Holder talks pot, more big bucks flow to Oregon initiative, federal judge to ponder whether marijuana belongs in Schedule I, the right attacks Vanita Gupta, Canada's NDP calls for decriminalization, and more. Let's get to it:

US Attorney General Eric Holder (justice.gov)

Attorney General Holder "Cautiously Optimistic" on Marijuana Legalization. In a Monday interview with CNN, Attorney General Eric Holder said he is "cautiously optimistic" about marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington. He said that the Justice Department was focused on eight "priority areas" when it came to legal weed, including prevention of distribution to minors, drug trafficking across state lines, and drug-related violence. "What I've told the governors of those states is that if we're not satisfied with their regulatory scheme that we reserve the right to come in and to sue them. So we'll see," Holder said.

Oregon Initiative Reports More Big Bucks Donations. The campaign committee for Measure 91 has reported receiving $800,000 in a pair of high-denomination donations. The Drug Policy Action Network, the campaign and lobbying arm of the Drug Policy Alliance, kicked in half a million bucks, while the New Approach PAC, tied to the family of the late Progressive Insurance magnate Peter Lewis, gave $300,000. Over all, Drug Policy Action Network has contributed $1.85 million and the Lewis group has given $1.25 million. The initiative campaign has spent more than $1.1 million on TV and radio ads.

Federal Judge to Consider Whether Marijuana Should Be Schedule I. A US district court judge in Sacramento will hold a hearing next Monday on whether marijuana is appropriately classified as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act. The hearing comes in the case of United States v. Pickard, et.al. Expert witnesses, including Columbia University psychology professor Dr. Carl Hart, will testify that classifying marijuana as a Schedule I drug is not consistent with accepted scientific evidence. This is the first time in recent memory that a federal judge has granted a hearing on the issue.

Decriminalization Fails By One Vote in Columbia, MO, City Council. A move to decriminalize marijuana in Columbia failed on a 4-3 vote Monday night after hours of intense debate. City staff opposed the measure, saying it would put the city in conflict with state law, and local police also opposed it, saying it would put officers in an awkward position, especially when doing joint counter-drug operations with other state or local law enforcement agencies.

Medical Marijuana

Missouri to Begin Taking Applications for Low-THC, High-CBD Medical Marijuana. People who want to grow high-CBD, low-THC marijuana for medical purposes under a new state law can begin submitting applications to the state Department of Health beginning November 3. The state will license two growers, and the window for applications is 30 days. The growers must operate as nonprofits and must produce marijuana that is less than 0.3% THC.

Law Enforcement

Conservative Attacks on DOJ Civil Rights Nominee Gupta Get Underway. Heritage Foundation resident expert Cully Stimson has penned an opinion piece that lays out one line of attack on Vanita Gupta, the ACLU attorney just named acting head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights division and who is nominated to permanently fill the post. "The New Civil Rights Division Head Wants to Decriminalize Possession of All Drugs," is his headline -- and the gist of his argument. Click on the link to read his piece.

International

Canada's NDP Calls for Marijuana Decriminalization and Study. The New Democratic Party (NDP) will this week officially call for immediate marijuana decriminalization, with monitoring of the health and social side effects. The call will come in a supplemental document published alongside a House of Commons health committee report, which is set to be issued today or tomorrow. While the NDP's stand is progressive, it is not as progressive as the position of the Liberals, who are calling for legalization.

Cairo University Begins Mandatory Drug Testing of Students. Any student who wants to reside in school housing at the University of Cairo must undergo mandatory, suspicionless drug testing under a new university policy. Some 4,000 students have already been tested, with 9,000 more waiting their turn. No objections to the policy have been heard.

An unnamed fifth grader at an Indiana school was bitten by a police drug dog during an anti-drug Red Ribbon Awareness Week at the Clay County Courthouse last Thursday. The bite occurred after the dog's police handler handed the boy a bag of real drugs.

The fake drug raid, complete with actors, was carried out to help "educate Clay County fifth graders on drug awareness," but they got a lesson in drug war awareness instead. The police hid a small amount of drugs on the kid's person to demonstrate how drug dogs can find extremely small amounts of drugs in a scenario "under the exclusive control and supervision of members of the court and law enforcement."

Oddly enough, drug dogs are not typically used to sniff individuals, but are instead commonly used to sniff vehicles and buildings.

"It was an unfortunate accident," Police Chief Clint McQueen told the Brazil Times. "Wish it hadn't happened like that but it did. We are trying to evaluate (the incident) to make sure nothing like this happens again."

High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society, by Dr. Carl Hart (2013, Harper/Harper Collins Publishers, 340 pp., $26.99 HB)

Some of those things contradict the conventional wisdom, but Hart has the cred -- both street and academic -- to state them. Although it is the addict or problematic drug user who is too often the media's face of drug use or the subject of scientific research, he notes, the vast majority of drug users are not addicts or problematic. And yes, that even extends to the most demonized drugs, like crack. While we were told one hit could get you strung out, it turns out only a small fraction of crack consumers are addicts, he points out.

Hart also has good, practical advice -- naive drug users shouldn't take drugs the same way experienced users do, for example, or get enough sleep! -- based not only on scientific research, but also personal observation and experience. Now at the pinnacle of his profession, he also wants to restore some sanity to our drug policies.

Dr. Hart has come a long way from the mean, if sun-splashed, streets of Miami, and with High Price, he takes you along for the ride. The journey is well worth it. Part memoir, part social history, part drug science, part plea for sanity on the issues of drugs, race, and class, High Price is revelatory as well as readable, illuminating as well as incisive, as impassioned as it is important.

While Hart grew up the wrong color and in a family scrabbling to hang on to its lower middle class status, his is, above all, an American story -- a story of coming of age, overcoming adversity, and striving for success and understanding in a world seemingly stacked against him. It's also the story of the American working class, buffeted by the de-industrialization that began in the 1970s, targeted by Reagan Republicans with cuts in social programs in the 1980s, and mostly dealt with by "tough on crime" and "tough on drugs" policies that have been in place ever since. That the malignant swelling of the nation's prison population is tied to Reagan era policies ( though many of them enacted by Democratic legislators) too often goes unnoted.

But of course, Hart isn't an unhyphenated American, he's African-American, and that means he carries an additional burden, the assumption too many make of criminality based on little more than his skin color. He wasn't expected to succeed, but to become a number, like so many of his peers. And, as he notes, but for the grace of god he could have gone down that path. He recounts the teenage criminality of he and his peers, making the stark point that a single arrest could make the difference between a career as a scientist and a career as an ex-con car washer. Some of his friends, no better or worse than he, had that unfortunate first encounter with law enforcement and the criminal justice system and never recovered: Educational opportunities blocked, job opportunities lost, they were essentially assigned to the scrap heap.

For some of them, it was a drug bust. Slinging dope was and is a way of life for the marginalized poor, an income, although not a great one, and a way to achieve status and respect. But of course, it's also a ticket to the slammer, particularly if you're poor and of color, without the resources available to middle class white folks. One thing Hart makes crystal clear is just how stacked the deck is against the urban poor, and that alone makes his book worth noting.

Hart grew into young adulthood imbibing the conventional wisdom about how drugs had had such a devastating impact on his community, but he also began to start thinking critically about the mismatch between rhetoric and reality. At some point along the way, he had a Chris Rock moment.

"You know what they say, crack is destroying the ghetto," Rock once famously observed. "Yeah, like the ghetto was so nice before crack. They say that shit like everyone in the 'hood had a yacht, a mansion, and a swimming pool, and crack came by and dried it all up."

As Hart began studying psychology and eventually neuroscience, he began noticing that the effects of crack cocaine widely touted in media and political discourses didn't match the science. In fact, he observed, most of the devastating effects attributed to crack could more fairly and accurately be attributed to poverty. Crack didn't bring guns to the ghetto; they were already there. Crack didn't bring broken families to the ghetto; they were already there. It may not have helped, but it was not the root cause of the problem.

"The effect of crack, when it had one, was mainly to exacerbate the problems that I'd seen in my home and in the hood since the 1970s," he wrote. "The drug's pharmacology didn't produce excess violence."

The studies on which he embarked, moving on from observing the effects of drugs on rats to observing their effects on people, led him to a startling -- and eye-opening -- conclusion: "Much of what we are doing in terms of drug education, treatment and public policy is inconsistent with scientific data."

Hart's critique extends to the science itself. He describes famous experiments where rats or monkeys alone in a cage will repeatedly press a lever to get more drugs, up to the point of death itself. But he then explains how those doses are many times higher than those any human would use, and he makes the crucial point that obsessive drug-taking behavior is reduced when the lab animals are part of a community and when they have other options.

Based on his scientific research, as well as his own observations and historical research (and musical and lyrical inspiration from the likes of Bob Marley and Public Enemy), Hart decided he needed to speak out against the injustices of the war on drugs. He became a board member of the Drug Policy Alliance, he began speaking to groups large and small, and High Price is part of that same education project.

This is not your typical drug policy tome. It's not a paean to pot, nor is it a dry academic treatise. But it is important, not only because it provides a voice for the voiceless peers he left behind, but also because it is a science- and evidence-based clarion call for a smarter and more human approach to drugs, one that situates drugs and problematic drug use within the broader social context. And it's a damned good read, too.