South Korean prosecutors sign on for more, better drug war, a group of French senators makes an urgent call for marijuana legalization, and more.

Marijuana Policy

Gallup Poll: Support for Marijuana Legalization Remains High, But Americans Are Split on Whether Pot is Good or Bad for Society. In a Gallup poll released this week, support for marijuana legalization was at 68 percent, equaling previous Gallup highs on the question. But Americans were evenly split on whether it is good or bad for society, with 49 percent saying it was a positive and 50 percent saying it was a negative. People who have used marijuana -- nearly half of American adults -- were much more likely to view it positively for both users (70 percent) and society (66 percent). Those who have not used marijuana were more likely to say has negative effects on users (62 percent) and society (72 percent). Some 16 percent of respondents said they currently use marijuana.

International

Bolivia Sees Third Week of Clashes Among Coca Growers. For the third week in a row, hundreds of coca growers from La Paz department marched on Monday to demand the closure of a "parallel" coca market affiliated with the ruling Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) Party. Under the country's coca laws, only two markets are recognized -- one in La Paz and one in Cochabamba -- but the "parallel" market has been operating anyway without any government action.

The La Paz coca growers, organized as Adepcoca, marched toward the parallel market in Villa El, where residents put up barricades to protect themselves and their homes from police and protesters. They had suffered damage during street clashes in the past two weeks. Hundreds of police officers protected the market, shooting teargas at the marchers and arresting 24 of them. But more signs of division among coca growers are becoming apparent. The coca growers of the tropics of Cochabamba declared themselves in a "state of emergency" and said it was not possible "to side with the pro-coup right wing." The government, for its part, on Monday sent a letter to the Adepcoca unionists with an invitation for talks to resolve the issue.

French Senators Petition Macron's Government for Urgent Marijuana Reform. Some 31 senators from the Socialist, Ecologist, and Republican group -- a socialist bloc making up about one-fifth of parliament -- published a letter in the Le Monde newspaper calling on the government of President Macron to launch a consultative process to introduce new legislation to legalize marijuana. The senators rejected the half-step of decriminalization, saying it was a demagogic option and would merely "perpetuate the existing ban." In a commentary published with the letter, Le Monde said that marijuana prohibition is "unsustainable" and it is time to "face reality head-on."

South Korean Prosecutors Vow All-Out War on Organized Crime, Drugs. Prosecutors on Tuesday declared all-out war on drugs and organized crime amid a rising number of such offenses. Drug seizures are at an all-time high and drug arrests are up 13 percent over last year. Prosecutors from six district prosecutors' offices met at the Supreme Prosecutor Office (SPO) in Seoul to plot strategies to suppress organized crime and drug crimes. The prosecutors said the increase in drug crimes was because ordinary citizens are using social media to buy and sell drugs. The SPO said it will construct a database on organized crime and drug crime and would strengthen cooperation with international organizations, such as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). It also said it would form a consultative group with police and the state intelligence agency.

The country's largest federal workers' union wants an end to marijuana testing of employees in states where it is legal, Mexican cartel gunmen get in a shootout with the Guatemalan president's guards at a border village, and more.

Marijuana Policy

Largest Federal Workers' Union Calls for Ending Marijuana Testing for Most Government Employees in Legal States. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the nation's largest union representing federal workers, adopted a resolution earlier this summer supporting marijuana legalization and calling for an end to marijuana testing and other policies that penalize marijuana-using employees in states where it is legal. Only the title of the resolution, "Resolution to Support Deleting Responsible Off-Duty Marijuana Usage from Suitability Criteria," has been posted, not its actual text. But a draft version of the text included support for marijuana legalization and urged the US Office of Personnel Management to "rescind its policies regarding pre-employment use and off-duty use of cannabis by federal employees in non- safety-sensitive, non-national security positions to the extent such cannabis use is permitted by state or District of Columbia law." The AFGE represents more than 700,000 federal workers.

California Marijuana Consumption Lounges Set to Take Off. After a slow start because of pandemic shutdowns and local concerns, marijuana consumption lounges appear set to expand across the state. Most lounges in the state are currently centered in the San Francisco Bay area (there is only one in the Los Angeles area, in West Hollywood), but now lounges are getting the go-ahead from municipalities in Southern California and the Central Valley. That means the number of lounges in the state could double from the current dozen or so. Right now, new lounges are approved to open in Fresno, Riverside, San Diego, and Ventura counties, with more in the pipeline.

International

Bolivia Coca Growers Clash with Police in La Paz. Fighting broke out in the capital city of La Paz between hundreds of coca growers from the Association of Coca Producers (Adepcoca) joined by other opponents of leftist President Luis Arce and the police. The clashes are over the commercialization of coca and who will benefit from it. Adepcoca is facing off against pro-government coca growers over who will control the Adepcoca market, through which 90 percent of the country's legal coca crop passes. They accuse the pro-government growers of running a parallel market. The same conflict led to violence clashes in La Paz last year, too. Tuesday's clashes feature coca growers throwing firecrackers and dynamite caps with responding with volleys of tear gas. "We are asking that this alleged market for the sale of coca, which has nothing to do with the legal market of Adepcoca, be closed immediately," said protest leader Carlos Choque. "We will not be afraid if they want to 'shoot' us, we are here." Protest leaders said the protests would continue until the parallel market is closed.

Mexico Drug Cartel Attacks Guatemalan Presidential Convoy. Gunmen from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel launched an attack Saturday on a Guatemalan presidential convoy at the village of La Laguna on the Guatemala-Mexico border Saturday. President Alejandro Giammattei was reportedly not involved in the incident. The presidential guard had been traveling around the village when it spotted armed gunmen approaching. The soldiers told the gunmen to back off, but they instead opened fire. One local cartel leader was wounded and subsequently arrested with the rest of the gunmen fleeing into Mexico, where Mexican authorities arrested four Guatemalan nationals. The JNGC operates extensively in Guatemala.

Chronicle Book Review: Opium's Orphans: The 200-Year History of the War on Drugs by P.E. Caquet (2022, Reaktion Books, 400 pp., $35.00 HB)

The history of drug prohibition is increasingly well-trodden territory, but with Opium's Orphans, British historian P.E. Caquet brings a fascinating new perspective embedded in a sweeping narrative and fortified with an erudite grasp of the broad global historical context. Although Asian bans on opium pre-dated 19th Century China (the Thai monarchy announced a ban in the 1400s), for Caquet, the critical moment in what became a linear trajectory toward global drug prohibition a century later came when the Qing emperor banned opium in 1813 and imposed severe penalties on anything to do with it, including possessing it. Precisely 100 years later, after two Opium Wars imposed opium on the empire followed by decades of diplomatic wrangling over how to suppress the trade (and for moralizing Americans, how to win favor with China), the 1913 Hague Opium Convention ushered in the modern war on drugs with its targeting not just of opium (and coca) producers or sellers but also of mere users for criminal prosecution. It urged countries to enact such laws, and they did.

What began at the Hague would eventually grow into an international anti-drug bureaucracy, first in the League of Nations and then in United Nations bodies such as the Commission on Narcotic Drugs and the International Narcotics Control Board. But it is a global prohibition regime that has, Caquet writes, straight-jacketed itself with an opium-based perspective that has proven unable or unwilling to recognize the differences among the substances over which it seeks dominion, reflexively resorting to opium and its addiction model. Drugs such as amphetamines, psychedelics, and marijuana don't really fit that model -- they are the orphans of the book's title -- and in a different world would be differently regulated.

But Opium's Orphans isn't just dry diplomatic history. Caquet delves deep into the social, cultural, and political forces driving drug use and drug policies. His description of the spread of opium smoking among Chinese elites before it spread into the masses and became declasse is both finely detailed and strangely evocative of the trajectory of cocaine use in the United States in the 1970s, when it was the stuff of rock musicians and Hollywood stars before going middle class and then spreading among the urban poor in the form of crack.

Along the way, we encounter opium merchants and colonial opium monopolies, crusading missionary moralists, and early Western proponents of recreational drug use, such as Confessions of an English Opium Eater author Thomas De Quincey and the French habitues of mid-19th Century hashish clubs. More contemporaneously, we also meet the men who achieved international notoriety in the trade in prohibited drugs, "drug lords" such as Khun Sa in the Golden Triangle, Pablo Escobar in Colombia and El Chapo Guzman in Mexico, as well as the people whose job it is to hunt them down. Caquet notes that no matter how often a drug lord is removed -- jailed or killed, in most cases -- the impact on the trade is negligible.

For Caquet, drug prohibition as a global phenomenon peaked with the adoption of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. Coming as it did amidst a post-World War II decline in drug use around the world, the treaty criminalizing coca, cocaine, opium and opioids, and marijuana seemed to ratify a successful global prohibitionist effort. (In the US, in the 1950s, when domestic drug use was at low ebb, Congress passed tough new drug laws.) But before the decade was over, drug prohibition was under flamboyant challenge from the likes of LSD guru Timothy Leary and a horde of hippie pot smokers. The prohibitionist consensus was seeing its first cracks.

And the prohibitionist response was to crack down even harder, which in turn begat its own backlash. Drug use of all sorts began rising around the world in the 1960s and hasn't let up yet, and the increasingly omnivorous drug war machine grew right along with it, as did the wealth and power of the illicit groups that provided the drugs the world demanded. As the negative impacts of the global drug war -- from the current opioid overdose crisis in the US to the prisons filled with drug offenders to the bloody killing fields of Colombia and Mexico -- grew ever more undeniable, the critiques grew ever sharper.

In recent years, the UN anti-drug bureaucrats have been forced to grudgingly accept the notion of harm reduction, although they protest bitterly over such interventions as safe injection sites. For them, harm reduction is less of an erosion of the drug war consensus than all that talk of drug legalization. As Caquet notes, perhaps a tad unfairly, harm reduction doesn't seek to confront drug prohibition head-on, but to mitigate its harms.

The man is a historian, not a policymaker, and his response to questions about what to do now is "I wouldn't start from here." Still, at the end of it all, he has a trio of observations: First, supply reduction ("suppression" is his word) does not work. Sure, you can successfully wipe out poppies in Thailand or Turkey, but they just pop up somewhere else, like the Golden Triangle or Afghanistan. That's the infamous balloon effect. Second, "criminalization of the drug user has been a huge historical blunder." It has no impact on drug use levels, is cruel and inhumane, and it didn't have to be that way. A century ago, countries could have agreed to regulate the drug trade; instead, they tried to eradicate it in an ever-escalating, never-ending crusade. Third, illicit drugs as a group should be seen "as a historical category, not a scientific one." Different substances demand different approaches.

Opium's Orphans is a fascinating, provocative, and nuanced account of the mess we've gotten ourselves into. Now, we continue the work of trying to get out of that mess.

Pennsylvania will provide some protections to banks and insurers doing business with marijuana companies, a Florida therapeutic psilocybin bill is filed, and more.

Marijuana Policy

California Awards $1.7 Million in Grants to Support Sustainable Marijuana Cultivation. State officials have announced that have handed out more than $1.7 million in grants to promote sustainable marijuana cultivation practices. The funding is coming from the Qualified Cultivator Grant Program with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife's Cannabis Restoration Grant Program. The grants are going to qualifying nonprofits, government entities, and tribes, who will then distribute the money to individual grower applicants. This is just the first round of grants under the program, which will total $6 million through April 2023.

Medical Marijuana

Pennsylvania Governor Signs Marijuana Banking and Insurance Reform Bill into Law. Gov. Tom Wolf (D) on Monday signed into law House Bill 311, which includes provisions to protect banks and insurers who work with state-legal medical marijuana businesses. The measure does not protect banks and insurers from any federal repercussions but sends a signal to the financial services industry that it won't face repercussions under state law. The new law says that a "financial institution authorized to engage in business in this Commonwealth may provide financial services to or for the benefit of a legitimate cannabis-related business and the business associates of a legitimate cannabis-related business." And ditto for insurance companies.

Psychedelics

Psychedelic Pioneer Ann Shulgin Dead at 91. Ann Shulgin, who along with her husband Sasha co-authored the pioneering psychedelic classics PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story and TiHKAL: The Continuation. The two acronyms refer to phenelthylamines and triptamines I have known and loved, and the two volumes are compendiums of recipes for hundreds of psychedelic substances. Sasha was the chemist, but Ann was the therapist, and worked with drugs such as MDMA in therapeutic settings when it was still legal. Shulgin continued to advocate for the therapeutic use of psychedelics throughout her life. She spent the last eight years as a widow after Sasha Shulgin died in 2014.

Florida Bill to Legalize Psilocybin for Therapeutic Use Filed. Rep. Michael Grieco (D) has filed the Florida Psilocybin Mental Health Care Act, which would create state-sponsored clinics where patients suffering from mental health disorders could be administered microdoses of psilocybin by a licensed medical professional. The patient would go through the experience under the therapist's supervision and then be offered a post-trip counseling session. The bill comes after earlier bills to study therapeutic psilocybin died in committee in the Republican-controlled legislature.

International

Drug Traffickers in Fresh Round of Violence Against Peru's Indigenous Communities. Indigenous leaders in the Peruvian Amazon have announced that multiple killings of members of the Native Federation of Kakataibos Communities (Federación Nativa de Comunidades Kakataibos -- FENACOKA) in the departments of Ucayla and Huanaco. Four leaders of the federation have been killed since 2019, the group said. The group says the indigenous communities it represents have been subject to worsening intimidation and violence since asking the Peruvian government for support in eradicating coca crops. Last month, armed drug traffickers beat and threatened to kill one community member, demanding that he tell them where to find the leaders who "brought the Navy" to eradicate coca. In another incident last month, three community members were threatened by traffickers and forced to flee their homes. The remote area has become a favorite for traffickers because the presence of the Peruvian state is so attenuated there.