Drug warriors don’t answer phone calls or emails from the likes of us, so the only way to ask them questions is to show up when they’re speaking publicly and hope to get called on during Q&A. Sitting in the moderator’s line of sight helps, as does not looking like a balls-to-the-wall hippie drug-legalizer (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

And so this past Friday I attended the “African American Brain Trust on Eliminating Racial Disparities in Substance Abuse Policies” sponsored by the National African American Drug Policy Coalition, for the dual purposes of developing contacts for an unrelated project, and hopefully to get some answers from NIDA Director Dr. Nora Volkow who would be presenting. NAADPC assembled an impressive list of speakers, and though the event was neutral in tone, it’s probably safe to say that if NAADPC replaced ONDCP, there'd be less to blog about. The audience consisted primarily of criminal justice and medical professionals, but the full anti-prohibitionist viewpoint was represented by ubiquitous reformers Kymone Freeman and Howard Wooldridge of LEAP. True to form, both asked about legalization, which prompted squirmy but less-than-dismissive responses from panels of distinguished judges, prosecutors, and law-enforcement professionals.

A neutral, non-politicized discussion of the drug problem inevitably favors the compassionate activist over the status quo, but the final word of the day from Dr. Nora Volkow provided a startling reality check. Dr. Volkow’s power-point presentation titled “Using Science and Medicine to Effectively Treat Drug Addiction” conjured a distopian future in which “addicts” are administered government drugs by force in order to prevent them from enjoying the drugs they take voluntarily. But she didn’t phrase it that way.

Dr. Volkow argues that prolonged drug use alters the brain in ways that reduce the user’s control over drug-taking itself, thereby necessitating compulsory treatment in order to help the user regain the ability to make his/her own decisions. Addiction is a disease, yes, but drugs themselves cause the disease over time, according to Dr. Volkow. By this logic, intervention appears justified at any stage.

With time running short, I was fortunate to be one of three people chosen to ask questions. Mine came out something like this:

I hope that by looking at drug addiction as a disease, society will become less inclined to stigmatize people with drug problems. But there’s a flipside in that most people who use drugs are doing just fine. I know that most people in treatment for marijuana were coerced into it by the criminal justice system, for example. As your research progresses, will you still acknowledge that most drug users don’t fit into the addiction model you just described?

Dr. Volkow was answering before I was done asking, and her answer was clever. She admitted that many drug users don’t experience negative consequences. “We’ve always acknowledged that” she said, as if I was kind of stupid for asking. “But it’s important to realize,” she went on, “that even experimentation with drugs can have dire consequences.”

It’s pathetic that after a forty-five minute presentation on addiction science, she would resort to such an unscientific generalization. Yes, experimentation can have consequences, but as Jack Herer once said, “nobody’s ever died from marijuana that wasn’t shot by a cop.” Too often, the consequences of drug use take the form of government persecution justified by junk science from prohibitionists masquerading as public health experts.

Dr. Nora Volkow says we shouldn’t stigmatize drug-users, but then she goes around diagnosing them with a brain-rotting disease that most of them don’t actually have.

Last Friday the blogosphere provided a good example of how readily even political progressives can fail to see the important points in drug policy. A post in Bob Geiger's U.S. Senate Report titled "Bill to Cripple Taliban Drug Trade Passes -- After GOP Tries to Kill It" informs us that Republican senators had unsuccessfully tried to block an amendment by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to put $700 million into the latest defense appropriations bill for suppression of Afghanistan's opium trade. Schumer explained, "The Taliban draws its strength from the drug trade and in order to prevent them from reclaiming the country, we need to crack down the drugs that fuel their regime. We need to ensure that the Department of Defense has the resources available to attack this problem before it becomes far worse." Geiger, a partisan whose web site solicits "liberal love" and "conservative castigation" by e-mail, described the Republican effort as "inexplicable," remarks that it "will leave you shaking your head and asking yourself whose side Republicans are really on," and reports that "[f]ortunately... it passed with the support of a handful of Republican votes." Anti-war liberals like Geiger ought to also oppose the Drug War. An article we published in Drug War Chronicle Friday discusses in depth why opium eradication in reality is an extraordinarily bad idea that will strengthen the Taliban mightily by pushing countless poor farmers who are surviving on opium growing into their hands. Opium production is literally the backbone of Afghanistan's economy, and wiping it out at this point, even if that could be accomplished, would plunge the nation into chaos beyond anything before seen. While I doubt Geiger will be moved by the fact that libertarian free-marketeer Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute thinks the only satisfactory way of addressing the situation is through legalization, perhaps he'll pay some attention to the Brookings Institution fellow or the Univ. of Nebraska Afghan scholar we quoted. At a minimum he ought to at least note for his readers that not everyone thinks eradication is a good idea and that a radically different scheme, licensing the opium for the medical market, which stops short of legalization, is being fairly extensively discussed, including by high-level people in our NATO ally countries who are suffering an increasing share of the casualties. This is simply not the cut-and-dried issue Geiger has taken it to be. Geiger's piece was republished in the widely-read Huffington Post blog -- ironically, given Arianna Huffington's own longstanding opposition to the drug war. I don't know that she has specifically written about the Afghan opium conundrum, but in both her conservative past and her liberal present she has been a strong voice on the issue. The summer 2000 "Shadow Conventions" in Philadelphia and LA, in fact, which Arianna spearheaded, adopted opposition to the drug war as one of the three primary issue tracks. Nothing in this post should be interpreted as implying that the Republican Party is good on the drug issue either. Just in case I'm about to get slammed as "right-wing," look a little bit up on this web page in the "Higher Education Act Reform Campaign" block for a photo from the press conference we organized where ten Democratic members of Congress spoke. Or click here for a picture of me and outspokenly liberal Congressman Jim McDermott chatting last year at our Seattle event. And just in case anyone thinks we're soft on the Taliban -- be aware that we condemned them back in 1997, when the UN and the Clinton administration were working on funding them.

This "Prohibition in the Media" post is not tied to a particular article. If you do a Google News search on "drug money laundering," you'll get a list of over 1,400 articles. These are only the ones that the news outlets still have online -- the global financial system is virtually "awash" in illicitly-generated revenues, much of it from the drug trade. Of course, it has to be that way under prohibition -- because we've made drugs illegal, all the money that people spend on them goes into the criminal underground. That's hundreds of billions of dollars per year -- I've seen estimates ranging from $150 billion (the RAND Corporation) to $400 billion (the UN) -- and it has an enormous increasing effect on violence rates. The local dealer protecting his turf, to the vicious source or transit country cartel trying to intimidate press or the authorities, to the terrorist organization using the relatively easy-to-get proceeds of drug sales to augment its budget and be able to kill more innocent people, these are just a few of the ways that prohibition has made our world a more dangeous place in which to live. I've written about that here before. The main point I'd like to make today is the effect of the flow of the money itself. If a drug lord is able to buy or build a city, for example -- it is said that the skyscrapers making up the Bangkok, Thailand skyline were built with drug money -- that gives him an enormous amount of influence going beyond his original illegal business. When our investigators of possible terrorist activity try to track the flow of that kind of money, that must be made more difficult to pinpoint given the ocean of drug money in which it is immersed. And of course anyone happening to stand in the way of some of the money is a potential weak link for corruption. Does drug money have an effect on how some international aid dollars get spent? Probably. I don't say that because of any particular examples to which I have access. It's just that there's so much drug money, in so many places, that it seems like it must have some such impact here and there. We need to drain the flooded basement before we'll have a chance of being able to clean it up. That first means blocking off the pipes that are spilling into it. Which in the case of drug money means... legalization. We are going to say "legalization" over and over until the point sinks in with people. In the meanwhile, we would be most grateful if readers could bring our attention to any particularly interesting money laundering stories you spot, especially stories that involve some additional harm resulting from it. (We'd also appreciate if you have or know of some relevant images that are in the public domain that we could use on our web site.)

USA Today's coverage of DEA's new pain medicine regulations (also blogged here) contains this unbelievable quote from DEA Administrator Karen Tandy:

"The DEA does not belong in the practice of medicine. We want doctors to be able to prescribe drugs when people are in pain. We're trying to give them a comfort level."

Truer words have never been spoken more disingenuously. Tandy has presided over an unprecedented assault on the medical profession. In two years' time, her agency has arbitrarily clarified, revoked, and revised the rules that determine when the most miserable among us will be offered relief. Immobilized by agony, the true victims of DEA's misguided witch-hunt have suffered in silence, some driven to suicide, as fear-stricken pain specialists trade in their Oxy for Advil.

Tandy has played doctor indeed, and she's done so capriciously; perpetrating a shell-game with policies that affect millions, seemingly to convict one doctor who should never have been targeted to begin with.

Nor has Tandy's negligent quackery been confined to the realm of pain-management. For a woman who, by her own account, "doesn't belong in the practice of medicine", Tandy has a lot to say about medical marijuana. And all of it's wrong.

If only she were a doctor...

The DEA’s war on pain doctors got a facelift today as explained in their ironically titled press-release “Working Together: DEA and the Medical Community”.

From DEA.gov:

Today, DEA is unveiling a proposed rule that will make it easier for patients with chronic pain or other chronic conditions, to avoid multiple trips to a physician. It will allow a physician to prescribe up to a 90-day supply of Schedule II controlled substances during a single office visit, where medically appropriate. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is accompanied by a policy statement, “Dispensing Controlled Substances for the Treatment of Pain,” which provides information requested by medical professionals regarding DEA’s position on this important issue.

It’s nice to see the spirit of cooperation take hold at DEA, but recent history tells a different story. I’d bet the average pain management specialist feels less like a partner here and more like the groom at a shotgun wedding.

Indeed, this is a not-so-subtle attempt to smooth over the public relations nightmare that has resulted from the agency’s relentless harassment of pain management doctors:

Also new today, DEA is launching a new page on its website (www.dea.gov) called “Cases Against Doctors.” Everyone will be able to see for themselves the criminal acts committed by those few physicians who are subject to prosecution or administrative action each year.

The Cases Against Doctors page reeks of insecurity on DEA’s part, suggesting that widespread criticism may have affected Karen Tandy, who’s usually numb from heavy doses of self-righteousness.

Update: USA Today and Washington Post have the story. Both note the hostile relationship DEA has fostered with the medical community. Washington Post describes the regulations as an unambiguous concession to the medical community, which has generally gotten the cold shoulder from DEA on this issue.

Still, to the extent that DEA has capitulated here, it probably has more to do with last month’s reversal of the Hurwitz conviction than any sudden recognition that maybe doctors have useful ideas about how to define legitimate medical practices.

The Canadian federal government -- relatively hostile to harm reduction measures like safe injection sites since the Conservative Party took power in the last elections -- will not fund further research for Vancouver's InSite safe injection site, Health Ministry spokesman Eric Waddell told the Drug War Chronicle this afternoon. That was news to the site's operator, the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, whose spokesperson Viviana Zonacco said she had not been informed of that aspect of the ministry's decision.

The Health Ministry had funded research on the injection site's efficacy for the past three years to the tune of $500,000 a year. The ministry extended the site's exemption from the country's drug laws for only year instead of three years last Friday—the dead news day before the three-day weekend in Canada—saying that it required further research on how well it worked. But after demanding more research, the Health Ministry doesn't want to pay for it. Go figger.

I learned about this as I was researching an article I will write about the decision for this week's Chronicle. Check it out on Friday.

Here are the links to the two DEA policy statements. I tried pasting them into this blog, but that crashed it. Sorry about that.

http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/01jan20061800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2006/pdf/E6-14517.pdf

Drug Enforcement Administration

Dispensing Controlled Substances for the Treatment of Pain

ACTION: Policy Statement.

---------------------------

http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/01jan20061800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2006/pdf/E6-14520.pdf

Drug Enforcement Administration

Issuance of Multiple Prescriptions for Schedule II Controlled Substances

On Saturday, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime released its estimate of the 2006 Afghan opium crop, and the numbers are astoundingly bad. According to the UNODCO, this year's crop is 60% larger than last year's and will yield an all-time record 6,100 tons of opium. Afghan opium will account for a whopping 92% of global illicit opium production. This report, which must come as a punch in the gut to the US and NATO, strongly suggests that the US/NATO/Karzai strategy of attempting to uproot the opium crop and the opium economy--which is Afghanistan's primary economic motor--is not only failing, it is backfiring. Opium production has now spread to 28 of the country's 34 provinces, and in the restive south, opium profits are helping fuel a resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgency. It is a situation eerily reminiscent of Peru in the 1980s. Maoist insurgents of the Shining Path were making inroads among Peruvian coca producers, who were being hounded by the Peruvian government at the behest of the United States. Some Peruvian generals got smart and decided to lay off the peasants, ignoring their coca cultivation in a bid to win hearts and minds. The US government got mightily pissed, but in the end, the strategy worked. The Shining Path was not able to bring the coca growers into its insurgency and eventually faded away. There is a lesson here for NATO and American war planners. You can have your war on terror or you can have your war on drugs, but it doesn't seem that you can successfully have both. It's awfully difficult to win hearts and minds when you're burning down farmers' fields and destroying their livelihoods.

In 2003, Harrison County (Mississippi) Sheriff George Payne got a tip from a confidential informant (that's law-speak for "snitch") that marijuana plants were being grown on land leased to the Boarhog Hunting Club. Payne led a crew of lawman onto the property and chopped them all down, even though a field test on a sample plant didn't identify it as marijuana. The property owner, Marion Waltman, said he only found out about the raid when he turned on the local news and saw inmates chopping down the plants at the sheriff's direction. Waltman was first puzzled, then outraged--the sheriff and his crew had just destroyed $225,000 worth of kenaf (hibiscus cannabinus), a plant Waltman was growing as deer feed. So, the sheriff errantly raids private property and destroys a healthy amount of goods belonging to the property owner. He should pay up, right? Wrong. At least according to US District Judge Louis Guirola, who dismissed Waltman's civil lawsuit against Sheriff Payne in May 2005. U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr. in May 2005 dismissed Waltman's civil lawsuit against Payne. Waltman had claimed the sheriff violated his rights by destroying more than 500 kenaf plants grown as deer food. But Judge Guirola rule that Sheriff Payne was protected by qualified immunity since he was acting in his official capacity and his conduct was "objectively reasonable." Now, Waltman is appealing.

As police departments around the country struggle to eradicate outdoor marijuana crops before the fall harvest, rogue cannabis plants are fighting back.

From All Headline News:

West Duluth, MN (AHN) - At least 12 marijuana trees were discovered growing outside the front door of West Duluth police station in Minnesota.

Hilarious.

West Duluth police Lt. John Beyer said they were unaware of the marijuana plants growing outside their precinct because they seldom use the front door. He said most officers use the backdoor entrance to the police station. He said, "The only thing I can say is somebody has a sense of humor. Now they'll read about it in the paper and say,'Yeah, that was me.'"

I would encourage whoever did this not to say “yeah, that was me.” Afterall, considering the tendency of police to estimate per-plant yields at over a pound and to assume a $5,000 per pound retail, you might get accused of growing $60,000 worth of marijuana in the front yard of the police station.

Here’s another good one from AZCentral.com:

PRESCOTT - A Yavapai County sheriff's deputy patrolling a senior housing development outside Prescott Wednesday spotted a 5-foot-tall marijuana plant growing between two residents' driveways. Deputy Justin Dwyer got out, identified the plant and interviewed the residents, spokeswoman Susan Quayle said. They told the deputy they thought the plant was "just an attractive weed, and they had been watering it because it looked so nice."

That’s a new one. I hope I live long enough to see people growing cannabis purely for its aesthetic value.

As for these particular old folks, I can’t tell if they’re incredibly stupid or surprisingly clever.

During the research I did for Friday's feature article on the prisoners doing "Katrina time", two of the of the people I talked to implored to look into the plight of another set of victims of the Louisiana criminal justice system: the "heroin lifers." The "heroin lifers" are a group of prisoners, many now aged, who were arrested under a draconian state law enacted in 1973 that mandated life in prison without parole for the sale of any amount of heroin or possession with intent to sell. Some were released on appeal beginning in the 1980s, but others linger in prison. At this point, I'm a little unclear on the numbers and the exact situation. The tough heroin law may have changed in the 1980s--I'm not sure yet--and the state dramatically reformed its sentencing practices in 2001. So why are the good citizens of Louisiana paying to keep a bunch of non-violent old men on the geriatric ward? I just did an initial Google search, and it revealed very little: Two links to a Louisiana blog that linked to a New Orleans Times-Picayune story that can no longer be found, and a five year old plea on a prison justice mailing list for help in the case of one of the lifers, then 53-year-old Earnest Perique, who was trying to get out after serving 26 years. I'll be looking into this for another feature story next week.

Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine has opined once again on the Hurwitz pain case in The Accidental Drug Trafficker: A repudiation of prosecutions that treat doctors’ errors in judgment as felonies. If you haven't already, check out our news feature on this story <?php print l('here', 'chronicle/450/hurwitz_drug_convictions_overturned', NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, TRUE); ?>.