The man who was once Colombia's most powerful cocaine traffickers gets decades in US prison, New Hampshire will study the state liquor store model for potential legal marijuana sales, and more.

Marijuana Policy

Gallup Poll Now Has Republican Majority for Marijuana Legalization but Partisan Gap Remains. New polling data from Gallup on partisanship among the American electorate shows that a majority of Republicans -- 55 percent -- now support marijuana legalization, but Democrats supported it at a much higher level -- 83 percent. Support among independents was not measured.

While Democrats have historically been more likely to be legalization supporters, the partisan gap has widened over the past decade because support among Democrats has risen much faster than among Republicans. Overall, though, support for legalization among all Americans remain near or at an all-time high -- with majorities of self-identified Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all backing legalization.

New Hampshire Governor Signs Bill for Commission to Study State Marijuana Sales. Gov. Chris Sununu (R) has signed into law House Bill 611, which will create a commission to study on how the state could handle legal marijuana sales in a way similar to the state liquor store model already in place in the Granite State.

"New Hampshire has an opportunity to safely regulate the sale of marijuana with a model few others can provide," Sununu said. "By establishing a commission to study state-controlled sales, this bill will bring stakeholders from across New Hampshire together to ensure that preventing negative impacts upon kids remains our number one priority."

The state-control model of cannabis legalization the governor favors was met with widespread skepticism from both Democrats and Republicans in the state legislature earlier this year, but the legislature has failed to pass any form of legalization so far.

Drug Policy

Former Leader of Colombia's Gulf Clan Cartel Sentenced to 45 Years in US Prison. On Wednesday, Dairo Antonio Úsuga David, known by various aliases, including "Otoniel," a citizen of Colombia, was sentenced by United States District Judge Dora L. Irizarry to 45 years’ imprisonment for engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise as a leader of the multibillion-dollar paramilitary and drug trafficking organization known as the "Clan del Golfo" (CDG -- the Gulf Clan).

Úsuga David was also sentenced to 45 years' imprisonment for engaging in a maritime narcotics conspiracy and 45 years' imprisonment for engaging in a narcotics importation conspiracy. The sentences will run concurrently. As part of the sentence, the Court ordered Úsuga David to pay $216 million in forfeiture. The defendant pleaded guilty to all three charges in January 2023.

Úsuga David controlled an armed force of about 1,800 men, mainly recruited from former rightist paramilitary groups and operated Colombia's biggest drug trafficking organization until his arrest in 2021 by the government of Conservative then-President Ivan Duque. He was then extradited to the US to face charges, although there are also suggestions that he was extradited to avoid having him answer questions that could link rightist paramilitaries to Conservative Party politicians.

"Otoniel led one of the largest cocaine trafficking organizations in the world, where he directed the exportation of massive amounts of cocaine to the United States and ordered the ruthless execution of Colombian law enforcement, military officials, and civilians," said Attorney General Merrick Garland. "This sentence sends a clear message: the Justice Department will find and hold accountable the leaders of deadly drug trafficking organizations that harm the American people, no matter where they are and no matter how long it takes."

San Francisco Jail Population Jumps as Drug Arrests Mount. For the first time in years, the jail population in the city has hit the 1,000 mark, driven largely by a renewed emphasis on drug arrests. The average daily jail population was 1,277 in 2019 and dropped to 850 in 2020 amidst the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.

Even though crime reports in the city are down slightly over last year, drug arrests are up a dramatic 36 percent, especially since the city launched an initiative on May 30 to arrest people for public drug use. That push tipped the jail population past the 1,000 mark; it hit 1,001 on Tuesday.

David Mauroff, executive director of a nonprofit called the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project, which provides resources to people who are awaiting criminal trial, said the increase in arrests has squeezed his organization's ability to properly serve clients.

"The city has now decided that arrest, prosecution and incarceration is the answer to our public safety issues," Mauroff said. "It's been demonstrated by volumes of research and science that the war on drugs failed."

Drug arrests are not the only thing fueling the jail population jump. The Public Defender's Office has been holding sit-in all summer to protest court backlogs that have denied more than 1,100 people the right to a speedy trial. The office said 115 people have been held in jail for months or even years past their speedy trial deadlines.

Four federal legislators file a bill to strengthen the drug war in the Caribbean, a Hawaii bill to ease the way toward the therapeutic use of psilocybin and MDMA passes the Senate, and more.

Marijuana Policy

Minnesota Marijuana Legalization Bill Wins More Committee Votes. The effort to legalize marijuana continued to bear fruit this week, with the House version of the bill, House File 100 being approved Monday by the House Human Services Policy Committee and the companion Senate bill being approved that sa me day by the Senate Transportation Committee. The actions mark the eighth approval by a House committee and the sixth by a Senate committee. With majorities in the House and Senate, as well as control of the governorship, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party is confident the bill will become law this year. It looks like there are only four committee votes to go before the bill heads for floor votes in the two chambers.

Opiates and Opioids

Idaho Bill Would Lower Heroin Penalties, Create Mandatory Minimums for Dealing Fentanyl. A bill before the legislature, House Bill 67, would raise quantity thresholds and reduce sentences for heroin dealing while creating a mandatory minimum sentence for fentanyl dealing. The amount of heroin required for a trafficking charge would jump from two grams to seven in the bottom tier and from 10 to 14 grams in the middle tier. Sentences for the top tier of heroin trafficking offenses would drop from 15 years to 10 and sentences for the middle tier would drop from 10 years to five. The bill would also make possession of more than seven grams of fentanyl a felony chargeable as "trafficking." Those caught with more than seven grams would face a three-year mandatory minimum, while those caught with more than 14 grams would face a five-year mandatory minimum, and those caught with more than 28 grams would face a 10-year mandatory minimum. The Idaho Chiefs of Police, Idaho Sheriffs Association and the Idaho Prosecuting Attorneys Association are all in favor of House Bill 67.

Psychedelics

Hawaii Psilocybin and MDMA Research Bill Wins Committee Vote. The Senate Health and Human Services Committee has approved Senate Bill 1531, which is aimed at promoting research into the therapeutic uses of MDMA, psilocybin, and other alternative mental health treatments. The bill would create a Beneficial Treatments Advisory Council that would review the scientific literature on using such substances for mental health treatment as well as exploring state and federal regulations on them. The council would be required to develop a "long-term strategic plan to ensure the availability of therapeutic psilocybin, psilocybin-based products, and [MDMA] that are safe, accessible, and affordable for adults twenty—one years of age or older." A companion bill in the House has yet to move.

Drug Policy

Old School Prohibitionist Bill to Fight Caribbean Drug Trafficking Filed in Congress. On Monday, three Republicans and one Democrat, Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Alex Padilla (D-CA) and Reps. Jenniffer González-Colon (R-PR) and Stacey Plaskett (R-VI) introduced the Caribbean Border Counternarcotics Strategy Act , which aims "to stop the illegal trafficking of deadly drugs in the Caribbean, specifically between Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Florida." The bill would "ensure the Federal government has a strategy in place to prevent the flow of illicit drugs through the Caribbean region and into the United States by codifying in statute the requirement for ONDCP to issue a Caribbean Border Counternarcotics Strategy—just as Congress has codified the requirement for the Southwest Border and the Northern Border Counternarcotics Strategies." It would also clarify that US territories are included in the definition of "state" and "United States." 

International

Colombian Government in Peace Talks with Leftist Rebels Who Demand "Alternative Drug Policies." The government of President Gustavo Petro and the country's largest remaining rebel group met in Mexico City to restart peace talks aimed at resolving a conflict dating back to the 1960s. The communist-inspired National Liberation Army (ELN) is calling for a "temporary, nationwide cease-fire" and that any agreement should include "an alternative anti-drug policy that is no longer based on repression and war." The ELN has a presence in some 200 Colombian township, mostly in areas of widespread coca cultivation and cocaine production. Like the larger FARC, which signed a peace agreement with the state in 2016, the ELN is involved in the drug trade and has replaced the FARC in many areas. But even though it is involved in the drug traffic, the ELN is adamant that it should not be treated like a drug trafficking organization but as a political force. This is the second round of talks since Petro took office last year. The first round did not achieve much. 

There's a drug crackdown going on in India's Punjab, Afghan drug prices are rising despite questions about whether the Taliban ban is actually happening, and more.

Marijuana Policy

Schumer Says Senate Close to Passing Marijuana Banking, Expungements Bill After Talks with Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Sunday that Congress is "very close" to filing and then passing the SAFE Banking Act + bill, which includes provisions including banking protections for state-legal marijuana businesses and expungements of past marijuana convictions. Schumer cited progress he had made in talks with a "bunch of Republican senators."

Schumer had blocked earlier efforts to pass the SAFE Banking Act, which has passed the House seven times, but now appears ready to move on it as prospects for a broader legalization bill fade. "We are getting very close," Schumer said. "I am working in a bipartisan way with Democrats and Republicans to take the SAFE Banking Act, which allows financial institutions to involve themselves in cannabis companies and lend money to them -- but it also does some things for justice, such as expunging a record. So, expunging the records is important, and we're getting clos We may be able to get something done rather soon. I'm working with a bunch of Republican senators, a bunch of Democratic senators, to get something passed."

Drug Treatment

State Opioid Treatment Program Regulations Put Evidence-Based Care Out of Reach for Many. Opioid treatment programs (OTPs) are the only health care modalities that can offer methadone as well as buprenorphine and extended-release naltrexone to patients. They are the only facilities that can offer methadone, but federal and state rules not based on evidence are curtailing access to high-quality OTP care, the Pew Trust reports in new research.

Among barriers to OTP treatment, Pew found that 20 states require a new OTP to seek state approval baed on demonstrating a need for services before opening, seven states impose restrictive zoning rules on OTPS that don't apply to other health are facilities, 10 states don't allow clients to take medication home in the first 30 days of treatment, 48 states allow OTPs to throw patients out of the program for not being abstinent from opioids or other drugs, and 23 states specify a counseling schedule for patients rather than providing individualized care. Click on the link for methodology and a full data set.

International

Afghan Drug Prices Soared After Taliban Ban, Despite Little Evidence of Enforcement. Illegal drug prices have skyrocketed in Afghanistan since the Taliban banned the drug trade in April, even though there is only limited evidence that the militants are enforcing the ban. Opium prices have increased more than 50 percent, while methamphetamine prices have also risen, according to countrywide data gathered by the private, UK-based satellite imagery company Alcis. While analysts said the ban is not yet widely enforced, prices are rising based on fears of a future crackdown. A new opium poppy planting season is about to get underway, and it is unclear to what degree local Taliban commanders intend to or even can enforce a ban on poppy production. Satellite data, though, has shown a crackdown on ephedra (used to manufacture meth) markets and meth labs already underway.

But any crackdown would come in the face of a massive nationwide economic crisis that could drive people away from supporting the Taliban. "The things that people used to survive on in the face of a drugs ban -- in terms of joining the [army], working in the cities in construction -- those options are gone," David Mansfield, a researcher on the report and expert on Afghanistan's drugs trade, said. "Do local Taliban... press on this and risk increasing a humanitarian crisis, alienating a population, or do they let it ride because of the fear of resistance?"

India's Punjab Police in Massive Drug Crackdown. Police in the Punjab have arrested 6,997 drug smugglers since July and registered 5,436 FIRs (first information reports -- the initial report of a possible criminal offense), of which 580 are for possessing large quantities of drugs. The crackdown is part of Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann's "war against the drug menace plaguing the state."

Between roadblocks and other searches, police have seized nearly 260 kilograms of heroin, as well as an additional 147.5 kilograms seized at the ports of Gujarat and Maharashtra. They also seized 300 kilograms of raw heroin, 197 kilograms of marijuana and nearly three million pills, capsules, and vials of pharmaceutical opioids. State police chief Gaurav Yadav has called on police to investigate all leads in every case no matter how small and to aggressively seize the assets of drug suspects.

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.