood.)

Third, as I pointed out in my editorial this week, the risk created by infected used syringes, while a major one, is by no means the only risk. So long as heroin itself continues to be illegal, the user will continue to be "at risk of overdose from fluctuating purity or poisoning from adulteration," and the addict will continue to suffer "severe financial debilitation from the high street prices created by prohibition," some of them "driven to extreme measures to afford drugs that would cost pennies to produce in a legal market." I know for a fact that Scott understands this as well as I do, and I published that editorial less than 24 hours before Scott wrote his blog post, so it must have been fresh in his mind.

(Fourth, Scott was simply being sarcastic, in case anyone didn't realize it. He and I both scoff at the idea that more needle exchange will lead to increased drug use -- and we have the evidence to back us up.)

So, I'm afraid that Scott and I will be holding out for legalization before we start shooting smack. I recommend that you wait too.

(I'm being sarcastic too -- we also reject the idea that legalization will lead to large numbers of people using intense drugs like heroin who don't already use them now -- I certainly have no interest in it.)

From The Washington Post:

The House yesterday lifted a nine-year-old ban on using D.C. tax dollars to provide clean needles to drug addicts, handing city leaders what they consider a crucial new weapon against a severe AIDS epidemic.

Well, I know what I'm doing tonight. Heroin. Because concerns about the availability of clean needles were the only thing stopping me.

Pro-AIDS activist Mark Souder is furious. He thinks this will cause a heroin epidemic or something. He's right, if you can call a bunch of heroin users that would otherwise be dead an epidemic.

Not to mention that all my friends are pawning their playstations in anticipation of getting super-wasted on uncut, AIDS-free H. I hear it's like having sex with a cloud.